In My Wildest Dreams

by Leslie Thomas

  After that first night in Georgetown I remember how I got a bus back to the leave centre and strode in the gate like a Trojan, taking lungfuls of morning air. As I flung open the door of the room I shared with Smudge he turned dismally on his bed and muttered: "Ere comes the night shift.'

  'Smudge,' I intoned. 'Smudge, she was terrific. There's not many girls like that around.'

  'Only a few million,' he commented acidly but truthfully. He turned rheumy-eyed. 'I've 'ad enough,' he said hoarsely. 'Enough for the rest of my working life, mate. I ain't going to abuse my body any more. I'm going to save the rest of it for going 'ome. For the girlfriend.'

  As for me, the energetic companionship of that night had given me a taste for it. Before I went back from leave I expended a further fifteen dollars on Mitzi (as she was known during the second week. Mitzi Gaynor being named in lights above the cinema). Earlier that evening I was with the others in the restaurant we used for our steak, egg and chips, and Dolores, my unassailable Eurasian beauty, swayed in with her untouched sister. As I left she smiled and I coolly kissed her on the cheek, a touch of nonchalance, before sauntering off towards the evil and beckoning glow of the City Lights. Smudge it was who remained and in the morning he reported that they had enjoyed a wonderful conversation. 'Wiv them Chinese tarts,' he observed with disdainful wisdom. 'You can't 'ave a talk, only a shag. I like to 'ave a good talk sometimes.'

  When I left Penang my Chinese girl who, for the sake of clarity, I shall identify by her eventual fictional name, Juicy Lucy, promised that she would soon join me in Singapore. She had heard that the Liberty Club in that city was looking for girls.

  I only half-believed her but, on our return and after a month of barrack room boredom, I took the Saturday-night bus and sought out this place which remains, deep as a murky pool, in my memory. It was a heavy stone building which appeared in some not-too-distant previous life to have been in ecclesiastical use. It had a tall ceiling, church-shaped windows which had been boarded up or otherwise covered as if to decently blindfold them, and two long rows of stalwart stone columns. It was a curious edifice to find at the centre of an Oriental city, a sober relic of some British devotees I suppose. They would have been less than happy to witness its conversion. Viewed from the bandstand where, as it turned out, I spent some of my time, it presented a scene of desperate and unbridled sin. The band blared and in the wreathing smoke the dancers clutched each other, performing motions and actions that fell little short of the carnal act. Sometimes a quickstep would be played and the partners would work up a tremendous sweat to add to the gathering passion and would then sink soggily together for a sensual and insanitary embrace to the music of a waltz. Songs like 'My Foolish Heart', 'We'll Gather Lilac' and even 'Tumbling Tumbleweed', played by a Chinese band, had a lot for which to answer.

  The girls who worked at the Liberty Club were unencumbered by shame and the soldiers, sailors and airmen were grateful for the simplicity. Not all the dancing partners were attractive but they knew their business. They freely entered a competition between themselves, observed to much Eastern female giggling from the floorside seats, to see who could provoke the most manifest erection in her partner during the dance, the results and the scores noted as the said partners limped away from the arena. Once I got my comb wedged sideways in my trouser pocket and my partner was adjudged the winner of that round. They were of all sad sorts (so were we, I suppose) making a living the only way they could. There was one poor speechless little tart called Dum-Dum, whose tongue, so the tale went, had been cut out by the Japanese. She laughed nearly all the time.

  I was singing with the band one night (just how this stardom occurred I will later relate) and, looking down on the Hogarthian hell, I saw Juicy Lucy standing on one side, facing the floor fetchingly sipping a soft drink and looking up at me. She was taller than most Chinese, her face and shoulders white, her dress long and black. She wore elbow-length gloves. I tried to imagine that she did not belong in that place.

  But Lucy was delighted with the situation. As we danced, very properly compared to the simulated sin going on around us, she told me that she had found a room and was now eager to make her fortune. We were both aware that she was not going to make it from me, but from that moment and for the next year we saw each other every week, sometimes once, sometimes twice. We went swimming together at Changi beach and to the pictures and rode about in a trishaw. When I could afford it we went to bed, but only then for it was understood that this was something separate; the way she earned her difficult living. Up to that period of my life, she was the nearest thing I had ever had to a regular and active girlfriend. She was mine Saturday nights, Wednesday afternoons and sometimes Sundays, when I was not playing cricket. The rest of the time she was anybody's.

  Someone with improving ideas decided to demonstrate to Lucy, and her many sisters-in-sin, the error of their ways and the rewarding alternatives life offered – in this case basket weaving. All the bar and dance-hall girls were rounded up and shown how to make baskets and other pastoral arts. There were so many attending these lectures (a rumour was abroad that the participants would be paid) that they were held, not inappropriately, in a wrestling stadium. Lucy enjoyed them greatly for, as she explained, it gave the assembled girls an unusual opportunity to compare notes and to work out current prices in the trade. She also found the weaving interesting and would sit at the side of the dance floor in the Liberty Club industriously working away at a flower or fruit basket while waiting for her real living to come along. She showed me how to do the weaving once as she lay in bed of a hot Wednesday afternoon. I can still see her sitting up, grave and naked, reciting 'This go through there, and pop out there, this go through there . . .' as she fingered the strips of bamboo. Another thing she taught me was to sing 'Jingle Bells' in Chinese, an attainment which, for subsequent lack of opportunity, has declined to disuse over the years. All I can recall now is that the first two lines went:

  Ding, ding, ding,

  Ding, ding, ding.

  Another song she could sing in Chinese (and so for some reason could many of her compatriots) was 'Auld Lang Syne' which made her something of a favourite with Scottish soldiers, two of whom, however, hastened the closing down of her workplace, the Liberty Club, by celebrating Hogmanay too strenuously. They tried to kill each other and one succeeded. The next day the authorities barred the doors for ever. It was well named, for no place I have ever entered, and I've entered a few, lent itself to more liberties, both taken and accepted, although the enchantingly named Crockford's Club in Colombo does run it quite close.

  Throughout the happy time 1 knew Lucy, there remained living within me a little prude who unendingly nagged. In an attempt to satisfy this void and to become legitimate again, I asked one of the Chinese girl clerks at the office to go to the cinema with me and she agreed. She looked like a melon but she was not on the game, which to my personal internal hypocrite seemed important at the time. Unfortunately when I turned up for our date outside the Cathay Cinema she was there accompanied by her entire family. There was no escape; I had to take the girl, her mother, father, grandmother and two small melon babies into the pictures. Fortunately the seats were cheap but I had a salutary lesson and a miserable time. The grandmother, who kept cracking nuts and spitting out the shells, and the mother sat on either side of me so I could not even get my arm around the girl. One of the children, who had just wet, climbed onto my lap, and then Gran, who had become overly excited by the film (which was about the Berlin air lift), poked me in the eye with her long black fingernail. After that night I remained faithful to Lucy.

  She could rarely get my name right and when she did manage it, after some rehearsal, she had forgotten it by our next assignation. So I took a leaf from her book and adopted the names of film stars, Humphrey (as in Bogart), James (as in Cagney), and my mother's old heart-throb Edward G. (as in Robinson).

  In my stupid young and romantic way I suppose she was my first true (in the sense of real) love
. She had given me something no other woman had thought appropriate and with it her friendship. Over the years I have many times visited Singapore and I have wryly wondered if she is still there. One night she threw my trousers out of the window while I was asleep and I had much difficulty the following day in retrieving them. The incident was the one possibly recognisable part of our relationship portrayed in The Virgin Soldiers. If she, a dedicated cinema-goer, saw the film, perhaps some far-off chord might have been struck for her. Would she, in her thirties by then, have realised that she was Juicy Lucy?

  Perhaps, perhaps not. All I know is that on the final night in Singapore, before the long-awaited troopship came to carry me back to England, I went to see her for the last time at the club where she had begun work when the Liberty closed its doors. I remember going up the familiar fetid stairs into the compressed room, the garish lights and the strained music, and seeing her at once sitting in her usual corner waiting for someone to hand her a ticket for a dance. She did not see me and I could not bring myself to go across the floor. A creased sergeant, whom I dimly recognised as a cook at Nee Soon, nodded towards her. 'Nice that one,' he observed. 'Calls herself Oliver. Funny name for a bint ain't it, Oliver?' I was so choked that I merely turned and walked down the stairs and out again. The air was dense, men sat in the gutters selling little bits of food from glowing stoves, I could hear the imperious voice of the Raffles Hotel doorman summoning chauffeurs by number, like a bingo caller. Tomorrow my dream of going home would be realised. I walked steadily towards the bus station. Yes, there it was, above the Cathay Cinema, Olivia de Havilland starring in so-and-so.

  I could have meant only little to her and the art of forgetting was an integral part of her trade. But I was, and am, someone who needs someone to love and for a while it was her, Juicy Lucy, Rita, Doris, Veronica, and the rest. I have always been grateful. Whoever she was.

  XIII

  The troopship sailing out to take me back to England had proved to be a long time coming. Our original eighteen months' term of national service was summarily increased to two years on account of the war in Korea. Mr Attlee, the far-off Prime Minister, made a speech which was broadcast on Radio Malaya as we sat stunned on our beds, draped in the customary off-duty towels like men in an unhappy Turkish bath. The thin voice of the Labour Premier issued irresolutely from the loudspeaker set across one corner of the room where it had functioned perfectly well until Trooper Johns had got his hands on it. Johns, a large Welshman sprouting spider-red hair, had mysteriously appeared in our midst from up-country, and having made up his bed turned his attention to improving our general domestic situation, beginning by repairing the perfectly good radio set. He had several pieces left over when he had finished and the set had never worked properly since. Even now, at this trying moment, there were glares in his direction as the sounds crackled, faded and wobbled about, as if Trooper Johns and not the Government were responsible for the bad news.

  'The increase in national service,' Atlee forecast from his safe distance, 'is bound to cause disappointment and hardship. It is bound to be unpopular . . .'

  That was the understatement of the century. There we had been, marking our names, numbers and destination on our energetically scrubbed kitbags ('UK ex-Malaya'). We had been measured for our last flimsy civilian suits from the Chinese village tailor and some, in an excess of vanity, had even had special and very unofficial uniforms made privately from smooth American-looking olive green material with all sorts of coloured flashes and insignia, mostly thought up by the tailor himself. One lance-corporal, short-sighted and with a hump on the left side of his back, was all prepared to go home looking like General Eisenhower. The show-off uniforms could, at the most, only be worn during the dreamed-of two weeks of disembarkation leave in England but it was judged that they would prove to be well worth their cost in just one evening at the Hammersmith Palais de Danse. ('Just come back from the jungle, see love, haven't seen a white woman in months.')

  Now, after all this and ritual crossing off of calendar dates, the promising letters to females, friends and families, the imagining of English sunlight slanting across Southampton Water; now the dream was to be postponed, perhaps even indefinitely. We remained speechless after the faraway Attlee had faded. Then Trooper Johns, who was a regular on a seven-year term, proclaimed loudly, with the triumphant and certain fervour of a Welsh evangelist. 'Six months – never! Six years more like it. The next big war is coming, boys!'

  We told him to shut up but he would not and he was bigger than any of us. 'Sign on, lads, you might as well. Get the extra money while you can. You're never going home now.'

  According to our pipe-voiced premier we were going to get a rise in pay anyway, in consolation, but it was little to relieve our despond. It was the beginning of the week and nobody had any money. The skinny Mongo, our Tamil bearer who for a dollar a week used to make your bed, clean your boots and brasses, was always willing to lend the dollar back, at a small percentage, and on this night several of the young men in the barrack room availed themselves of this facility. Now, at least, they could afford a NAAFI beer. The rest of us sat moodily on our beds. Some hauled up their mosquito nets and dubiously retired to privacy.

  The acute Cockney, Reg Wilcox, normally ebullient and cheerfully insubordinate (he saluted officers with a clenched fist), sat cloudily and picked at his guitar while his neighbour, an unparticular corporal, did likewise at his nose. Eventually Reg went to the centre of the barrack room, where the tea-bucket was located, and sat on one of the two wooden cross-benches, our only furniture apart from beds and lockers. He began to sing, like a dirge, a song intended for more jovial moments:

  She's a big fat cow,

  She's twice the size of me,

  She's got hairs on her belly

  Like the branches on a tree . . .

  Some of us joined in. Then others, gathering around, made a sing-song of our woe. As we chorused through the crude repertoire, more and more soldiers appeared from other disconsolate barrack rooms. People started to do individual acts, somebody told worn jokes, and a nice young fellow who occupied the next bed to mine and was leader of a local Chinese Wolf Cub pack, demonstrated the wonders of knot-making and amazed us with Kim's Game, the Boy Scout memory technique to recall in sequence up to thirty different objects. We were all in this together. Reg and I harmonised in 'Moon above Malaya', a song composed by someone snugly back home about a boy and girl 'dreaming in a bamboo hut'. There was a raucous version of this and everyone heartily joined in. It was simple and innocent enough and we were astonished when a glowering sergeant and three armed and heavily booted men entered resoundingly into the room. The trio of strangers were transit troops from the camp next door, with a sergeant we recognised as being a resident misery. The singing faltered but, under Reg Wilcox's defiant leadership, gathered again until it was far louder and ruder than before. The sergeant, a thin wet-eyed individual, scowled. 'Stop it!' he squeaked. 'Stop this row!'

  With slow obedience the song faded. We sat dumbly. The armed soldiers were standing nonplussed. They were newly out from Britain and they looked nervous. 'Find it!' ordered the sergeant in their direction. 'Search the place. Find it!'

  Not one of us had said a word and now we looked askance at each other. Find it? Find what? Perhaps, I thought, they were searching for our secret dog, a wretched pooping pup which we had found and, against the regulations, were rearing in the barrack room. At that moment it was below somebody's bed. But it was not the dog. 'All right, smart alecs,' said the sergeant straightening up. 'Where's the booze?'

  Booze! Reg looked everywhere as if searching. 'Booze, Sarge?' he said with half his usual grin. 'I wish we had some. Have you got any?'

  'Less of your lip, lad, or I'll have you on a charge,' responded the man nastily. I wondered if he had a wife and family. 'There must be booze somewhere. Or you wouldn't be singing, would you?'

  The remote logic of this was hard to grasp. The young fellow who ran the Wolf Cubs, a
nd was respected everywhere except when he trooped them into the barrack room on a Sunday morning, said to the sergeant, 'Nobody here has had a drop of drink, sergeant, We're singing because we're unhappy.'

  The watery NCO looked at us uncomprehendingly.

  'Because you're what?'

  'Browned off,' translated Reg.

  'What for? What have you lot got to be browned off about?'

  'Six months extra on our service,' Reg told him.

  'Six months! Six bloody months!' He almost wept. 'I'm in for eighteen years!'

  Reg Wilcox was never lost for a reply. 'You'd better sit down and join in, sarge,' he suggested politely. 'You'll like the next song. "Happy Days Are Here Again!"'

  He gave a twang on his guitar.

  If the new war and its resulting demands on our lives came as a shock to us, our annoyance was nothing compared to those who had served through the harsh years of the Second World War only to find themselves summarily pressed into the army again and hurriedly transported overseas to a place of which many had never heard.

  A favourite legitimate and cheap haunt of conscripts in Singapore was the appropriately named Shackles Club, a bar and social centre where selected local girls, known for their decency and dancing, used to foxtrot with us for nothing. There was nothing to follow either for they were invariably escorted away from the corrugated iron building while we stood in a down-faced group like dogs who had suddenly seen a variety of tasty bones removed from under their noses. It was in the bamboo bar of this otherwise pleasant establishment, among the rattan chairs and yellow-covered wedges of the Daily Mirror overseas edition, that I met a man who looked almost too elderly to be in army uniform. He was drinking Tiger Beer in deep thought, every now and then pausing to peer about him in the manner of someone who has quite recently lost their memory.