CHAPTER 3
After the final healing, my parents treated us to an evening at an amah’s market, our chance to stay up later than normal and eat things my Dad said we wouldn’t want to see by daylight.

There was nasi goring in little cardboard boxes, and pork satay on sticks, and the ubiquitous pint bottles of Fraser and Neave fizzy drinks in a variety of eye-closing colours. This was well before the days of additive control, and tartrazine was everywhere, along with all sorts of other more interesting chemicals. Years later, my mother discovered why she had been drinking so much, in order to sleep, when she found out that the ‘slimming pills’ she was being prescribed were actually amphetamine sulphate, and she was steadily turning into a speed freak, just like the hippies so despised by the Singapore government, who at that time had a policy of compulsory hair cuts for arriving male foreigners.

WE went out in the fragrant dark, and as I walked down the hill to the bus stop I squealed and had to hop under a street light to pull off the red ants that were hanging from my foot by their jaws. Just another evening on the island.

The market had so many smells, from food stalls to burning mosquito cols, and absolutely everywhere was the stink of cigarette smoke. Crowds of people moved through the packed streets, a mixture of local Chinese actually shopping and Forces families grazing and looking for toys and trinkets. Young soldiers and other servicemen talked loudly, cans of Tiger beer clutched in their hands, and MPs and civilian police kept a watchful eye on them.

Iain had spotted a toy stall, and was digging through the racks of ‘Action Man’ compatible outfits. Not that he had a real Action Man; ours were a cheap copy called, believe it or not, G.I. Jose. Iain was addicted to the stuff, and all he really wanted was a proper Action Man with a diving suit. Till then, he consoled himself with what he had.

I had two different interests there, different both from his and from each other. Firstly, I sought books, SF of course, and what I prized were Ace doubles, where two novels were bound back to back and upside down to each other, so that you could read either one you fancied. Two sets of cover art, as well, and less of those irritating notes and selective newspaper quotes from people I had never heard of. Second hand book stalls drew both my father and me as bare flesh drew the mossies. It was one time I could be close to him, standing side by side flicking over the books to find something neither of us had read. These weren’t the sober yellow Gollancz jackets I had learned to look for in the adult library, these were lurid and exciting, and sometimes the pictures matched the stories. There were loads by a man called E.E. Smith at the first stall, but when I picked one up my father put it back down.

“They are rubbish, Stevie, not worth the money. Here, try this one”

And, with that, he handed me a copy of ‘Earth Abides’. Years later I tried the Smith books, and they were very, very dated, and downright silly, but Stewart’s book was a revelation. That was a clue that my difficult, diffident, distant father, who had literacy problems a later generation would call dyslexia, actually had a very deep soul. I loved my dad at that point, really loved him.

The other thing I delighted in was the Chinese clothing on display, satin cheongsams in amazing colours that I wished my mother would wear. She was only five feet tall, and I wanted to see how the colour and brightness would look on her as she always seemed to be dozing in gin or frantically doing something, anything, round the house and beneath the deep tan of her skin she always had a pallor, almost a jaundiced look to her, and dark shadows beneath her eyes. I just felt that something so pretty would make her look brighter, that the brightness might flow into her skin and make her well. She never bought one, though, but I always had a fascination with the outfits. I restricted myself, in the end, to helping her pick cushion covers, as bright and cheerful as I could manage to persuade her to buy. That night, we were laden as we caught the STC bus back home; me with my books, Iain with three outfits for his boy doll, and my parents with more soft furnishings.

Once more, with hindsight, I see how much both of them missed home, my mother in particular. We were coming up to three years out here, our second tour, and with the years between partly taken up by a stint in Germany she had been away from family and friends for what seemed a lifetime, and in Iain’s case actually was.

A month later, and I was back in the swim, literally, out to Gillman for my Personal Survival Award gold test, swimming round a pool in a pair of pyjamas as bats skimmed the water to drink and chase the insects brought in by the brilliant lighting. I had been given money for a beefburger and chips, and of course a drink, and as Iain was finishing his silver test Mam appeared to escort us home.

“Your Dad and I have some news, love. I’ll tell you when your brother is out”

She sat with yet another G&T till Iain joined us for his own meal, and as he ate she worked her way through another Rothman’s king-size.

“We have got a posting at last, so we’ll be going home in two months.”

Just like that, after half my life had been spent on the island, we were going somewhere she thought of as home but which I hardly remembered. Cold, far away, and it would mean a flight, and the last time had flown had meant 23 hours of vomiting.

“Can’t we just stay here? It’s nicer here, not cold and miserable like I remember.”

Iain just sniffed. “Can I go to matches when we get there?”

That really sums him up, even now, an obsession with football above all else. We really were chalk and cheese, so unlike each other I used to wonder if we really had the same father, but one look at my mother’s tired eyes showed no energy in her for anyone else. We had to move out of our house, of course, and into the transit camp, as someone else took over my room, my bed, the swings on the tree in the front garden, and we lived in a chalet until the flight was ready for us. I sad goodbye to Sally and Julie, knowing I would never see them again, and finally our number was up and we were waiting out by Changi for the VC10 that would bring so much of my life to a close. Dad treated me to a rump steak meal before we boarded, but the meat was so full of gristle I could hardly chew it, and then we were onto our plane for the long flight to somewhere my parents called ‘home’. My father already knew that two weeks after we landed he would be off to Germany.

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We flew into Brize Norton on what seemed an Arctic day. As we boarded the bus to cross the tarmac I was sure my skin was actually sticking to the handrail. This was awful. I was wearing the suit I had flown to Singapore in three years earlier, which was a measure of how little I had grown in that time, and my bare legs felt flayed by the wind across the tarmac. It wasn’t fair; why was I being dragged halfway across the world, away from warmth and swimming, to such a hole? I remember thinking that ‘home and family’ had to be pretty wonderful to offer such a temptation to my parents, but first I just wanted to be warm again.

At the school, in Alexandra, we had had a language laboratory where I first started to learn French, and because of the tape-based system it used it was the only air-conditioned room in the entire establishment, chilled all the way down to about 75 degrees Fahrenheit, and when I knew I had a class there I would take a jacket to help keep me from freezing. This was worse, far worse, and it was only September. Could it get any colder?

We took a train into London, and then found a compartment in a train to Carlisle, where a mixture of elderly buses and a final overloaded taxi dropped us at what must have been the shittiest posting in the whole of the UK, a grim military village on Moricambe Bay called Anthorn. No, not Morecombe Bay, Moricambe, a sludgy inlet from the Solway Firth a few miles across boggy moorland from the very end of Hadrian’s Wall at Bowness on Solway, almost on the Scottish Border.
That sounds romantic. It’s a shithole, or so it seemed to me at the time. Basically a huge array of transmitter masts for talking to submarines or something, on the scrag end of a peat bog sticking out into the mud of the Irish Sea. Not a thing to attract anyone except hardened bird watchers, and this was what we had come back for. Nana lived in Eskdale, at the end of the La’l Ratty, and this was the closest Army married billet my Dad could get. No wonder he was straight off to Germany and the cheap beer and night life there.

It was a grim concrete village of grey houses, nothing to keep the Westerlies at bay except a few stunted hedges, and no town anywhere near. I sat in my bedroom after we got the keys, an old mattress on the floor to sleep on until the MFO boxes with our possessions arrived by sea weeks later, and cried. This was not what I wanted, and in my twelve year old mind I could not understand what the hell we were doing here, and why I had had to leave the few friends I had managed to make at school, none of whom I saw again until someone showed me a copy of a porn magazine that had my classmate Yvonne in it, looking rather older and with less clothing than I remembered her wearing.

We had three days to get used to hell, and then my mother announced that we had a school placement. Of course, there was nowhere in the village, and I was expected to go all the way to Bowness. Fortunately, there was a school bus for us, and on the appointed morning I was walked down to the stop, in new corduroy LONG trousers, thank god, and an old Army large pack for my oddments, my PE kit and any books I might have to carry back, and with a group of whey-faced strangers I boarded the old Bedford for the trip across the moors to the Big Village.

I was puzzled by the way the bigger boys rushed to the back bench seat, followed naturally by Iain, and I simply squeezed into the first spare seat I saw. I ended up opposite a couple of obvious twin girls, about my age, and they immediately went on a combined attack.

“Hello, she’s Jane and I’m Emma, and you’re new, aren’t you? Are you a wog, you’re all brown!”

“No, I’m not a wog, we’ve just been living in Singers and you get a suntan out there. Why are they all rushing for the back seat?”

Emma, I think, giggled. “You’ll see, this is one of the good drivers. He does the bumps right.”

I soon saw, all right. The driver actually sped up as we came to each little road hump, so that the back of the bus kicked up and those in the back seats were thrown into the air with a scream. So that was entertainment in Anthorn. I resolved to bring a book with me each day, and then realised that I had no idea where I was supposed to get any more. No amah’s market, no warrens of odd shops in Chinatown, and when Dad finally went to Osnabruck, no father to take me round them if they had existed. I felt lost, really lost.

Emma and Jane were wearing uniform, something Mam had yet to buy me, and it consisted of pinafore dresses in what looked like a really warm material, thick tights, and quilted anoraks over their school blazers. I had a new parka coat, with a fur trim to the hood which I blessed as I sat on the poorly heated bus and wondered what the school would be like.
I got my introduction early. The first lesson was given to me in that morning’s PE lesson. I sat down in the grim concrete changing room, with its slatted wooden benches, and started to get ready for what I was told would be a cross country run, and as I stripped off, there were mutters around me.

“Wog, I tell thee, fucking wog, He’ll stink the showers out, I bet thee”

I suddenly realised one of them was trying to pull my large pack off the hook, and without thinking I grabbed it back.
He actually sat on my shoulders as I knelt on the floor, punching me in the face till I felt my bottom lip burst, and then left me lying on the grey floor while he tipped up my rucksack, finding my copy of Blish’s ‘Welcome to Mars’ and laughing as he dropped it into the toilet and then pissed on it. He prodded me with his foot as he went out with his laughing friends.

“A wog, aal reet, and a puff”

A minute later a man I recognised as the sports master came in.

“You have two minutes to get after the rest, Jones, or I come back with the tawse. Got me?”