Time and tide wait for no man, nor does the Army. My first discovery, when I fronted up for duty on Monday morning, was that I had been replaced in the Pay Office and my successor, who was occupying my chair, even had the audacity to smirk at me. Like a drowning man, my mind quickly reviewed all the nasty and soul destroying jobs that might become my lot but my second discovery was to my delight rather than my horror. By way of compensation (unintended, I’m sure), I had been given the second best job in the unit! (The best job, by universal acclaim, was that of Mail Orderly but the position was already occupied, worst luck!) . I was to be installed as pay clerk to ‘B’ Company, our Malay detachment. The job was regarded as a lesser appointment in the paymaster hierarchy and didn’t carry any stripes but the lower status was more than outweighed by the perks and fringe benefits that attended it.

‘B’ Company consisted of about 150 LEPs (Locally Enlisted Personnel), we called them, although their official designation was Malayan Other Ranks. They were separated from us at the main barracks and occupied a large and imposing mansion in the Johore Bahru suburbs, about four miles away.

A glib real estate salesman would probably have described this mini-palace as ‘elegant and desirable, with a spectacular outlook – price on application’. The house had once belonged to a Tunku, or Malay nobleman, who had lost it to the Japanese and then to us. We found some evidence of its previous occupants, occasionally. Once, when we opened some shutters which had been closed for years, we discovered graffiti in Japanese characters behind them but whether it read ‘Long live the Emperor!’ or ‘British go home!’ we never knew. On another occasion, a dusty carton, found on the top shelf of a disused storeroom, revealed two dozen unopened bottles of blue-black ink. Obviously, the Japanese bureaucrats had intended a long stay!

‘B’ Company residence (This photograph was taken in December, 2006)

It was a four-storied masonry building of generous dimensions with an interior constructed entirely of teak. An elaborate wooden staircase swept magnificently up from the front entrance to the first and second floors, where the men lived. The ground floor was divided into offices, a dining room and recreational areas, including an indoor badminton court. Badminton was the national sport in Malaya and in the kampongs almost every pair of adjacent trees had a net strung between them. Behind the main block there were numerous outbuildings, formerly stables and servants’ quarters, which had been converted into kitchens, ablutions and storerooms. On the roof were four turret-like rooms offering stunning views of the Johore Strait and Singapore Island beyond.

We, the three resident European staff, that is, occupied this level. I shared one of these roof top-chambers with Len Bridges, who was the unit’s quartermaster-sergeant. This palatial boudoir even boasted a marble floor! Another turret was the home of our CSM, ‘Jock’ Brewer. *

A small room downstairs, furnished with a table and a few chairs, served as our mess. The Army thoughtfully provided us with a civilian Chinese cook and, because we were only three in number and unable to make the same economies of scale as a 300-strong company, additional rations.

‘Jock’ Brewer, true to his race, insisted on porridge being served at breakfast every morning but otherwise, we determined our own menus, so our meals could be described as ‘a la carte’. Some of them turned out to be rather novel, as well. Our cook announced at breakfast one day that he was going on leave, immediately, and that we would have to make other arrangements if we required lunch. We managed to ‘borrow’ an army cook from the Chinese cookhouse but he had no experience of European cuisine! He seemed to be a bright lad so we taught him how to make chips and told him to fry everything else. Lunch that day was served on time and beautifully presented. Even Escoffier would have been impressed!

It consisted of chips and fried tinned salmon! Fortunately, he was a quick learner and eventually did us proud. We were only too aware that we were living well above our stations - and by that I don’t just mean on the roof!

Our commanding officer was Capt. Hamer, an elderly regular who was actually in semi-retirement – except that he hadn’t informed the Army! He kept ‘gentleman’s hours’, arriving from the downtown officers’ mess long after the working parties had departed for the depot and returning around midday for an extended liquid lunch, which often occupied the whole afternoon. In the interim, he pottered about in his office, delegating most of his tasks to one of us. He was a benign old soul who seldom bothered us so we were particularly careful not to bother him.

The Company Office where I worked, languishing under the nickname ‘Batu’, which is Bahasa for stone, was occupied by a cosmopolitan staff of clerks and, together, we attended to the day-to-day running of the unit. I say ‘cosmopolitan’ because one, Anthony Pasarebu, had a Dutch father and a Chinese Philippina mother and had been raised in the Netherlands East Indies. Another, Cpl. Hakim, was half Negro and half Malay, the outcome of a brief liaison between his indigenous mother and his American merchant seaman father. The third, Cpl Loh, was pure Chinese, as far as I could discover. Between them, this motley crew spoke a total of eight languages, plus a smattering of Japanese, all having lived through the occupation. ‘Pash’ boasted Dutch, Tagalog and some German, in addition to the local Bahasa and English, of course. Loh knew three Chinese dialects besides and was so fluent in all of them that one could dictate a passage to him in English and he would type it directly into Malay, that is from one foreign language to another! ‘No mean feet’ as a Chinese chiropodist might have put it! My ‘iechid da’ and ‘La plume de ma tante’ paled into insignificance in this Tower of Babel!

Some of the crew at ‘B’ Coy:
Cpl Loh, CSM ‘Jock’ Brewer, L/Cpl Hakim
L/Cpl Anthony Pasarebu, Sgt. Len Bridges

Although we were within easy walking distance of Johore Bahru, that did not mean that I went ‘on the town’ every night. The job, desirable as it was, didn’t carry any extra money so I was still Stone(y) by name and by nature! That applied more-so to the Malayan troops, who were paid even less than I was. Having been spurned by both the NAAFI and the AKC because of the unit’s small size, we set about relieving boredom by providing our own entertainment. Capt. Hamer was only too happy to encourage and endorse our efforts as it meant that he could reap the glory without having to do any of the work.

First, we inveigled one of the dhobi wallah’s extended family (I think it was a brother-in-law) into running a canteen. He didn’t stock alcohol but as almost all his customers were Muslims that didn’t really matter. Cups of tea, soft drinks, local confectionery, smokes and the all the usual toiletries and military paraphernalia were available and whatever profit he could manage to extract was his to keep. We then introduced Tombola – all the numbers in Malay – which rapidly escalated into an addiction, to the extent that we had to limit the games to two evenings a week to prevent the players blowing all their pay and as much as they could borrow! A small percentage of the proceeds was deducted and used to subsidise the canteen, making it legal in the Army’s eyes

Somewhere along the line, I had learned to operate a 16 mm film projector. There were plenty of empty rooms and no shortage of timber, tarpaulins, paint and rope, etc. so, with the enthusiastic assistance of our Malay comrades, we were able to build a permanent cinema. It may have lacked some of the refinements of the commercial variety but it was perfectly functional and, more to the point, free!

Two evenings a week, the ‘Wayang’ (taken from the name for the shadow puppets which have entertained Malays for hundreds of years) was filled with a cheering, stomping and thoroughly delighted audience.

The films were supplied without charge by the AKC and once a week I caught the mail truck into Singapore to select the programs. Although we were physically in Johore State, our postal address was c/o G.P.O. Singapore and our mail had to be collected from there, daily. A Dodge 15 cwt was used for this task, captained by the Mail Orderly and although its primary designation was to collect the letters, it doubled as a general carrier and passenger conveyance. Anyone needing to see a dentist or having some other pressing reason for going into the city joined the complement. In addition, the mailman was often bullied into doing shopping for the officers and senior NCOs.

Every Thursday, the truck, with me aboard, made a detour into Nee Soon, a village a couple of miles off the main highway, headquarters of the Royal Army Pay Corps and the home of the Command Paymaster. (Nee Soon achieved international fame a few years later, as it was the setting for Leslie Thomas’s book and film, ‘The Virgin Soldiers’, a good account of a conscript’s life in Malaya in the early ‘fifties.) My primary reason for going was not to collect films but the battalion payroll. It was part of my duties to total up the amount of money required for the unit’s weekly pay parade, broken down into denominations of notes and coins. The Paymaster issued a warrant for that amount which I then lodged at the local bank in Johore Bahru on the return journey. The adjutant, with an armed escort, picked up the cash on the following morning and took it back to the battalion headquarters, ready for the afternoon parade and its eager recipients.

After collecting the mail, we made a leisurely trip out to East Coast Road where the film library was located, incongruously placed amidst the expensive villas of ‘millionaires’ row’, fronting the beach. The old Singapore airport at Kalang was on our route and, in 1949, the main road actually ran across the runway. Vehicles were halted by traffic lights if there were any aircraft movements, the planes having right of way, of course. A similar system applied at Northolt, which was then London’s main airport in the days before Heath Row, an indication that neither air nor road traffic in either city had yet developed to the extent that this minor inconvenience amounted to much more than a hiccup.

‘B’ Coy comrades – ‘Pash’, me and another

Sgt Ahmed

My existence at ‘B’ Coy was, without doubt, ‘the good life’ and I could have endured it forever, no sweat! Unfortunately, sinister forces were bent on destroying this idyllic lifestyle.