Bugs 2. Flaming vengeance.

Bugs 2
The big insect problem for us in Singapore though, wasn’t ants, or beetles, or even the cockroaches, which sometimes hid in our clothes. We didn’t even really have mosquitoes to any significant degree – the Army had carried out a highly effective anti-malaria programme draining stagnant water and liberally using DDT (later to be banned worldwide for its effects on bird life) So although we had mosquito nets, they weren’t really necessary and few used them.
No, the big problem was man’s eternal companion the common bed bug. These terrible minibeasts were in their element – a warm climate, sweaty beds and lots and lots of human flesh. You knew you’d got them when you felt one crawl up your back in the middle of the night. It would perhaps continue across your pillow, and if you squashed it with your thumb you would produce a little splash of your own blood – which made you indignant at the idea of being invaded. We were plagued by them. You’d go for ages without noticing them and then, suddenly, one morning you’d wake up covered in little specks of blood where the little devils had been feasting on you in the night.
The Army knew there was a problem. In fact they tried to solve it by withdrawing our coir-stuffed mattresses, giving us posh Dunlopillo ones instead, presumably believing that the bugs wouldn’t nest in them.
They were missing the point, though. Bugs don’t necessarily need mattresses to live in. They will nest anywhere within reach of humans – in hollow walls, under peeling wallpaper. But when we really noticed them was when they set up home in the angles of our metal bed frames which they did from time to time. They could appear quite suddenly. You’d see a chap wake up in the night and move his mattress on to the table in the middle of the barrack room, having been driven off his bed by the arrival of the little red invaders.
The quartermaster gave us insect powder – presumably the then ubiquitous DDT. The best solution, though, was to burn your bed – not the mattress, but the iron bit.
This was quite a ritual, usually carried out at the weekend. You went to the NAAFI and bought a can or two of lighter fuel. Then you took your mattress off your bed and carried the iron bed frame on to the grass. Next you poured fuel over the iron frame and set it alight. The bugs perished in a satisfying series of cracks and pops. A riskier but more satisfying alternative was to squirt a stream of lighter fuel from the nozzle on the can and then light it, so you had a sort of mini flame thrower to work with. The only trouble was, if it lit back into the container itself you were likely to share the crackly fate of the bugs.
The other big insects we occasionally encountered were the cicadas – burly members of the grasshopper family, who sawed away producing music all night in the grass. Any film about the tropics has them in the background. The only time I saw one at close quarters though, was one night when I was on guard. I was lying on a bed in the guardroom, when I turned my head and there, about two inches away, looking me straight in the eye, was this giant thing a bit like one of those crayfish they put on the top of the paella in Spanish restaurants.
They’re harmless, of course, but that didn’t stop me from taking off and flying across the guardroom. I swear I actually levitated and travelled twenty feet still in a lying position.
All of this was in my mind when we returned to Singapore in 2000. Of course, I didn’t expect that we’d have to burn our bed on the lawns of the Shangri La Hotel. (“Two cans of lighter fuel, waiter, as soon as you like.”) But I did think we’d be plagued by night time flyers as we walked around.
In fact I don’t recall seeing many insects at all. All I can think is that the whole island has been so comprehensively zapped with chemicals that there’s nothing left. It was Rachel Carson’s “Silent Spring” brought to life.