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.

Bugs 1.

Why Bugs 1? Because there’ll be Bugs 2 in due course. Lots of bugs in the tropics remember.

In Singapore, the heat and humidity bred insects like – well, like flies I suppose. Not that flies themselves were the main problem. In that we were lucky, compared with our comrades who served in places like Aden and Egypt, where the flies were organised into brigades, with officers and NCOs, and were practically running the country.
That, though, left several species of flying annoyances. Because we were short on entomological knowledge we called them one of two things. They were either “weirdies” or “flying kitbags.”
Weirdies were, well, weird. And some of them could nip you. Flying kitbags were huge flying beetles – so big they seemed to be defying the laws of physics, managing to keep aloft with what looked like impossible wingloadings. They were peaceful things, content to lumber around under the eaves of the huts where, presumably they had nests. Maybe they weren’t harmless at all. Maybe they had time expired National Servicemen cocooned in their nests, hoping for death like those missing crewmen in “Alien”
There were ants, too. Big, and fierce and red, like Russian soldiers. They made it impossible to sit on the grass outside the barrack rooms at Tyersall. In fact it wasn’t advisable even to stand still for any length of time. You got the feeling they could strip a horse and rider to skeletal form in short order, like the African jobs I once read about in a horror story.
They were clever devils, too. I once saw them do something that I’ve kept it to myself, because I didn’t think anyone would believe me. So do I tell you now? I only hope that among the half dozen or so people who get to read this there’ll be someone with enough ant-based knowledge to confirm that I really could have seen it.
I was in the shower. The dividing walls between the shower stalls were of brick faced with plaster, and they were about six feet high, finishing well short of the ceiling. One afternoon, I was showering blissfully, enjoying the feeling of the day’s sweat rolling away, when I became aware of movement on the wall beside me. Stepping hurriedly out, I got my glasses from the washbasin shelf where I’d left them and went back to look.
There, on the dividing wall of the shower I’d just left was a working party -- I can think of no better description – of ants. They were half way up the wall, and they were carrying the dead carcass of a very large cockroach.
Imagine the excitement in antland! Think of the joy as they made their way home with the biggest lump of food anyone had captured all week.
Still, they were calm enough when I spotted them, and they continued to work their way up the wall.
The problems they were solving were considerable. The cockroach was hundreds of times bigger and heavier than any one of them. The wall was vertical, and so somehow they had not only to drag its weight, but they also had to keep from dropping it.
What interested me, though, was what they were going to do when they got to the top – the wall didn’t go all the way up remember, so they were faced with transferring their burden from the vertical face of the wall to the horizontal surface on top. How would they do it? I stayed and watched.
Eventually, they reached the top of the wall, where they stopped. They were carrying the insect on its back, and lengthways --- fore and aft so to speak, with its head leading. You can now imagine, can’t you, how they were fixed. The problem was how to get enough leverage to tip the dead cockroach over from the vertical to the horizontal. They tried, several times, and each time they failed. They got the cockroach so that it was ready to be tipped, but they just couldn’t get enough force to bear on it to complete the job. They could get it tilted a bit, but the final topple evaded them.
What’s amazing, of course, is that the ants somehow knew what the limits were – that if they tried too hard they risked losing control and letting the cockroach drop.
So what did they do? First they tried something incredible but rather stupid. They took the cockroach back down the wall a few inches and turned it through 180 degrees and then brought it back up to try again. But what they hadn’t realised, being common squaddies and not members of the SAS, was that with the cockroach facing the opposite way, the problem was exactly the same. It was still on its back, still lengthways.
“What to do now, Lads?” That was clearly the issue in ant city now. They were not about to give up, however. What they did was what you’ve already guessed and what they should have done to start with, which was take the cockroach down the wall again and turn it not through 180 degrees but through 90 degrees so that now they were taking it up the wall sideways. As a result when they presented it to the top of the wall again, the task was easier – probably less leverage needed, and it was possible to get more ants engaged in the tipping. So, over went the cockroach, and off went the working party along the top of the wall, with renewed vigour. I swear I heard faint singing, fading away into the distance like the Red Army Choir at the end of one of their marching songs.

A month or two ago I asked a world authority on ants about this. He confirmed I hadn’t been dreaming, but pointed out that I’d made a sexist assumption and that the ants I saw were undoubtedly female.

Reading a dodgy lesson in the Garrison Church.

My churchgoing was done at the main GHQ Garrison Church -- St George’s, Tanglin.
St George’s was the centre of my world in Singapore. Before I joined the army I’d gone to church at home and done the churchy things that young people did then -- sung in the choir, taught Sunday School and served on the Youth Club Committee. So St George’s was a blessed (in every sense) continuation of civilian life, at least for a few hours distributed through the week.
Except, of course, that it wasn’t really a civilian place. The Army is the Army. The Chaplain, a nice enough chap, was an officer, with an officer’s rank badges, so there was always some distance in the relationship. It would have been unthinkable to call him by his Christian name, for example.
Then, although I sang in the choir seated democratically (at least in the eyes of the Lord) beside a full colonel, you could never get away from the fact that as garrison church of a major headquarters St George’s could be a pretty formal place. On Sunday mornings, generals and brigadiers sat on the front row with their ladies.
I was always aware of this when read the lesson, which I did quite frequently at short notice when someone didn’t turn up. After all, I was in the choir within easy reach, and the Chaplain knew that I was good at sight reading the Bible
Mind you, it was a bit intimidating to stand at the lectern, fixed by the stony gaze of the top brass of both sexes.
“I say!” I always imagined them thinking, “This chap’s an ordinary soldier – a private for God’s sake! With an oiky Yorkshire accent! And bloody acne! And he’s reading the sacred word of God! It’s probably illegal! And we’re having to listen. Must have a quiet word with the Chaplain General!”
It was in those circumstances that I drew, one Sunday, the shortest of all possible straws.
You see there’s this passage in the Bible – in the Second Book of Kings actually -- that goes like this,
“And thou shalt smite the house of Ahab thy master, that I may
avenge the blood of my servants the prophets, and the blood of all
the servants of the Lord, at the hand of Jezebel. “
So far so good. No tricks there. But then it continues –
“For the whole house of Ahab shall perish: and I will cut off from Ahab him that pisseth against the wall, and him that is shut up and left in Israel.”
Now as usual, I didn’t have time to read the lesson through ahead of time. Normally that didn’t worry me, for I was quite adept at reading the immediate words on autopilot while my eye looked ahead to see what was coming.
And so suddenly, there it was, three four lines further on down the page, the dreaded word “pisseth”.
I couldn’t believe it. I slowed down a bit and glanced ahead again. Maybe I was mistaken. Perhaps it actually said “passeth” or “putteth” or something. Surely it was just my coarse mind, seeing what it wanted to see?
But no, as my voice droned automatically on, the word came reeling in, nearer and nearer, and, yes, it really did say, “pisseth”. Not only that, but it became apparent that the whole phrase was “pisseth against the wall!”
What the…! Here I was, faced with the General Officer Commanding, Far East Land Forces, the Brigadier who was Chief Signal Officer, two full colonels, and a motley crew of primped and dewy cheeked lieutenants acting as ADCs and various kinds of acolyte. And that’s not to mention the fragrant be-hatted ladies. And here was I, a bleeding Signalman about to describe an act usually carried out by drunken soldiers on a Saturday night. “Pisseth against the wall,” indeed!
My mind raced. Maybe I could change it? But into what? What were my chances of dredging up a meaningful word, in the space of five seconds, which was all that was left, while half of my brain was busy with the current line? In the end, I just went for it. “If it’s in the Bible it must be OK” I though.
So, I read it boldly, with lots of emphasis. After all, if you glance at the passage you’ll see that it calls for something of a kick on the key phrase. It’s also true – and I suggest you try this, taking care about where you are at the time – that the phrase, “Pisseth against the wall,” is quite difficult to say. It’s a bit of a tongue twister, and invites a slow, deliberate and emphatic approach. So although I didn’t actually bang my fist on the word “pisseth”, I have to say I came pretty close.
I said the sentence, and paused. As its echoes died away, I looked in a challenging way over the lectern at the row of top brass. They stared glassily back. Not one of them moved a muscle, except for the General, whose ears waggled a bit, much as my dad’s used to do when he was making me laugh in my cot. The General’s motivation was different, though.
I guess that underneath the impassiveness they were having one of two reactions. They were thinking, either, like me, “It’s in the Bible after all,” Or they had decided
“The bastard! He’s made that up! He’s done it for a bet. Bloody ignorant squaddy. He’s probably drunk. I’ll get the Chaplain to arrest him at the end of the service.”
As I sat in my pew through the sermon, I did genuinely wonder, fleetingly, whether the Chaplain would arrest me. Army Chaplains after all, are commissioned officers. People like me called them “Sir”, and saluted. They weren’t usually your friendly vicar types in those days.
I don’t think I entertained the thought for long. After a bit of consideration, I decided that everyone would be just too embarrassed to do anything other than just forget about it.
In that, I was wrong. The Chaplain came up to me in the choir vestry afterwards and smilingly pointed out that the Church of England – which thinks of everything – has standard substitutions for the Bible’s naughty bits, which make them suitable to be read aloud in the prim and proper surroundings of an English church. He acknowledged that it was his fault for not telling me this and giving me the alternative word. What it was I cannot now remember – “standeth” perhaps, or something equally bland and utterly meaningless.

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.

Monkeys and Parrots 6 Stand by your beds.

This little bit of my memoir "Monkeys and Parrots", is about kit inspections at Catterick Camp. I actually still occasionally use the phrase "Stand by Your Beds" when I walk into a room, thus confirming the impression of geriatric lunacy that many people have of me.

“Stand by your beds!” The entry of an inspecting officer or NCO into the barrack room was always heralded by that cry, from one of the NCOs in attendance, followed a flurry of leaping to attention, and a deal of activity at the door as people of increasing importance came in – a corporal, a sergeant, perhaps a sergeant major -- and then stood back waiting for whoever was the senior to make an appearance. In basic training, routine inspections were carried out by your troop officer, usually a second lieutenant, although the company commander, a major, would make regular visits, and occasionally we’d see the CO of the Regiment, a lieutenant colonel. He’d peer at your name card.
“Haigh, eh! Where are you from?”
“Barnsley, Sir.”
“I see. Well, your kit seems OK. Keep it up, play fair with us and we’ll play fair with you. Any questions?”
“Please can I go home, Sir?” (Just joking. The real answer was --)
“No thank you Sir.”
“Good, good, carry on.”
If you were unlucky, the RSM, following along behind the Colonel, would look more closely at your kit.
“I can still see the joins in these bootlaces! You’re an idle soldier!”
“Yes, Sir.”
“Do them again and show them to your corporal this afternoon.”
“Yes, Sir, thank you Sir.”
“Don’t thank me. Just think yourself lucky you’re not parading at the orderly room to show them to me.
“Yes, Sir, thank you Sir. I mean just Yes Sir, without the thank you, Sir.”
“Are you taking the piss, Signalman.”
“No, Sir. Sorry Sir.”
“I’m watching you. Remember that!”
“Sir! Yes Sir!”
Your own troop officer, a National Service second lieutenant, would be following behind. If he was the right kind of young officer, who’d got to know you, he would, after hearing an exchange like that, give you a crafty wink and a grin. (In his own training, it has to be said, he’d certainly had worse experiences. But because he’d been to public school he was used to it. )
The remarkable thing about all of it was that it was entirely ritualised. It could have been scripted, and it was often delivered with an undertone of genuine humour.
So familiar did the order, “Stand by your beds!” become to all ex-servicemen (and women) that it passed into the language. People used it when they walked into workplaces, raising a rueful smile of reminiscence. Even now, you hear it from time to time. Now it’s a joke. Then, it could loosen strong men’s bowels.

Monkeys and Parrots 5.
How to display your bootlaces.

Quite a lot of my "Monkeys and Parrots" memoir -- most of it in fact, as it currently stands -- is about my National Service with the Royal Corps of Signals. There's a longish section on the basic training we had at Catterick Camp in North Yorkshire, in the freezing Winter of 55 -- 56. There are a few paragraphs about the rigours of kit inspection, and this little snippet describes how we had to display our spare bootlaces.

Spare bootlaces. The dividing line between spare bootlaces and insanity is finer than you think. That’s because this is how, in 1955, with the Cold War at its height, the Royal Corps of Signals, at the very core of the Free World’s communications systems, displayed its spare bootlaces for inspection.
First, you took your bootlace -- which was of leather and maybe two or three millimetres square in section – and coiled it tightly so that it became a flat disc a little larger than an old penny. Then, using a piece of black cotton, you tied it so that it would stay coiled.
That was just the start, the easy bit. The object now was to treat the coiled bootlace in such a way that the coils themselves – and, if possible, the cotton thread -- became invisible, and you were left holding a shining black disc. This you achieved first by ironing the bootlace disc on both sides with a hot iron, and then by polishing it with boot polish. The process was repeated until you had an object of beauty the real nature of which could not have been guessed by anyone outside of the madhouse which was the armed forces in the Nineteen Fifties.
From your two spare bootlaces you crafted two of these jewel-like objects, and displayed them proudly, in their allocated correct positions, on your kit layout.
The really, really, sad thing about this was that you could get really absorbed in the task -- relishing the challenge of producing the best spare bootlace display in the Regiment.
All of this kind of thing has been described many times, and I only mention it here so as to confirm its truth, in support of all those National Service veterans who are assumed to be rambling and senile when they tell their tales. Don’t trouble your head wondering at the sense of it all, because there never was any. However incredible the stories you hear of bullshit in the barrack rooms, don’t doubt, only believe.