The Railway Man

  We reached Singapore railway station on 30th November, in the afternoon, and were picked up by an unusually strong force of guards. We still did not know where we were going. Once the truck was on the move, however, Bill Smith, who had spent years in and around the island and knew the city well, said quietly that he thought we were heading for Outram Road Gaol.

  We pulled up outside high, grey gates set in massive, mock-gothic walls and waited. It looked from the outside as British and as Victorian a prison as any in London or a provincial English town, a reassuring and solid symbol of legality and justice. The huge doors swung open from the inside, the truck drove in and the doors boomed shut. Little did we realize that we had left all justice behind.

  CHAPTER EIGHT

  THE SIX OF us were led into a reception area where there was an obviously well-practised routine. We were told to strip, and stripped totally of all our miserable things, clothes, books and pictures. All I was allowed to keep was my long spoon and my pair of spectacles, which had survived everything, though hardly intact; they were held together with surgical tape and gentle handling. I always treated them as though my life depended on it – which it did, in some ways, for semi-blindness added to what I had gone through would surely have been the last straw. At least I could trust the witness of my eyes, at a time when what I heard was often humanly incredible.

  I was still wearing my splints, but a warder inspected my hair, which was now long and tangled, along with all the others’, and our ears. I never found out what strange information he was expecting to find in men’s ears, though presumably he was checking for hacksaw blades in our anal passages when he poked around in there.

  We were each given an extremely small pair of shorts, a shirt, a cap and a so-called towel, which was not much bigger than the shorts. Each of these items had been worn out, patched and worn out again, as though a whole company of men had slept in them. We felt ragged enough when we walked into that prison, but these clothes made us look like castaways. They took away our shoes; of washing materials and toothbrushes we had none. I wondered whether our kit would truly be kept in store for when we were released in five or ten years’ time.

  Finally we were told that our names were abolished and that we were to have new identities. Mine was rokyaku ju-go, which sounded splendid but translated merely as No. 615. The former Prisoner No. 1 was slipping fast. They made us memorize and repeat our numbers over and over again until we got them right, and all of us managed except the hapless Bill Smith, who could never cope with even a single word of Japanese. The warders gave up on him.

  These gaolers appeared to be Japanese military prison service men, wearing white epaulettes to distinguish them from their regular colleagues outside. Others, including many of the warders, it would turn out, were ordinary Japanese soldiers convicted of disciplinary offences. Even to be a warder in Outram Road was a punishment.

  The initial ceremony of degradation over, we were marched outside. We headed in a line out of the reception area into a cell-block. I noticed a large letter ‘D’ at the entrance. As we came into that long gloomy hall, with iron stairs stretching before us and galleries up above us in what seemed like level upon level, I was aware of a total silence. Our bare feet and the guards’ boots were the only sounds in that high arcade. There were cell doors on each side, and another floor of cells above that, but I was too agitated to notice properly whether there was a third floor. The hall looked more or less as I imagined a British Victorian prison would look, on the inside, with cliff faces of cells opposing each other across empty space. The air in the hall was close, as though it were a morgue rather than a place that held living men.

  Fred Smith and I were put into Cell No. 52; the others into Nos. 53 and 54. The guards told us, with menaces, that talking was forbidden, even between men sharing a cell, and that attempts to communicate between cells would be punished severely. The door was then shut, and we looked around our new home. It was totally empty: a stark oblong space, about nine feet long, six feet across and with a very high ceiling. The walls were peeling, had once been thickly painted in white and were utterly blank. The door was solid and steel-clad, with a rectangular slot like an English post-box. There was a small window, very high up in the end wall, through which we could see the sky. It seemed to be a nice day outside.

  We were very, very tired. The anti-climax of the trial and our survival was still having its effect and we wanted to rest and to be left alone. I could not remember when I had last slept in a real bed, so I lay down on my side on the bare cement floor, and immediately went to sleep.

  Fred and I were woken by the door banging open; a guard handed in a set of three wooden planks and a strange wooden block and a blanket for each of us, followed by a wooden latrine bucket with a lid. We were puzzled by the wooden blocks, until we realized that these were our pillows. Our cell was now fully furnished.

  Later in the evening there was a rattling at the cell door; the slot was banged down and a bowl of rice, a small saucer of tea and a pair of chopsticks for each of us were handed in through the slot. Even on our first day, the complete absence of colour, of sound and variation were such that the arrival of this wretched meal was an event. We tried to make it last as long as possible, but eating a bowl of overcooked rice can only take so long.

  The first day ended like that, with barely enough food to keep us alive and nothing like enough to dull the appetite. I thought I already understood hunger, but this was a new level of craving. Fred and I spoke in whispers, trying to make sense of our deprivation, wondering whether they seriously intended to leave us in this condition for our entire sentences. We were waiting for sleep, expecting to be switched into darkness when the electric light bulb high above our heads was turned off; but it stayed on all night, and we fell asleep in the glare of our empty cell.

  * * *

  No-one had told us where we were; indeed had Bill Smith not identified the place as Outram Road we might have been left wondering where we were for a long time. All we knew was that Outram Road had been the main civil prison in Singapore until the new gaol at Changi was opened late in the 1930s. It was now clearly being run as a punitive military prison, an extreme version of what the British Army would call a ‘glasshouse’.

  We were kept in our cells almost all the time. The only interruption to this incarceration was that on most days, at different times, the cell doors were opened for a form of roll call. We were each required to call out our numbers, and we all managed this except Bill Smith. Sometimes someone else would call out his number for him; sometimes he would reply ‘Twinkle, twinkle, little star’, which the warders seemed to find acceptable.

  The main events apart from this were the delivery of the so-called meals three times a day. Each consisted of rice and tea, or at least a quantity of slightly discoloured hot water which looked like tea. This was our main fluid intake for the day, and thirst usually preceded it by many hours. The rice came in a large aluminium bowl, the tea in a small enamel dish. The other big moment was the handing out of the latrine bucket to a squad of prisoners supervised by guards, and the return of the bucket, emptied and washed, later in the morning.

  One morning, at last, Fred and I were taken out of the cell apparently for some purpose other than the roll call. When we reached the open yard at the end of D Block we realized that we were here for exercise, but what we saw was a glimpse of the underworld. In the yard were about twenty prisoners, most of them apparently unable to walk. Some lay flat out; some were crawling on their hands and knees. Several were totally naked. Almost all had one thing in common: they were living skeletons, with ribs and bones protruding from shrunken flesh. Since we had not seen ourselves in a mirror or looked objectively at each other for a long time, it was a terrible shock to realize that we must look like these damned creatures – or soon would. One man was blown up like a balloon, his face so inflated that his features were unrecognizable. This was what advanced beri-beri looked like, while others seemed to have the dis
ease in earlier or less severe forms, but still with dreadful body swelling. Their skins were raw, pustular and peeling; some men were covered in angry scabby patches. We thought these tragic figures must be British and Australian, but they were almost beyond recognition.

  Fred and I were told to join a small group of nearly naked prisoners, who were being exercised by a Japanese soldier. The exercises consisted only of standing still and waving our arms about, by number, in response to the instructions ‘ich, ni, san, shi, go, rok, shich, hach’, and periodically walking around in a circle. The six of us from Kanburi were in better shape than those POWs who had been any length of time in Outram Road, and we hardly felt robust. Very occasionally, when we were out in that yard, we were allowed to have a wash. There were taps in the walls of the yard; there were buckets, but it was forbidden to touch them without orders. So these filthy, scabrous men walked or crawled within a few feet of the water that could have cleaned and eased them even a little.

  Without my cellmate, a sight like this might have destroyed me. But Fred Smith was an absolute hero, and I have never forgotten him. I can still quote his army number from memory: 1071124. He was an incredibly fit, strong man, shorter than me but very sturdy, and he survived the cumulative mistreatments astonishingly well. He could never understand why, although he had been interrogated three times at Kanburi, he had not been tortured or beaten. So certain did it seem that he was going to get what Thew had been given that Lance had passed him his short puttees, and he had wrapped the strips of cloth around his body under his shirt to make a thin barrier against the pick-helves; but perhaps because some Japanese officer decided that a mere artilleryman could not be central to the conspiracy of signals and ordnance officers which they had imagined for us, Fred never had to test his cotton armour.

  Fred was a good and considerate companion. His father had been an engine driver – the irony was lost on me at the time – at Stewart’s Lane rail depot in south London. He had grown up around there, and just before being posted to Singapore had been assigned to the Coastal Battery at Pembroke Dock, in West Wales. Because he was an artilleryman, a regular soldier with experience of coastal guns, he had been sent to help man the mythic 15-inchers on the southern coast of Singapore Island. He would talk about his wife and son, and his worries about his wife’s neglect of his son, and I detected some bitter suspicion of his wife’s fidelity beneath the coded language men used in wartime about their loved ones.

  Fred was an uneducated working-class man, a ‘rough diamond’ in the language of the day, but in the situation we found ourselves in rank and class counted for nothing. Character, decency and loyalty counted for more than previous good fortune or the possession of a commission. Fred was simply a good man. (Only once, in all my time at Outram Road, did I ever pull rank. I told two characters to stop arguing with each other, afraid that they would draw down the Japanese guards and pay heavily for their irritation and boredom. They ignored me. It would take more than an officer to put a lid on the anger these men were forced to swallow every day.)

  We looked after each other as best we could, and watched each other’s physical deterioration carefully; but the only physical weakness that I can remember Fred ever revealing, despite the thin starvation rations and the filth, was a terrible boil on his back, below his shoulders and out of reach of his hands. It got so bad that I kept showing it to the guards, and it became a huge angry red swelling threatening to poison Fred’s blood. One day, without warning, a Japanese man came importantly into our cell clutching a naked razor-blade, the kind used for shaving. This was the medical orderly. He looked at Fred’s back with as much interest as he would have devoted to a cockroach and ordered him to lie flat on his stomach. With a swift gesture he cut an X into the abscess. Blood and pus spurted on to the wall and floor of the cell. Fred didn’t make a sound.

  The worst new enemy which we faced, even compared to the dirt and hunger, was perhaps the most formidable of all: silence. It was often absolute. There could be a sick, deadly hush throughout the entire prison, so quiet that you could hear the metallic twisting of a key in a lock echoing up the levels to the long roof. A warder’s boots would make a booming sound on the stone floor, and I would be afraid that the sound of a whisper would carry all the way along to him.

  For they were serious about their decree of silence. It seemed particularly sadistic to make us share a cell and forbid us to speak to each other and at the same time deprive us of books and distractions of any kind. There was precisely nothing to do in that room.

  Sometimes the slot would fall open when we were talking quietly and a voice would shout at us in Japanese to shut up; at other times the door would be thrown back and a guard rush in, his sheathed sword whipping down on our heads and shoulders like a hard rod, the shock worsened by fear that the blade of the sword was only a thickness of leather away from slicing us apart.

  By listening to the sound of the warder’s fading footsteps or hearing their voices we could tell when we were more or less safe for a few minutes, and talk in low tones. We worked out what the arrangements were for warders’ shifts and meal-breaks, and learned to tell where they were from the strength of the sound their feet made on the floor. Our hearing seemed to grow more acute in the silence. Before long, we were able to identify each warder by his footsteps. We seldom found out their names, instead identifying each by some nickname: Horseface, or Mary – a guard who we thought effeminate for his very quiet feet, who we hated. He was one of those who wore rubber-soled boots to deaden the sound of his coming.

  We were here because we had broken a taboo on listening to forbidden words, and their ban on talking had an obscene aptness about it, whether they were aware of it or not. We had survived two years in the camps only by endless talk; and our need to know what was happening around us was now greater than ever.

  When we were taken to work we were usually on different squads, in different areas, and so Fred and I could swap notes of the snatches of whispered conversation we had had, and talk about what we had seen. Everyone on these work-details was trying as hard as possible to talk to everyone else, and the regime of silence was undermined by these countless small dialogues.

  Our conversation was necessarily about our most immediate surroundings. Who has been moved into the cell down the corridor? What are people being made to work on now? Who are those new arrivals? Is Bill at death’s door? Why is a prisoner sitting bolt upright in a bath out in the yard at the end of the block?

  Piecing together information, very slowly, very gradually, was like rubbing at a dirty window with a tiny rag, making blurred peepholes that allowed us to catch glimpses of the world outside D Block, but also confirmed to us how bad our situation was, how dangerous it was to be in Outram Road at all. We did not know what the death rate was, but we knew that some people had got out and had never been seen again. Nobody knew where they went to, whether there was an even worse cell somewhere – underground in the dark, perhaps – or whether they were murdered. All we knew for certain was that we were living with risk day after day in this vast tomb.

  By the middle of December 1943 we had established that Outram Road consisted of parallel blocks, and that the military section occupied two of them, Blocks C and D; beyond a very high wall were the other blocks, which were being run by the Japanese Army as a prison for civilians, for what crimes we could not then imagine. As far as we could tell, there were about thirty prisoners in our block. The infallible indication that a cell was occupied was its inclusion in the list for a latrine-bucket visit in the morning. Everyone in the block seemed to have been convicted by Japanese court martials of ‘anti-Japanese offences’ ranging from escape attempts and sabotage to more spectacular crimes. The rumour was that one man was here for attempting to steal an aircraft and fly it towards Allied territory.

  We also discovered that in the past some men in our block had become so ill that they had died quietly in their cells, from a combination of disease, brutality and starvation. And stil
l the most tantalizing information was that occasionally prisoners who were on the point of death were sent away from the gaol altogether. The best rumour was that they were sent to Changi, to a special hospital there. The other rumours came to seem less important, remote probabilities compared to the certainty that nothing could be worse than where we were.

  * * *

  If it seems absurd to send prisoners to gaol, what our captors were in fact doing was consigning us to a lower circle of hell. This was a place in which the living were turned into ghosts, starved, diseased creatures wasted down to their skeletal outlines.

  But as always, whether on the railway or in the camps, there were people who were humane enough to take risks to help us. Some of the Japanese prison staff tried to do nothing to add to our squalor and unhappiness. I remember that the same Gunso who had guarded us before our trial in Bangkok ended up in Outram Road shortly after we arrived, and that he personally removed my splints when the bones of my arms seemed to be set, and took away my long spoon but only after I had assured him that I could manage without it. But some of his colleagues were bored, slovenly and brutal Japanese private soldiers. They were randomly abusive, and could beat us at will for minor or imagined infractions of the rules. There was a good deal of this casual violence.

  Among the warders, we were astonished to discover that there were two men who appeared to be English. Before long they identified themselves in whispers through our door-slot as Penrod Dean, an Australian Army officer and John O’Malley, a British signalman. They had been among the first POWs to be sent to Outram Road and had been nominated by the Japanese as tobans, or trusties. They collected food from the kitchens, making deliveries to the cells and collecting the empty dishes. So far as was practicable they looked after the interests of the prisoners, slipping us extra rations or insistently bringing illness to the attention of the indifferent guards, at least making it more difficult for them to ignore us. I saw O’Malley carry paralysed men into the sunshine of the exercise yard in a desperate attempt to keep them alive, cradling those frail creatures of skin and bone in his own emaciated arms.