In My Wildest Dreams

by Leslie Thomas

  'How did you get here then?' he asked us simply. 'All this way from home? Lads like you?'

  I was with Smudge. We had been dancing with two sinuous Eurasian girls whose fat mother had just arrived to take them home because it was ten o'clock. In her sing-songy voice she was saying: 'It is past my girls' bedtime.'

  'Not much it fucking ain't,' Smudge remarked, taking a consoling swig of his beer as he watched the slight and slinky backsides retreat. It was left to me to tell the sad soldier that we were doing our national service, a condition of which he appeared to have no knowledge. I thought he might have come from somewhere remote for he had a wild accent; perhaps a place where the outside world did not greatly intrude.

  'I thought,' he intoned, regarding us as if he were still unsure we were flesh and blood, 'that when the war was finished it was finished. All over and done with. We could all go home like they promised. I'm married now, I got two boys and I've just started a new farm job. All going nice. And then they come around and tell me that I've got to go back in the army because I'm a reservist. I never knew they could get you back just like that.' My heart felt very heavy for him. And,' he added almost like an accusation, 'I come out here and you're here already.'

  'Well,' offered Smudge a little defensively 'we don't want to be 'ere either, mate, and now we've got another six bleeding months.'

  'As for this place, Korea,' said the soldier as if he had never heard Smudge, 'I'd never heard tell of it until now. And I've got to go and fight there. Nothing seems sensible, do it?'

  We left him and returned thoughtfully on the bus to Nee Soon, our now familiar home, the smelly wooden village at the foot of the hill with its shops and houses spilling into the roadside monsoon drains, the cafes and the tailors' shops and the wooden cinema so flimsy it swayed when there was a wind. There we often sat rooting for the cowboys while, for some deep reason, the local Chinese always identified with the Indians.

  It was dull but it was safe and, after all, Mr Attlee had promised faithfully that after our new six months, provided no further war had cropped up, we could all go home. There were some, however, who deeply doubted this and for the first few days, following the imposition of the extended service, I was among them. Sitting at my desk sorting through the details of dead men, I realised that in all dread probability I was in the army for ever. I might as well sign on as a regular soldier and at least get a lance-corporal's stripe and extra money. The inevitability stared me in the face. At that moment I almost marched into the Adjutant's office and offered my body to my country. Fortunately I had to pass the latrines on the way and I paused there, as one might pause when troubled at a wayside church, sitting in the cubicle studying the map of Korea on the front page of the Straits Times. The forces of the north, the Communist Koreans and their Chinese allies, were pushing in fierce black arrows far down into the south of the peninsular country. As a military man myself I judged that it would not be long before they drove the United Nations Forces, mostly Americans, with ourselves and some Australians as helpmates, into the China Sea. (Actually they did not. When only a small pocket was left to our side the advance was stemmed and a clever amphibious landing at Inchon further north eventually resulted in the Communist forces retreating.)

  It was while I was in the lavatory, studying the strategy and becoming more convinced that I might as well face facts and throw in my lot with the army, that my eye was taken by a separate paragraph low on the page saying that a British swimmer, Roy Romain, was to take part in some events in Singapore. He was from Walthamstow and I had seen him swim a number of times when I worked for the local newspaper. Once I asked him how he was and he replied: 'Fine, thanks.' Now, miraculously, I saw myself transformed back again looking smooth, interviewing the grand and the great, attending receptions and crimes, writing in the late yellow light of some famous Fleet Street office. I rose from the bog with my mind changed and my ambitions relit. What, after all, was labouring in an army pay office compared to going to Cup Finals and economically meeting attractive women? On the following day it was announced that the Chinese advance had been halted.

  A rumour went around as swiftly as rumours do in such enclosed societies, that some men from Nee Soon would be required to go to Korea, a prospect so unpleasing that there was a communal sigh of relief when it was decided that clerks from elsewhere would be sent. They, as it turned out, had very much the final laugh because they got no further to the front line than Tokyo, where the pay office was established, and enjoyed themselves immeasurably in that city of pleasure.

  For other young soldiers, of course, the going was much more painful. The Gloucestershire Regiment, mainly conscripts like ourselves, had paused in Singapore on their way to Korea and they had been somewhat in awe of those of us who had been getting our knees brown, as the expression was, for a year or more. Later they fought in one of the fiercest battles of the Korean War, along the Imjin River, and earned themselves many honours and many deaths. They were the real soldiers.

  Even in the blackest circumstances, however, there are those whose inborn optimism carries them on, and sometimes it is most oddly apparent. A friend in the West Country has the skeleton of a Chinese soldier on the sitting room piano at his home. In the middle of mud and death in Korea he began considering his future and decided he would like to qualify as a doctor when his national service was complete. A doctor, he was aware, needed a skeleton and even imitation skeletons were expensive. The real thing cost a fortune. And there he was in the front line of battle surrounded by potential skeletons. Why not take one home? He crept out and at considerable risk returned with a Chinese soldier who had been dead some time. The men under his command were not very taken with this addition to the unit and even less so when their officer proceeded to 'boil up' the body in a large cooking pot. Eventually, after much disgust, the bones were clean and he clattered about with them throughout his Korean war service. When he returned home he changed his mind about the life of medicine but he kept the skeleton. His children played at skipping with the threaded vertebrae.

  I have also heard a story that when the Argentine prisoners were being evacuated from the Falklands they were told they could take as many of their belongings as they could carry personally. One fellow was humping a huge sack as he prepared to board the ship. He was stopped by a British officer and asked what it contained. 'It's my brother. He is dead,' said the soldier. And it was.

  For us, for another six months, the fans continued to whirr in the heavy air of the office; the arrival of the tea trolley and a journey to the latrines every hour helped to push the time by but it was still slow. My task of burying the financial affairs of soldiers who were themselves by that time buried continued to be undemanding but depressing. My physical aspect was not out of keeping with the role for, stripped to the waist as we often were in the office, my ribs were easily visible and my shoulders were like a yoke. This cadaverous ensemble was topped with a head of sharp cheekbones and deeply saucered eyes. By crossing my thin arms below my chin I could do a fair imitation of a pirate flag. Once I took some documents to a sergeant in charge of a distant section. I was wearing my shorts, gaiters and boots and presumably a serious expression. 'Death cases, sarge,' 1 said as I put the folders on his desk.

  He took in my skeletal frame. A wrinkle of a grin cracked the skin of his jaw. As I went away I heard the clerks in his section erupt with laughter. One of them told me later that as soon as my back was turned the sergeant said: 'Death cases! Blimey, he looks like a bloody death case himself. What an 'orrible thing, dying in a pay office.'

  I had tried desperately to build up my frame by going to the garrison swimming pool each evening and crawling a laboured, lonely, mile. As a rule the only other occupant was the conscript who was trying to go blind by getting as much of the water's chemicals into his eyes as possible, thus gaining his passage home. Swimming opposite ways we would trudge up and down the pool although he could at least alleviate the tedium by merely sitting in the shallow end
and ducking his eyes. After more than a month of this not a solitary enlarged muscle could be detected in my frame. My comrades used to count my ribs as the Chinese counted the abacus frames and our secret barrack room dog tried to gnaw my shinbone.

  Even now, although the remainder of me has spread, my legs remain spidery. In those days I only wore shorts when I had to. I even refused to play cricket away from the garrison because someone said that in white shorts I looked like two surrender flags. It was very personal and distressing.

  In my more optimistic moments, however, I believed that I bore some resemblance to the famished fledgling Frank Sinatra of a few years before. When I began to sing professionally I did my hair like him. This stardom had come because of that dejected evening when we had tried to sing to ourselves and the sergeant thought we were drunk.

  The guitar-playing Reg Wilcox decided that we harmonised adeptly and we formed a quartet with a fellow called Chalky White from the next barrack block and a Women's Royal Army Corps girl who had a good voice and a bust nudging disturbingly at her shirt buttons when she breathed. We called ourselves Three Boys, A Girl and A Guitar, and it was thus 1 made my first broadcast crooning 'Tumbling Tumbleweed' and 'Mamoola Moon' (the popular version of a traditional song that has since been elevated to Malaysia's national anthem but in those days was a mere foxtrot).

  Our career began with a performance in the sergeants' mess at their Sunday beer night, and then at a neighbouring camp, then for some officers and their wives, and even at a children's party, where the army brats bombarded us with sultanas and raisins. We were paid a pound each for these recitals. Reg, the cheerful anarchist, sometimes adapted the words of a song (as at the children's party) so that 'My Grandfather's Clock' was rendered:

  My grandfather's cock

  Was too tall for the shelf,

  So it stood by itself in the hall.

  It was taller by half than the old man himself . . .

  Our delight when Radio Malaya invited us to partake in a forces concert was only exceeded when the compère announced us as coming 'Right off the top shelf!' The top shelf must have been somewhat dusty because my memory of the result, as broadcast later, is that it was not unlike the ragged harmonising outside a pub after closing time. Nonetheless we continued to give performances, supplementing our meagre army earnings. The girl went on to make broadcasts on her own and Reg and I, together and individually, crooned through the murk and garish lights of many a Singapore dance hall. Our speciality was 'My Foolish Heart', a ballad made popular by a band singer in Britain called Steve Conway who tragically died almost at the moment of his success. It was this song that I sang at the early apex of my career as a vocalist, standing one night on the stage of the ballroom at the fabled Raffles Hotel with a large orchestra behind me and the floor crammed with the quality of colonial Singapore, white dinner-jacketed, long-dressed, absently applauding, chattering and gin-slinging. That night, looking down on those select heads, the last generation of their sort, although no one knew it then, I thought how splendid it would be to be able to afford to buy a drink at the legendary long bar where Somerset Maugham and Noel Coward had sipped.

  It was fifteen years later, on my way to Australia as a newspaperman assigned to a royal tour, that I entered the Raffles under my own auspices. But before I could realise the then attainable ambition I was stricken with a rapid case of appendicitis. All I could manage was a drink of water, brought to me nonetheless by a turbaned Sikh bearing a silver tray. When in 1977 I went with my wife Diana to Singapore to write and appear in a television commercial for Singapore Airlines, I set the final scene of the sixty-second drama in the Palm Court of the Raffles. There as we sat in evening dress, beneath the palms and the stars, with a Chinese string quartet playing Vivaldi, I lifted a glass of wine. That drink had been a long time coming.

  To the small rewards gained by singing were added the occasional pounds I still earned from writing unimportant articles for provincial newspapers back home. (The RSM, to whom I continued to submit these pieces for censorship, remarked that it was amazing how easy it was to make good money from writing and that he was determined to enter the field when he finished his term of service – the first of many who have told me that they intend to start writing their best-seller tomorrow, or the day after, or as soon as they've finished their career or their drink.) Briefly I had become a lance-corporal, although I was ingloriously demoted following the incident when Juicy Lucy flung my trousers from her window in the middle of the night, causing me to report late at the barracks the following morning. My extramural activities resulted in the trebling of my pay, not a difficult achievement bearing in mind that the original amounted to less than two pounds a week. This largesse meant, however, that I could purchase further flimsy going-home suits from Fuk Yew, the village tailor. Others were doing the same and I even heard it said that the only advantage of the additional imposition of service was that it enabled the conscript to return better furnished with Chinese tailoring.

  I now had several suits, one in peacock blue, as well as a fawn jacket and chocolate-brown trousers which I wore when I was singing. In the ensuing years Fuk Yew has paid me back many times for my custom because I involved him and his curious name (his family probably came from Fukien Province in China) in The Virgin Soldiers, although Columbia Pictures ducked the risk of having it spoken in the film. The name is not uncommon among Chinese. There was a shop in Hong Kong where it was blazoned over the facade and just along the street another trader, in hundred-year-old eggs and dried frogs, advertised himself as Fuk Yew Tew.

  It was my fawn and brown ensemble that I chose to wear at the most lavish function I ever attended in my days as a soldier – the Annual St David's Day Dinner of the Singapore Welsh Society. My section officer, the good-humouredly languid Lieutenant Williams, was a member of this society and when the dinner was being arranged he insisted that 'private soldiers who are breathing the very fire of Wales' should be invited as well as those who owned their own white dinner jackets. He pressed his point with such vigour that not only were our tickets provided free but we were transported in military vehicles to the banqueting hall in the city, our arrival provoking only a little less attention than that of the General Officer Commanding, Field Marshal Sir John Harding. The group of us, six or eight, were wearing what was our version of formal clothes, me in my singing outfit, another Welsh lad in a chequered sports jacket with a naked girl painted on his tie, and another surrealistically hung with a kilt of the Seaforth Highlanders, borrowed from a Scottish soldier who owed him money and who guaranteed that it was approved formal wear, even on a Welsh night.

  Many years later in London I interviewed Sir John Harding at the Naval and Military Club and he remembered that night. But since on this latter occasion I was more properly dressed, wearing a cricket club tie and arriving by taxi, he concluded that I must have been commissioned during my time in the army. He politely suggested that we might well have met up on service duties at that time and asked which unit 'did you have?'. I had to confess that the unit had me, rather than me it, after which he bought me a drink and said that the ordinary soldier, even those in the Pay Corps, had behaved magnificently when the emergency arose.

  Indeed he had prophesied an emergency on that Singapore Welsh night while most guests were drinking liqueurs and I was sipping a Burton's bottled brown ale. It was, he said, important that such national societies should keep in close contact both with each other and with other like organisations in the colony. There might come an occasion when everybody would have to close ranks and if Welsh, Scots, Irish and English people knew each other well, that combining would be all the more effective. My instinct was to make notes of the speech and write it up for the Straits Times but Lieutenant Williams saw me starting to scribble and rolled his eyes to warn me off.

  Sir John Harding was right. Within only a few days the emergency arose. While the two Singapore cinemas were proclaiming in lofty neon their current films: Panic in the Streets
and The Wicked City, there was real drama down below.

  On one Saturday morning each month at Nee Soon we rehearsed rioting. The practice was rarely short of farce but even so it fell well short of the real thing. For these drills the unit was divided into two sections, one designated British Army and the other local riff-raff. We took it in turns to be part of one or the other and the latter category was by far the most popular since you were allowed to dress up, hurl abuse at commissioned and non-commissioned officers and throw things. The two factions would face each other across the barrack square, under the silent and sardonic scrutiny of the Chinese waiters from the NAAFI who, when it came to it, would presumably be numbered among the riff-raff. Reg Wilcox made a natural riot leader, encouraging the shouting of obscene and obscure sentiments. For some reason, which I did not even understand at the time, a catch insult had gone around the garrison to be bellowed at odd moments, in the cookhouse, in the barrack room and – at considerable risk – on such occasions as drill periods and pay parades. The phrase was 'Old Boot!' and the object of the game was to shout it at a moment when it put the caller at most peril. Reg would march up for his pay, stamp in front of the bored paying officer at his table, thrust up his clenched-fist salute, stamp his feet and emit a muffled 'Old Boot!' before announcing his name and number.

  Few officers ever even glanced up but one, perhaps more awake, did raise his eyes and asked Wilcox, 'What did you say?'

  Reg's shining face spread to the cherubic, 'Me, sir? Nothing, sir. Just name and number, sir.'

  'I could have sworn you said Old Boot.'

  'Old Boot, sir? Me, sir? No, sir.'

  'Very well. Carry on.'

  The riff-raff section of the riot rehearsal adopted this pointless slogan as their war cry and a stranger might well have been puzzled at the sight of a phalanx of British soldiery confronting a rabble in fancy dress howling 'Old Boot!' at them.