All posts tagged Gravy Browning

Stand Up Virgin Soldiers by Leslie Thomas (1975)

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

Leave a comment
by Simon on June 7, 2024  •  Permalink
Posted in Comedy, Novel, Sex
Tagged , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , ,

Posted by Simon on June 7, 2024

https://astrofella.wordpress.com/2024/06/07/stand-up-virgin-soldiers-leslie-thomas/

The Virgin Soldiers by Leslie Thomas (1966)

Brigg is a naive, virgin, 19-year-old private coming towards the end of his two-year National Service in Malaya during the communist insurgency (1948 to 1960). He’s a clerk in the Royal Army Pay Corps based at Panglin, a little way north of Singapore Island. In the evening he and his mates take the bus down to the island, to hang around in bars, many of them full of Chinese or Malay prostitutes. He knows he’s had a cushy number compared to the poor bastards who have been posted ‘up country’ i.e. further north and into the jungle. Those guys have seen real fighting, have been injured and seen their mates killed. By contrast the only violence Brigg and his buddies see is fights among the bored squaddies themselves or the occasional farcical incident such as when a drunk corporal having a crap in a latrine saw some fireflies dancing in the middle distance and so emptied his Sten gun magazine at them, sparking a barrack-wide panic until the other soldiers came running and saw what a plonker he’d been.

So it’s essentially a farce of army life, or features many farcical incidents – which means that, when the brutal reminders of war do come, they seem all the more brutal, inexplicable and horrible.

Cast of characters

As with many army novels, there’s a fairly big cast of characters because that’s the basic fact about the army, it’s very big, very populous – all the privacy and domestic quiet you enjoyed at home is torn from you and you’re thrown into the permanent company of all kinds of men you really don’t like, all day long, and then spend all night in big dormitories surrounded by men fidgeting, farting, crying and wanking.

And just often enough to give the whole experience a horrific edge, there’s the risk of actual fighting, of ambushes or sudden attacks by a homicidal enemy.

One way to cope with all this is to bring out the ludicrous and farcical aspects of army life. And one way to do that is to convert all the horrible men you’re forced to spend all your time with into gargoyles and caricatures. At moments The Virgin Soldiers reminded me a bit of Catch-22 in the way that both are populated with characters each of whom is allotted an obsession, an idée fixe or dominant characteristic which recurs robotically for comic effect.

Private Brigg, main character.

Private Sandy Jacobs, a hairy Scottish Jew.

Corporal Brook, ‘a thin man who was mad’, oddly ineffective, liable to freeze at vital moments, a figure of fun right up till the moment when he freezes in the face of a crowd of rioters in Singapore, so that one of them skewers him with a fence railing, in one of those moments of sudden violence which pierce the farcical mode.

Private Fenwick, who is trying to give himself an ear infection so as to be invalided home but only manages to give himself rheumatism and then falls in love with a nurse at the hospital where he’s treated so that, when he’s offered the opportunity of going home, he now desperately tries to have it rescinded so he can stay with his love.

Private Tasker, in on most conversations and trips to the bars and brothels, reliably randy, always first to pick up a girl and then take her off into the jungle to get his end away.

Private Sinclair, one of the most broadly comic characters, an obsessive trainspotter (p.60), continually thinking about train timetables, keen member of the Railway Society, despises the other men and their obsession with sex. In the book’s sudden violent finale, he turns out to be something of a hero before being killed by insurgent fire.

Patsy Foster and Sidney Villiers, gay couple, walk around hand in hand, always found in each other’s bunks; officers yell at them but they never get into any real trouble i.e. everyone seems to accept them.

Gravy Browning, international table tennis champion.

Sergeant Wellbeloved, officious bully and loudmouth, constantly bragging about his experiences in World War Two when he was captured by the Japs and interned in one of the notorious prison camps, singing his own praises as the only prisoner who stood up to them etc. Late in the book we are informed that this is all bullshit, that he was a coward and sold out his comrades to the Jap authorities. ‘He had a rancid face and a yellow bald head,’ (p.24). Brigg heartily loathes him.

Sergeant Driscoll, haunted by the memory of accidentally shooting some of his own men in Caen, during the Normandy Landings, when his Sten gun jammed. Moments later the house they were in was bombed so they’d have died anyway, but it doesn’t stop his ongoing PTSD. He is also haunted by the way his beloved wife divorced him when he refused to quit the army. Both scenes are described very powerfully.

Sergeant Fred Organ, 22 stone of blubber, ran the canteen tent, hung up a sign saying Fred’s Bar, 30 years service, barman, fatman, singer (p.67). Meets a grisly end when he treads on a landmine left over from the war on an apparently innocent carefree beach.

Phillipa Raskin, the daughter of Regimental Sergeant Major Raskin. Her father mercilessly bullies her, wants her to be a real woman, eventually provoking her into drunkenly losing her virginity on the night of a regimental party, she getting completely plastered at the family home and shouting at more or less the first soldier she sees passing the family home to come and fuck her. This soldier turns out to be Sergeant Driscoll and they proceed to have a very satisfying affair.

Colonel Wilfred Bromley Pickering, officer in charge of the regiment and the barracks. Lost his eye in Normandy, which terminated a promising career. To his eternal ignominy it wasn’t due to some heroic engagement with the enemy but when, under fire, he looked into a particularly beautiful flower thus disturbing a bee which was nestling in it, which came out and stung him on the eyeball. This disability explains why he has ended up in charge of this clerical unit down in peaceful Singapore, well away from the fighting against the communist insurgents further north.

Juicy Lucy. Crude nickname given to the slim, beautiful Chinese prostitute that Brigg goes with one night, more or less as a bet, who guides him through the mysteries of sex and who he thus loses his virginity to, thereupon falling heavily in love with.

She started from the beginning and went all the way. He felt like a balloon being slowly blown up. When she showed hi the big secret, she whispered: ‘How the virgin like?’ ‘Oh it’s lovely, Lucy,’ he shivered. ‘It’s lovely, it really is.’ (p.47)

Main events

The narrative consists of a series of incidents, some comic, some farcical, some grimly violent:

Wellbeloved supervises a squad digging a ditch who unearth a mass grave of Australians murdered by the Japanese during the war.

Wellbeloved and Driscoll nearly have a fight in the beer tent.

Fred Organ gets blown up on the beach when he has the bad luck to tread on one of the many landmines sprinkled on it back in 1942.

Brigg loses his virginity to prostitute ‘Juicy Lucy’ and then agonises that she will have given him an STD.

A soldier tells the boys that if you have a circumcision you get ten days leave. After some discussion in the bar, Brigg and his mates all agree to undergo the operation. But the soldier was misinformed and none of them get any leave. There’s some crude comedy when the nurse attending the row of just circumcised squaddies play with their exposed toes at the bottom of their beds, acting coy, just enough to arouse them and give them erections which, of course, hurt excruciatingly.

The boys build a catapult to hit the countless barking dogs which keep them awake at night but which instead, with its very first shot, hits Wellbeloved on the knee with half a brick, temporarily crippling him.

Phillipa chooses Sergeant Driscoll

The regimental dance. Sergeant Major Raskin’s beastly behaviour to his daughter Phillipa who he bullies and accuses of being a lesbian. To appease him she dances with the first soldier she sees, Brigg, then escapes the dance, goes home, makes herself very drunk, then leans out of the posh house she lives in with her bullying dad and gaga mother and shouts at a soldier crossing the wooden bridge below. This soldier turns out not to be Brigg, as she drunkenly thought, but Sergeant Driscoll, who takes advantage of her drunkenness to relieve her of her virginity, and they commence a friendly affair. Despite this Brigg insists on looking her up and taking her out and she allows him to, but never with the slightest possibility of sleeping with him. She is being very satisfactorily serviced by her sergeant.

The Singapore riots

Riots break out in Singapore. Sent to quell them, a patrol of our boys comes directly face to face with rioters. Wellbeloved orders ineffectual Corporal Brook to disarm the leading rioter but Brook freezes and is skewered and killed by a man with a spiked railing (who is immediately eviscerated by our guys’ gunfire).

Whoops there go my trousers

During this rioting period, Briggs finds himself in Lucy’s part of town and runs up the stairs to her flat. There she lures him in, scantily clad in a silk dressing gown, and persuades him to have sex. Then he wants to leave but she playfully throws his trousers out the window into the alleyway below. In a panic Briggs yells at his patrol partner Lantry to go and retrieve them. But when Lantry gets to the alleyway the trousers are gone. Terrified he’s going to get court martialled, Briggs makes Lucy give him some trousers, the only ones she owns being green silk woman’s trousers which, of course, look ludicrous, but Briggs wearing them rushes off with Lantry. Almost immediately they come upon a calm dignified Sikh holding the trousers who says that, finders keepers, they are now his. Furious Briggs attaches his bayonet to his rifle and points it at the Sikh who calmly hands them over. Farce.

The Driscoll and Wellbeloved fight

Sergeants Driscoll and Wellbeloved hate each other. In the empty sports arena where the regiment are staying while in Singapore, they have an epic fight. Driscoll has discovered that all Wellbeloved’s stories about fighting the Japs during the Second World War are lies, that he was not only not a hero, but sold out some of his comrades in the Japan camp to curry favour with their captors.

Brigg saves Phillipa

The platoon are driven back up to regimental headquarters at Panglin where there is an extended farcical incident. When a squad are detailed to go and protect officers’ houses from possible attack by the rioters Briggs smuggles himself along, effectively disobeying orders. He then peels off to the house of Phillipa and her dotty mother and, in an infection of panic, warns them that rioters are coming, hustles them out of the house and through the garden, as he sees a crowd of Chinese running towards them. He gets off a few shots before hustling them up a path behind the houses then he has a brainwave: there’s a huge overland pipeline running behind the houses so he forces the dazed stumbling mother and protesting Phillipa up onto it then they set off in terror through the night full of shots and cries. Their panic increases when they realise the Chinese mob have followed them and are also running along the pipeline. Brigg turns, kneels, gets off a few potshots then turns to hassle the women along, but the old mum is exhausted, and eventually slips and falls off the pipeline into the muddy swamp below.

Brigg drags Phillipa down there with her and all three hide in the scrubby jungle as they hear the mob come up abreast of them, on the pipeline overhead, pause, confer, then, mercifully, hurry on. They say in the muddy swamp till dawn, then wearily ascend the pipeline and stagger the last few hundred yards to a road where a jeep finds them and drives them back to the barracks.

Here Brigg is brought in front of Colonel Pickering who wearily points out that he disobeyed orders at least twice; there were no rioters near the houses so he, in effect, abducted Phillipa and her mother, nearly killing the old woman in the process; and that the Chinese he shot at were loyal Chinese from the camp laundry who were also fleeing in a panic. Lastly, one of his bullets shot off the fingers of the laundry’s chief mangler, a venerable old boy in his 70s who all the others look up to and the Chinese union are now demanding compensation or they’ll go on strike. Altogether a completely farcical misunderstanding. And the vulgar icing on the cake is that the venerable old mangler’s name is Fuk Yew.

The Colonel very decently says he won’t press charges against Briggs for desertion in the face of the enemy. nor will he name him as the shooter-off of Fuk’s fingers, but he will require him to hand over his next 6 weeks’ pay as compensation to the old Chinese. Thoroughly chastened, Brigg leaves the colonel’s office thinking of the possible newspaper headline: ‘How I shot FUK YEW the Chinese mangler’.

Lucy is dead

Brigg goes to see Lucy for the last time of dancing and sex but the bar manager tells him she’s dead. She was kicked to death by squaddies who thought she’d given them STIs. In a sweat of panic fear Briggs takes a taxi to her apartment and sure enough finds it has been emptied, only an old Chinese lady on the bed looking at some of the bric-a-brac before she gets up and walks out, leaving Briggs to collapse on the bed where he lost his virginity and cry his eyes out.

Frog races

As a result of handing over his weekly pay, Brigg is now penniless until he comes up with a plan of volunteering to do guard duty at the nearby ammunition depot for cash in hand. He discovers that the ammo boys hold epic frog races using the big wild frogs which throng the jungle. After a comical build-up Briggs’s frog wins the big race and the next day he puts in for some leave.

R&R up north

He catches a train north and a ferry across to the leave centre on Panang Island. His mellow mood is ruined by being billeted with a soldier, Waller, who’s been sent here because a squad of all his mates was recently massacred by CTs (communist terrorists). Waller flatly, calmly, asks Briggs how he can wangle himself a nice cushy number like Brigg has and Brigg is ashamed.

The rickshaw race

The boys attend a bordello named the Piccadilly Lights. To their surprise Sinclair the trainspotter ends up dancing with one of the prettiest hookers, nicknamed Little Nell. The other boys – Brigg, Lantry and Tasker – have a discussion about whether Little Nell should be left to Sinclair or one of them should take her for the night which escalates into the decision to have a rickshaw race for it. They go outside to the rack of rickshaws, each get into one then brief their drivers that it’s a race, which proceeds with predictably farcical results.

Phillipa relents

On the last day of his leave Brigg is mucking about in a canoe when is surprised to see Phillipa standing on the shore. She’s up her beginning the long training to become a nurse and his room-mate Waller mentioned he (Brigg) was here so she came looking. They spend a lovely day together till they get back to her room where Brigg makes a move, she says no, and he explodes with frustration, slapping her face and turning to go, crying tears of anger and frustration. But she calls to him, he turns and finds she has stepped out her dress, quite naked. They make love and it is wonderful. Fall asleep, shower, go out for an evening meal, come home, make love again. Early the next morning she’s left for her early shift and he has to hurtle back to the leave centre just in time to pack his stuff and jump onto the lorry to the ferry and the start of the journey back to Panglin. Just one niggle. In the middle of the night, he had reached out to hold her and she had sleepily said, ‘sergeant’. Sergeant? Which sergeant?

CT attack on the train

The book climaxes with a serious attack by armed insurgents on the troop train. An intense ten pages describe how the train is blown up and derailed, then wave after wave of rebels storm it. The soldiers fight back, not just our boys but a platoon of plucky Gurkhas. Waller, the infantryman traumatised by the deaths of his pals takes charge and is rock steady. Brigg finds a place under a carriage and fires at each new wave of attackers. Sinclair is taken down to the Gurkha end of the train and out in charge of an arc lamp to highlight the attackers, until it is shot out and he is shot twice in the chest, falling from the top of the carriage. Waller is shot dead and Brigg panics, he runs off shouting hysterically that he is going to fetch help. He stumbles through the jungle, falls into a ditch, becomes completely disorientated and blunders back out onto the track some distance away.

Brigg walks along the track till he sees the lights appear of an approaching train which he flags down. This one is packed with soldiers and he briefs the officer in charge about the ambush, so that the train starts up again and arrives as a relieving force. Brigg is thrilled to find his old muckers Lantry and Tasker still alive if seriously shell shocked, dirty and shaking. For the whole of the rest of his life Brigg spends long nights piecing together the chain of events, trying to make sense of it, trying to make sense of his behaviour, but never quite managing.

The end

Two short final codas.

1) Driscoll has been stationed in Butterworth, in the north of the country, and Phillipa moves to Penang to be with him. She hears about the raid on the train but isn’t worried. She knows her sergeant is indestructible.

2) Then in the last few pages, the National Service boys pack up their kit for the last time, climb aboard the truck which will take them to the port and their ship back to Britain. The last image is of Brigg spotting the old Chinese mangler at his work outside the laundry and he shouts a cheerful ‘Fuk Yew’ at the Chinaman who makes a cheerful V-sign in return.

Prose style

Given the book’s reputation for bawdiness it’s a surprise to see how hard Thomas worked at giving it style. Every page contains sentences which make an effort to impress.

It was not really dark because there was a moon looking daggers through the doors. (p.69)

Having a cold shower:

He let the stream of cold water hit him sharply like a dropping sword, jumping at its first strike, but then tackling it and mixing into it. (p.95)

After Sinclair has had his first sex, with a prostitute, he walks down to the beach:

He walked from her flat, down some concrete steps to the beach and then along the sand towards the place where big waves were coming white over the rocks like sporting ghosts. (p.175)

And:

On this beach the waves came up noisily, banging their fists on the shore and trying to grip the shingle with their fingers as the parent sea pulled them away again. (p.177)

The hot tropical sun, its movements and shadow, inspire repeatedly florid descriptions from Thomas:

They got a bus from the foot of the hill into Georgetown, arriving when the shadows were probing everywhere, and the sun was drifting away on its evening journey. (p.181)

As I read these many instances of imaginative and teasing descriptions, I couldn’t decide whether this is good style or terrible style, vivid and imaginative or arch and contrived. Either way I found them interesting and different and, when I learned to relax and enjoy them, all these little metaphors and turns of phrase add hugely to the book’s entertainment value.

Thoughts

When I was a boy this kind of book had the thrill of being ‘naughty’, about boobs and sex and stuff, an impression encouraged by saucy cover of the hardback edition showing images of war projected onto a busty Asian body.

But although there is a fair amount of sex in it – numerous soldiers fantasising about sex, talking about sex, and then actually having sex in a sweaty fumbling sort of way – there’s much more to the novel than that. It is an impressive depiction of life as a British soldier doing National Service in a hot, sweaty country on the other side of the world. It has the depth of lived experience and, although some of the passages are extended comic set-pieces, others are as disturbing and upsetting as life is.

Most of all, and despite Thomas’s often strange, sometimes contrived way with words, it is amazingly easy to read. During his lifetime it sold not just a million but millions of copies. Touched a nerve or a cluster of nerves. Impressive.

Credit

The Virgin Soldiers by Leslie Thomas was first published by Constable and Co in 1966. References are to the 1974 Pan paperback edition.

Leslie Thomas reviews

Malaya reviews

History

Fiction

2 Comments
by Simon on June 3, 2024  •  Permalink
Posted in British Empire, Comedy, Novel, War
Tagged , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , ,

Posted by Simon on June 3, 2024

https://astrofella.wordpress.com/2024/06/03/the-virgin-soldiers-leslie-thomas/