Hi Everyone. Judy, My Sister and I Were at Slim 1953 to 56

Hi everyone. Judy, my sister and I were at Slim 1953 to 56.

My wife and I went out to see our daughter, Lucinda, at Songkhla

University in southern Thailand at end Aug/early September (that’s

the only time she could spend some quality time with us). When we

had had enough of the beech and swimming pool thing, Jo and I hired

a car and drove across the border and down the state highway to the

Cameron Highlands, staying for the first night in one of those new

(and grotty) hotels in Tanarata. We went into town and I had the

first 'proper' bee hoon soup for years - what memories!

We then moved on and stayed at The Smokehouse, on the edge of the

Cameron Highlands Golf Course - a suite of three rooms with

excellent service - and all those oak beams! Madam Lee (seriously)

the sister of the owner was staying in a cottage next to the hotel

and she and her manager arranged a wonderful surprise for us. You

guessed it, a visit to Slim Kem. A driver duly arrived and took us

to our old alma mater where an impossibly young army Lieutenant

greeted us and showed us round the old classrooms and the new

central block in which, if you remember, Major Benn had his

offices. In the mess hall of this Malaysian army camp there is a

framed photograph with a view taken looking down on Slim from the

nearby hills. It was of my era. Immediately underneath it, in the

same frame, was a recent picture taken from the same spot. I took

a picture of the photo but unfortunately the flash reflected off

the glass and so it is not as good as it might be. After an hour of

reminiscing, which included recalling the time that a black

leopard was supposedly sighted on the playing fields, and the

jungle game explaining to the lieutenant how we went into the

jungle for a complete day. He shook his head in disbelief, as if to

say "mad British". Then the Camp Commandant arrived. A gregarious

Malaysian h excellent English who, as he stood alongside me to have

our photo taken, commented that his head only came up to my chest -

and I'm not quite 6'2"! He was totally absorbed when I told him the

time all those years ago when the big field guns appeared on a

plateau firing shells over the school, 20 miles, day after day, into

the jungle beyond where several hundred terrorists were believed to

be. I told him of our long trips up and down 'The Hill', at the end

and beginning of each term, in the armed convoys with us stuck in

those awful 'coffins', and how I always managed to have someone who

suffered from travel sickness and vomited through the one of the

slits in the side of the APC, euphemistically called a widow! He

laughed and laughed and told us how welcome we were. What a lovely

man. A further half an hour, and 40 pictures later, we left, my

head full of half-remembered memories. For days that song we used

to sing in the evenings in the three tonners, on the journey up to

Hopetoun, kept coming into my head...... "There is a prison camp,

far far away. Where we get codeines ten times a day. Bread and

butter we don't see, we get sawdust in our tea, that is why we

gradually, fad, fade away". Any of you guys remember it? Next I

took Jo on the Jungle Walk which had always been my favourite. You

know the one - along the track to the waterfall. I recounted the

time we came across the little men of the jungle, the Sakai(?),

blowing darts at birds in the tree canopy. They've now been settled

nearby, into a permanent village, which Madam Lee insisted on

showing us, and had a name change. What a shame! And not a

blowpipe in sight! On the way to the waterfall we digressed and

took a steep path to the top of the hill and climbed the Watch

Tower. From there we could see the extent of modern development,

the new hotels in garish colours poking their heads above the trees,

totally out of keeping with our Cameron Highlands. But we Slim

Schoolers knew it when it was exciting!

Jeremy Kitchin

www,grange-cottage.co.uk