Posted to GHQ Signal Regiment, Far East Land Forces, I sailed for Singapore on board the Troopship Empire Orwell, one of several troopers in use at the time, most of them with “River” names – the Empire Fowey was another.
I don’t know how many of us there were on board, but it was an awful lot – probably upward of fifteen hundred. Officers travelled first class, in shared cabins, but as ordinary soldiers we were on what were known as the “Troopdecks”. These were big below-deck spaces – holds, really – filled with rows and rows of folding bunks. The arrangement of the bunks was very space efficient. They were in sixes – three high and two side by side. Another six started a few inches from your head, and yet another a few inches beyond your feet. Across a very narrow gangway was another row, and beyond that another and so on, into what looked like infinity. The whole ship just a big floating block of humanity. The most irksome thing about the arrangement – apart from the obvious claustrophobia of it all – was the lack of space to put your stuff. You had a locker, but it could be a long way from your bunk, and so it had to be locked and carefully watched – and you really couldn’t bring very much to your bunk. A book – and my specs -- had to stay in bed with me when I went to sleep because there was nowhere else to put them.
During the day, soldiers were drilled and lectured at, lest they get lazy and mutinous. The fear was, presumably, that we’d take over the ship and sail off over the horizon to an island paradise peopled by dusky beauties. Now there’s a thought.
So most of us were kept busy drilling and doing PE. A few, though – the lucky ones -- were given actual jobs to do, helping the crew, away from Army discipline. That, thank heaven, after a few days, was me.
I was doubly lucky, because not only did I have a cosy job in the bakery, helping the baker who already had a good enough assistant of his own, but I was also on the night shift. So at night, when I was working, I was in the depths of the ship, out of the way of the crowded troopdecks. Then in the daytime I could quite legally sleep on the empty troopdeck -- after, I should add, a huge breakfast in the galley. (Big breakfasts were a strong feature of my early months in the Army.)
The baker was a genial Londoner. He always had a fag in his mouth, with about an inch of ash on it, ready to drop into the bread mix. His assistant was Northern Irish and very kind to his incompetent slaves. We really had hardly anything to do except sit and gossip. They both had stories to tell about the great liners, including the Queen Elizabeth – that’s the first one, not the QE2—which they insisted was a death trap, its hull patched endless times by the simple expedient of pouring concrete into the gap between the double skin.
“Full o’ concrete!” they’d say. “Won’t catch me sailing on her.”
At some point during the night I’d go up on deck with a big cardboard box full of rubbish – potato peelings, tins – and drop it over the stern. I don’t think you’re allowed to do that now. It’s too environmentally unfriendly. The environment hadn’t been discovered then, so everything went over the side. It’s said that during the war the U boats followed trails of garbage to find merchant ships, until the crews got wise to what was happening.
After I’d dropped the box I’d stay there and gaze down at the wake and imagine myself just slipping over the rail and jumping, and swimming steadily until I reached whatever land was nearest – Malta, or North Africa perhaps. No-one would see me go. Everyone would assume me dead, until at some safe time in the far future I would turn up on the doorstep at home, with long hair and a beard. “Hi Mum, I’m home!”
All that went through my head as I gazed back along the ship’s wake. Now, my wife and I like to go on cruises, and I often re-enact that scene. I stand alone, in the night on the stern with the wake stretching away into the dark, and the memories come back.
Sunday, 28 March 2010
Tuesday, 2 March 2010
Hosetops and puttees
It’s not possible to talk about Singapore without mentioning the climate. It doesn’t take long to describe it – it’s very hot and very humid, with occasional brief torrential downpours that make the pavements steam with vapour when the sun comes out again.
For a Northern European, the steamy heat is scarcely bearable. In colonial days it was recognised that, for career diplomats or businessmen, a long posting to Singapore would shorten your life. The right to a “long leave” (six months for example) back home every few years was built into many contracts – in fact the then Governor, Sir Shenton Thomas, was on long leave in England during much of the crucial period when Singapore’s defences should have been built up during 1940.
A climate like that demands careful thought about what you’re going to wear. Which is why, through many years, Europeans, with long experience of Empire and service in the tropics, have ignored the dress developed over centuries by local people and deliberately and consistently worn entirely inappropriate clothing.
Standard military dress consisted of olive green shorts and tunic, worn with a webbing belt and a beret. (We were issued with a floppy hat in olive green. Troops up country in Malaya often wore them, but we never did)
After dark, to protect from insects, we wore long trousers in the same starched olive green material, and the sleeves of the tunic could be – but rarely were -- rolled down and buttoned at the wrist. Under the tunic (and under civilian shirts) we always wore a vest to soak up the sweat.
In the daytime, in offices and working areas away from the public most of us, apart from officers, went naked above the waist. This was called “Bare buff order.” (Officers didn’t do such things. Even today, whether or not a man goes naked above the waist in public in hot weather is a social class issue.)
Footwear varied. With ordinary working gear we could wear black shoes rather than boots, but only if we bought them ourselves. With shoes went long khaki socks with garter flashes in the Regimental colours. The alternative was to wear issue Army boots with regulation grey socks, which we wore rolled down to the boot tops only when we were in bare buff. That basic gear – bare buff, shorts, boots and rolled down socks – was standard for everyone who did any sort of manual work out of sight of the civilian world outside.
For parade occasions when we were on view to the public – at Church Parade for example -- we wore, with our shorts and tunics, our best Army boots with those diabolical twins, hosetops and puttees.
The best way to explain these is to describe the process of putting them on.
First, there was a pair of standard Army woollen socks – thick grey jobs that came up above the ankle. Then came the hosetops. These were Regimental blue kneelength thick woollen stockings with no feet in them. You pulled them up so they folded over just below the knee, and finished at the top of the boots and socks. They were held up with elastic garters embellished with Regimental garter flashes.
The boots themselves were next – standard issue leather ankle boots with metal studs and hard toecaps, all polished to a mirror finish.
Finally, you wound on your puttees.
Over the years the Army has worn its puttees (the word obviously came from India) in various ways. Our puttees were lengths of coarse khaki material perhaps a yard long and four inches wide, ending in a thinner, ribbon like section that was used for fastening. The Signals method was to wind them round the ankle so as to overlap the top of the boot, not extending up the calf, as was the practice in earlier years, but simply covering the untidy looking junction between the bottom of the hosetops, and the top of the socks and boots. If all of that sounds crazily difficult, what made it really impossible was the existence of lots of little rules about exactly how you wore all this stuff – the depth to which the hosetop turned over below the knee, the tiny but exact degree of overlap of each succeeding wind of the puttee, the precise finishing point of the fully wound puttee, the way you dealt with the end of the ribbon that held the puttee on. Get it right and it looked tight and neat. Wrong, and at the first forward step the top of your boot escaped from under the puttee, and the puttee itself started to unwind. Nothing made you feel more inadequate – and this happened to me more than once – than the realisation that one of your puttees was adrift and trailing behind as you marched.
In thirty two degrees of heat, and humidity that made mildew grow before your eyes, it was madness to make us encase our feet and lower legs in thick wool and leather. And just to make sure we didn’t miss the craziness of it, we were given antiseptic foot powder and treated to lectures on how to prevent our feet from rotting away. The saving grace was that as soon as we got back to camp we took everything off, showered and went around the barrack room area in a pair of flip flops and a towel.
For a Northern European, the steamy heat is scarcely bearable. In colonial days it was recognised that, for career diplomats or businessmen, a long posting to Singapore would shorten your life. The right to a “long leave” (six months for example) back home every few years was built into many contracts – in fact the then Governor, Sir Shenton Thomas, was on long leave in England during much of the crucial period when Singapore’s defences should have been built up during 1940.
A climate like that demands careful thought about what you’re going to wear. Which is why, through many years, Europeans, with long experience of Empire and service in the tropics, have ignored the dress developed over centuries by local people and deliberately and consistently worn entirely inappropriate clothing.
Standard military dress consisted of olive green shorts and tunic, worn with a webbing belt and a beret. (We were issued with a floppy hat in olive green. Troops up country in Malaya often wore them, but we never did)
After dark, to protect from insects, we wore long trousers in the same starched olive green material, and the sleeves of the tunic could be – but rarely were -- rolled down and buttoned at the wrist. Under the tunic (and under civilian shirts) we always wore a vest to soak up the sweat.
In the daytime, in offices and working areas away from the public most of us, apart from officers, went naked above the waist. This was called “Bare buff order.” (Officers didn’t do such things. Even today, whether or not a man goes naked above the waist in public in hot weather is a social class issue.)
Footwear varied. With ordinary working gear we could wear black shoes rather than boots, but only if we bought them ourselves. With shoes went long khaki socks with garter flashes in the Regimental colours. The alternative was to wear issue Army boots with regulation grey socks, which we wore rolled down to the boot tops only when we were in bare buff. That basic gear – bare buff, shorts, boots and rolled down socks – was standard for everyone who did any sort of manual work out of sight of the civilian world outside.
For parade occasions when we were on view to the public – at Church Parade for example -- we wore, with our shorts and tunics, our best Army boots with those diabolical twins, hosetops and puttees.
The best way to explain these is to describe the process of putting them on.
First, there was a pair of standard Army woollen socks – thick grey jobs that came up above the ankle. Then came the hosetops. These were Regimental blue kneelength thick woollen stockings with no feet in them. You pulled them up so they folded over just below the knee, and finished at the top of the boots and socks. They were held up with elastic garters embellished with Regimental garter flashes.
The boots themselves were next – standard issue leather ankle boots with metal studs and hard toecaps, all polished to a mirror finish.
Finally, you wound on your puttees.
Over the years the Army has worn its puttees (the word obviously came from India) in various ways. Our puttees were lengths of coarse khaki material perhaps a yard long and four inches wide, ending in a thinner, ribbon like section that was used for fastening. The Signals method was to wind them round the ankle so as to overlap the top of the boot, not extending up the calf, as was the practice in earlier years, but simply covering the untidy looking junction between the bottom of the hosetops, and the top of the socks and boots. If all of that sounds crazily difficult, what made it really impossible was the existence of lots of little rules about exactly how you wore all this stuff – the depth to which the hosetop turned over below the knee, the tiny but exact degree of overlap of each succeeding wind of the puttee, the precise finishing point of the fully wound puttee, the way you dealt with the end of the ribbon that held the puttee on. Get it right and it looked tight and neat. Wrong, and at the first forward step the top of your boot escaped from under the puttee, and the puttee itself started to unwind. Nothing made you feel more inadequate – and this happened to me more than once – than the realisation that one of your puttees was adrift and trailing behind as you marched.
In thirty two degrees of heat, and humidity that made mildew grow before your eyes, it was madness to make us encase our feet and lower legs in thick wool and leather. And just to make sure we didn’t miss the craziness of it, we were given antiseptic foot powder and treated to lectures on how to prevent our feet from rotting away. The saving grace was that as soon as we got back to camp we took everything off, showered and went around the barrack room area in a pair of flip flops and a towel.
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