Thursday, May 08, 2014

Leslie Thomas obituary

Outgoing author best known for The Virgin Soldiers, a comic novel about national service

Leslie Thomas in his garden in Salisbury, Wiltshire.
Leslie Thomas in his garden in Salisbury, Wiltshire. Photograph: Chris Barham/Daily Mail/Rex

Only a few good writers are also good talkers. The novelist and journalist Leslie Thomas, who has died aged 83, was one of them: he could extract on the printed page, on radio and television or in a face-to-face interview good-natured humour from almost anything that life threw at him – including his own bleak orphaned childhood in a Barnardo's home or his national service in Malaya at a time when terrorists attempted to murder as many British troops as possible.

It was his "peacetime" national service – whose humorous possibilities he saw ahead of anyone else – that gave him the idea and material for the novel that made his name and a fortune, The Virgin Soldiers, which was published in 1966 and filmed in 1969 with John Dexter directing. It showed a group of raw young conscripts desperate to get laid while all around them enemies lurked. Thomas had been in that position himself and the bar-girl character Juicy Lucy was based on a Malayan girl who had provided his sexual initiation. She also lost him his lance-corporal's stripe when she threw his trousers out of a window.
The timing of the release of the novel in the swinging 60s was perfect, and so was its attitude. It was bawdy, but drew vivid pictures of the bar girls relentlessly in pursuit of money and adept at changing names to whatever film star was popular that week; the conscripts wetting themselves in moments of crisis and discharging their guns in the wrong direction; the often rather limited NCOs doing their best with raw recruits. Its irreverence about military life exactly suited the needs of the era.
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