Salisbury

Vic, our hearty seventy-two year old and thoroughly British driver from Salisbury, turned out to have been stationed at Nee Soon Camp.

"1954," he boomed, with the volume of someone slightly hard of hearing. "I was there for two years before we were shipped off to Hong Kong. We fought the communists."

He glanced up from the road and gave us a roguish wink. "There were really good cabarets at Bugis."

It was three in the afternoon - we had touched down at Heathrow before dawn and had spent the morning pottering around the Stonehenge and Roman Baths - and now we were cruising through Salisbury in his taxi.

Vic was palpably eager to introduce his birthplace to us, though that enthusiasm was paralleled by his excitement at this accidental link to his past. And so, as we wound through the countryside, he alternated between introducing the sights and quizzing us on Singapore.

"Nasi goreng," he said, "I love nasi goreng. Can't get anything like that around here. By the way, there's a crop circle on that hill in front of us. Some folks think it's the aliens, but I think it's the damn hippies who come at midnight and ruin the crops."

At the next bend, he pointed out a white chalk horse dug into the hillside. 

"They say it was a mad doctor who ordered the villagers to make one in the eighteenth century. He stood on top of the hill and shouted down a megaphone at all the villagers until it was completed. Sounds like any other boss, personally," he chuckled mischievously. "You know what I mean!"

Eventually, we rounded up the day tour at the Salisbury Cathedral, which was just down the road from his house. There, he bade goodbye to us, though not before he shared one last anecdote on how the "Nee Soon Camp commander got us to stuff straw between sheets of canvas for mattresses." What a character!