I could have told him that discovering Steinbeck at the age of sixteen was one of those formative moments that helped me understand there really existed a life which couldn’t be explained by the beliefs that had been given to me. About reading the end of The Grapes of Wrath where Rose of Sharon suckles the dying man and feeling profoundly changed in ways I couldn’t even begin to explain. But instead I simply said, ‘I like him.’

‘For sure,’ he said, ‘but Fitzgerald’s my main man – all those blue lawns and green lights. Filling your head with dreams.’

‘“Boats against the current … ”’

‘“Borne back ceaselessly into the past … ”’

We both smiled, and suddenly we were members of the same club, naively costumed in our brightly coloured uniforms of a shared romantic readiness. And it was that smug unspoken belief that we were somehow intellectuals that inured us in part against some of the ridicule and indignities that we encountered in our menial roles.

‘Hemingway too, of course,’ he said. ‘He’d have turned up here following the action. Do you know what he said about writing?’ And when I told him I didn’t he straightened in a mock-heroic way and declaimed, ‘“There is nothing to writing. All you do is sit down at a typewriter and bleed.”’

Later in a pavement café, over a couple of Tiger Beers that tasted so bitter I resolved to avoid them at all costs in the future, he revealed a little self-consciously that he was doing his own bleeding and writing a novel about the war. But it was proving so difficult that sometimes he occasionally was driven to taking a notebook to the bar at the Continental Hotel where Graham Greene had supposedly worked on The Quiet American, as if in the hope that some psychic transference of inspiration might take place. Even though I hadn’t asked, he told me he couldn’t let me see it yet as it was in its early stages and he was still trying to get things shaped in his head. I never did get to see it and never knew whether it existed in any tangible way or was merely the product of his imaginative desire, but as we sat in the sultry, slowly ebbing heat of the night, where the city’s inexhaustible variety of life coursed around us, I was prepared to believe that all things were possible.

And he did go with me on my first trip to the PX Exchange – we went to one in the Cholon district for reasons I can’t remember. It was an Aladdin’s cave packed to the gills with everything under the sun. I’d never seen anything quite like it. And it wasn’t just basics like toiletries, but clothes, stereos, guitars, watches, refrigerators, cameras, all type of booze and every home comfort that might be physically and psychologically needed to survive in a foreign land. And, unless I’ve imagined it, they had machines for making popcorn and ice cream. While I bought an electric fan, Corley studied a display of engagement rings but didn’t buy anything other than a carton of Hershey Bars and some pants that looked like they belonged on a golf course.