In My Wildest Dreams (31 page)

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.

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.