Dead in the Dog

They drew up outside the Mess and as he walked in, the new doctor had another look at the place in the light of the bare bulbs hanging under the verandahs. The left-hand hut was given over to the dining room and beyond it the lounge, rather grandly called the ‘anteroom’. The kitchen was this side of the dining room and the ablutions were at the far end. The other hut opposite contained about ten small rooms for the resident officers, their row of slatted doors reminding Tom of the changing cubicles in a swimming pool. His room was near the middle, a plywood cell with a single bed inside a sagging mosquito net, a clothes locker, a washbasin, a desk and a ‘chair, easy, officers for the use of, one’, as it was described in the inventory.

For fear of incurring the steward’s displeasure, they went straight to the dining room and sat at the long table just as Number One came in from a door at the other end, where the cooking was being done by his tiny wife. He bore a tureen of soup which he put down between the place settings, then padded out, his flip-flops slapping on the linoleum.

‘Bit thin on the ground tonight, aren’t we?’ said Alf Morris, looking across at the other pair of diners. One of them was Percy Loosemore, a major who specialized in skin and venereal diseases. He was a bony man of about forty, with sparse fair hair, a long nose and a waspish nature.

‘Some panic in theatre, apparently. The sawbones and the gasman are dealing with some MT accident – a REME squaddie who stuck his hand in the fan of a Saracen’s engine.’ He ladled some tomato soup into a bowl and slid the tureen towards Alfred.

Tom’s vocabulary of acronyms was already wide enough to gather that some accident had occurred to a private in the Royal Electrical and Mechanical Engineers from the Motor Transport section. What a ‘Saracen’ was, he had no idea.

The younger man was Alec Watson, a fresh-faced, gingery Scot only eighteen months out of medical school, who added his two-pennyworth to the conversation.

‘They say that an alternative cap badge for REME should be a crown surmounting a crossed screwdriver and a condom, with the motto “If you can’t fix it, f— it!”’

Major Morris grinned, but then wagged a finger at the lad.

‘That’ll cost you a dollar in the box, laddie. You know the rules.’

Their Commanding Officer had instituted a strict no-swearing regime in the Mess, the penalty being putting a Straits dollar in the swear-box for the Red Cross. There was even a faded list of words pinned on the anteroom wall, listing the proscribed oaths. There was also a ‘no-treating’ rule, which meant that though a member could invite another to have a drink, each had to sign a chit to go on their own mess bill.

Alec Watson grinned ruefully and promised to fork out later. He was a mere GDMO – a General Duties Medical Officer – which meant that he was too junior to have a speciality and was a medical dogsbody in the hospital. He ran the Casualty Station during the day, as well as the Families Clinic, though there were relatively few of those, apart from the dependants of the Malay-enlisted Other Ranks and some Gurkhas.

They ploughed through the soup course, which came straight out of Campbell’s tins, then a tough piece of local chicken that the sardonic Percy claimed must have died of senility. The best part was the dessert, which was a fruit salad of fresh mango, papaya and pineapple, the first two being a totally new experience for Tom Howden.

After the meal, they went through the door at the other end into the anteroom, which like the dining room, was across the width of the long narrow hut, louvred doors running down each side. Most of these were open, letting in the heavy scent of the tropical night, along with the incessant twitter of the cicadas and monotonous burp of a bullfrog lurking in a nearby monsoon drain.

Number One glided in with a tray of coffee which he put on one of the low tables within the rectangle of easy chairs that filled the centre of the room. Another table at one side carried outdated magazines, the Lancet, British Medical Journal and a few copies of the airmail edition of the Daily Telegraph, as well as the Straits Times. Apart from a faded picture of the Queen on one wall, a clock and a shelf of books abandoned by former residents on the other, the room was bare. All the furniture was uniform Barrack Store issue, plain no-nonsense wood with anaemic fabric on the foam cushions.

There was a sleepy silence while they all sipped their coffee, which was blatantly Nescafé with a dash of Carnation tinned milk. When they had finished, Number One came to collect the tray and take orders for drinks. They all ordered a beer, except for Alec Watson who regretfully shook his head.

‘Sorry, I’m OMO tonight, Number One.’