Forgotten Wars_ Freedom and Revolution in Southeast Asia - Christopher Bayly [280]
We’re a shower of bastards,
Bastards we are…
We’d rather fuck than fight,
We’re the pay corps cavalry!33
Leslie Thomas, who arrived in early 1950, christened himself and his comrades ‘the virgin soldiers’: ‘idle, homesick, afraid, uninterested, hot, sweating, bored, oversexed and under-satisfied’.34 For them, barracks life was ‘as peaceful as a suburb’; its ennui only occasionally disturbed by transit of men from the jungle war: ‘The garrison soldiers would examine them with curiosity, at a distance, as though looking for bullet holes… There was a dullness about the infantrymen’s eyes, a redness about their faces, so that they looked like labourers or country boys.’35
For a colonial society still obsessed by prestige, there was the perennial problem of how to keep in line thousands of poor whites whose very presence transgressed the racial code. Handbooks of military Malay marked out the boundaries: ‘By a Malay, or by a Malay speaking Asian, the European male is addressed as “TOO-AN”… Master.’36 But the new arrivals discovered that few of the expatriates they were there to protect would have anything to do with them socially. The planters upcountry were more hospitable, but most of the clubs in Singapore were barred to men in uniform. A functional Britannia Club was built opposite the opulent Raffles Hotel, to keep soldiers out of trouble. But the native city had a compelling lure. Kuala Lumpur was invaded by serviceman as never before. Police lieutenants held wakes for fallen colleagues at Nanto’s on Batu Road; they would put up nearby at the Coliseum Hotel, which was, and still is, famous for its baked crab and steak. The bars and cafés thrived. As one Gurkha on military police detail remarked of British soldiers, ‘I had a lot of working to do to keep them apart on a Saturday night from their drunken fights and away from the brothels in Kuala Lumpur. I couldn’t understand why they were so worthless.’37
The soldiers lived at a remove from the locals. Leslie Thomas was later to recall that he did not once eat Chinese food during his tour of Malaya. Local businessmen catered to English tastes. The local stout, brewed by Carlsberg, was increasingly popular, and remains an enduring legacy of empire. For Alan Sillitoe, an RAF signaller, an evening out in George Town was ‘a meal of rice with an egg on top at the Boston café, then to see a film such as “Cato” or “Watch on the Rhine”, followed by an evening with taxi-dancing Eurasian girls at the City Lights’.38 The cabarets were a rare opportunity to talk to local girls and to practise ‘bazaar’ Malay; the men paid 30 cents a ticket to dance with them for five minutes. The new sensation was the joget modern, a mixture of the samba, rumba and conga fused with the swaying local sound of the ronggeng. In Kuala Lumpur there were three joget ‘parties’, the ‘Sentosa’, the ‘Lucky’ and the ‘Chendramata Joget’ in Bukit Bintang amusement park. The star turns became famous; Rose Chan’s python dance was legendary. But the cabarets generated great moral unease. Girls as young as twelve were to be found working in them. Welfare officers campaigned to raise the minimum age to fifteen, in the hope that a girl would then be ‘quite robust to stand any strenuous job and is quite matured mentally to understand the tricks and traps laid out by a man in his attempt to spoil her morality’. It was at least, the argument went, an alternative to prostitution.39 The best-selling Malay novelist of the day, Ahmad Lufti, combined frank accounts of the fall of young women with a sharp moral and religious commentary. His novels were pornographic