In My Wildest Dreams

by Leslie Thomas

  The soldiers would then bring forward a banner, held aloft by two men holding its poles. This, in several languages, told the insurgents, somewhat unnecessarily, that we were British troops and, therefore, in charge. They must disperse and return to their homes, if they had any. The appearance of this banner was greeted with derision by the mob who stayed put and continued to throw objects.

  When the real riot occurred it was for none of the reasons that might have been anticipated. There was no political motive, although doubtless such elements took due advantage of the situation. The outbreak was, in fact, caused by a twelve-year-old Dutch girl.

  Her name was Bertha Hoertog and she had been left in the Dutch East Indies as a child when the Japanese invaded the islands in 1942. Her parents, depositing her with an amah, escaped to Europe. When they returned after the war both girl and amah had vanished. Eventually they were traced to a village in Malaya where the round-faced, pig-tailed, white girl had been brought up among the native children. She spoke their language, she ate their food, she washed in a stream and played in the shade below the stilts upon which her home and the other houses in the kampong were built.

  The parents claimed the girl but the amah refused to give her up. Immediately the Dutch couple applied for a court order in Singapore and the Malays retaliated by 'marrying' the girl to the village schoolteacher, seeking to establish in this way that she was a Moslem.

  The Singapore Supreme Court, sitting in its municipally domed, white building, decided that until the case was decided, Bertha was to be accommodated in a convent. It was that which so enraged the Moslem Malays. To put the girl in a Christian establishment was taken as the deepest affront. Within hours the whole city was in smoke and turmoil.

  At Nee Soon there was the customary military mayhem. The order went out to form the riot squad, and thinking it was just a surprise practice (we were twelve miles from the city and knew nothing of the outbreaking violence) half of us appeared in our fancy dress ready to throw clods of earth and bellow 'Old Boot!'. We were hastily instructed to discard our costumes, to get into uniform, draw rifles and ammunition, and parade in battle order. Ashen-faced, an officer said he had heard that the pavilion of the cricket club had been blown up. Matters were patently serious.

  Looking and feeling warlike we were convoyed to the city. Smoke was making a curtain over the sunset and peeping through the gap over the cab of the lorry we began to experience a few touches of apprehension. The riot was well under way by the time we arrived. People had been killed, buildings were toppled and cars were blazing in the gutters. A Chinese of prosperous proportions, stood outside his car showroom looking benignly at the crackling vehicles and rubbing his hands.

  We disembarked from the lorries near the Happy World amusement park which, naturally, was under heavy guard. A national service officer, pink as a flamingo, was rushing about with a piece of paper sending platoons off in different directions to protect government offices, residences, junctions and bridges. He appeared to have run out of locations when he reached us. He checked his list and his face was rose, the pink deepened to scarlet. He mumbled: 'Peculiar posting for you chaps, I'm afraid . . . It's the . . . you know . . . The VD Clinic.'

  It did indeed seem an odd place to require protection but we obediently set off. When we reached it we found, in fact, that we were part of a larger force which was surrounding not only the clinic but the adjoining Shackles Services Club which was situated in convenient proximity.

  'Never thought I'd have to guard this place,' sniffed Smudge, surveying the barred windows. 'Blimey, look at them bars. Do they reckon somebody's going to break in to pinch the bloody spoggies.'

  Spoggies were contraceptives which the clinic dispensed to soldiers who felt desperate. A man, ominously several fingers short, and some fussy orderlies normally manned the station. Around the walls were warnings of what might happen to you if you dallied with wicked women, posters depicting little children of the future with no arms and legs, that sort of propaganda. One ex-soldier (he was wearing campaign medals and an old beret) was portrayed groping blind and lame along a gutter. Selling matches, naturally.

  To prevent this sort of inconvenience in years to come soldiers who felt they had to could go to the building and there receive a protection kit not much smaller than the average picnic basket. There was a supply of French letters (several, presuming I suppose that you might lose one, or one might explode, or that you might not feel satisfied with the first time) and a selection of ointments and lotions which were supposed to be spread over the genital region before the illicit congress. Smudge swore he had been there once but that they would never inveigle him again. 'There was all these tubes of stuff,' he remarked in his graphic way. 'Creams and junk like that. You're supposed to spread them over the spoggie once you've got that on. By the time I'd done all that, and the bint was standing there, starkers, twiddling her thumbs, watching me . . . by the time I'd put that lot on, I'd forgot what I'd gone for.'

  It occurred to me that perhaps that was the real object. Another former client of the clinic, an engineer who arrived in the night to test the telephone, confirmed the details. 'By the time I'd squeezed all that lot on me,' he said, 'I felt like a pastrycook.'

  While we were guarding this essential installation there were plenty of explosions, smoke and other signs of trouble in the vicinity. An infantry officer came in and, disdainfully seeing we were desk soldiers, ordered us to try and appear fierce and follow him to the next street. None too bravely we obeyed and found ourselves around the back of St Andrew's Cathedral, a wedding cake church built to look like a corner of old England, where there was a commotion. There were shadowy figures and a car was blazing at one corner. On another, a calm crouching Chinese was still putting morsels of meat on skewers which he cooked over another, rather smaller, fire and sold to both rioters and troops.

  We must have looked more businesslike than we felt because the insurgents broke as soon as we appeared and vanished into the many alleys and cuts. We joined up with some more troops from Nee Soon who had heavily embarrassed their platoon officer by displaying the riot banner back to front. We spread along the street and six of us had just tentatively taken up position behind some ornamental shrubs when the door of the church-like building opposite burst open and out poured a frenzied gang of Orientals. They were shouting and gesticulating, several fell down the steps, and they were lucky we did not open fire without waiting for orders.

  The leader, in a gorgeous blue and silver costume rushed towards us and exclaimed: 'Oh boys, so glad you're here! Hooray! Hooray!' Clearly this was no rioter.

  The English upper-crust accent scarcely fitted the curly costume and the bells on his toes, or the painted pointed eyes. He was not only exotic, he was drunk. He was also more than a bit queer. He saw that we were staring. 'I'm Nankipoo!' he exclaimed.

  'Nanki . . . who?'

  'Nankipoo. You know, silly. Nankipoo – from The Mikado!' He turned to where the rest of the Orientals were sorting themselves out, doffing costumes and hats and revealing solid, if temporarily shaky, British citizens. 'This is the rest of the cast,' announced Nankipoo. 'It was our dress rehearsal tonight. Singapore Operatic Society, you know. And this wretched disturbance started. We've been shut in that hall for hours. I feel quite faint.'

  After a few days of enthusiastic civil disorder, the appearance of a squadron of armoured cars from up-country, accompanied by a company of diminutive but businessless Ghurkas, quickly settled the city. We went back to Nee Soon, to the ledgers and the calculations, me to dead men's dockets and a short story I was busily composing in the army's time.

  Others in the office were also busy at unrecognised occupations. There was a scandal when one of these was uncovered and everyone was thrilled at the arrest of the garrison's most popular young officer. He and a senior non-commissioned officer were charged and confined to barracks while army detectives from the Special Investigation Branch uncovered a unique and ingenious fraud. Sitting sw
eating in that humid pay office, the lieutenant had formulated a scheme which I am certain began as fancy but quickly solidified to fact once the possibilities were recognised. He simply invented a small army. He was in charge of a section dealing with Ghurka accounts, a specialised subject since the little warriors from Nepal had a different pay scale and different service arrangements from the rest of the army (if he so wished, so it was said, a Ghurka could go home and send his brother to replace him in the service). The young pay office lieutenant simply wrote down a list of concocted Ghurka names and invented home addresses in remote Nepal. He then proceeded to have his phantom troops posted up into the Malay jungle to fight the Communists. Up-country an accomplice would indent for money to pay these fictitious fighters. When the money arrived it was all properly accounted for and the records in Singapore were straight. Every now and then the two officers and their accomplices would meet up and share out the spare cash. It was ingenious.

  How the plot was uncovered I do not know. But there was to be a court martial at Nee Soon and strict orders were given that on no account was the accused officer to be allowed in the vicinity of the pay office. He was under open arrest and wandered around amiably in much the same way as he had always done. His benign attitude had always made him popular with the other ranks; now he became the object of admiration. One evening I was on guard duty at the pay office, patrolling up and down, bayonet fixed on rifle, the crickets creaking, watching the dying day, and thinking about England. Up the path from the direction of the officers' mess came a figure with a familiar saunter.

  'Halt, who goes there?' I challenged.

  'Is that you, Thomas?'

  'Yes, sir,' I replied, worried at the quick reversal of roles.

  'Well this is me. You know me, Thomas.'

  'Yes, sir. Of course, sir.'

  He reached the head of the path and lit a cigarette, offering me one. 'No thanks, sir. Not on guard. I don't smoke anyway.' I was very worried about his presence.

  He laughed languidly. 'Good chap.' He took a meditative puff towards the setting sun. 'Absolute shithouse place this, don't you think?'

  Flattered by the familiarity I confirmed the assessment. 'Be glad to get home won't you, son?' he went on. 'How long now?'

  'Three months, fourteen days, seven hours, sir. Before actually sailing that is.' Troopships always departed on the evening tide and with our demobilisation calendars, tide tables, sailing lists, names of vessels, duration of voyages and all other essential information, we knew to the moment.

  'I'll probably be here for the next ten years,' he shrugged, conversationally. 'Hope they don't stick me in Changi jail.'

  I seconded that and at that moment he patted me on the shoulder and said: 'Be a good chap, Thomas. How about letting me slip into the office for a couple of minutes? There's something I've left in my desk.'

  My mouth sagged. I could feel it dangling. 'I . . . I . . . can't, sir,' I pleaded. 'There's special orders that you're not allowed in. I'd be court-martialled myself

  He looked sorry he had asked. 'Right,' he said. 'Of course you would. Never mind, Thomas. I thought I'd give it a try. Have a good trip home, son.' To my overwhelming relief he strolled away down the path towards the sunset and the officers' mess. I seem to remember he got three years in the end. Whether it was in Changi I don't know.

  Our excitements were generally more domestic. The arrival of a new intake of national servicemen from Britain invariably provided a measure of minor amusement. We would lean over the barrack room balcony like old sweats, making rude comments on the quality of the arriving troops, how pale their legs were and the eternity of service stretching ahead of them. This, as a measure of status, strangely mattered. 'Get some service in,' or more frequently, 'Get some in,' was no flippant phrase, but a method of showing seniority even if, like me, you were an unexalted private. One day Smudge and I were stopped in Singapore by two obvious, freshly arrived, military policemen. They said we were out of bounds and had our hands in our pockets, both accusations being true. We gave them a terrible lecture about the necessity of getting some service under their belts before accosting veterans like us and they went away suitably chastened.

  Jokes were gleefully played on the newcomers, sending them out on bogus midnight patrols, putting giant beetles in their boots, telling them that it was their turn to sweep the barrack square and so on. The cost was occasionally heavy. Their retaliations were, in the main, unconscious and genuine mistakes, but dramatic for all that. In the middle of the barrack room was a large bucket which was used for what the army calls 'gunfire' – early morning tea. The overnight guard would bring in a couple of gallons of the thick brown liquid at first daylight and we would stagger from our beds and fill our enamel mugs, half for drinking, half for shaving because there was no hot water in the mornings.

  On the night after the arrival of a fresh intake of conscripts, I woke to an ominous noise, realised what it was, and shot up in bed just as others were doing the same. On went the lights to reveal a long, white and nervous newcomer peeing into the tea bucket.

  In the latrines were rows of what were poetically known as thunderboxes, wooden crates with a lavatory seat fashioned on the top. These were removed every day and scrubbed, being left on the balcony to dry in the sun. One of the newcomers was found squatting on a thunderbox on the balcony. 'It's too late – I've done it!' he howled miserably when we rushed towards him. 'I thought this was the proper place!'

  Occasionally a novelty arrived with a new group. Such was Corporal Ankers, a breezy regular, who had occupied himself on the outgoing troopship by learning to be a hypnotist. A few nights after his arrival several men in the barrack room sprang upright at midnight and wished everyone a hearty goodnight. Half asleep, the rest of us took little heed. Then it happened again, and then again. It transpired that Corporal Ankers had hypnotised these men in the NAAFI that evening, leaving in their subconscious an instructions that at certain hours they were to rise in their beds and wish everyone goodnight.

  He was encouraged to demonstrate further. Dangling a coin on a chain in front of the subject's eyes he would whisper, 'You're going into a deep sleep . . . deeper and deeper into a deep, deep sleep. Deeper and deeper into a deep . . . refreshing sleep.' Astonishingly the victim would keel over into the obedient unconscious. Then he could be made to do almost anything, from reciting rhymes to a striptease. Corporal Ankers seemed to be able to do it at will, to anyone and everyone. A sceptical NCO entered the barrack room one evening to witness this miracle and ended up making embarrassingly carnal love to a bolster which he firmly believed to be his wife back in England. When he came out of the trance he burst into tears. An ape-like potato wallah from the cookhouse, a mountainous fellow who sweated more than anyone else in Singapore, stood reciting 'Georgie-porgie, pudding and pie . . . kissed the girls and made them cry . . .' knees together, finger in mouth like the four-year-old he had once been and had suddenly become again. We had to stifle our hilarity in case we woke him up, but it proved impossible to suppress when he forgot one of the lines and stood, a huge infant, scratching his head, trying to remember.

  Corporal Ankers was the star turn of the garrison concert although not in the way intended. He was worried that, in the spotlights, his powers might wane and he would not be able to entrance any and every volunteer who went up to the stage. So he asked six men, on the premise that if he failed with two or three, then others would be successes.

  I was one of the six. He had successfully put me in a trance before and I had balanced, according to witnesses, supported only by my heels and the back of my head between two chairs. On the concert night volunteers were spaced across the stage and Ankers started at one end of the line and progressed to the other, putting each subject under the influence in a matter of moments. I was the first to be hypnotised, soon captured by the dangling coin and the repeated words. Apparently I stood there, at attention, while Corporal Ankers moved on to the next man, and, having put him under, to the n
ext. When he reached number six, I suddenly toppled, still stiff as a pole, from the stage and into the lap of the Colonel's wife who was sitting beside her husband in the front row. All I know is I woke up looking into the startled eyes and flushed cheeks of the grey-haired lady, with the Commanding Officer's voice beseeching me: 'Come on now, lad. Wake up. Wake up.'

  Even after this debacle Corporal Ankers was permitted to continue with his performance, although while they were recovering me from the stalls the second standing soldier dropped likewise from the stage, this time narrowly missing the Adjutant. The climax of the display, however, went even more disastrously awry. The subject was persuaded, as I had been in the barrack room, to lie like a plank of wood between the slender backs of two chairs. The applause which greeted his feat provoked Ankers to overplay his hand. With a flourish he climbed up on the man's chest and stood there, feet apart, arms outstretched like a Cossack bareback rider. The clapping was immense but above it came two distinct cracks and the medical officer leapt to his feet and shouted: 'Now you've done it, Corporal! You've broken his ribs!'

  He had too. The act finished in agony and confusion. Later, sitting chastened on his barrack room bed, Ankers snatched at a crumb of comfort: 'You'll notice,' he pointed out, 'that he didn't yelp until I'd brought him around, did he?'

  XIV

  There were still some weeks until May and our embarkation for home. The war in Korea seemed to be going better for our side and there were no alternative wars breaking out anywhere else, although each breach of the peace was followed anxiously in the newspapers. It seemed we might be getting on the boat after all. I was glad I had not signed on for life.

  Roy Romain, the swimmer, who unknowingly had helped to save me from a military career, came to Singapore and swam in the international gala. He was a tall hairy man with long arms, who wore a skullcap in the water. I wrote a news story about his appearance and, since he was a personality in Walthamstow, I sent it back to my old newspaper. I was also sending reports of Nee Soon garrison rugby and soccer matches to the Straits Times and once caused some trouble when the newspaper sent a reporter to interview one of our conscripts who, so he said, had been secretly signed by Manchester United. The Chinese journalist walked past the garrison guardhouse and sat in the barrack room asking questions of the footballer and taking a picture of him sitting on his bed. Our colonel wanted to know how this civilian had penetrated the security. It was not very difficult. He merely walked through the gate. Indian taxi drivers, Chinese laundry boys, Tamil cleaners and Sew-Sew, the lady who used to sit on the balcony and mend our clothes for a dollar a time, all walked through the gate. Years later when I made a sentimental journey to Nee Soon, Australian troops were in the barracks and they had taken the gate off altogether. Then, on a further much later visit, I found the small alert soldiers of the Singapore army in occupation. They had replaced the gate and security was very tight.