In My Wildest Dreams (29 page)

'How you like me?' she enquired sweetly.

'Oh,' he stammered, thinking she was awaiting instructions for the position she should assume. 'Just the usual.'

'The usual?' she asked. 'What's usual? How you like me? I am pretty, yes?'

'Yes, yes,' he hurried, annoyed at his mistake. 'You're very beautiful, Lucy.'

. . . He fixed his starving, anxious gaze on her and scrambled forward in the crawl that infantrymen use over broken ground.

When he was near, or thought he was near, he stabbed at her frantically and missed. It was painful. The second time he all but fell from the bed.

. . . Brigg was sweating waterfalls. Where was it? Where in hell was it? Fancy hiding the bloody thing under there. He wiped the perspiration from his eyes so he could see better. Then he made another huge lunge. This time he did a fantastic pole vault, hurting himself, and landed heavily on top of her. She was holding her breath expectantly and he knocked it all out of her.

She started to be angry, but looked and saw he was crying. With a tender, involuntary movement, she brought him close to her with his cheek against her breast and the tears wetting both.

'You cry?' she whispered in wonder. 'Why so rough, then cry?'

'It's the first time,' he sniffed like a schoolboy.

'The very first . . .'

Lucy emitted a round little whoop, sitting stark upright as though she had a spring in the small of her back. Her slant eyes were round and glistening with amazement.

'First time?' she repeated as though it were the Hidden Name of God. 'Never have before?'

'Never,' he mumbled miserably, waiting to be tossed with scorn from the bed.

A virgin,' she breathed unbelievingly. 'A little virgin soldier.'

Juicy Lucy is, in fact, the name of an old American jazz tune. Just after writing the novel I was appearing on a television programme in New York when one of the technicians enquired if I were a jazz historian. He then told me the origin of the name. After the appearance of
The Virgin Soldiers
it surfaced in a number of forms; there was a pop group called Juicy Lucy and a number of restaurants adopted it, those dealing in nature foods, fruit and vegetable juices found it particularly apt. It also appeared for several seasons on a newsagent's board in Soho. It would have been pleasant to think that it was the same lady, but the passing years and the width of oceans made me come to the logical conclusion that it was not, which was a pity.

She had told me that first night in Penang, when I was lying smug, triumphant, and at last wise, that she wanted to travel south to Singapore. Her story was that she had run away from home in the north of Malaya, near the Siamese border, because her father wanted to trade her off in an advantageous (for him) marriage. She had found her way to Penang and at nineteen had set herself up in business. On the girls' grapevine she now heard that the rates and conditions were better in Singapore and she wanted to get there. Would I take her with me?

After the first shock and the secondary confusion I explained that the army to which I was pledged might be unsympathetic. She argued she knew of several Chinese and Eurasian girls who had gone with soldiers to Singapore – and even
married
them. The thought took my breath away. Here was I, after all those worried years, at last rid of my virginity at a cost of fifteen Malay dollars – and she was talking of
marriage.
She must have thought my stunned attitude meant that I was considering the proposal because she offered to give me my money back. (The sequence in the book and in the film where Lucy actually does return Brigg's money is fiction. Some things have to be. Few hardworking Chinese girls, no matter how good-hearted, would have refunded the fee solely on account of it being the young soldier's initiation. The part about her offering cocoa is also made up. Although Lucy did have an opened packet of Cadbury's on a tray at the side of her bed she never offered any to me.)

After that first night in Georgetown I remember how I got a bus back to the leave centre and strode in the gate like a Trojan, taking lungfuls of morning air. As I flung open the door of the room I shared with Smudge he turned dismally on his bed and muttered: "Ere comes the night shift.'

'Smudge,' I intoned. 'Smudge, she was terrific. There's not many girls like that around.'

'Only a few million,' he commented acidly but truthfully. He turned rheumy-eyed. 'I've 'ad enough,' he said hoarsely. 'Enough for the rest of my working life, mate. I ain't going to abuse my body any more. I'm going to save the rest of it for going 'ome. For the girlfriend.'

As for me, the energetic companionship of that night had given me a taste for it. Before I went back from leave I expended a further fifteen dollars on Mitzi (as she was known during the second week. Mitzi Gaynor being named in lights above the cinema). Earlier that evening I was with the others in the restaurant we used for our steak, egg and chips, and Dolores, my unassailable Eurasian beauty, swayed in with her untouched sister. As I left she smiled and I coolly kissed her on the cheek, a touch of nonchalance, before sauntering off towards the evil and beckoning glow of the City Lights. Smudge it was who remained and in the morning he reported that they had enjoyed a wonderful conversation. 'Wiv them Chinese tarts,' he observed with disdainful wisdom. 'You can't 'ave a talk, only a shag. I like to 'ave a good talk sometimes.'

When I left Penang my Chinese girl who, for the sake of clarity, I shall identify by her eventual fictional name, Juicy Lucy, promised that she would soon join me in Singapore. She had heard that the Liberty Club in that city was looking for girls.

I only half-believed her but, on our return and after a month of barrack room boredom, I took the Saturday-night bus and sought out this place which remains, deep as a murky pool, in my memory. It was a heavy stone building which appeared in some not-too-distant previous life to have been in ecclesiastical use. It had a tall ceiling, church-shaped windows which had been boarded up or otherwise covered as if to decently blindfold them, and two long rows of stalwart stone columns. It was a curious edifice to find at the centre of an Oriental city, a sober relic of some British devotees I suppose. They would have been less than happy to witness its conversion. Viewed from the bandstand where, as it turned out, I spent some of my time, it presented a scene of desperate and unbridled sin. The band blared and in the wreathing smoke the dancers clutched each other, performing motions and actions that fell little short of the carnal act. Sometimes a quickstep would be played and the partners would work up a tremendous sweat to add to the gathering passion and would then sink soggily together for a sensual and insanitary embrace to the music of a waltz. Songs like 'My Foolish Heart', 'We'll Gather Lilac' and even 'Tumbling Tumbleweed', played by a Chinese band, had a lot for which to answer.

The girls who worked at the Liberty Club were unencumbered by shame and the soldiers, sailors and airmen were grateful for the simplicity. Not all the dancing partners were attractive but they knew their business. They freely entered a competition between themselves, observed to much Eastern female giggling from the floorside seats, to see who could provoke the most manifest erection in her partner during the dance, the results and the scores noted as the said partners limped away from the arena. Once I got my comb wedged sideways in my trouser pocket and my partner was adjudged the winner of that round. They were of all sad sorts (so were we, I suppose) making a living the only way they could. There was one poor speechless little tart called Dum-Dum, whose tongue, so the tale went, had been cut out by the Japanese. She laughed nearly all the time.

I was singing with the band one night (just how this stardom occurred I will later relate) and, looking down on the Hogarthian hell, I saw Juicy Lucy standing on one side, facing the floor fetchingly sipping a soft drink and looking up at me. She was taller than most Chinese, her face and shoulders white, her dress long and black. She wore elbow-length gloves. I tried to imagine that she did not belong in that place.

But Lucy was delighted with the situation. As we danced, very properly compared to the simulated sin going on around us, she told me that she had found a room and was now eager to make her fortune. We were both aware that she was not going to make it from me, but from that moment and for the next year we saw each other every week, sometimes once, sometimes twice. We went swimming together at Changi beach and to the pictures and rode about in a trishaw. When I could afford it we went to bed, but only then for it was understood that this was something separate; the way she earned her difficult living. Up to that period of my life, she was the nearest thing I had ever had to a regular and active girlfriend. She was mine Saturday nights, Wednesday afternoons and sometimes Sundays, when I was not playing cricket. The rest of the time she was anybody's.

Someone with improving ideas decided to demonstrate to Lucy, and her many sisters-in-sin, the error of their ways and the rewarding alternatives life offered – in this case basket weaving. All the bar and dance-hall girls were rounded up and shown how to make baskets and other pastoral arts. There were so many attending these lectures (a rumour was abroad that the participants would be paid) that they were held, not inappropriately, in a wrestling stadium. Lucy enjoyed them greatly for, as she explained, it gave the assembled girls an unusual opportunity to compare notes and to work out current prices in the trade. She also found the weaving interesting and would sit at the side of the dance floor in the Liberty Club industriously working away at a flower or fruit basket while waiting for her real living to come along. She showed me how to do the weaving once as she lay in bed of a hot Wednesday afternoon. I can still see her sitting up, grave and naked, reciting 'This go through there, and pop out there, this go through there . . .' as she fingered the strips of bamboo. Another thing she taught me was to sing 'Jingle Bells' in Chinese, an attainment which, for subsequent lack of opportunity, has declined to disuse over the years. All I can recall now is that the first two lines went:

Ding, ding, ding,
Ding, ding, ding.

Another song she could sing in Chinese (and so for some reason could many of her compatriots) was 'Auld Lang Syne' which made her something of a favourite with Scottish soldiers, two of whom, however, hastened the closing down of her workplace, the Liberty Club, by celebrating Hogmanay too strenuously. They tried to kill each other and one succeeded. The next day the authorities barred the doors for ever. It was well named, for no place I have ever entered, and I've entered a few, lent itself to more liberties, both taken and accepted, although the enchantingly named Crockford's Club in Colombo does run it quite close.

Throughout the happy time 1 knew Lucy, there remained living within me a little prude who unendingly nagged. In an attempt to satisfy this void and to become legitimate again, I asked one of the Chinese girl clerks at the office to go to the cinema with me and she agreed. She looked like a melon but she was not on the game, which to my personal internal hypocrite seemed important at the time. Unfortunately when I turned up for our date outside the Cathay Cinema she was there accompanied by her entire family. There was no escape; I had to take the girl, her mother, father, grandmother and two small melon babies into the pictures. Fortunately the seats were cheap but I had a salutary lesson and a miserable time. The grandmother, who kept cracking nuts and spitting out the shells, and the mother sat on either side of me so I could not even get my arm around the girl. One of the children, who had just wet, climbed onto my lap, and then Gran, who had become overly excited by the film (which was about the Berlin air lift), poked me in the eye with her long black fingernail. After that night I remained faithful to Lucy.

She could rarely get my name right and when she did manage it, after some rehearsal, she had forgotten it by our next assignation. So I took a leaf from her book and adopted the names of film stars, Humphrey (as in Bogart), James (as in Cagney), and my mother's old heart-throb Edward G. (as in Robinson).

In my stupid young and romantic way I suppose she was my first true (in the sense of real) love. She had given me something no other woman had thought appropriate and with it her friendship. Over the years I have many times visited Singapore and I have wryly wondered if she is still there. One night she threw my trousers out of the window while I was asleep and I had much difficulty the following day in retrieving them. The incident was the one possibly recognisable part of our relationship portrayed in
The Virgin Soldiers.
If she, a dedicated cinema-goer, saw the film, perhaps some far-off chord might have been struck for her. Would she, in her thirties by then, have realised that she was Juicy Lucy?

Perhaps, perhaps not. All I know is that on the final night in Singapore, before the long-awaited troopship came to carry me back to England, I went to see her for the last time at the club where she had begun work when the Liberty closed its doors. I remember going up the familiar fetid stairs into the compressed room, the garish lights and the strained music, and seeing her at once sitting in her usual corner waiting for someone to hand her a ticket for a dance. She did not see me and I could not bring myself to go across the floor. A creased sergeant, whom I dimly recognised as a cook at Nee Soon, nodded towards her. 'Nice that one,' he observed. 'Calls herself Oliver. Funny name for a bint ain't it, Oliver?' I was so choked that I merely turned and walked down the stairs and out again. The air was dense, men sat in the gutters selling little bits of food from glowing stoves, I could hear the imperious voice of the Raffles Hotel doorman summoning chauffeurs by number, like a bingo caller. Tomorrow my dream of going home would be realised. I walked steadily towards the bus station. Yes, there it was, above the Cathay Cinema, Olivia de Havilland starring in so-and-so.