In My Wildest Dreams (30 page)

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.

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, and 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.

'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.