His eyes were red. His penis hung like a limp lighthouse. He was a poor sight.
(Stand Up Virgin Soldiers, page 4)
Third in the ‘Virgin Soldiers’ trilogy and the least satisfactory. It opens with an extremely brief, 3-page prologue telling us that it is 1974 and the hero of the first two novels, John Brigg, is back in Singapore, remembering being the original virgin soldier doing his National Service in 1949/50, i.e. 25 years earlier. Now he’s back as a middle-aged staff sergeant, ‘a ghost of other days’, sent to help supervise the shutting down of the British garrison in Singapore.
But barely have we taken this in and accustomed ourselves to Singapore 1975 than… surprise, surprise, the entire text flashes back to 1950 and the original Virgin Soldiers moment, in fact right back to the exact moment when the first novel ended. If you remember, the original Virgin Soldiers novel ended with Brigg and the other surviving conscripts, their service complete, leaving the barracks at Panglin in a big lorry en route to Singapore to catch a boat home.
In this rewriting of the story, they get to the port only to discover that, due to the unexpected start of the Korean War (25 June 1950), their period of service has been extended by six months (pages 5, 12, 22). Thus, with a stroke of his pen, Thomas is able to rustle up six more months of virgin soldier narrative to bolt onto the end of his original narrative. Well, he was a business-like writer and the brand was selling well. So why not?
Cast
Page numbers are when we first hear a character speak or get a decent description of them, as opposed to just a namecheck.
- John Brigg – our hero, all the way from Kilburn, north London
- Harold Tasker – his best mate and wingman (p.7), from Shoreditch (p.284)
- Lantry
- Sandy Jacobs – Glasgow Jew
- Gravy Browning – table tennis addict
- Patsy Foster and Sidney Villiers – gay couple, their camp dialogue reminiscent of Kenneth Williams, Villiers has a lisp (p.75)
- Corporal Eggington – fan of fancy ointments and porn mags, nicknamed ‘the Calamine Kid’, aged 30 (p.224), very fat (p.257)
- Private Quentin Fundrum – looks like an unkempt tree, surprisingly learned and articulate (p.96), nicknamed ‘Brainy’ (p.279)
- Private Conway – from Belfast, jigsaw addict (p.83)
- Lance-Corporal Williams – reading through a complete set of encyclopedias (p.82)
- Corporal Field – big Siegfried Sassoon fan with a flat Midlands accent, five feet two tall
- one-eyed Lieutenant Colonel Bromley Pickering (p.21) – his wife is the Southern Counties’ Women’s League Champion jam-maker (p.88)
- his stammering Adjutant, Reginald ‘Reggie’
- Regimental Sergeant Major Woods – who suffers from bad feet
- Sergeant Wellbeloved – roundly hated by all
- Lieutenant Grainger – freshly posted (p.19), 20 years old (p.75)
- Lieutenant Wilson – a short stodgy officer from the pay department (p.19)
- Longley – a slow-thinking private with vicious acne and a tendency to lean to one side due to a bad hip
- Lieutenant Perkins – officer in charge of the Pay office where Brigg and the rest work
- Sergeant Bass – NCO in charge of the Pay office where Brigg and the rest work (p.79)
- Major Bilking – the medical officer (p.103)
- Bernice ‘Bernie’ Harrison – Cockney nurse (p.114), stocky, ‘pretty but podgy’ (p.274)
- Corporal Lunes – the medical orderly, rumoured to be mad (p.127)
- Sergeant-Major Ringbold – commanding the mongrel force brought together to protect the depot at Johore Baru (p.152)
- Sparkles – one of the contingent at Johore (p.155), astonishingly ignorant and stupid man, from Walsall
- Corporal Dobbie – Catering Corps man at Johore (p.184), from Dorset, shot dead in the attack in the Rajit
- Miss Phillimore – mad old lady who sells Brigg tennis gear (p.231)
The book’s cons
Tired
Stand Up Virgin Soldiers is OK, very funny in some places, but it feels tired, tired of itself, like the later Carry On films. It doesn’t help that it starts in an atmosphere of general gloom and depression as all the squaddies mooch around, stunned by the news they have to serve an extra six months.
Reviving finished relationships
Nor the way all the relationships, such as with the hated Sergeant Wellbeloved or the sentimental CO Colonel Pickering, which had reached a natural end in the first novel, have to be revived, pumped up like leaky old bicycle tyres. While other relationships – such as with Phillipa whose love affair dominates the first book – are never mentioned, disappear without trace.
Resurrecting Lucy
The worst resurrection of all is of ‘Juicy Lucy’. This was the nickname given to the Chinese prostitute (herself aged only 20, p.169) who showed Brigg how to have sex i.e. took his virginity in the first book. In a very intense, prolonged and moving passage in the first book, Brigg discovers she’s dead, has been kicked to death by squaddies. This (believe it or not) suited the edgy feel of the first novel, which ends in a welter of violence, but also felt complicatedly appropriate for her role in his sex life, somehow. It evoked complicated, intense and tragic emotions.
Anyway, in a move which feels cheap and shallow, Thomas simply resurrects her. Writes a sentence saying it wasn’t her but some other hooker who was kicked to death, Lucy had just gone off with a rich businessman for a while, then she came back. Which, at a stroke, destroys the intense psychological resonance her death created in the first book (p.29).
Forgetting what we’ve learned
Also, trying to get back into the mindset of Brigg 1950 requires the huge effort of putting out of your minds everything we read about Brigg 1970, as described in the second book of the trilogy, ‘Onward Virgin Soldiers’ – about his wife, her tragic death, his problematic son, his posting to Hong Kong, and the touching love affair with a lonely American woman. Basically, there’s a whole lot of stowing away what we know from books 1 and 2 of the trilogy which is required before we can really settle down to engage with this retread.
Sexism
Lastly, pretty much all the attitudes displayed by the swaggering protagonists of the book – Private John Brigg, his wingman, Harold Tasker, and the new character, the American named Clay – are completely and utterly unacceptable these days.
Indeed, from one perspective the book amounts to a sustained exercise in the objectification of every woman it describes. It’s a kind of embodiment of the male gaze, as our testosterone-driven heroes size up every woman they encounter, assessing their figures and features in purely sexual terms.
A tiny Chinese girl from the village, brown, calm-faced, walked by them, two tin cans hung from a bamboo pole on her shoulder. Also on the pole was a small lantern to light her path. Both men let her go by and then turned to watch her backside, tidy and tight in her peasant trousers. (p.123)
Lots and lots of moments like that.
Racism
And, because they spend a lot of time going to bars frequented entirely by local prostitutes, you can add outrageous racism to the charge sheet as well.
She had good legs for a Chinese girl, not splayed or muscular, and they now slid lazily from beneath the robe as she sat. (p.41)
Plus plenty of other stereotyping of the native Malays, the Chinese, the Indians and so on. It’s not deliberate, conscious, or hateful white supremacist racism – generally the opposite, as the Chinese, Malays and especially Indians are generally shown to be much cleverer, calmer and more sensible than the irresponsible, incompetent white soldiers (the only person who reacts sensibly in the Rajit shooting scene is the Indian shopkeeper, p.190) – but I think it comes under the kind of passive racial stereotyping which is, these days unacceptable in any context. And calling all the natives ‘Bongos’ doesn’t help (p.163). Or ‘wogs’ (p.251).
The Chinese eye may be narrow but it observes much. (p.255)
Ouch. Maybe this is why my local library service doesn’t have a single copy of any of Thomas’s 27 novels. Maybe someone quietly burned them all.
Except that this is now, from our perspective, a historical novel, as it was when he wrote it in 1974 or so, harking back to 1950. That’s 73 years ago and, presumably, how people spoke back then. Thomas is a novelist not a moral philosopher, and his novels contain all kinds of uncomfortable attitudes, make a point of ‘subverting’ bourgeois behaviour, telling uncomfortable truths. In a way, what’s surprising about it is the lack of racist attitudes; a handful of unacceptable terms, maybe, but by and large Briggs and the sympathetic characters like the natives and often acknowledge their superiority.
And also this is an old-style comedy, largely made up of familiar stereotypes of everyone, extending just as much to the white characters – the bumbling colonel, the posh adjutant, the sadistic sergeant major, and a host of regional stereotypes among the squaddies (the slow Northerner, the depressed Midlander, the peevish Welshman, the stingy Scot and so on).
Homophobia
While we’re listing Thomas’s sins against contemporary sensibilities, I suppose I should add the stereotyping of the two ‘pansies’ among the squaddies, Patsy Foster and Sidney Villiers. What surprised me in the original novel and in this one, too, is the very relaxed attitudes of all the other squaddies and NCOs to this pair i.e. a bit of banter, a few jokes, but they get off much easier than a lot of the other soldiers who are mercilessly teased, lampooned and sometimes beaten up. Whatever anyone says, Patsy and Sidney ‘were never put out’ (p.74), and always ready with a disarming riposte. Their occasional snippets of camp dialogue or witty put-downs of thick officers reminded me of Kenneth Williams.
The pros
That’s the negatives. As to the positives, Thomas is a very amiable writer. He just gets on with it and so do his characters. Somehow the original novel felt full of the vim and breakthrough excitement of the 1960s. This one feels like the tired sexist humour of the 1970s. Modern young readers shouldn’t waste their time on it. I only bought it to complete my reading of the Virgin Soldiers trilogy which I only started reading because I was looking for fiction about the Malaya Emergency.
I’ve registered all the cons listed above but I’m a completer-finished so had to relax and enjoy it for what it is, 1970s middle-brow entertainment, as packed with unacceptable attitudes as all those 1970s sitcoms. The complete haplessness of a bunch of young men in the army far from home kept reminding me of the sitcom ‘It Ain’t Half Hot, Mum’, which was first broadcast in 1974, and as packed with (sometimes very uncomfortable) stereotypes. A guilty pleasure.
But, despite everything, it is often very funny. Thomas is a gifted comedian. I smiled and I laughed. In these grim times, that’s a gift.
The main events
Mostly the narrative is made up of a series of comic scenes. The squaddies lament the extension of their contracts. Brigg and Tasker go to a bar-brothel looking for Juicy Lucy, dance with a few hookers, make casually racist, sexist jokes, then Brigg goes to find Lucy at her apartment and discovers she is still alive! She cries. They make love etc. Pretty much all the drama and emotion surrounding her from the first book is, thus, destroyed.
The arrival of Morris Morris, a mountain of a man, Welsh and extremely pissed off at being conscripted to fight ‘SOME FUCKING WAR’, as he puts it, a manic-depressive giant, a big rich comic character (p.47).
Tense but ultimately farcical raid on the local village looking for Chinese terrorists (CTs). Farce when there’s an outburst of machine gun fire and the entire troop throw themselves on the muddy ground in a panic, then Chinese toddlers come up to look at the funny white men lying in the mud and some customers come out of the nearby cinema where an American crime movie is playing, and that turns out to have been the source of the gunfire which scared them all.
During this village raid Lieutenant Grainger proves himself a psychopath by firing Brigg’s rifle just a foot over his head and then claiming he could have Brigg court-martialled for undisciplined use of a firearm. Brigg is shaken, horrified, then fearful of what this lunatic will do next.
The daily ritual of the soldiers working in the Admin office (pages 80 to 81).
A single American who’s become detached from his unit sent to Korea is posted on them, much to the Colonel’s disgust. Private William Clay (p.90).
Morris Morris organises a concert which is predictably dire, but not given the full setpiece treatment as the concert in ‘Onward Virgin Soldiers’. The main moment is when four nurses come on to do the can-can, with the all-male audience going predictably wild, but then Morris invites volunteers from the audience and Brigg, Clay, Tasker and another fight their way onstage to dance with the girls. Brigg likes his one who’s a feisty Cockney named Bernie. Afterwards, to their frustration, Lieutenant Grainger goes to the girls changing room with champagne and Wellbeloved tells them to clear off. Out the back a comedy pyramid of men climbing over each other to see in the window for a glimpse of naked flesh. Men. Testosterone. Brigg and Clay come up with a plan, to feign the symptoms of VD in order to be sent to the hospital where they can enquire after ‘their’ nurses.
Clay and Brigg lie to the MO about having STDs, so are packed off to the ambulance to be driven to the Singapore hospital. On the way two old lags give detailed descriptions of the spikes and hooks they use on your penis until Brigg is pale with fear and a young squaddie in the corner is crying. Turns out to be a wind-up, all the medical officer wants is a little blood sample. Brigg finds out from a tea orderly that the nurse called Bernie is Bernice Harrison who works in Casualty (p.137). So Brigg and Clay saunter off in that direction with a view to chatting up her and her mate, but the doors swing open, almost smacking them in the face, as Bernie, other nurses and a doctor hurry through two trolleys occupied by badly wounded young men. Christ! Humbled and ashamed our two Romeos get the ambulance back to barracks and thank their lucky stars.
Lantry and Clay are scheduled for guard duty, go for a drink beforehand, get hammered and, while on guard duty, their simmering rivalry erupts into a full-on fight. Until they hear officers shouting and approaching and stand up straight, smartish.
Brigg and Tasker are selected to be sent for three days depot guard duty at Johore Baru, up-country.
Before they leave, Brigg has a free afternoon and night with Lucy. For the first time they have an outing together, taking her 2-year-old nephew to the beach, the toddler playing in the surf while they chat. At one point the boy needs a poo and Brigg takes him along to the very nearby RAF base where a series of soldiers refuse him use of the loo and the little boy poos himself in tears. Brigg is furious at the rule-bound uselessness of the British. That night, they make love in a way Brigg feels is special, homely, though it’s doubtful whether Lucy the pro feels the same.
Brigg and Tasker are sent to the nearby village of Rajit to get provisions, along with the not-very-bright Private Spark and the dull Dorset man from the Catering Corps, Corporal Dobbie. Surprisingly, in the village they are attacked by snipers. Brigg, Tasker and Sparkle are in a store and survive but Dobbie was in the open by the lorry and is shot dead.
Next day Brigg and Tasker return to Pinglin and pull rank as old timers who’ve seen war. They are greeted with the tragic news that the Colonel’s stamp collection has gone missing! This seems trivial. Clay tells Brigg that in his absence he went to the nurses’ accommodation, tracked down Nurse Bernie and got two tickets to the Red Cross ball! At which point evil Sergeant Wellbeloved enters to dormitory tom tell the boys that, as the Colonel’s stamps have not been found, all leave for the following weekend is cancelled i.e. the day of the ball. This is a transparent set-up for more farcical goings-on.
First development is that some soldiers are allowed out, so long as they are going to support Gravy Browning as he competes in the Inter-Services Table Tennis Championships. Gravy is no fool and charges each of the dozen ‘supporters’ he selects ten dollars as he knows none of them give a monkeys about table tennis. On the first, Friday, night of the championships, Brigg, Clay, Tasker and the rest cheer their heads off, because they desperately want him to get through to the Saturday round, which he does.
Clay and Brigg dress in ludicrously ill-fitting evening dress ‘borrowed’ for the night from the village laundry, and set off with Browning’s other ten ‘supporters’ before skiving off to meet their dates, Bernie who we’ve met and her friend, Valerie Porter (p.214). Broad comedy because Clay’s trousers are so extremely tight that he can’t dance without risking them splitting. They look like Keystone Cops. At the end of the evening both men get a little kiss before the nurses turn and go, leaving our heroes frustrated.
‘Christ, I just touched her on the tit, hardly felt it, and she told me to be a good boy.’ (p.222)
But a few days later he calls Bernie from St James-the-Less Rest Home for British Soldiers and, to his surprise, she offers to come along and play tennis. Obviously he doesn’t have any kit nor know how to play so there’s a panic-stricken run around to buy the gear, from a mad old lady, spindly Miss Phillimore, who keeps reminiscing about the good old days of the Raj.
A digression about sex
Then they go to the chalet he’s rented where, after some snogging, she reveals that she’s a virgin and scared to death. What most strikes me about the (fairly graphic) descriptions of sex Thomas has in his novels is the way there’s little or no foreplay and no attempt at lubrication. Most times I’ve had sex with a woman it has required a lot of foreplay, kissing and stroking etc and very often additional lubrication from the wide variety of lubrication products available everywhere these days i.e. all high street supermarkets.
My point is that there’s none of that in Thomas’s descriptions, none. There’s a bit of kissing, he suckles one or other nipple, then kneels between the woman’s legs, lowers onto and into the woman and gets shagging. That’s it. Every time. The variety and inventiveness of sex we’ve got used to over the past generation or so, not just from manuals and guides but just from telly and the movies, simply doesn’t exist in these books.
By the same token, on the occasion when they’re in bed together and he can’t get an erection, Brigg asks Bernie ‘to sort of play about with him a bit’ (p.269). That’s it, that’s as much as he can think of.
Sorry to be so graphic, but I found this complete absence of sexual sophistication, and the lack of awareness of female anatomy or needs, a fascinating part of the book’s social history. I suppose Brigg is meant to be 19, has only himself just lost his virginity, lacks any kind of maturity, so shouldn’t be taken as any kind of evidence of sexual knowledge in 1950 or 1975, but still…
Anyway, Brigg takes Bernie’s virginity in an extended scene conveyed entirely through their dialogue, as she describes his erection entering her, how it hurts, how it’s too big, how she’s crying, does he really love her etc and then, in seconds, he climaxes and it’s all over.
God, to think that in the old days we relied on books like this for our information about sex (porn being almost completely inaccessible and sex education useless). The waste…
Back to the plot
Now they’ve had their brief crude intercourse poor Bernie thinks they’re in love and are going to get married or such, while we know that Brigg is actually still in love with Lucy, so Bernie’s heading for a bad disillusionment.
Clay comes to Brigg for advice. They agree to take the girls out on a double date. They go to a dire dance hall but the girls insist they move on so Clay takes them to a club. Excruciatingly, it’s the one where Lucy works, the Liberty Club. The white girls go to the loo together and Brigg runs over to Lucy to tell her he’s only performing a duty, he’s been tasked with entertaining some officer’s wives. She treats him as if she’s never met him and coolly tells him to fuck off. Back at the table he is even more upset to learn that Clay, who watched the exchange, has himself had sex with Lucy a few times.
The evening ends in farce when they notice Eggington, who had earlier made a big deal about trying a new Japanese mud treatment for spots, dancing by himself on the dancefloor, completely drunk and celebrating that his spots have, in fact, disappeared. Brigg is desperate when the beautiful Lucy deliberately punishes him by dancing with fat, ugly, sweating Eggington, but then he goes mad and starts a striptease, eventually completely naked and waving his big schlong at their table screaming ‘No spots, no sports!’ as Valerie and Bernie scream with delight.
Bouncers converge on the fat man, the soldiers go to his defence and it dissolves into a massive fight, until the Military Police arrive and everyone finds themselves on the pavement outside helpless with hilarity.
A comic scene where Clay and Valerie, Brigg and Bernie break into the grounds of St James-the-Less Rest Home, with the help of a comically punctilious Indian watchman who loans him a ladder for five dollars.
That night they bicker because Bernie saw the way he looked at Lucy and her feminine intuition did the rest. He can’t get an erection and they don’t have sex. However, next morning they’re woken by Miss Phillimore and two elderly friends delivering tea to each chalet with a hymn and him standing and singing (while Bernie hides) makes her laugh so much they proceed to have genuinely relaxed sex and, for the first time in her life, she has an orgasm (p.272). Only then does she reveal that she and Valerie have put in for a transfer and are going to move to a hospital in Colombo, Ceylon, on Christmas Eve. They both pretend to be upset but deep down Briggs suspects they’re both relieved.
Christmas morning and the squaddies in their dormitory have a good old moan. There’s an interesting passage where the Jew, Jacobs, rubbishes Christianity for being a fairy story and the others say well it all started with ‘his mob’, all said without any animosity, just because they’re irritable and missing home (p.277).
On Christmas morning all the privates in the barrack put on an impromptu fancy dress parade, marching up the hill to the CO’s mansion for his one-eyed blessing. During the confusion someone deposits the stolen stamp collection on his sundial.
There’s an epic Christmas lunch with the officers serving the men, who become maudlin. Mad Lieutenant Grainger comes over and kills all mirth by informing them that they’ll be going to back to the depot for stints of guard duty. Then he goes and deliberately spills boiling custard over sergeant Wellbeloved’s bare legs. ‘He’s mad, that bastard,’ mutters Brigg (p.288).
We learn that Bernie’s gone, flown away. Just like that (p.292). End of the affair which had seemed central to the narrative. Briggs is back itching after Lucy.
On Boxing Day after some bickering, Clay says he needs a breath of fresh air. Briggs is convinced he’s going to see Lucy, so gets a taxi into town. He finds him at the Liberty Club but Lucy’s not there and the Yank runs off. This turns into a comic race between the two rickshaws they’ve hired.
But when they both arrive at Lucy’s flat it’s to find her seriously ill, too weak to move, a lake of vomit by her bed. Clay runs to fetch help, while Brigg tries to make her drink water but she’s almost unconscious. Ambulance arrives and takes her to hospital. three hours later our sad boys know it was attempted suicide. Why?
Cut to Brigg in the office closely supervised by officers. The officer supervisor announces that he, along with his cronies Clay, Tasker, Morris Morris, even Sergeant Wellbeloved, have been selected for another round of guard duty at the Johore depot.
They’ve barely arrived at the depot and dumped their kit before Grainger is round to tell them about the wild pig hunt. Thomas had Grainger mention this a couple of times back at Pinglin, his enthusiasm to go and hunt wild boar in the forest, bring it back, roast and eat it. Now, as this is page 414 of a 444-page book, we know this is probably going to be the Big Climactic Scenes. Give Thomas’s form in the other three novels I’ve read (i.e. there are grisly deaths) I fully expect someone to get killed during this ‘wild pig hunt’.
All the men are too scared of Grainger, too cowardly and too sensible to do anything. But remember that tiny detail of how, at the Christmas lunch, Grainger accidentally-on-purpose tipped scalding custard over his junior, Sergeant Wellbeloved. Well, my money was on Wellbeloved shooting Grainger.
But it doesn’t turn out that way. Grainger leads the men off on a long and exhausting trek through dense jungle along narrow paths, breaking occasionally for rest and food. On the way back they come to a clearing and to everyone’s terror a huge wild boar bursts out of the wall of jungle and makes a run at them as they all leap aside. Once it’s got to the end of the clearing it turns for another run and the others watched astonished as Grainger plants his feet like a matador and taunts it. When it charges Grainger waits till it’s half way to him then fires a long burst on his Sten gun and kills it, its momentum making it plough into the ground at his feet.
Unfortunately, that’s not all. They see men standing at the end of the clearing, who they suddenly realise are CTs (communist terrorists). Grainger tells them to duck and Brigg flings himself into the wall of greenery, tripping over a log and slipping and falling a hundred feet down to a stream. From here he hears a lot of further shooting and hand grenades from back up in the clearing. Then a great bulky rumpus coming down through the undergrowth towards him.
It’s Morris Morris, he’s been badly shot, a bullet ripping through his stomach and groin leaving a big exit wound in his back. He comes to a rest in the stream, leeching blood. Brigg tries to reassure him, goes back up to the clearing and is horrified to see Grainger dead next to the dead pig. Terrified, he skeets over to the officer, retrieves his field dressing and returns to Morris and tries to apply it to the huge wound.
There follows an extended and meant-to-be moving scene where Morris slowly bleeds to death in the stream and confesses to Brigg that he’s not married with kids. He invented the wife and family, even fabricating letters from them. He is in fact gay or, in the lingo of the time, ‘a poor old Cardiff docks poof’ (p.332). Briggs is flabbergasted.
They hear voices and Briggs inches his way back up the slope to the rim of the clearing and sees armed men tie the dead pig to a bamboo shaft and then the corpse of Grainger, too, and then carry them away. He waits five minutes before moving, inching back down to the stream where Morris is dying.
As night has fallen and its gotten darker, they’ve realised there’s a light downstream and sounds. Morris won’t let Brigg leave him so Brigg has to get the man-mountain to lean on him as they blunder along the shallow stream, eventually arriving at a local village in the middle of a fiesta. By the time Brigg staggers into the clearing, Morris is dead.
The villagers let Brigg stay there overnight but insists he sleep in the same hut as the corpse. In the morning they send a messenger. Soon a truck arrives with a driver and two silent Gurkhas. The driver informs him that the others are alive: a) Clay got his posting back to an American unit and has left; b) Wellbeloved got a shoulder wound and bored everyone bragging about his bravery; c) Tasker is unwounded. With amazing speed he’s back at the depot for a tearful reunion with his mucker, Tasker.
Tasker describes Grainger’s mad heroism, the way he immediately charged the CTs, firing non-stop, must have got 3 or 4 of them before he himself was shot down, while Clay and Tasker dived into the undergrowth.
An Army lorry takes them back to good old, safe old Panglin. They buy an ice cream from the local vendor. They clump into the dormitory and look at Morris’s vacant bunk. Brigg wryly states that they still have two months, 25 days and 22 hours of the six months left to serve.
THE END. As with the first novel, the reader is left feeling dazed and bereft.
Nice turns of phrase
Almost very page is illuminated by imaginative and generally funny turns of phrase and thought. Here are the lads on parade:
Around them other squads were formed on the square; wooden figures like clothes pegs on long washing lines. The moon was hanging about the Naafi and the eternal noise of the crickets rattled the night. (p.57)
The prosaic reality of colonial prostitution:
Mucky Meg, the plump and motherly Eurasian who did midweek masturbations for impoverished soldiers at a dollar a time, missed the serious importance of the soldiers’ invasion altogether. ‘You like dollar wank, Johnny?’ she inquired politely of Brigg as he stood stiffly at a street corner. (p.59)
‘Dollar wank’ – a nice collocation of American and British culture. When the platoon are walking in single file, led by Corporal Field who jumps with fright at every flicker of light or strange sound:
The patrol behind him jumped in reactions to his jumps, giving the effect of an apprehensive caterpillar. (p.62)
The character of the man-mountain Morris Morris gives Thomas plenty of scope:
Most nights he looked like a great pie on his bed as it bowed spectacularly under his weight. (p.86)
Of the lanky, bony American, Clay, when he goes to salute:
Clay’s loose limbs came together as though someone had pulled a lever. (p.92)
In the waiting room to see the medical officer:
It was like a Trappist monastery after a wild night of illicit talking. (p.127)
Christmas morning:
The sun looked as though it had been up all night. (p.279)
This is what I mean by how easy and pleasurable and entertaining it is to read Thomas’s prose.
Movie version
Stand Up Virgin Soldiers was made into a cheap and pathetic movie (1977), strongly redolent of the skinflint production values of the period (Hammer, Carry On). Supposedly set in Malaya it very obviously looks like where it was shot, namely in and around rainy Maidenhead in Berkshire.
It was directed by Norman Cohen who also directed movie versions of the TV comedies, ‘Till Death Us Do Part’ (1969) and ‘Dad’s Army’ (1971) and some of the truly dreadful ‘Confessions of…’ sex comedy series: ‘Confessions of a Pop Performer’ (1975), ‘Confessions of a Driving Instructor’ (1976) and ‘Confessions from a Holiday Camp’ (1977). God help us. This was what was served up to us at our local cinemas in the 1970s.
It’s mildly interesting that Thomas wrote the screenplay himself.
Credit
Stand Up Virgin Soldiers by Leslie Thomas was published in 1975 by Methuen Books. References are to the 2005 Arrow paperback.
Leslie Thomas reviews
- The Virgin Soldiers (1966)
- His Lordship (1970)
- Onward Virgin Soldiers (1971)
- Tropic of Ruislip (1974)
- Stand Up Virgin Soldiers (1975)
- Dangerous Davies: The Last Detective (1976)
Books & Boots 