The Railway Man

  I kept my eyes shut, but could tell that we made our way down the central hall, across the sunlit yard and into the administration offices, where I was dumped on the floor. My kit was loaded on top of me and the stretcher was lifted again, out into the open air. I could hardly believe it when I realized that I was being put into the back of a vehicle, an open truck of some kind. I was about to learn what happened to the men who had gone out of here before me, and take the consequences of my leap in the dark. The truck drove off.

  I could look up through half-closed eyelids and see the sky, and smell the air of a city again. The sun was warming and the vault of blue looked imponderably beautiful and limitless. I heard Chinese voices, Malay voices when the truck slowed, even women and children’s voices – the first I had heard for a long time.

  The truck seemed to leave the traffic and traffic noises and drove through what smelled like countryside. I was beyond fear, but I hoped dully that I was not being driven to some lonely execution ground. After about half an hour there was a silent length of road, then a right-hand turn, another short road, a near stop, another right-hand turn which interrupted the sunlight – and then, an English voice. Almost immediately, the stretcher was lifted off the truck, I was transferred to another stretcher and carried away.

  I opened my eyes fully for the first time. I was still a prisoner, and around me I saw the functional and naked walls of a modern gaol. But this was what I had been trying to achieve for months: I was inside Changi at last.

  CHAPTER NINE

  IT IS UNLIKELY that many people have regarded a notorious POW camp as heaven, but I felt that that is where I had arrived within a few hours of being at Changi.

  When I finally opened my eyes, with almost superstitious caution, I did not see a single Japanese soldier. I was surrounded by the concerned and grinning faces of ragged British and Australian prisoners. My stretcher was the centre of caring bustle and activity and after a few minutes I was carried into the ground floor of a two-storey block which my bearers called HB. I was in the safest possible hands, in the care of sympathetic and supportive British and Australian servicemen. Then I began to cry, an uncontrollable cascade; tears of relief and joy.

  I was given a bed, a real iron bed with a mattress, sheets and a pillow. The bedding was hardly needed, given the sweltering atmosphere of a Malayan summer, but the feel of cotton on my filthy skin was beautiful. Someone brought me some real tea. Then they began to appear around my bedside, bags of skin and bones I was half-convinced had been dumped by the Japanese on some city rubbish heap: Bill Smith, ‘Mac’, Slater, explaining that they were in the upstairs ward and that HB was one of the two hospital blocks inside the gaol and was reserved for us, for men from Outram Road. I would be moved upstairs shortly, they said. It was an astonishing coming-together, and I felt a calming wave wash over me, knowing that we had all survived so far.

  A man called Jim Bradley introduced himself. I thought I had not met him before, until he explained that he had been in solitary confinement in Cell 41 in Outram Road and had been carried out on a stretcher just before Christmas. I remembered the stretcher which had been carried through the main hall of Outram Road that day, bearing a stick figure with a huge matted black beard, as though the hair had grown wild as the body wasted. Bill Anker also came up, and Ian Moffatt and Guy Machado, who had all been carried out of solitary cells, in each case with their faces lost in a mass of hair and beard. No-one was allowed to cut the hair of those in solitary confinement. There were more petty levels of cruelty than I had imagined.

  At first no-one bothered about medical attention for me, but I didn’t feel neglected: being in Changi was the best psychological lift that a body could wish for. My bed was just inside the ward, near the entrance; it was a little like being in bed on a railway-station platform, with crowds and movement to and fro. Yet I slept well that night, from utter exhaustion, and from the effort of talking loudly and freely to so many people.

  HB was run by an Australian Army doctor from Hobart called Bon Rogers. He was an outstanding and truly dedicated man, remembered by thousands of POWs who passed through Changi.

  When he examined me in the morning, the first thing he did was to weigh me. I was put on an old scales and discovered that I weighed 105 pounds, about 60 pounds less than my normal, pre-war weight. Rogers gave me a course of vitamin pills, and prescribed milk and even the occasional egg for me. This was a really rich diet: the food that came into the hospital was the best that Changi could provide, but it was still mostly rice.

  Just being there was the real cure. With the relative peace, the predictability of the routine, a little extra food, the cleanliness, the kindness of the male nurses, and the comradeship and support from the other refugees from Outram Road, I slowly but steadily began to gather strength and to put on a little weight.

  The Japanese had, I discovered, restored my Bible to me. They were as meticulous about prisoners’ property as they were careless of their bodies. I even got my watch back. But when I tried to reawaken the spirituality I had always experienced in reading that sonorous seventeenth-century prose, I found that I had nearly forgotten how to read, and the page was a blur; my eyes could not focus properly. I had not seen a single word of print for over seven months. My acquaintance with language had shrunk to the letter ‘D’.

  I was reduced to spelling out the captions and garish headlines in a bound volume of Lilliput, a gossip and pin-up magazine of the day, and later a children’s spelling book, from which I slowly copied out simple words. I had lost my mind, and spent days digging about for some memory of script. To my intense relief, the skill of reading came back fast.

  After a few days I was moved upstairs to HB2. There were ten of us in that ward, five on each side of a central passage. At the end furthest from the door were the nursing staff and, equally important, the shower heads. I luxuriated in the abundant, clean, cold water that came on twice a day, for there were times in Outram Road when the stink of one’s own body and its rotting covering seemed ineradicable. Just to stand with water pouring over me was lovely. In the ward there were also, at the entrance, two lavatories, real WCs with flushing mechanisms that actually worked.

  Despite the cramped conditions and our shattered emotions we got on extremely well; there was never so much as an outbreak of bad temper. We had all travelled a very long way along the valley of the shadow of death and we had all emerged, so we had no time for small irritations. Some of us had taken extreme measures to get out of, and extreme boldness had put some of us into, Outram Road.

  Jim Bradley, for example, had escaped from Song Krai, a camp at the very top of the railway. He was among ten prisoners who had walked into the jungle and into Burma, where high ridges ran at right angles to their line of march to the sea. It must have been like stumbling up and down through uncurbed bush on the sides of steep rocky trenches. Five of the party died in the wilderness; the survivors were captured. They were about to be shot out of hand at the prison camp, but Captain Cyril Wild, who had been Percival’s interpreter at the surrender of Singapore and had been banished to this last ditch of the prison world, addressed a passionate and eloquent appeal to Lieutenant-Colonel Banno, the local Japanese commander. Jim was only alive thanks to the fluency of Wild’s Japanese.

  Jack Macalister’s life was even more charmed. He was the Australian flyer we had heard about at Outram Road. Shot down over Timor, he had attempted twice to steal a Japanese plane, with the help of the local resistance; on each occasion he hadn’t succeeded in taking off. Escapers, radio spies, stealers of planes: crucially for our harmony, we knew we were all still in extreme danger. The prison chiefs at Outram Road would never forget, or be allowed to forget about us. As far as they were concerned, we were simply in Changi to gain enough strength to be recalled to finish our sentences, and we were thus in a strange conflict. Bon Rogers wanted us to regain our health, and so did we, but the last thing we wanted was to be well enough to return to Outram Road. We were ghosts on h
oliday.

  There was in any case a limit to what could be achieved in the hospital at Changi. Some of us could not get our limbs to work properly. My arms were in bad condition, as I discovered for myself when I tried to write or move my fingers quickly without lifting my arms high. Some men’s eyes had been weakened dangerously: those who had lost their glasses suffered from near-blindness. Stomach illnesses were endemic. Slater had appalling dysentery. Nevertheless, slowly, our physical condition improved.

  Bon Rogers came around every morning in the best hospital tradition, exuding authority and reassurance, and he took the closest personal care of us. The nurses gave us whatever medicine was available. I was given an enormous daily dose of rice-polishings in a kind of broth. These are the fibrous husks of rice, removed in the normal processing of white rice and contain vitamins and roughage. They were difficult to consume, so light and dry that they floated in a heap on the surface of water. However, I packed the ticklish flakes down diligently.

  On his rounds, Dr Rogers also began to give us snapshots from the war. Since we had been in Outram Road the English and Americans had landed in Europe, the Russians had forced the Germans back towards Warsaw and the Japanese were being wiped out in the Pacific and pushed back in Burma and China. This was exalting news, but it was not unmixed with fear. Only if the war came to an end quickly had we any real chance of survival, but even then we were worried about the vengeance the Japanese might exact if they saw defeat on the horizon in the form of an invasion fleet. Even if the Allies started bombing Singapore in earnest, there might be reprisals on prisoners, and on convicted criminals among them first of all. The best we could do, therefore, was to live a day at a time, but no matter how hard we tried, and no matter how soothing our friends at Changi tried to be, we could never throw off the permanent burden of continuous fear that the warders from Outram Road were liable to appear at any moment to conduct their own so-called medical examinations.

  It was clear to us, though we were careful not to ask or learn anything we did not need to know, that Bon Rogers was not getting his victory bulletins from obliging Japanese guards. Where the radio was and who was operating it were interesting secrets, but we prayed that the group running it would be more careful, or just luckier, than we had been. It was one more proof of how hard it is to shut down speech.

  In the afternoon we tried to read and to rest. There were enough books in Changi to provide an amazing and eclectic library, endlessly circulating until the books fell to pieces: religious tracts, Victorian novels, the works of Hugh Walpole, Somerset Maugham, the Powys brothers and Arnold Bennett, moving from hand to hand in a hot, sweaty prison-city. For the population of Changi never fell below about 3000, and frequently rose to 5000, and because the Japanese allowed the POWs to run it internally more or less at their own discretion, there was more cultural activity here than in most small towns.

  Changi had stamp-collecting clubs, debating societies, literary circles, even a dry land yacht club for commodores nostalgic about the sea. Everyone was using memories to support themselves and entertain each other.

  Up on the second floor of HB, we could not take part in debates about the shape of the post-war world or the meaning of evolution, but we certainly had books. There was a book bindery at the prison, and the tattered volumes were kept together with heavy, home-made gums made from rice and water or stewed bones, and patched up with cannibalized prison records, of which there were reams. Charge sheets for Indian privates written in copperplate in happier colonial days became the endpapers of works by Bunyan, Blake or Defoe. The adhesive still feels solid, heavy, and crude, but also very strong; I have some of these books with me now. They are the most well-thumbed, eroded books I have ever seen, worn to a softness and fragility, and made compact by sheer use, but they seem indestructible.

  One of the books I still have is a Gibbon’s stamp catalogue for 1936, Stamps of the British Empire, Part One. I remembered how not long ago I was spreading out hundreds of these stamps on the floor of an Edinburgh house with a young friend. The thought of the order and beauty of these franked bits of serrated, squared paper was extraordinarily comforting to me: there was once a world of regularity, punctuality and neat categories. I made careful pencilled notes on African and Malayan stamps, columns of different prices, colours, devices and monarchs’ heads. It was a therapy of lists; it was a way of forgetting arbitrary, unpredictable hell.

  It was during this time in Changi that I swapped my Authorized Version of the Bible for the Moffatt translation which I still have, because I was curious about this new and celebrated edition, and so Harkness got my tiny marginal commentaries and underlining and I got his. Between rereading the Bible, learning Hindustani – which I was also trying to do, from a grammar – and classifying things in order to remember them, the afternoons and the months passed quickly for me.

  Bon Rogers told us that as a safety measure we must never go out in daylight, but he allowed us out for walks around the gaol after dark. It meant we were still in a prison within a prison, but the restriction was worth it. There were no Japanese inside Changi – except when they came in to seize a prisoner or negotiate with the senior officers – so Bradley and I made slow circuits of the complex while we looked up at the night sky and breathed the air of our heaven. Outside the walls thousands of Allied prisoners were living at Selarang, at Kranji and in other makeshift camps, but we were dangerous, so we were in the prison itself. Our favourite walkway was the road between the inner and the high outer walls, because it was so secluded; it made a blank concrete channel, and it was like walking along the bottom of a drain. The Japanese were at the main gate, but not on the walls, and we walked unmolested for hours.

  For many prisoners, Changi was a dreadful place: only Outram Road made it seem homely to us. I was relieved to see the shockingly swollen figure of Stan Davis, ill with beri-beri, arriving at Changi soon after my own arrival; and Harry Knight was carried in on a stretcher one day. This reminded us that we were on leave from obscenity. He was at rock bottom; barely recognizable, his frame reduced to weak bones in loose pale skin, his eyes sunk in his head. Rogers had him moved immediately to another hospital wing inside Changi, but within ten days Harry was dead.

  Jack Macalister thought that his own recovery had gone far enough to be dangerous. He talked to one of the medical officers, quietly and privately, and one day they put their plan into operation. It was all done calmly, as though the MO were about to give him an injection. Jack sat on a chair and held a length of 2-inch steel pipe vertically over his left foot. The other man lifted a big hammer and smashed it down on the open top of the pipe. Macalister was in bad pain as the MO wrapped his foot in plaster, but he had bought himself an extra few weeks of companionship and humane treatment.

  Knight’s death prepared me all too well for leaving what Macalister was determined to keep. The POWs on duty at the prison entrance would instantly send a message to HB if any of the Japanese from Outram Road appeared, so that we might have at least a few minutes’ warning in which to arrange ourselves. On 25th January 1945 the blow fell, and the warnings were useless. A party of Japanese, including one who we thought might be a doctor of some kind, came without warning into the hospital block. Their medical officer, accompanied by Bon Rogers, walked around every bed on both floors and looked closely at the occupants. Dr Rogers outlined each person’s medical history and listed their various ailments and demonstrated their disabilities. Unfortunately, I was betrayed by my own cursed vitality. I was looking quite well that day, for a sick prisoner, and the Japanese officer decided that I was well enough for Outram Road.

  Within a matter of minutes I had to pack my kit, say goodbye to the fortunate ones and climb on to a truck where, for the second time, the Imperial Japanese Army Prison Service took charge of me.

  We drove quickly into Singapore and headed straight for Outram Road. I had expected this for weeks, but the thought that my clean, relaxed body would shortly be reduced to scrapings and dirt,
and that my time at Changi was about to pass away like water was unutterably lowering. The truck drove up to the huge doors, they opened like the jaws of a beast and shut with me inside.

  * * *

  I knew the routine; stripping off, laying small items on a table, handing everything over for storage, and being inspected and examined in every orifice.

  They allocated me a new number. This time I was No. 540, otherwise Go-hyaku yon-ju. I wondered what had happened to the last 540, whose number had come and gone. Then we were taken across to D Block. I knew the way. I was allocated a cell almost opposite No. 52, my old address, and found that I was sharing with a young Indonesian from the island of Celebes, or Sulawesi.

  We communicated haltingly, for his English was not good, but we got on well together. He was the first Asian person I had ever been close to as an equal, and so my forced education in other ways of life continued. He had been a Dutch East Indies soldier in Sumatra, and the Japanese had suspected him (rightly, as it turned out) of membership in a resistance group. He was lucky to be alive at all. He talked about his village, about the fishing and farming his people lived off. I told him about the Shetlands, of which his island seemed a tropical reflection.

  Some things had changed for the better in Outram Road. Cell doors were now open nearly all day, although this meant that we had to be even more careful about talking. The food had improved a little. The worst of the diseases which we had had to suffer a year earlier seemed to have been eradicated. Meals were now taken in silence at a long table in the middle of the main hall. Most prisoners were out of their cells for a good part of the day. Presumably the Japanese had suddenly realized that in D Block they had a potential labour force which was not only docile but which did not have to be paid. About thirty or forty men were taken out on most days in trucks to excavate tunnels in a hillside some miles away, preparations for some suicidal resistance to invasion. We did not feel good about those tunnels.