The story and writing are similarly stripped down which means this is not a work of gorgeous adventure or prose. It is another beautiful story of virgin soldiers and their life and death stories in Malaya. It is a privileged glimpse into the lives of young men under a lot of pressure and stress. Some of these he recounted in works such as “The Virgin Soldiers” and also in “In My Wildest Dreams” his 1984 autobiography. In fact, Thomas has said that he got the inspiration for “The Virgin Soldiers” from some sex vow made by some conscript.

Eventually, he got a job at the “Evening News,” which is where he penned his debut work “My Name is Mud,” which was unfortunately never published. Singer Not the Song, The (1961) The Singer Not The Song is set during the 1950s in a small isolated Mexican village. Local Roman Catholic priest Father… Thomas married his second wife, Diana Miles, in 1970. She survives him, as do their son, and the daughter and two sons from his first marriage, in 1956, to Maureen Crane, which ended in divorce.

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Excellent performances from the supporting cast: George Layton, Nigel Davenport, John Le Mesurier, Edward Woodward (whose character Sgt Wellbeloved is not all what he makes out to be) and Warren Mitchell as Morris Morris (with a very funny Welsh accent). Soon after that, his mother died of cancer, and Leslie and his siblings were sent to various foster homes. To avoid getting beaten up by the many big boys at the foster home where he lived, Leslie became a storyteller. Thomas attended Kingston Technical School and he then took a course in journalism at South-West Essex Technical College in Walthamstow. [3] In 1949 he was called up for National Service and embarked on a two-year tour of duty in Singapore with the Royal Army Pay Corps. While there he was briefly involved with the military action against communist rebels in the Malayan emergency. He also began to write short articles for publication in English newspapers.

This section needs additional citations for verification. Please help improve this article by adding citations to reliable sourcesin this section. Unsourced material may be challenged and removed. That Thomas was able to divine the funny side of almost any situation made for his survival personally and as a writer. His father was a "wandering Welsh sailor" whose home was in Newport, Gwent – a stoker in merchant ships who became domestically violent aftger getting drunk, which was often. When he was on the dole, his wife went with him to collect his money so that he could not spend it on drink before he reached home. When he once came home excessively drunk even by his standards, his wife threw a chamber pot at him. He didn't show himself again for two years: the pot was full. Thomas writes some lovely prose with apt and unique descriptions of landscapes with sympathetic and three-dimensional characters. Writer Leslie Thomas revisits his Malayan war memoirs but this time the result is more akin to “Confessions of a National Serviceman”.

So Young, So Bad (1950) Idealistic and naive psychiatrist Dr John Jason (Paul Henreid) arrives at the Elmview Reform School for Troubled Girls and immediately begins… The Welsh-born writer died at his home on Tuesday surrounded by his family after battling a lengthy illness. The British soldiers living on the base all have to suffer from the all-pervasive and intense heat. Clothing soon becomes an unnecessary burden for the men in uniform and they are soon discarded. Later on, he worked for the “Exchange Telegraph,” even as he submitted short stories to several publications.

Nonetheless, all he ever wanted was to be called up which eventually happened as he ended up in the Royal Army Pay Corps. Starting in 1950, he lived in Singapore for 18 months, where he gathered all manner of hilarious stories and experiences. This is where Leslie Thomas met Charles Mitchell the author who encouraged him to study journalism at the Walthamstow-based South West Essex Technical College. In 2007, he wrote his last novel in “Soldiers and Lovers,” which explored the romance of characters living at the tail end of World War II. While he was studying at Barnado’s in Kingston, he went on an exchange program to Kingston Technical school. He was a naturally opportunistic Fleet Street journalist, capitalising on everything including his own misfortunes. When a spy cut his wrists to avoid capture and was taken to a London hospital, Thomas was already there as a patient and was therefore the only journalist who could report on his condition. But his independent writing was proceeding apace. He was commissioned by the BBC to write A Piece of Ribbon, an army detective story set in Malaya. He did talks on Woman's Hour. His first published book, This Time Next Week (1964), about his life at Barnardo's, remained continuously in print long after some of his later novels had slipped out of sight.Thomas got married to Diana Miles in the early 1970s and the two lived together until his death in May 2014.