In My Wildest Dreams (27 page)

It was not the Communists who had laid them. The mines were British, left over from 1942 when the Japanese were invading Malaya. A bomb-disposal team appeared and detonated the booby traps with a roar that shook the trees for miles.

Not being of a very courageous, or even a very military, nature I was ever conscious of the potential danger around us. There was an ambush on a road only three miles away and several civilians were killed. These attacks occurred daily. Not even the highest were safe. A newly appointed High Commissioner for Malaya was shot dead when his car drove into an ambush in the supposedly terrorist-free Cameron Highlands area. One day we had sent out a patrol which failed to return at the appointed time. Dusk dropped and there was still no sign. Random men were chosen to form a search party and, unfortunately standing there, the finger pointed at me. As we were about to set off into the darkening jungle the lost patrol appeared in the other direction. So abruptly did we chance on each other that we almost opened fire before the mistake was realised.

One day we were led across the swamp and into a Malay kampong, the houses on stilts around a haphazard circle. The people, simple-faced children, ancient women, and a few mothers (the men were out working), regarded us without expression. Intrusions like this happened regularly over the past few years. First the British Army, then the Japanese, now the British again and the Communists too who came to cruelly take food and money from them. The poor people were caught between the factions. We 'screened' the village (our sergeant thought it strange that all the men were absent), pushing our way into their houses and overturning their belongings. I felt very ashamed.

From the kampong we continued far into the jungle. I had volunteered to be getaway man, a double-edged position, at the rear of the patrol. The getaway man, twenty or thirty yards behind, had a duty to
run away
in the event of an attack so that he could summon assistance. The attraction of this early exit, however, was countered by the fact that the straggler was frequently, and for good and obvious reasons, the first to be shot. Ever unsoldierlike, I was holding my snub-nosed rifle at the incorrect angle and I contrived to push it, snout-first, into a looming ant-hill, made of damp earth. The muzzle sank into the wall and when I pulled it out the barrel was stuffed solid. I dared not clean it out then but as I stumbled on I could not help wondering what would happen if I was required to pull the trigger. Would there have merely been a sludgy sound with the bullet dropping softly out of the end like something from a slot machine? I was told later that I would have blown my own head off.

My personal appearance in the jungle was a trifle irregular. Being unable to close the left eye independently I had needed to resort to the handkerchief stuffed under my hat. In the event of ambush I would have needed to pull this down over my eye and grip the loose end between my teeth. By that time I would probably have been dead anyway.

Trudging, thus ill-fitted, through the close and muttering jungle we once came to a stream about fifty feet wide, the water thick as chocolate. The lieutenant at the head of the column was a keen young fellow, eager, yes
eager,
to make contact with the Communists. He decided that we must cross the river, and, in his phrase, forget the crocodiles. Crocodiles! We stood looking down at the ominous water. A rope was brought up and one of our men went a little upstream where there was a perfectly good wooden bridge crossing from one Malay village to another. He then walked down the opposite bank and secured the rope to a tree before throwing the loose end back. 1 was tempted to mention that I had a long history of rheumatism and a longer aversion to the crocodile but the officer was too busy playing soldiers.

There was no reason, other than this military madness, why we should not all have crossed the stream without getting soaked and possibly eaten by using the bridge like the natives. One by one we dropped into the rusty, warm-flowing water, hand over hand on the rope, our rifles around our necks. Most could just touch the bottom, where there were stones, by standing on tiptoe. I could not reach. Reg Wilcocks, the national serviceman suspended behind me, told me more than thirty years later that my head actually went under the surface and he caught my hat as it floated away. My rifle was awash, and then, I still don't know how, my bayonet slipped and dropped to the bottom of the brown river. 'That, sonny,' said the officer when I owned up after we had gained the other bank (he could not have been much older than me), 'that is a court-martial offence.'

On our last day at Mersing, before gratefully embarking on the landing ship again, I saw to my astonishment a luminous blue Cadillac bump down the track from the village. It pulled up in the camp and out got a bronzed and breezy fellow accompanied by two stunning young women. We stood, as green and virgin as ever young men were, gaping at this man and his twin visions. We heard later he was a famous war correspondent. That, I thought, is the job for me.

Before I could set out on the path I had charted for myself to glamour, glory and girls, there was the matter of my pending court martial. For some reason I had not appreciated the full threat of this. Normally when you lost things in the army, a pair of socks or the oil bottle for your rifle or even your belt, you simply had to provide replacements out of your pay, and after all it was not my fault that my bayonet was now lying in an ooze of river mud west of Mersing.

It was only when we had returned to Nee Soon in Singapore that the unpleasant reality came to me. I was called to see the Adjutant, a brusque but decent man, who looked worried. He picked up a sheet of paper from the desk. 'They want to court-martial you, Thomas,' he announced.

'Who does, sir?' I asked shocked.

'General Headquarters,' he sighed. 'And they can too. Losing a weapon on active service is a serious offence. I've had a word with the Commanding Officer and we've been trying to think of ways to get you off. Up to now we've come up with nothing. It looks pretty serious.' He grinned good-naturedly. 'Perhaps you'd better make a run for it, son,' he suggested.

White-faced I returned to my desk. How long in the glasshouse would I get? The prospect was frightening. Military prisons were notorious. Mr Lee, the young Chinese clerk on our section who had given me the
Roget's Thesaurus,
shook his head and muttered, 'King's Legulations,' followed by a section and a paragraph number.

'What's that?' I asked hopefully. I had forgotten he was a wizard of military law. What he was doing posting off packets of accounts I never understood.

'Excuses,' he said. 'Leasons for no court martial.'

'What are they? I'll do them,' I said instantly.

'Mostly medical,' he said. He regarded me wisely. 'You said one day that you had leumatism?'

'After playing football I ache,' I agreed. 'I had rheumatic fever when I was about five, I think.'

'This crimate,' he continued eruditely. 'Bad for leumatism.'

'Swamps and steamy heat and all that,' I added hopefully. I rubbed my legs. 'I can feel them aching now.'

'And your arms?' he suggested. 'Leumatism often get in the arms.'

At a quick limp and holding my shoulder I went back to the Adjutant. He had already thought of the medical let-out. 'Been on sick parade much?' he asked before I could tell him why I had come.

'Prickly heat, sir,' I said not wishing to rush it. 'And I got a cricket ball on the head.' He regarded me in a prompting manner. 'Any rheumatism?' he asked.

Arms and legs, sir.'

'Good. Let's get you to the medical officer and build up a bit of a case history for you. By rights you shouldn't be soldiering in this climate, at all.'

'Might they send me home, sir?' How my fortunes had changed in half an hour!

'I think we'd better concentrate on the court martial,' he cautioned.

That morning I went to the medical officer and he examined me, cocking his ear so that he could hear my joints creak. From somewhere the Adjutant had produced a whole sheaf of medical reports giving dates when I had needed to report sick with my aches, although I remembered none of them. The MO played along sportingly. 'Rusty,' he announced. 'You're all rusty, Thomas. Better send you to hospital.'

An ambulance was ordered and I was put on a stretcher and transported to the British military hospital in Singapore. If I felt a fraud, I felt a justified fraud until waiting in the entrance hall I saw two young soldiers carried in, eyes staring uncomprehendingly through smeared blood. Their faces were like putty. They were hurried away. I heard an orderly say to another: 'There's a third squaddie in the wagon. Stiff as a board.'

Chastened, I sat until the specialist could see me. He listened closely but he did not seem to be able to hear my joints creaking. He said I would be admitted for a few days for observation. I was taken into a ward and placed in a bed between a hairy Seaforth Highlander with malaria and a French sailor with appendicitis. It was more difficult understanding what the Seaforth Highlander said, even when he was not delirious, than it was the French sailor. No one else in the ward, however, even tried to converse with the matelot and he was despondent. My solitary and distant year's French, under the indomitable Miss Quick at Stow Hill School in Newport, was scraped together. I worked out convoluted sentences about the Frenchman's
maladie
and his
bateau
not to mention his
appellation
and his
ville.
When I tried them out on him his eyes widened with thanks and delight and he gabbled off fiercely until I stopped him. After that I used to converse, briefly, with him every hour before going away to put together some more painful sentences.

Twice a day I had to go to the physiotherapy department and, standing in pyjamas under the instruction of an attractively spruce nurse, I was required to turn a great wheel fixed to the wall, first with one arm and then the other, and then by means of a pedal attachment, with both legs, an occupation as tiring and boring as it was unproductive, but better than being court-martialled.

There were two soldiers in the ward who were in for circumcision. 'Great skive,' one informed me from behind his hand. 'Little snip here and there, and you ave a week in 'ospital, all mod cons and 'aving a decko up the nurses' skirts and that. Then you can get sick leave as well. Nothing to it.'

Unfortunately I had been given a precautionary snip as an infant. In the urinals at school I had often wondered why mine had a different end from so many others, and in my early teens I had indeed begun to wonder whether I was Jewish. Nevertheless this information seemed too good to waste. When I returned to Nee Soon, my medical dossier now complete (there was no court martial), I passed the idea on to several inmates of the barrack room. Three of them actually went to have the operation, having complained to the medical officer that the heavy climate was having nasty repercussions on their private bits. They returned furious. 'We ought to kill you, Thomas, you daft bastard,' observed one. 'It 'urt like bloody 'ell, especially when you got the 'orn wiv them nurses comin' and ticklin' your feet.
And
there's
no
bloody sick leave, neither!'

A lot of our thinking time was directed to those lower regions. Being up at Mersing, and indeed seeing those poor young soldiers carried into the hospital, made me realise how brief life could be. And yet I still did not know what it was like to be with a woman. Such were matters in those days that eighty-five per cent of my comrades were in similar uncertainty. We used to sit and debate what women were
really
like. 'I hope,' said one youth piously, 'I don't get a bullet before I get a shag.' In that moment the idea for
The Virgin Soldiers,
not written for many years, was born.

Such was our ignorance of what was required and
how it actually felt
that we were stunned with admiration when we learned that a mild, curly-haired, young lad, who lived quietly in the corner of the barrack room without bothering anyone, was being sent back to Britain
because his girlfriend was pregnant.
Here was one of the smallest and most innocent-looking soldiers in the garrison and he had not only got a lady up the stick, as was the expression – but he was being repatriated on the strength of it! As he sauntered off towards his four-day trip by plane, home and his wedding, we squatted disconsolately, jealous of his luck and his foresight.

'Leave,' decided a brightly browed youth called Harold Wilson from Manchester. 'That's what we need – leave.'

'Penang,' muttered Johnny Staton, who came from the same city, with a confirming sniff. We were like boys planning an unofficial outing from school.

'The City Lights,' I added, naming a legendary place of fun and filth. 'The Piccadilly,' I went on, naming a second. I was eager to make a start to my sex life. 'Get anything you want there, so they reckon.'

'And some things you don't want,' added a cautious lad called White.

'Got to take some risks,' pointed out a soldier called Smudge. He sat with both feet in the barrack room tea bucket.

The risks were not all sexual, however, for Penang, an island off the west coast of Malaya, was reached only after a long and perilous journey by rail through the length of the bandit-haunted country. Ambushing expresses was the easiest attrition the Communists could undertake. They simply lay in the darkness on the side of the line and fired through the windows or the roof of the train as it roared through the steamy night. One group of national servicemen had returned to Nee Soon from leave only two weeks earlier, white-faced and with the most terrible tale of an ambush when the train was almost at Johore Bahru where the causeway took the line across the strait to the safety of Singapore. Machine-gun fire had come from a high embankment. Two civilians had been struck dead in front of the eyes of the hapless British soldiers and the foot of a Chinese baby had been shot off. The conscripts returned, shaking and splattered with the child's blood. They did not want to go on leave again.