Glasshouse Guidance

I missed a parade one day for reasons now long forgotten. My Sergeant Major, whom I’d nicknamed “Jambang Tikus” (Malay for shit-house rat) loved me as much as I loved him. Tikus charged me with absence from place of parade. A first time offender I was fined and warned.

The next week the Tikus ‘volunteered’ me for a religious retreat in Singapore. I didn’t want to go. I was told I was going amen!

Now the fist of fate struck me a series of perverse blows the first of which was that the Malaysian railways went on strike so alternative transport was arranged. My copy of orders said: Report to the guardroom at 0800 and catch the mini bus. I was in good time. There was a bus but it was a large one. I waited for a mini bus. None came. The big bus left.

Tikus went berserk. My copy of the travel order mysteriously vanished and his copy said Mil (short for Military) bus. I was marched in front of the Battery Captain because the Battery Commander, Major Roberts, was away. A decent fellow who hated punishing soldiers the captain referred me to our Regiment’s Colonel.

The Colonel was also away so his second in command, a strict martinet, deputized. “This is a second, recent and most serious offence” he told me sternly. Before I could plead that religious retreats weren't compulsory and that I’d simply changed my mind (A plausible lie) he barked "Seven days detention march out.”

The glasshouse is a place of harsh discipline, work and woe where wayward warriors are ‘guided’ back to the paths of righteousness. Here fate had another quirk in store. In the cell opposite mine was a huge mean looking bloke everyone feared. He was recently discharged from the SAS for hospitalising someone over a woman. Somehow Sonny and I became friends.

After lunch each day we were allowed to associate with other prisoners for half an hour. Sonny possessed a packet of illicit tobacco which he willingly shared with me. On evening cell inspection he clenched the packet in the cleft of his enormous arse grinning whilst doing so. They searched his pockets and his cell thoroughly but they never found it.

As the orderly officer and sergeant turned and came into my cell Sonny would retrieve the tobacco and wave it at me behind their backs pulling faces, trying to make me laugh. The bugger nearly succeeded too whilst I, standing stiffly to attention, had to bawl my number, rank, name and sentence.

Later, whilst on active service in Brunei and Borneo, this friendship stood me in good stead. A veteran of the Communist Terrorist war in Malaya Sonny taught me survival. The jungle is extremely beautiful but it’s a hellish place to hold a war and no place for a novice.

So a wicked injustice was perfectly counter balanced by a deep and enduring friendship courtesy of a shit-house rat.

He moves in mysterious ways what?