They laughed together at the memory. It had happened when the new CO, a stiff-backed colonel with a Pommy accent and a bristling white moustache, arrived for the first inspection of his men mounted on a prancing black horse. He dismounted and handed the reins to a sergeant, who passed them on to Tellemalie who was loafing nearby.
‘Why give it to me, sarge?’ Tellemalie complained. ‘I don’t know nothing about horses.’ He held up the reins. ‘I don’t even know what this is called.’
The sergeant shook his head at such ignorance. ‘They’re the reins. And you don’t have to know anything about horses to hold on to them. So start holding.’
‘If I’m standing here holding on to these reins things and someone asks me something about the horse, I should be able to answer them, shouldn’t I, sarge? How about giving me a few pointers?’ He proceeded to ask what the various parts of the horse were. The sergeant patiently told him.
Tellemalie kept a straight face as he listened. He’d roped, saddled, broken and ridden more horses, including wild brumbies, than the sergeant had ever seen.
When he’d run out of parts to explain, the sergeant said, ‘Do you understand about horses now?’
‘I think so, sarge. Do they bite?’
‘If this one bites, son, you’re so raw it’ll spit you out’, the sergeant said, leaving Tellemalie grinning to himself.
As soon as the sergeant was out of sight, Tellemalie whipped the saddle off the colonel’s horse and reversed it. An army saddle the wrong way round isn’t easy to detect because the pommel and rear part of army saddles are about the same height. It becomes obvious only when the rider mounts and finds that the stirrups are at the horse’s flanks instead of behind the front legs.
By the time the colonel returned to his horse, the sergeant was holding it again. He’d taken the reins from Tellemalie and told him to clear off. If anyone was going to get in the CO’s good books for looking after his horse, it was going to be him.
The colonel mounted the horse and for a few seconds he just sat there, legs stretched out behind him like a motorbike rider. When he realised what was wrong, he roared at the sergeant, ‘Are you trying to make me look like a fool? I’ll have your stripes and you’ll be peeling potatoes in the cookhouse!’
‘Wasn’t me, sir’, the sergeant replied. ‘It would have to be the private I had holding your horse. I took the reins off him when I saw you coming.’
‘Who is this man? I’ll make him wish he’d never joined the army.’
The sergeant was keen on self-preservation, but reluctant to dob in one of his men. He’d take care of Tellemalie later. ‘He’s new here, sir. One of a new batch of recruits. I wouldn’t recognise him again.’
‘I’ll find out who he is’, the colonel fumed. ‘Everybody on parade. Immediately!’
When the troops were assembled before him, the colonel slapped his swagger stick against his thigh with menace. He could barely speak for anger. ‘The private who switched the saddle on my horse will step forward.’
Nobody moved, least of all Tellemalie.
‘I order you again. Step forward the guilty man.’
Again, there was no response.
‘Then I regard every one of you as guilty!’ the colonel shouted. ‘You are all confined to barracks for a fortnight on extra duties.’
He turned and strode off the parade ground to his horse. With the saddle now placed the right way round, he was able to canter away sedately.
As they laughed about it now in Changi, Jim said, ‘You were bloody lucky to get away with that one, Tellemalie.’
‘I didn’t exactly get away with it. The blokes gave me merry hell when they were confined to barracks, and the sarge gave me all the shit jobs around the place.’
‘You seemed to be doing all right when you joined the unit’s brass band.’
Tellemalie grinned. ‘I’d almost forgotten about that.’
‘How did you come to be in the band? Nobody knew you were musical.’
‘I’m about as musical as an armless fiddler. I picked the band as a soft lurk when I saw them practising in the shade while everyone else was marching around in the hot sun.’
When he’d applied to join the band the interviewing officer had asked about his musical qualifications. ‘He nearly had a fit when I told him I played the mouth organ, but I had him near tears when he heard about me deprived childhood and parents so poor they couldn’t pay for me to have cornet lessons. All they could afford was a mouth organ.’
‘And he let you join the brass band as a mouth organist?’
‘Don’t be bloody silly. Whoever heard of a mouth organ in a brass band. The officer sympathised with me about my deprived childhood. He found a cornet for me, told me to practise on it, and said I’d be in the band when I was good enough.’
Jim nodded. ‘I remember you sitting in the shade with your cornet while we poor bloody footsloggers drilled and sweated.’
‘Yeah, the band was a pretty easy touch.’
‘So you finally learnt the cornet and made it into the band?’
‘Nah. Never could get a note out of the bastard of a thing.’
Jim shook his head in admiration at the cheek of the man. ‘Did they boot you out when they found out you couldn’t play?’
‘I gave it away. Turned in my cornet. If I’d stayed any longer they’d have wanted to make me bandmaster or something, so I applied for a job in the army stores.’
‘The army stores?’ Jim laughed. ‘They used to say you should have been called Hydraulic Jack because you’d lift anything. Don’t tell me you were able to talk your way into working where they keep all the expensive gear?’
Tellemalie shook his head sadly. ‘I was rejected. Can’t understand it, after I told them about my experience with stores.’
‘You’d been a storeman?’
‘Store bullocks. I’d rounded up plenty of stores in the outback.’
Bodero grinned. ‘With all that experience, they didn’t want you in their stores?’
‘Shit, mate’, Tellemalie said as he departed, ‘the army’s stupid, but not that stupid.’
Days later, when Jim ran into him in the compound, Tellemalie’s tattered tunic no longer had the Mobile Laundry patch on the sleeve. Now it carried the colours of the 2/29 Battalion.
Jim pointed to the colour patch. ‘Another regimental change?’
‘Matter of self-preservation. I’ve been checking on which mob in this place is eating the best. Nobody’s doing too well, but the 2/29 seems to be doing better than most, so I’ve put myself on battalion strength.’
‘You can’t just walk in like that, Tellemalie. They’re going to wake up.’
‘They wouldn’t wake up if the roof fell in on them. In each company, there’s a few blokes who know each other. The rest wouldn’t know if bloody Hirohito was among them.’
That was the last Jim saw of Tellemalie in Changi. It was to be in another prisoner-of-war camp much later in the war that they were to meet again.
The Japanese knew prisoners were getting out of Changi at night and smuggling in food. Fred Ennett, a corporal from Mount Isa, was caught outside the wire. They beat him unmercifully, but Fred still smiled. It was a habitual smile-he didn’t know he was doing it. When they couldn’t wipe it off his face, the guards grew angrier and beat him harder, but the smile remained. Maddened, they took to him with clubs and fists, and then kicked him down a steep flight of concrete stairs. Fred died of his injuries.
Changi had many Sikh guards who had defected to the Japanese after the fall of Singapore. The Sikhs caught two prisoners climbing trees outside the wire in search of coconuts and handed them over to the Japanese. The two men were badly beaten.
However, the coconuts were nutritious, and it took more than a beating to discourage Jimmy Harris, a big cane farmer from Mackay. He was up a coconut palm one dark night when a Sikh guard came along and paused for a rest underneath him, his back against the trunk.