But there was very little a toban could do in the face of such systematic neglect. We had no toothbrushes, for example; my teeth were ruined by the middle of 1944. We were allowed no shaving kit either. A month or so after we arrived we were taken for a haircut. A Japanese barber set up outside a cell on the ground floor and every prisoner in turn was ordered to sit in front of him. He grasped my neck in his left hand and took up a large set of clippers in his right, and started snipping the hair on the nape of my neck, working the clippers around and up and across my head in a single movement, down my sideburns to my beard which showered its wirier hair on to the softer filaments of my head, never lifting the clippers once. I could feel the cold metal bumping on my exposed skull, which felt as fragile as an egg. It was like being shorn by a skilful, rough sheep-farmer. That shave was the only regular hygienic attention we received.
In return we were expected to do irregular work. There was no pattern to it, because I think that they wanted us to spend as much time as possible in blank isolation. The work could involve floor-washing, gardening, carrying firewood to the cookhouse or – the task we dreaded most – cleaning the Japanese toilets. The condition of those rows of holes was appalling. There is something unbearably sickening about cleaning other men’s ordure.
Or else they would ask us to shift 100 kg sacks of rice, which was crippling work for men in our condition. But the most bizarre task was one that allowed a group of us to stay together for a while in the sunshine out in the yard. The guards produced a great heap of rusty and extremely dirty army equipment which we suspected had either been stored in the open or had been salvaged from a ship. There were mess-tins, and buckets and containers of all kinds, caked in rust and dirt. Our job was to clean all these and restore them to pristine beauty. The trouble was that the only tools we were given were large rusty nails, bits of wire and handfuls of earth. With these primitive resources the Japanese expected sparkling results.
A dozen prisoners were gathered in the open, sitting on concrete under a lean-to attap roof that deflected the fierce heat a little. We sat cross-legged, hunched over the filthy utensils. If somebody looked sideways instead of down, a guard would lean over and punch him in the face.
Even under these circumstances we managed, with care, to talk. I had always been close to Mackay, and we sat beside each other while we scraped junk metal with wire in the hope that gleams of steel would start to appear beneath the grime. For much of the time we worked naked, partly to try to get fresh air around our unwashed and itching bodies and partly because we had very little to wear anyway. One day I noticed that Mac, who had been a well-built man, had become so thin that his anus stuck out like a short pipe.
I then discovered that I could close my hand around my own upper arm and that my stomach was very close to my spine; there seemed to be no solid body on me anywhere. My ribs were sticking out. I asked Mac how I looked, and he said that I looked like a skeleton with skin stretched over it. I had become one of the living dead who had so frightened me when I first came to Outram Road. I knew then that I was close to death, and that I had to get out of Outram Road at all costs.
It wasn’t only the decline in my physical condition that led me, eventually, to take the risk of making myself deliberately worse so that they would have to move me. The balance of probabilities seemed just to be in favour of the assumption that they were not quietly murdering the sick prisoners, and I convinced myself that the percentage prospect of survival if I stayed was virtually nil; but this rationalism was beside the point: beyond reason or calculation, I wanted out of this place.
Certain events weakened me, but toughened my resolve. Early on, on Christmas Day 1943, I was given a fish head with my evening rice. I ate the head, but I could not manage to eat the eyes. They lay on my plate, little tough jellies staring up at me. I longed then for the winter feast of northern Europe, for my family and for my mother in particular, and the contrast between my memories of them and this tropical black hole was acutely depressing.
I found a definition for ‘hunger’ when I was sent on a rare errand without a guard to take an empty pan to the cookhouse, and as I was walking through the main hall I saw a single grain of rice on a cell doorstep. I went over and picked it up and ate it.
Then there was the itch. We were used to diseases of the skin, which were rampant in the camps because of the lack of soap, but this was an itch the like of which neither Fred nor I had encountered before. The slightest touch on one’s skin produced an urge to scratch savagely. To succumb to this temptation was disastrous, and made the itch worse than ever, so we sat motionless with our skins on fire.
The itch developed into a horrible skin condition, perhaps an extreme form of scabies. Each of us in turn found little pimples appearing on our skin. To begin with they were clear and transparent; then the clear liquid turned into yellow pus, the pimples burst, erupted and the fluid dried into horrible yellow scabs. Picking them off meant losing a patch of skin. I myself lost every inch of skin on my body with the curious exception of the skin on my face and the tips of my fingers and toes. Worse still, as fast as one picked off the scabs new eruptions appeared. Those men who were too ill and weak to move and were unable to do anything for themselves gradually became encased in a brownish-yellow crust of pus, a spectacle that still wakes me at night, the nausea still fresh.
O’Malley and one or two others voluntarily took on the task of cleaning up the most helpless men by patiently picking off the encrusted scabs and washing their bodies in cold water. What they did deserves the adjective ‘heroic’ as much as bravery under fire.
Partly as a result of their efforts, the Japanese began to take note of the disease. A liquid which they described as ‘creosote’ was brought into the block in large containers, and they produced a few metal tubs. Those of us who were badly infected were allowed to have what was almost a bath, our first in several months, though still without soap, in the yard outside the block. I sat in a tub for hours. It did not noticeably improve my skin, but the feel of the water lapping around me was worth the pretence.
When the ‘creosote’ did not work, the Japanese administration gave us a paste or ointment which looked suspiciously like saddle-soap. We were told to strip and to coat every inch of our bodies with the ointment, telling ourselves that at least it might suffocate the tiny maggots or whatever it was that was causing the trouble. Perhaps it did; or perhaps the epidemic had run its course, for the disease slackened off soon afterwards.
By the end of April 1944 my three British fellow-officers, Bill Smith, Jim Slater and Morton Mackay were all seriously ill, and Harry Knight, the Australian major, looked no better. When I caught glimpses of them I was terrified for all of us. Only Fred Smith seemed to retain some strength despite the starvation diet. The guards sent a stretcher party one day and removed three of the others, but left Fred, Harry and me. The fact that we could totter across a yard must have excluded us. I was now the only officer left in the entire block, apart from Knight.
The old anxiety and fear surged back with renewed force. Although we had a sentence, we could not imagine this term of imprisonment coming to an end. The uncertainty was gross and desperately stressful. We didn’t think we could survive years of this, and even if we did there was no guarantee of being ‘released’ into anything but a larger and perhaps relatively more humane prison camp. We were prisoners within a world that was itself a prison. That larger sentence of servitude was completely indeterminate, for who could say when the war would end? And if the Japanese won it, what would they do to us?
I found this uncertainty particularly difficult. I was afflicted with the strange combination of a vivid imagination and a need to locate myself exactly, to be sure of where I was and where I was going – I had the character of a mapmaker, a listmaker, of one who knew about dates and classes and varieties. Being thrown into the pit and not knowing whether I could ever find a ladder to climb out of it did me no good at all. Without reading, writing or bearings of a
ny kind I felt that I was living through the end of whatever time had been given to me; the delirium of the last days was closing in.
We could not measure time, let alone occupy it. Our time was now entirely theirs. We could identify Sundays because the guards took time off on Sundays, and O’Malley or Penrod Dean could sometimes identify the hour or date for us, but that was never enough. When the evening came, there were twelve hours of utter emptiness to get through. Outside it was dark; inside, the electric light was on continuously. During those long nights I sharpened my desperation to get out, even though it felt like jumping from a window in the dark, not knowing where I might land. And in the end, I used time itself against them.
* * *
They gave me my chance when they took the unprecedented step of separately identifying extremely sick men and classifying them as ‘byoki’ They were then placed in a group of cells on the ground floor furthest from the door of the block.
I had discovered that I could drive up my pulse rate by deep and accelerated breathing, so producing a state that frightened my cellmate and even me; and that there was one exception to our complete lack of any means of measuring time. In very still and very quiet conditions the faint chimes of a clock somewhere in the distance could be heard, though it was a long time before I was aware of it. I imagined it as a public clock on some tower, for it struck the quarters as well as the hours.
I disciplined myself to count the little beats of blood in my wrist for fifteen minutes at a stretch. It was not that hard, really; what else did I have to do? Forcing myself to concentrate on nothing but my pulse – the effort alone probably put me into a kind of agitated trance, and I was already near hallucinating from starvation and weakness. They had taken all sense of normal, filled time away from me and I focused my panic in on myself in a fever of self-control.
I would count carefully all the time I was doing this and divide the resulting figure by fifteen, giving the pulse rate per minute. The normal rate is about 76; I got mine up to a figure which was so high that I could not count properly and I was confident that I could repeat this whenever I wanted to do so.
One day, when I was lying down and there was a warder within earshot, I worked my pulse up, cried out and twisted and clutched myself. My performance had an effect: the warder took a look at me and had me carried down to one of the ‘sick’ cells. And so I lost sight of Fred Smith, who seemed resigned to survival in Outram Road and whose extraordinary resilience could not be disguised long enough even to pretend weakness. He had supported me to the hilt and told me I was doing the right thing, but I hated leaving him alone in that horrible bare cell.
In the sick cells the doors were left open during the day, which was a slight improvement, and you did not have to take part in work squads. I was joined in the cell by an Australian called Stan Davis, who was not officially sick – he was supposed to look after me, and save the therapeutic energies of the medical orderly. Stan probably knew as much about medicine as that individual, in any case, and when we were able to talk we plotted the best way for both of us to get beyond the sick cell to the hospital at Changi – if indeed it was not a dangerous mirage. Stan was another radio man, even luckier than we had been. A private soldier in a motor-transport company, he had been part of a group operating a radio in the POW camp in Sandakan, in British North Borneo, and planning an escape. This group really had been in subversive communication with local civilians. The Japanese shot his officer, Captain L.C. Matthews of the Australian Army Signals.
Stan and I agreed that I would eat all the food which came into the cell other than rice and that Stan would eat all the rice, and nothing but rice, and we swore that we would stick to our diet until the end, whatever it might be. My resolution was not as suicidal as it may sound because by May 1944 the food had improved slightly, and the rice now came with a few soya beans or fragments of fish, but I very quickly became even thinner while Stan got more and more bloated, and looked as though he had real wet beri-beri.
We each made exaggerated shows of trying to move about, taking care to fall over or otherwise to collapse whenever we left the cell, and so after a while we were spending twenty-four hours in the cell with nothing but determination to drive us on. We had nothing to distract us from our self-destructive will to live, and only the faint chiming of that mysterious clock to mark the passing of time.
Stan and I exchanged anecdotes of the campaigns in Malaya and life in Borneo, the fall of Singapore and the early days of captivity. He had been brought up a Catholic in Western Australia and entertained me with stories of the fierce angry discipline handed out by the Christian Brothers, a religious order that specializes in teaching poor children; and he spoke about distances I could barely imagine, deserts taking weeks to cross and farms measured in square miles. I tried to find a way of explaining lowland Scotland to this hard man of the outdoors, for whom life in these cells must have been terribly constricting; we compromised by reciting poems like James Henry Leigh Hunt’s Abou Ben Adhem, which seemed to declaim something beautiful and defiant to us:
‘What writest thou?’ – The vision raised its head,
And with a look made of all sweet accord,
Answered, ‘The names of those who love the Lord.’
‘And is mine one?’ said Abou. ‘Nay, not so,’
Replied the angel. Abou spoke more low,
But cheerly still; and said, ‘I pray thee then,
Write me as one that loves his fellow-men.’
I tried to sleep as much as possible, but it was difficult to find a comfortable position. When the body is so thin that your prominent bones stick out like handles there is no ease to be had on three wooden planks, and my hips were still in poor shape. I would drift into a kind of coma, full of dreams and hallucinations and waking impressions that were clear and completely unreal. As at Kanburi after the beatings, my mind was churning and spewing disconnected fragments of learning and memory; bits of rage at our treatment at Kanburi came up, the cages, the beatings, the repetitious stupid refrain of ‘Lomax you will tell us’ and the little interrogator with his thuggish friend. I felt I had been dead, I had been sentenced to death, ‘Lomax, you will be killed shortly’, I was suspended between life and death in my delirium. Often it was a brain fever spinning out automatic rhymes and strange biblical nursery verses. One of these at least I wrote down later:
At the beginning of time the clock struck one
Then dropped the dew and the clock struck two
From the dew grew a tree and the clock struck three
The tree made a door and the clock struck four
Man came alive and the clock struck five
Count not, waste not the years on the clock
Behold I stand at the door and knock.
There were non-stop, intensely tactile visions, so real that I could smell and see the places they presented to me: a procession of ocean-going ships slipping down the Clyde past Greenock; the unbelievably delicate evening light of the West Highlands; a summer lake in Kashmir, with vast snow mountains above it. My mind wandered back along the roads I had cycled in my search for steam engines, but it was a jagged, confused and chaotic reprise of those long journeys. I walked with S.’s hand in mine on an Edinburgh street past dark high buildings with glimpses of steps plunging down into old courtyards.
I had one vivid and frequent dream with a scene that seemed utterly perfect and unattainable, a vision of impossible beauty. It was the image of an old English garden in summer, near a cathedral, with banks of honeysuckle and roses under oak and willow trees, the cathedral spire rising above them. It seemed so entirely real, and at the same time a romantic painting of such a scene, as though I was looking at it from the side so that the smooth lawn swept away from me in a great green triangle. There was an old brown-red brick cottage hidden in the trees; it felt like order and wealth and safety.
The visions became more frightening and grotesque. One evening, the long wall of the cell began to dissolve. The c
racked cement and the brickwork melted away. Far away was an immense figure, standing erect with many waving arms, emerging from a heaving sea of flame and smoke, and growing larger, until it seemed to fill the entire view. It seemed to be standing above a lake, and the surface changed into distinct waves, and then into human figures tiny against the mass of the giant. They seemed to be worshipping, chanting, praising, calling out ‘Kali, Kali, Kali’. I felt sheer terror as the figure’s eyes looked down directly at me, the terror mounting like choking until I woke up to find myself looking at the bare light bulb and the cell walls.
* * *
After two months of dogged persistence in our dreadful routine, and by then we were both in a bad way, I made another attempt to frighten the warders by working myself into a crisis, my pulse racing and my body shaking – and this time the symptoms hardly needed to be simulated. It’s not too difficult to feign imminent death when you already look like a corpse. Stan called a warder, who looked at me, and then called someone else. He may not have wanted a death on his watch without checking with a superior.
Usually, they shut the cell door at night, but that night they left it open and a warder looked in several times to check on me. I acted up enthusiastically whenever I heard him coming. The following morning there were sounds of an unusually large group walking towards our cell. It turned out to be a stretcher party. I was bundled on to the stretcher, calling out for Stan to be taken too, but they stumbled out of the cell without him. Once again I was leaving a friend.