John and Chid had never been out of England before and I can only guess at their thoughts and emotions at being flung from a dreary English winter into a land of sunshine, colour and vibrant life. We were now in Singapore, land of the twenty-four-hour made-to-measure suit, the free port where Rolex watches and Minolta cameras were affordable to ordinary young men.
The billets at Changi were huge blocks containing three open-plan floors in which something like 250 men slept. We were on the top floor of Block 42, the roof supported by several enormous concrete pillars. There were no internal walls and several wide gaps led out on to the surrounding veranda in the outer walls. It was like living on one of the floors in a multi-storey car park. We had a bearer by the name of Bunti, an Indian with a magnificent body and a man who took no cheek from young sprats. He cleaned our kit for us, made our beds and did various other tasks. Since he looked after the whole floor of eighty-odd airmen, he probably earned a good wage. I liked Bunti and I think he liked me. One day he gave me a praying mantis, a pet I kept on my small locker for months. The mantis was not caged. Bunti taught me to ‘box’ it lightly with two fingers and it would seem to punch back with its forelegs. That was the reason, Bunti told me, it would stay with me, interested in our encounters.
Our greatest animal friends in the billet were the chit-chats, gecko lizards that stuck to the walls and ceiling with their sucker feet. They ate the mosquitoes and other biting insects. However, they did nothing to curb the bedbugs by which we were plagued for our whole Far Eastern tour. Every morning I would wake with splodges of blood on my sheets and little black bodies where I had rolled over and crushed the bugs while they were in the act of draining my veins. Their bites didn’t actually itch or hurt at all, but the vampire aspect of these parasites gave everyone the chills. Even putting the four legs of the bed into cans of oil did not help. Bedbugs came out of the cracks in the walls and on the ceiling, and dropped down like a parachute regiment of the insect world, to feast on the alcohol-charged blood of sleeping airmen.
The one other member of the natural world I remember with less than affection is the Singapore bullfrog, who would get into the storm drains at night and bellow. The drains were built like tunnels, so they amplified any sound that occurred within their walls. Bull frogs they were, but they made a noise like a rogue elephant.
One of our first introductions to Singapore was a lecture on Chinese secret societies: gangs of criminals. In 1959 they were averaging a Mafia-style murder a night, mostly involving rival gangs. Each gang had an identifying tattoo, which they wore with pride and for recognition in different districts. Airmen were told by an officer that he would inspect any tattoos they had to make sure they weren’t going to be mistaken for a rival gang member and bumped off in some alley. The favourite weapon of the Chinese gangs was a light bulb injected with sulphuric acid. This was tossed like a hand grenade.
To combat the Chinese Secret Societies the British had formed squads of Gurkha soldiers, who had vehicles similar to fire wagons. The wagons were manned by about 20 armed Gurkhas ready to swoop on any area in which a gang was operating. These Gurkha patrols had colourful names like ‘Dragon Squad’ or ‘Shark Squad’ and their wagons were painted with their symbolic creatures. If the squads couldn’t deal with the problem, a major riot for instance, the RAF could be called in. We were taught to form squares, rifles pointing outwards, with various officials inside the square. A man with a megaphone would order the crowd to disperse, then someone would read out the Riot Act and the consequences of not dispersing, and then finally tear gas and (God forbid) live rounds would be used on the rioters. It never happened while I was in Singapore and I never heard of it happening at any other time.
Lee Kuan Yew was the new first prime minister of the Republic of Singapore, though the island was not yet independent of Great Britain and would not be until 1963, when it would join the Federation of Malaysia. It became fully independent in 1965 when it left the federation and Lee Kuan Yew took it forward on his own. Even as I arrived Harry Lee (as he was known to the English) was cleaning up the colony of its ‘vices’ – sex, drink and opium. Lee Kuan Yew was a puritan of sorts who even had cinema posters of actresses with low necklines painted over so that they were not ‘revealing’. Later he would ban chewing gum and failing to flush a public toilet would become a criminal offence. Corporal punishment and execution have been retained to this day.
In his later biography Lee Kuan Yew spoke of his disappointment with the British Army when the Japanese defeated them in Singapore during the war, coming down as they did through the Malayan peninsula. Lee said Singaporians had until that point believed the British to be invincible and were devastated to find that they were as vulnerable as any other nation. This seems a bit naive to say the least, coming from an intelligent man who must be aware of world history. The British have lost many battles in the past – and that’s what it was, simply a battle – but what Singapore’s prime minister failed to underline was that the Japanese were eventually defeated and sent home with their tails between their legs. The war was won.
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Lee turned a colony into a wealthy, thriving nation despite its being populated by three separate groups – Malays, Chinese and Indians – as well as expats from several ‘white’ countries. Since I left in 1960 Singapore has flourished beyond recognition: the kampongs have all gone, the people are housed in flats, business is booming, the harbour is full of foreign merchant vessels, the trade in computer parts soaring, banking is flourishing. There are beautiful parks and walkways and numerous places of harmless entertainment, including the offshore island of Sentosa which has among its other multifarious attractions, a terrific golf course.
More recently Annette and I have walked in the clouds up on the Skypark, a liver-shaped platform straddling three tall skyscrapers, looking down on a city of the future. There are viewing areas, bars, restaurants and an infinity swimming pool up there. You can stroll in the heavens and enjoy tremendous views over Singapore and its magnificent port. Singapore is now one of the most modern cities, nay countries, in the world. Pristine clean, wealthy, thriving, its architectural landscape amazing, yet it has retained many refurbished old traditional buildings to keep a flavour of the past in its streets. It is a democracy which has never been tested by any change in its leadership, Lee having been its Prime Minister for over fifty years, but the politics seem to have worked for it, since there does not appear to be any overt corruption and its citizens enjoy one of the highest standards of living in the world.
Singapore rivals Hong Kong and Shanghai for being one of the most prosperous and crimeless cities in the world. In the first decade of the new millennium my daughter, Chantelle, and her husband, Mark, along with their three boys, lived for several years in Singapore. Annette and I took every opportunity to fly out there and stay with them. We love it still, even with Harry Lee’s modern-city makeover.
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However, back in 1959 there were still dance halls where girls could be met. I have already mentioned that the Great World was one of these, where you paid for a dance, got to know your partner and then met them after work finished in the early hours of the morning. Bedok Corner was a stretch of beach along which there were many many food stalls selling cooked fish, lobster, squid, beef, pork and rice. Paper lanterns hung from strings connecting the stalls and swayed in the night breezes. We would go drinking Singapore slings in the bars, especially the Long Bar of the Raffles Hotel, until midnight, then meet Chinese or Malay girls on Bugis Street. Thence to Bedok Corner for Hokkien prawn mee or some other local dish (the Singapore Chinese speak the Hokkien dialect of the country of their origin) and finally return to camp thoroughly washed out, fatigued and happy as Larry, ready to do a full day’s work.
Sometimes airmen would have to do guard duty on the edge of the airfield, a short ‘jungle’ .303 rifle in their hands. Malaya was still in a state of emergency with the War of the Running Dogs. Chinese-backed guerrillas were still causing
mayhem just over the water on the mainland of Malaya, the ‘running dogs’ a derogatory term for those who remained loyal to the government. In 2007 the Malaysian government sent me a medal for assisting in that war, though I did little but walk about peering into the rainforest hoping not to see anyone with a weapon.
I had not long turned 18 years of age.
Singapore evenings were the best, when the heat was not quite so hot and the humidity not quite so humid. If we didn’t go into the city itself we sat in the Malcolm Club and drank Tiger beer while the moths and mosquitoes battled with the lights. Sometimes evenings were quiet, on other times they developed into a party. (It was a time when ‘party’ was still only a noun.) Other clubs were the Cameron Club and the Chalet Club. Plenty of clubs for all tastes. Every so often I would order an ‘egg banjo’ from the food counter. This was simply a fried egg sandwich, but everything in Singapore had an exotic name. If not an egg banjo, fried rice from one of the stalls in the village. It was in Changi village one evening when I bought my first really good camera, a Minolta, which took excellent photos. I used it for black-and-white, but also for colour slides, which were the popular medium then.
Later, when I left Singapore for a year on Gan Island, in the Maldives, I hocked the camera at a pawn shop. On returning on leave some six months later, I thought I would have trouble retrieving the Minolta, but the instant I stepped inside the shop the owner said, ‘Ah, Mr Keewuff, you come back for your camera!’ He had only seen me once, when I pawned the item. The man had a phenomenal memory, as do many Chinese, probably due to the fact that their written ‘picture’ language requires memory, not encoding and decoding twenty-six characters as ours does. To read a newspaper only, requires remembering 4,000 different characters. To do anything scholarly, from 10,000 to 20,000. Their memory boxes have a wonderful capacity, to be sure.
We visited Changi jail one afternoon. Behind those walls were a thousand nightmares left over from the Japanese occupation of the Second World War. Graffiti abounded and I seem to remember a small chapel outside the prison confines with some heart-wrenching prayers cut into the wooden seats and altar. We knew what had gone on inside that place and it sobered our teenage minds for a day, which was quite a feat. It got me thinking about the place and I purchased a book written by a POW entitled Bamboo and Bushido. Harrowing.
One afternoon I ran into Petal, the pretty WRAF lass from Coltishall, who was living with her brother and his wife in Singapore. We went on a date to the pictures. I took her to a rather sedate restaurant for a meal, then we went home in a flying taxi. I went on several more dates with her, but neither of us was serious. She was a nice girl but she had no interest in a young airman who, it seemed, would never amount to much more than what he was already. For my part I liked her, but it went no deeper than that.
Now, the ‘flying taxis’ were something else. Mercedes cars that picked up people like buses until they were full. Singapore means ‘Lion City’ and if four of us were going into the beast-city, we would each take a separate flying taxi and pay the driver extra if he could beat the other three to Bugis Street. The road was our race track. If the driver had to stop for other passengers, that was all in the game. Picking up or dropping another passenger was a pit stop. The winner would be given free drinks by the others for the rest of the evening.
I already spoke a little Arabic from my youth and in Singapore picked up some Malay, but these days I can do little more than say ‘Good day’, ‘Thankyou’ and ‘Please’ and count up to ten in both languages. I can in fact count up to ten in about a dozen languages but can speak none fluently. I believe this comes from living in nine different countries and visiting sixty others, which is my current tally at the time of writing this autobiography. Since I have flitted here and there, around the world, my learning has been of a similar kind. I am interested, and dip and dive, into a thousand different spheres of knowledge. Seashells, birds, animal life, plant life, sailing, climbing, history, geography, poetry, music, etc etc. I am not one of those people who know a lot about one or two subjects. I am one of those who know a little about a lot of things.
As I have already written, I loved the scout movement as a boy, and this enthusiasm stayed with me into my youth as well. While stationed at Changi, Chid, Johnny and I joined the Rovers, which was then a grade one step beyond Senior Scouts. The Skip who ran that Scout group was called Chips. (If you’re going to be a lifelong Scout you really do need a name like ‘Chips’.) We had some great times camping and doing scouting stuff with the Rovers in Singapore, and once did a walk the whole length of the island. I say ‘did’, but for Chid and me it was an attempt, because we both dropped out halfway due to blisters. I blame the army boots we were told to wear. If we’d worn plimsolls as we wanted to, we might have finished the walk. Johnny Ball, however, indomitable as ever, did manage to get all the way. The walk took place at night and it was well beyond dawn the next day before the survivors, three including Johnny B., crossed the finishing line to glory.
Johnny was a boxer and he suggested Chid and myself get into the ring too. I weighed a magnificent eight stone thirteen pounds at the time and so became a featherweight (under nine stones). I think Chid was welter and Johnny was one weight above that, whatever that weight might be. I was the odd one out, being small, slightly built, and fashioned more for tennis than thumping the hell out of an opponent. Johnny Ball had a body like Tarzan. Chid was lean and rangy like Clint Eastwood: in fact he was a dead ringer for the film star. They could both box well. And me? I learned the techniques but spent most of my time in the ring ducking and diving hits rather than handing them out. I didn’t want my face turned into mashed potato, and I don’t blame myself for that. One Indian boy I fought was so skinny that even though he was a featherweight like me, his arms were twice as long as mine. I couldn’t get near the bloke and he gave me a bloody nose and two black eyes for trying. Boxing was not the best thing I ever took up, though I was to continue with it for over a year and a half.
I had one or two Chinese friends when I was there as a youth, a young man called Cheong in particular. The RAF in foreign climes used to recruit local men to assist with communications and other areas of expertise – Malta and Singapore especially – and this of course gave me the opportunity to meet and make friends with people who had been born and raised in the country I was simply passing through. Cheong was good at table tennis and taught me how to play the game Chinese-style, which stood me in good stead in the Far East Championships, where I acquitted myself much better than I had done at boxing.
A diary I kept at the time, the only one I have ever kept, tells me that Johnny Ball and I bought a record player between us and at the same time purchased a Johnny Mathis long-playing record The Twelfth of Never, along with Dave Brubeck’s Sounds of a Loop. I recall buying Brubeck’s ‘Brandenburg Gate’ but not the former. MJQ was another of my favourite modern jazz bands and I like most traditional jazz, from King Oliver and Bix Beiderbeck to Monty Sunshine. It was Johnny Ball who first aroused my interest in jazz and I have been an enthusiast ever since. Today I love the now ageing but still-brilliant French pianist Jacques Loussier, who plays jazzed-up Bach. His Play Bach album, the one recorded in Israel on the church organ and not the purified version on the piano recorded in France, is astonishing for its power. Whenever I play it, the first few bars hit me like a typhoon. I never cease to gasp at the breathtaking strength of its notes.
I have recently discovered another band who have taken the works of a classical composer and warp and weave with them. The Red Priest, who call themselves the ‘pirates of baroque’ do modern jazz versions of Vivaldi’s works. I will always be grateful to Johnny Ball for showing me how music can be twisted and turned to produce wonderful sounds, because like they say, if I hadn’t caught jazz in my youth, I would probably never play it in my more appreciative years. It has had a huge impact on my life and I can’t see that changing now.
Probably my love of jazz is why I also catch the per
ipheral and lesser-known types of music which seem to have a connection with jazz. I heard Cajun music for the first time in the film Southern Comfort and now have several CDs which I thoroughly enjoy. Oscar Wilde said that the definition of a gentleman is someone who can play the piano accordion – but doesn’t. Cajuns, descendents of French Canadians who live mainly in Louisanna are no gentlemen. They play the accordion like men possessed and the music they produce is phenomenal.
Likewise, since going to Spain I have come into contact with Spanish gypsy music, cante jondo, which usually involves a drummer, a guitarist and a vocals man with a voice like a landslide in the Sierra-Nevada. The first time you hear cante jondo it nearly blasts you out of your seat. You instinctively push your chair back from the stage and look round frantically for the fire exit. Cante jondo means ‘deep song’. It is an experience not to be missed, though my dear friend Ben Connor would disagree. A fan of Frank Sinatra, Ben believes cante jondo is the music of the Devil and crosses himself every time I play it. I once thought it derived from Moorish music, but I learned recently that cante hondo goes even further back, into some dark pagan era of the early Spanish mountain tribes.
I also see by my badly written diary that in 1959 I was reading Island in the Sun by Alec Waugh, which impressed me. Alec is the brother of Evelyn Waugh, who of course wrote Brideshead Revisited. I much prefer Alec and his love of sunshine islands, than Arthur Evelyn St John Waugh, whose name tells you all you need to know about his subject. I also read Arthur Grimble’s A Pattern of Islands during the same period. It was the beginning of my fascination with the Pacific and the Polynesian peoples, whose magical history of migration throughout their wide ocean inspired me to write a trilogy with the title ‘The Navigator Kings’, a series of novels which sold miserably, but of which I am enormously proud. That trilogy contains some of my best storytelling.
On My Way to Samarkand: Memoirs of a Travelling Writer Page 9