In My Wildest Dreams (23 page)

'Nightshirt', my old dormitory mate Frank Knights, was on leave in his uniform of the Royal Electrical and Mechanical Engineers. He blanched when he saw my shoulder flashes. 'The Pay Corps,' he said caustically. 'The Pay Corps!' He regarded my sparse khaki figure as perhaps an officer of the Household Cavalry might have done. 'I should do something about that,' he advised. 'And quick.'

'What can I do?' I demanded miserably.

'Why don't you desert?' he suggested.

Back in the barracks it was explained to us that wicked women could send us blind, eventually that is, and that we ought to have pride in our regiment. After all Napoleon had said that an army marched on its stomach, and he might easily have added that it went into battle on its pay packet. Soldiers who were not paid, were soldiers who did not care to fight. It was also necessary for the man going into action to know that his wife and family were receiving their proper allowances. I felt better about it after that.

That summer of 1949 was only four years after the war had ended, and yet they were talking about the start of another one.

'Wait till the balloon goes up!' our action-man sergeant used to exclaim happily, banging his small tight boots on the square. 'The Ruskies will have you lot for breakfast!'

I felt vaguely cheated. After all we had been told and all we had expected, there was every sign that we were going to have to fight again. Only yesterday, it seemed, we were collecting money to buy weapons for Russia. And this time I would be old enough. Nevertheless military training was at least open-air activity and it was a fine summer. Charging across corn stubble, burning realistically as if some scorched earth policy was being pursued, made me feel quite warlike although my enthusiasm would have doubtless waned perceptibly if a Stalin tank had appeared on the next hill.

With the second part of the basic training course came four weeks of technical instruction in army accounts. My heart plunged into my boots and stayed there. We sat in hot huts, with the September sun pouring down on the countryside outside the windows, and endured the most boring month of my life. Not only did I not understand the work, I had no urge to understand it. I wrote a private letter to the War Office, explaining what was happening to the ace reporter of the
Woodford Times
– what potential they were overlooking. Someone wrote back and, in a sentence, said it was hard luck.

The month ended with the Passing-Out Parade, the climax of the whole ten weeks' training. We had further drilling rehearsals in the evenings, after putting the damned ledgers away for the day, and our action-man sergeant, eyes and chest bulging, voice squeaky with emotion, promised every punishment in hell if we did not win the award for the best platoon on the day. And we really
wanted
to win; for ourselves and for our sergeant. But, on the night before the big parade, tragedy struck. Something terrible happened to Farrell.

Farrell was a tall, thickly spectacled youth with a galaxy of pimples. At that time there was a radio comedy team called Forsyth, Seaman and Farrell, and our Farrell, staring tall and blindly from the ranks, was known to the drill instructor, the good-natured blue-chinned Cockney, as: 'Forsyth, Seaman and Fucking Farrell' when there was reason to bawl in his direction, which was often.

Farrell, however, had a gift. He possessed a loud whisper. We had been taught to drill by numbers, each movement accompanied by the timing of one-one-two-three, and sometimes even four. At first, in our early days, we had all bellowed these numbers as we raised our knees and stamped our feet, wheeled, whirled, presented arms, thrust out legs and marched. In the more advanced stages, however, only one timekeeper was designated and this was Farrell. From his height his loud whisper would hiss across the heads of the squad, unheard by anyone at the distance of a saluting base, and we would perform the movements accordingly. He was the mainspring of the platoon. Then, on the night before the Passing-Out Parade, Farrell, possibly through sheer fright, lost his voice. He came into the barrack room mouthing things that no one could hear. At first we thought he was joking and told him sternly not to make fun about things like that. Then we realised he was not. He was rushed to the latrines and made to gargle with everything anyone could think of from cough mixture to whisky. Someone tried to scrub his tonsils with a toothbrush while the rest of us held him down. He was theatrically sick but his voice stayed resolutely absent.

Even before this disaster our barrack room had not been thick with confidence over the outcome of the Passing-Out Parade. We were lagging in the points table and now our opportunity for glory and an extra twenty-four hours' leave seemed doomed. No one else wanted the job of whispering. It was not a difficult task but one fundamental error could throw the whole squad into disarray and disgrace. The onus was placed on the nervous shoulders of Private Bandy.

'Me! I
can't
do it!' he moaned. 'I'll muck it up, honest I will!' It appeared he was declining into one of his sobbing fits. Brusquely he was told that there was no backing out. If persuasion were needed then his bed could be hauled with him in it to the rafters of the hut. It had been done before and he had tumbled out onto the hard floor below. With a defeated sob he nodded agreement.

Everything went wrong the next day. The inspecting senior officer arrived from Aldershot and the barrier at the gate became stuck and could not be raised to admit his staff car, so everyone was on edge from the start. Action-man stomped onto the square, muttering little orders as we marched. Other platoons went through their drill, heads cocked, arms straight, boots hitting the parade ground like mallets. We watched with lowering spirits.

When our turn came we stiffened our resolve, and managed to march correctly into position. The initial drill movements were negotiated safely. No one dropped their rifle and Bandy's whispered timing was audible if not convincing. Then, as we began the marching and counter-marching, his nerve cracked. Hesitation entered the hisses. Some we failed to hear at all, although he afterwards swore he uttered them. Action-man detected at once that all was not going well. The responses to his bark and his stamping feet became a matter of conjecture. Then, with a wild alteration of whispering in the middle of an about turn and a quick wheel left, the ranks faltered, fell out of time and step and finally panicked. Comrades collided with each other, half the platoon continued in one direction and the other stamped off at a tangent. Eyes swivelled. Men in the separating vanguards began to perform a curious knock-kneed side-stepping movement, not seen in the drill manual, in an attempt to join up again. When action-man finally and emotionally barked us to a halt we were spread like a posse over half the parade ground. Somebody started laughing on the sidelines. Action-man's eyes dilated. 'I'll kill 'em, bloody kill 'em,' we heard him incanting. The inspecting officer slapped his cane on his thigh impatiently and soon strode off to lunch. We clattered crushed to the barrack room.

Sitting on our beds, waiting for him, we said nothing. We could not even look at each other. Private Bandy was shaking so much his bedside locker was rattling. Action-man stamped in, his countenance like a bright, tight plum.

'I'm disgraced! Finished! Fucking finished!' he bawled as we sprang to our feet. He bounced in front of us. 'You 'orrible fucking shower, all of you.' He made for Bandy. 'As for you, son! I'm going to fucking well
kill
you.'

Private Bandy burst into tears.

The following week, gladly, we dispersed throughout the country to the various units to which we had been posted. There was a barracks concert the night before departure. I had to stand at the side of the stage with a blackboard upon which were written the Regimental Sergeant-Major's jokes. His eyes would swivel towards me and I would point to the key-word for the next joke in the list. During the course of doing this I managed to wipe half his repertoire off the board with my sleeve and he was none too pleased. I was quite glad to get away from the place in the end.

In the early morning after the concert, immediately before we left, I had to take some props to action-man's married quarters. I stood in his army sitting room and through a door I could see his wife humped in their bed. He came out, much smaller in pyjamas, and smiled a sickly smile as he took the props from me. 'You're a good lad, you are,' he whispered. Then he attempted to embrace me.

I got out of the quarters as quickly as I knew how, running back towards the barracks. His voice followed me, the old familiar bawl. 'That's right, Thomas! At the double, lad! At the double!'

During the following weeks something happened that became the root of a family tragedy, its bleak and unhappy echoes occurring over the years. It came out of the past and has continued into the future.

My posting had taken me to the Regimental Pay Office at Whitchurch in Hampshire where, to my relief, I was directed to the orderly room where my shorthand and typing were of use and life was very congenial when compared to the pen-scraping boredom of the accounts sections.

The army took on an unhurried almost domestic pace, a weekly routine of work and sports, pay parade, the ironing of uniforms in preparation for weekend leave. Virtually the only drill was the short march and salute at the pay table on Thursdays. Then, thrilled, I saw that 22157741 Private THOMAS L. was on a draft which was scheduled to sail for Singapore in December. The orderly room sergeant told me that I did not
have
to go if I did not feel inclined; after all a Communist terrorist war had broken out in Malaya. It might even be dangerous. I could easily be removed from the list if I wished to spend the rest of my eighteen months service in the cosy confines of the office. I begged him not to do it. Singapore! The mystic Orient! Wicked women!

Two weeks before I was due to sail, I received a letter from Chris, my uncle in Wales, a sort of anchor man for my dispersed and generally disinterested family, telling me that my elder brother Harold – Hally of whom I had not heard since he had, years before, sent me the tin of sweets – was dangerously ill in Birmingham.

Since I was about to be posted overseas I was granted compassionate leave and a rail warrant to Birmingham. There I was met by a sister-in-law I did not know existed. She was a gaunt girl, inarticulate and full of worry. My brother was in hospital she said nervously, and was in danger of dying. When I asked what the illness was she answered miserably: 'He's gone mad.'

They had four little daughters, all under six, and lived in a confined and noxious slum, a crumbling house in one of four terraces around a square at the centre of which were communal lavatories.

We went to visit him in hospital the next day. The poor girl trembled with nervousness and shame as we were led through corridor after corridor. Great locks were undone and bars rattled away until eventually we went into a ward where my brother Hally was sitting up cheerfully in bed. He showed no sign of surprise that I had turned up. He was not even sure who I was. I was in my army uniform and he imagined I had come to recruit him to fight somewhere.

'I can sing,' he suddenly announced and launched into a baritone ballad. 'I play rugby for Newport, you know,' he boasted. Wasted and white, he sat in the bed. 'And,' he whispered, 'I've lived with the Trappist monks.' He nodded to the man in the next bed and winked. 'He's barmy, he is,' he confided. 'Off his rocker.'

Stunned I led his tearful wife out of the ward. I was only eighteen but I had more confidence and logic than she could summon, poor lady. I sought out a doctor whom I finally traced to the hospital dance. A band was playing and a lot of people were waltzing around the floor. 'Everyone seems to be having a good time,' I ventured after I had told him who I was. A woman suddenly began whooping and jumping up and down. 'That's matron,' he nodded.

'Your brother,' he told me. 'Has general paralysis of the insane, GPI we call it. We are treating him as best as we can but there is no hope that he will ever recover. It's caused by untreated syphilis, you know. He's like that for life.'

It was early in the Christmas season. On the following day I took the four little girls, the youngest under two, to Lewis's store in the city to see Santa Claus.

The weather was icy and I wore a civilian overcoat – my brother's probably – over my army khaki and I worried in case I encountered any military police.

On the following day their mother accompanied me to the station and this stranger, who was my brother's wife, kissed me on the cheek and lent me half-a-crown because I had hardly any money. As soon as I got my first pay packet on my return to camp I wrote to her and enclosed a postal order in repayment of the loan. After that, when I reached Singapore, I sent her several letters but I never received a reply. The Thomas family had withdrawn into its isolation again. I was not to know for many years of the terrible thing that was to happen.

December of that year saw some spectacularly raging weather around the British shores. Dented ships limped into Liverpool and you could almost hear them sigh with relief as they berthed. We, however, were sailing out.

Marching from Lime Street Station to the dockside was hard enough, for the wind battered against us as we pressed forward in our widespread greatcoats and our bulky kit. We marched bent forward and as we did so the gale was shredded by a sleet storm. In the stoic tradition of the British Tommy we tried to sing in fractured voices. Not many people were about the streets in that awful weather but some who paused to see us march by were treated to one or other of the traditional digital salutes of the British soldier, the thumb or the two fingers up.

'Thank God we've got a navy,' taunted a building site labourer, sheltering and idle. I bent forward with the rest, imagining I was being heroic, perhaps even leading the retreat from Moscow. My military ambitions were confined to fantasy, however; not that I minded the wind and sleet. After all I was off to Singapore.

The troopship's white hull almost merged with the clay-coloured sky. We tramped up the gangway in the sleety wind. No band played. No one was there to see us off, nor did we expect there to be. Before the ship cast off it was announced that there were postal officials aboard who would accept what were somewhat ominously classed as 'last messages to the next of kin'. I had no idea who my next of kin might be but, perhaps to show myself as much as anyone else that I belonged to someone in the world, I queued with the others and sent a telegram to the plump girl I had met the previous evening at a dance in Slough. She made Mars Bars for a living, at a chocolate factory just along the road from the transit camp where we had been posted to await the troopship. Romantically I had walked her home, the soldier on his last night before going to a distant war, and we had shared a fumbling cuddle at her gate. She had given me a chaste kiss and a free Mars Bar, which I munched on my way back to camp. Now I sent her the dramatic message: 'Sailing troopship
Orbita,
Liverpool, today. Goodbye. Love Les.'