Monkeys and Parrots 8. Chasing memories.

I did my National Service in Singapore. Over forty years later, I went back there. On my first morning I got up early, left my wife sleeping off jetlag and walked the short distance from the Shangri La Hotel into the top of Orchard Road. I was restless, and anxious to renew my acquaintance with the City.
For the moment it wasn’t too hot. The early mornings are the best time of the day in Singapore. Before the real heat arrives, the air’s like wine. It’s invariably still, too, and once upon a time there’d have been smoke rising from kampong (village) fires on the outskirts of the City, and spreading out sideways as it met the overnight temperature inversion a few feet up. No kampongs now though. Just acres of high buildings, villas, cultivated tropical gardens, roads, dual carriageways.
I turned from Orchard Road into Tanglin Road. I knew the way perfectly. The buildings were different – more so than I could have imagined. There was no Manchester United shop in Tanglin Road forty-three years before for one thing -- but the road layout underneath it all was as familiar as that of my home town, even though the roundabout I remembered at the start of Tanglin Road had been replaced by traffic lights.
I passed the gates of the Botanical Gardens – the gates were the same -- and a little further on headed off the Tanglin road to the right into Tyersall Avenue. There I started up the camcorder, the archetypal tourist. Now the heat was coming. Soon it would be very hot and very sweaty. In that respect, too, the place hadn’t changed since I’d been there all that time before.
“My old army camp was up this road,” I said, self consciously, into the camcorder mike. “I’m pretty sure it won’t be the same. Maybe it’ll be used for something else, or it might even be derelict.”
Tyersall Avenue’s quite a narrow road, much like an English lane with hedges, except that beyond the hedges instead of cows and fields, there’s dense tropical undergrowth – rain forest really.
In the Fifties, Tyersall Camp was perhaps half a mile up the Avenue, on the left after a series of bends, well out of sight of where I was standing when I first spoke into the microphone.
Tyersall wasn’t the most comfortable of Army camps. The huts were all wooden, and despite the slatted shutters, deep verandahs and ceiling fans, they were unbearable in the heat of the Singapore day. On balance, though, we were happy to be a mile or so away from the main Tanglin Barracks, where most of the GHQ staff were based, dominated by all the palaver and bull of a major HQ.
I kept walking, with the camcorder running. “I feel quite strange,” I said into the mike. “And I just don’t know what to expect.”
In truth I didn’t expect much, but I walked on, craning to look to my left where, in 1956, the camp would have been visible over the hedge. Now, in 2000, there was only jungle. Then, there would have been coming into view rows of huts arranged inside a perimeter road maybe half a mile in circumference that we called “Camp Circle”. In the middle of the Circle, and of the huts was the parade ground and the offices of the Colonel – Lieutenant-Colonel R.B.S. Eraut – and the fearsome Regimental Sergeant Major, WO1 P.E.A. Hall (and no, we daren’t call him ‘Pea’ even privately among ourselves.)
It couldn’t all have gone could it?
Yes, it could.
I walked the full length of the stretch of Tyersall Avenue where the camp entrance used to be – that wide turning into the camp, with a lifting barrier, and the guardroom. But there was absolutely nothing to be seen. The hedge by the road was continuous. The rainforest was intact right up to the hedge. A ditch bordered the road for the whole of its distance, offering no sign that it had ever been other than unbroken.
It was a surreal, science fiction moment. I didn’t expect to see Tyersall Camp intact. But I genuinely thought there’d be something to see – though more sensible members of my family always stumped me when they asked, “What, exactly?”
I suppose I thought there’d be, well, some open space with overgrown concrete bases and so on. Something to wander about in, no matter how derelict.
What there was, though, was what I least expected – which was absolutely nothing. Not so much as the slightest sign or mark on the landscape that there had ever been an army camp there, home to a thousand soldiers, a park full of vehicles, a parade ground, some offices, a little chapel. All was entirely vanished under the jungle.
I stood there gobsmacked for quite a while. Then I walked to and fro wondering if I’d got the right place – which, of course, I had. I was searching in that futile way that you do – like when you’ve lost your keys and you keep looking again and again in the same place, even though you know they aren’t there.
I knew Singapore had changed enormously. I knew I’d find big differences. This, though, was more than a big difference. This was going back to your old school and finding a reservoir or a cow pasture.
I felt strangely bereft, as if a bit of my past had been rubbed out.

Monkeys and Parrots 7. Let loose with a rifle.

Because I enjoyed drill, I became an unusual recruit. At what you might call static soldiery – keeping my kit, clothing and boots immaculate – I was inept. Everything – polish on the brasses, shine on the boots – was at the margin of acceptability, and until I got to the Far East, where there were lowly paid local people to look after me, I was something of what the Americans used to call “a sad sack.” At mobile soldiery, however – foot drill, rifle drill, marching – I was fine. I’d been a keen cyclist, and in the school cross-country running team. Most of the other lads had left school at fifteen and so had spent three years devoted to beer, cigarettes and the pursuit of girls. So I had no problem at all with the physical demands of soldiering.
We also, of course, were taught the basics of actually using our weapons -- how to handle and fire our rifles. And, yes, we really did have “Naming of Parts”, complete with “...the piling swivel, Which in your case you have not got.” (Henry Reed's World War II poem, “Naming of Parts”.)Every soldier then had a standard issue .303 rifle – really the one that had fought the First World War, with just some largely cosmetic changes. We learned to fire it, and were tested in our marksmanship on the rifle range. I have no memory of how good or bad I was, but I assume that I passed whatever standard was applied. I do remember, though, how cold it was on that range up on the Yorkshire Moors. I also fired the Sten gun – a clever little sub-machine gun of skeletal construction that was reputed to cost only a few bob to make.
The rifle was unsophisticated, reliable, lethal and accurate up to half a mile. It only fired single shots, though, and the magazine held a single clip of a handful of rounds (was it seven? Something like that) You fired, then you manipulated the bolt to get another round from the magazine into the breech so you could fire again. It didn’t take long to do that, but it wasn’t a machine gun. At that time, you see, it was thought that you couldn’t give ordinary soldiers automatic weapons as standard issue, because they would poop them off willy nilly, wasting ammunition and endangering everyone around. Now, though, presumably reflecting the advance of technology and improved training, standard infantry weapons are effectively sub-machine guns – and by all accounts they’re not as reliable as our venerable rifles were.
So there we were. After four weeks we could shoot, march, keep ourselves and our kit clean and smart and obey orders. We were real soldiers, fit to be let loose on leave in the Queen’s uniform.