CHAPTER 2
The late sixties were the tail end of Empire. British Forces still spanned the globe, the presence ‘East of Suez’ still felt necessary, but it was in its last days.

Thousands of service personnel and their families still lived in exotic places, with schools, shops and their own island communities amid the sea of locals, but they were that last. We were the last. Gigantic American ships visited the harbour more and more frequently, but we were still there, just. Only a handful of years previously we had fought and beaten the Indonesians on Borneo as they tried to annex another country to their island realm, and so they would later turn their attention to easier prey, and we got to see what sort of overlords they made as they butchered their way through East Timor.

All of that meant that Dad was almost permanently preoccupied with work, and I only really got to see him at weekends. Mam was our anchor in those days, but most evenings she would be out, either playing badminton or at the Mess with Dad, and so Iain and I spent most evenings alone, just the amah for the first part and a shared bottle of pop as our treat. That was when I first discovered how women smell, looking in the laundry basket and seeing what my mother had discarded. It wasn’t an exciting smell, just a funny one, a different smell to anything had come across before. Betson was joking all the time about naked ladies, and sniffing girls’ bike seats, and if this was the smell I couldn’t see what he was so interested in.

Now, of course, I recognise that scent as the product of sixties hygiene and lack of modern deodorants apart from talc and soap, combined with a steady eighty-degree temperature as a minimum each and every day, and humidity to match.

That day n the hairdressers’ I sat reading about April, and wondered how they did what they had. I knew that girls were different to boys, and now knew that it all smelled differently, but I couldn’t understand what the process was. I was 12, and wasn’t quite up to speed there, and in those days even the papers I now consider as scandal sheets and rags, like the Screws and Mirror, drew back from detailed anatomical recitations. All I knew was that there was a way to change from one to the other, and I made myself a promise that when I was really old, at eighteen, and could have a job and money, I would see how much it cost.

Once more, I look back and realise that in my childish subconscious I had picked out my identity from the noise of everything thrown at me as a boy. That came to a head when we had our school medical exam. I stood in a line of boys in shorts, each holding a little pot of pee, behind Betson, who oddly started sniffing his as we got to the nurse’s desk. Then, in one go, he drank the lot.

There was a surge of “Ugh!” from round the room, and one girl was sick on the floor, and Paul just sighed and sad “I need a refill” and went back to the toilets with his empty pot. He whispered to the rest of us as he passed: “Apple juice”

I was taken behind a screen and told to “drop”, and a florid white-coated man pushed his fingers up behind my willy and demanded that I cough. A week later I was in hospital. This time it wasn’t after a kicking from Maxwell, or any of his friends.

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I remember waking after the operation, and being immediately sick, but with nothing to bring up. They had cut through my flesh just above the willy in question, to repair a juvenile hernia, and I hurt more than I could ever remember hurting before. Today was a day that Iain and I should have been walking the old rail tracks to get the bus for our swimming lesson, wearing nothing but our Speedos, flip flops and a short towelling robe with the club badge on. I wasn’t supposed to be lying in a bed with a stab wound trying to get my eyes to focus and my stomach to stay inside me.

I wondered if April had felt like this when they cut her willy off and…well, did whatever it was they did.

Mam was by the bed, looking tired, and smelling a little of gin, and Iain was looking round the ward for something to do, until he spotted a wheelchair and began racing round the ward in it. I just hurt. Years later, I saw a documentary on the Battle of Singapore, and as they recounted the story of how hundreds of patients and medical staff were bayoneted and hacked to death by the Japanese soldiers, they showed pictures of the places in the hospital where it had happened, and I suffered doubly, with sympathy for the poor sods who had been so horribly murdered, and with immediate flashbacks to that morning, and the pain, and what it brought me.

I was eventually allowed home, with the injunction that swimming was not allowed till the doctors gave me an all clear. It is hard to explain to those who live n less sultry climes, of those who have air-conditioning, which was rare then, how much swimming was part of our lives, how necessary it was. At the weekend, we would usually head into town on the free Forces bus and spend most of the day at the Britannia Club. The morning would be at C.K. Tang’s , and then the Singapore Cold Stores, with their air conditioning and free food samples, and we would have our traditional treat from Dad, an ice cream float, where a huge dollop of ice cream would be dropped into a tall and flared glass of pop and served with a long spoon. Much childhood discussion was devoted to the relative merits of each combination of flavours, and we tried our best to work through them all.

Then it was off to the Club, where Iain was fascinated by the huge toy racing car layout and I fretted for the next few weeks because couldn’t go into any of the pools .but had to sit with a shirt on at the edge, even when it was cloudy, because my father told me that you burned worse under cloudy skies than clear ones, and my fair skin and freckles were just a set of blisters in waiting.

The high balconies of the Club left us able to look down into what I now realise was a rather famous hotel’s courtyard, at fat men in once-white suits asleep under parasols, and the balconies on the inside were a temptation to drunken servicemen that brought me my first ever sight of death, as they egged each other to jump from the balcony across the terrace into the main pool, and one day the young man in question didn’t jump hard enough. I can still hear the sound his head made as it struck the edge of the pool, and then we were whisked upstairs and away, and into the Club’s restaurant for the first and only time, for milk shakes and omelettes.

I was back at school after that weekend, and Sally and Julie wanted to know what the doctors had done. I tried my best to explain what little I knew about what I now understand was an inguinal hernia, and I think the girls got it, but Julie was more pushy.

“So they didn’t chop your thingy off, like that woman in the paper?”

“No, they did not! Why would they do that?”

“Well, if you was a girl then Keith wouldn’t keep picking on you”

“And girls don’t get picked on? What about Caroline Whale, I saw her take your sweets once”

Sally giggled. “That’s why she’s so big and fat, like her name, cause she nicks all the sweets!”

Julie sighed. “Yes, girls get picked on, but it’s not the same. It’s more words and stuff, except for Blubber, of course, and you’re clever, you read all the time, you know words and stuff. You’d be good”

“But what if I don’t want to be a girl? And I can’t just go in and say, can I?”

Both girls giggled, and Julie whispered to Sally, who blushed a little, and then said “Lots of people think you are a sissy anyway, even the teachers. And you wouldn’t have to play cricket any more”

“Yeah, but” interrupted Julie, “there would be hockey instead. That’s nasty”

Was life so much easier for girls? It didn’t seem so, just a different set of problems. I thought about it all day, watching and listening as my scar ached and itched. It would be three years before we realised exactly how badly the surgeon had fucked up