On My Way to Samarkand: Memoirs of a Travelling Writer (9 page)

7. RAF Uxbridge

Uxbridge is on the tube line, with easy access to London, but strangely I never went into the Big Smoke at that time. Instead I joined another boy, Roy, and spent most of my time at the Pear Tree Riding School, owned by a tall efficient, young man of our age. Terry lived with his invalid mother in the Pear Tree Pub. His mum was confined to a wheel chair but had a fully active business brain. Terry doted on his mum and they were both huge fans of Shirley Bassey.

There were two seventeen year old girls who worked at the stables: Susan and Patricia. I liked Susan, a lovely young woman, but she was not interested in me. Patricia
was
interested in me, but I had eyes for no one but Susan. What a familiar story!

Terry taught me how to ride horses. I was never an ‘expert’ but I was competent enough to take out parties of sometimes twenty riders. I often rode a big grey mare called Lady, but also a frisky little pony that was difficult to control and gave me the satisfaction of knowing there were few people who could ride such a nervous beast. Terry once gave me the opportunity of riding his own precious mount, Texas, who promptly bolted towards a ditch and threw me in a magnificent somersault over the hedge on the other side. I landed on my back, winded, and was thoroughly annoyed with Terry because he seemed – damnit he
was –
more concerned that Texas might have been hurt by the event. He fussed over the animal long after I had got up, checked myself for broken bones, and then scraped the mud and twigs off my clothes.

I enjoyed my part-time job at the riding school and was eternally grateful to Terry for passing on his knowledge of horses. Years later in Bahrain I would mount one of the famous Sheikh of Bahrain’s stallions bareback and give a good account of myself in a race over the desert. I would never have been able to do that had I not been taught by a man who knew and liked quadrupeds better than he liked bipeds. After leaving Uxbridge I never heard of Terry again.

While working in the comcen at Uxbridge two superior-looking airmen returned from Singapore sporting gold watches and golden tans. I listened to their stories of Singapore with great envy, remembering my childhood in Aden, and wishing I could go to the Far East myself and turn into one of these golden people again. It was a yearning that was to be fulfilled. Many times in my life I have hungered for things – not money, I hasten to add, but such postings and work as would make my life a wonderful experience – and they have come through. Whether that’s due to a burning desire making it happen, or a belief in a greater spirit than Man, coincidence or simply fate, I do not know, but a guardian angel watches over me.

A posting to Singapore came through just four months after arriving at RAF Uxbridge, and what was more my old mates Chid and Johnny Ball were on the same flight. We were going to the mystic east together, Chid, John and I, to RAF Changi comcen. Life was about to get 100 percent better. Goodbye, grey old England. Hello, sunshine, bull frogs in storm drains, colourful birds, jungled islands, great food, oriental girls, Tiger beer, gambling until the short hours, good pay, cheap cameras and watches, terrific tailor-made clothes, expeditions into Malaya (not yet Malaysia), cicadas, swimming, boating, and oh, just the good good-life.

8. RAF Changi

We flew out to the Far East on 20 November 1959, in a Bristol Britannia, which had four turboprop engines. It was an airliner built to fly across the British Empire, but only eighty-five were made before pure jet-engined aircraft took over. The flight, which refuelled in Istanbul and Bombay, took almost a whole day real time. On board were three young airmen, still not yet out of their teens, keen to start life in the Orient. When we landed and stepped from the aircraft the heat and smells assailed us, smothering us like a hot wet blanket made of herbs and spices. It was wonderful. I breathed deeply, went down the steps and once more stood on eastern tarmac.

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.

~

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.

~

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.