David Waddington Memoirs by David Waddington Read Free Book Online

So we were sent home with our tails between our legs.
    I got my trunk as far as Manchester, crossed from London Road to Victoria Station with it, put it in the luggage van onthe train to Burnley and settled down in the compartment next door. I arrived at Burnley to find the trunk had gone. Apparently someone had concluded that Burnley via Bury and Ramsbottom was not the quickest route to Singapore, the destination for which the trunk was labelled. It took a few weeks to sort out that little problem, by which time the ship was ready to sail; so to Liverpool I returned.
    I was responsible for a troop deck which was home for 130 men. There were long tables across the floor at which they were to eat and hooks in the ceiling from which they were to hang their hammocks. In the best of conditions it would have taken the men a while to get used to sleeping in hammocks, but a day out from Liverpool we ran into a storm and by the time we got to the Bay of Biscay there was not a man capable of carrying out any duties, and conditions on the troop deck were squalid beyond belief. But at last the ship rounded Cape St Vincent, and soon we were in good order and in a holiday mood.
    The ship was to have refuelled at Port Said but at the end of 1951 Britain was coping with the first Suez crisis and it was decided to stop at Algiers instead. I remember how beautiful were the gardens facing the quay and how immaculate and prosperous-looking was the centre of the city. (I returned in 1968 as an MP to find it had changed out of all recognition – dirty, drab and squalid.) Orders went out that no one was to enter the Casbah in the interests of their own safety. Two hours later the place was full of soldiers. I know. I saw it for myself.
    The Suez Canal was not a pretty sight, the banks being lined by masturbating Egyptians – a very exhausting form of political protest which I have never seen repeated. An enterprising subaltern dressed up as an Arabian potentate entered the ship’s dining room. He was announced gravely as the Ding of Dong, and proceeded to the Captain’s table. There the Captain politely gave up his chairto him and stood blushing like a bride while The Ding (otherwise 2nd Lt Piers Dennis) ate his turkey.
    Next stop was Aden where we had another day’s shore leave. I took a fancy to a dinner service, bought it and arranged for it to be sent to my parents as a present. It was not a good move and led to my father complaining bitterly that he had to pay a large sum as demurrage because of the consignment languishing for some weeks on Liverpool Docks. When I arrived home a year and a half later I found the dinner service unused, at the back of a bedroom cupboard, and a few years after that it was given back to me as a wedding present.
    On Christmas Day 1951 we arrived at Colombo and I met my first snake charmer sitting on his haunches outside the Galle Face Hotel. On New Year’s Day 1952 we sailed into Singapore harbour through a veil of rain but, before docking, ran in to a bit of trouble. OC Troops had ordered all baggage to be brought up on deck and put on the port side, but this led to the ship leaning over in that direction and being unable to get alongside in an orderly fashion. An exasperated captain then countermanded the order and after half the baggage had been moved to starboard we tied up and went ashore. A few hours later, after being issued with a side-arm, I was on a train bound for Ipoh in Penang.
    We were in Malaya to take part in a fight against a communist insurgency which had begun not long after Britain, the colonial power, had arrived back on the Malayan peninsular at the end of the War. A plan had been laid for Malaya to be retaken by ground forces in 1945, but the collapse of Japan after the destruction of Hiroshima and Nagasaki by atom bombs meant that the British did not re-enter Malaya as conquerors but as representatives of a recently defeated colonial power. Many Chinese (the Chinese forming a large