The Forgotten Highlander - Alistair Urquhart [21]
After a shaky start I managed to hit my strides and win the 440-yard race, while wee Davie won the mile event. I didn’t fare as well in the 880 yards but still finished a credible third. I also won the high jump and the officer won all of his events as anticipated. Our 220-yard relay team was augmented by a fairly good runner, and with Captain Duke as anchor man we came in a solid second. On that showing we lifted the cup for 1940. There was no hugging and kissing, no grand party, just back to the barracks to spit and polish and get ready for the next day. But the grin on my face remained for a good while.
Athletics helped get me out of the cocoon that is military life. And after the battalion championships I decided to travel into Singapore as often as possible to break the tedium. However, as a conscripted private paid just a shilling a day, less deductions for my keep, and when converted to Singapore dollars, it was nigh on impossible to leave the barracks more than once a month.
But the more I did get out, the more I encountered the local colonial population. And the more I saw of them, the less I liked what I saw. Most of the white people, rubber planters, mining company managers or those working for the government, conducted themselves with swaggering arrogance and had nothing but contempt for the armed forces who had been sent out to protect them. On one day off I thought I would venture into Singapore. I had heard that the air-conditioned Cathay cinema was showing Gone with the Wind. I caught the ‘piggy bus’ and got dropped off downtown. Walking along the pavement, or ‘sidewalk’ as they called it, I had my first experience with the local colonials. Two chaps dressed in sandals, khaki shorts and immaculate open-collar cotton shirts were striding towards me. As they approached one of them said to me in a pukka upper-class English accent, ‘Hey, soldier. You have to get off the sidewalk to let us past.’
I stopped in my tracks, stunned. ‘Excuse me,’ I said. ‘Who are you talking to?’
‘You. Who else?’ one of them sneered.
Bristling with rage I replied, ‘Why do you think I’m here? I didn’t want to come to Singapore but we’re here to defend you and there’s no way I’m getting off the pavement for you or anyone else.’
Greatly affronted they threatened to report me to my commanding officer and stormed off pompously. I stood there shaking my fist at them. ‘You do that! But I’m not moving off this sidewalk!’
I was still cursing them as they disappeared from view. If this was how they treated us, goodness knows what they meted out to the native rubber-tappers. It was a miracle that there was not more trouble, I thought, as I marched to the cinema. I had never been treated like that before and it was disgusting to witness these English and Scottish colonials and their diabolically superior attitude to all and sundry. I swore never to become like them and arrived at the cinema only to discover that the screening had been cancelled – which did nothing for my mood.
A few weeks later I received an unexpected invitation to lunch from a chap called Ian, who was engaged to my cousin Cathie Kynoch. He was a fellow Aberdonian – a very large proportion of the colonials were Scottish – and managed a rubber plantation in the Singapore area. I was pleased to have been remembered and excited at the prospect of meeting people outside the stultifying confines of the