We were surviving, but that was not enough. All that energy which the surrender had stifled was still there, we were rebellious and eager to know what was happening in the war. We wanted to know if the tide had been turned; we wanted to win, even if only vicariously. Since we were young and clever and knew about machines, since most of us had been reared on enthusiasm for popular mechanics and loved the idea of transport and communication, we did the logical thing, and started to build a radio.
Enthusiasts had taken bits of radios from Changi, broken down and scattered among a number of men so that each had only a tiny piece to be responsible for. We also had headphones. But making one was still like assembling a mechanical jigsaw puzzle. We settled on an incredibly modest attempt to build a battery operated set that could receive All India Radio from New Delhi. But even this was a tall order. We had to reinvent wireless telegraphy, scouring a tropical prison camp for the materials we needed. We bartered stolen Japanese tools with a local trader for valves. I worked out the optimum length for an aerial for receiving the correct wave-length of the station; but we could not afford to display a full length antenna, so we had to make do with a ‘quarter-wave aerial’. Men would be given strange tasks: to find flat unfolded silver paper, or small pieces of flat aluminium; or lengths of wire of a certain gauge; or quantities of wax. No-one asked any questions; the prisoners’ discretion was wonderful.
Thew was our radio maker. He was in many ways a dotty amateur scientist, absent-minded and insensitive to risk. Making a radio at that time required a lot of soldering, and arrangements were made in the cookhouse for the soldering iron to be heated under conditions of great secrecy. But how can you carry a red-hot iron in secret? Thew once solved the problem simply by forgetting where he was. He walked across the main square holding the glowing iron, as though for a prisoner-of-war the most natural thing in the world was to be wandering around with this essential tool of electronics in his hand.
We arranged a security system in the main hut. POWs apparently engaged in reading or doing their woodwork were stationed in strategic places, on the lookout for guards, while Thew worked in his bed-space with assistance from the others. We finished one night, and Thew crawled under his blankets and tuned his primitive detector. He had a pencil in his hand, I remember, and he emerged smiling from ear to ear with some scribbled notes. It had worked beautifully. He had heard the crisply modulated English voice of the announcer cutting through the static.
The radio was primitive, little more than a crystal set, tuned to a single frequency and incapable of sending a signal; it was also a simple masterpiece. It was about 9 inches long by 4 inches wide, and fitted snugly into a coffee tin with a false top, which we filled with ground nuts. It sat there innocently by Thew’s bed, a rusty silver tin can hiding the valves and condensers.
The routine was the same each evening. Prisoners would be detailed to stand around the camp and warn us about the approach of any Japanese, many of them not even being told why they were doing it. Thew would couple the set to the aerial, which was hidden in the rafters, switch on the apparatus and burrow down under his blanket with the headphones on. He was always the operator, since he was by far the best person to deal with any tuning problems if the signals were lost or distorted. The news bulletin took about ten minutes, and he would note down the main items with his pencil as he listened. The precious scrap of paper was handed around a small group afterwards, as Thew dismantled the set and placed it back in its hiding place. I still remember his strong, careful handling of the crude little machine, the tenderness of the true craftsman.
We were stealing back information from our captors. We heard about the victories of the Solomon Islands, of New Guinea and Guadalcanal, and that the Germans had been stopped in Russia and driven back in North Africa. From November 1942, when our radio started operating, we felt again that we might eventually be liberated, that we were on the winning side.
Lance Thew could be a hair-raising innocent. We were free to ramble around the area, and often came upon small Siamese settlements. Thew had stumbled on an ‘empty Buddhist temple’, as he put it wonderingly, with a small gold-leaf-covered statue of Buddha in a dusty niche, and a few dead flowers around the image. He helped himself to the statue: a nice souvenir of Siam. When we discovered it in his bed-space, we ordered him vehemently to return it. We were afraid of some frightening chain of repercussions; less rationally, we dreaded the fixed smile of the deity and the feeling of bad karma that grew around him. I wondered later, and not idly, whether what happened was a kind of punishment for this blasphemy.
Perhaps what Thew did was just another symptom of our devil-may-care attitude, our defiance of the Japanese and of imprisonment. We still felt invincible. Surrender hadn’t brought weakness and submission.
All that winter, however, the long trains kept coming to Ban Pong station, a mile to the west of our workshop. Covered goods wagons packed with filthy, hungry men were pulled from Singapore and unloaded their freight of captive labour. The chugging Japanese and British engines had to use, in place of coal, the local wood, which sent up a characteristic thin and aromatic smoke, and at least twice a week we would see trails of it drifting over the trees when the noise of an arriving train had died away and the locomotive would be standing in the station, quietly expiring. The railway was burning men.
CHAPTER FIVE
THE OFFICIAL MEDIATOR between gaolers and prisoners at Ban Pong was a young Japanese interpreter with an American accent, whom we called Hank the Yank. He was a friendly enough man, and when early in February 1943 he came and told us that we should be ready to move the following day, the instruction caused no more than the usual spasm of anxiety.
At least we knew where we were going: Kanchanaburi, a town about thirty miles to the north west of Ban Pong on the new railway’s route to Burma over the Three Pagodas Pass. We were now pretty certain that the railway was destined to reach Moulmein in Burma, where the river Salween empties into the Gulf of Martaban. Relieved, therefore, that we were not being sent much further up the line, from which horrific rumours were already coming back as the work parties went deeper into the wild hilly country of Kanchanaburi Province, we packed our gear with aggressive good humour. We had our cookhouse equipment, our medical stores such as they were, and our bits of furniture – the odd stool or home-made table, a little unit of shelving made from discarded boxes: things we had scavenged and put together over the past few months to make our huts orderly and bearable.
We were cocky, taking risks and laughing at our captors because we did not yet fully understand the nature of the risks we were running. Life could still seem the kind of game it always becomes when young men are cooped up together and before they discover they are trapped. We almost flaunted our stolen goods. I had a saw strapped to the outside of a canvas bag which I had acquired before leaving Changi; we had whole workboxes of tools hidden in our baggage: chisels, hammers, screwdrivers, that soldering iron … If it had been a matter of cutting through bars to escape this prison, we would have flown away long ago.
We piled into a lorry driven by a British private soldier. I sat in front, with a Japanese guard between me and the driver. A small convoy of vehicles turned westwards out of the camp, leaving the bamboo fence and the long hut behind us. Halfway to Kanchanaburi, or ‘Kanburi’ as it was universally known among the English prisoners, our driver slipped his foot on the clutch in the sticky heat and bumped into the lorry in front of us. The Japanese guard went berserk, screaming incoherently at the driver, pushing him out of the cab. I got down carefully on the other side, keeping my distance but looking at the guard intently.
This was a man full of rage and fear and resentment. No older than me, and outnumbered by his prisoners, he nevertheless had absolute power over us and now he was close to losing control. Retribution would be his, no matter what we did. He went on berating the driver. I thought about the stories, about the nurses’ bodies in the surf at Banka Island. He gripped his rifle so that hi
s knuckles paled under the olive brown of his skin. But he calmed in time, and no blow was struck. He ordered us back into the cab and the lorries moved off again.
Until now, all our contact with Japanese violence had somehow been at second hand, for even the severed heads of the poor Chinese back in Singapore were not a direct threat to us as British prisoners. I had never, until that moment, seen any fellow prisoner threatened with assault, though of course the tracklaying gangs were being grossly abused simply by the nature of their work. It is true that I had seen men forced to stand hour after hour in the full blaze of the sun for some infringement of camp discipline; but no direct physical attack. I felt now that I had come very close to violence that morning. It was hard to tell if this was one unstable man, or whether his nerves were fraying because of some larger calamity; perhaps a foreknowledge of eventual defeat. This weird confrontation on the road, with the green of the big mango trees and nipah palms for a backdrop, seemed a step further towards danger, and away from the shreds of civilization and comfort we were still clinging to. Milepost zero of the railway was just east of Ban Pong. I began to fear that the higher numbers would be negative ones, measured on a brutal new scale.
At first, we seemed to have landed on our feet again. Kanburi was then a little town surrounded by the remains of a defensive brick wall. Within it was a main street, with the river Mae Klong parallel to it on the far side of the walls. There were shops here, and some substantial wooden buildings, corrugated-iron huts and patches of overgrown waste land. Some buildings backed on to the river, their yards running down to its banks, which were high above the muddy brown flood.
A little way outside town was the main ‘Airfield Camp’, as the Japanese called it, and to the south lay the railway workshops where our technical knowledge would once again shelter us from the worst. The workshop camp was known to the Japanese as the ‘Sakamoto Butai’, meaning the camp under the command of Major Sakamoto. It consisted, as usual, of a series of bamboo huts thatched with attap which were used as workshops, stores and offices, similar quarters for the prisoners in a separate compound, and a small group of better huts for the Japanese. Between each hut was a space about a hut’s width. The latrines were at right angles to the hut: deep trenches (though never deep enough) with planks across them and sheltered by a bamboo and attap cabin. A not very convincing bamboo fence ran around the entire site, with a guardroom at the main entrance near the road. One bored guard stood at the other side of the camp perimeter, a few hundred yards from the railway.
Sidings had been laid out near the town; closer in, there was a locomotive yard with a wooden water tower and a huge firewood dump. All of these engines burned wood, and steam engines are voracious consumers of timber. Once again, our camp was a repair-shop for the construction gangs’ tractors, the road-rail lorries and, as time went on, the locomotives themselves.
Our group was joined by officers and NCOs from other camps. Fred Smith, a sergeant in the Royal Artillery, was one of them; a regular soldier, a first-rate technician and a person who combined stoicism and good humour with immense physical toughness. Later I would realize that he was one of the most impressive men I was ever likely to meet. Here too were Major Jim Slater, a textile machinery manufacturer turned artilleryman who immediately superseded Bill Smith as our senior officer and whose droll and unquenchable pessimism made him the camp Jeremiah; Harry Knight, an easygoing Australian engineer from one of the Malayan mining companies, a useful and trustworthy man; and Alexander Morton Mackay, another artillery officer, who had been born in Scotland but spent a lot of time in Canada. He was in his early forties, vigorous and companionable, more youthful in spirit than his age seemed to allow. Of all my fellow-prisoners ‘Mac’ or Morton, as he was usually known, was the one who became closest to me.
Two other men in our hut at Kanburi can now only be thought of together, though they had nothing in common at all: Captain Jack Hawley and Lieutenant Stanley Armitage. The latter was a quiet studious Irishman; Hawley was his polar opposite, a smooth and showy character who modelled himself on romantic film-stars like Ronald Colman – a man who enjoyed the clubs and the ease of pre-war Singapore, where he had worked for the British American Tobacco Company.
* * *
In the workshops, we found subtle ways of keeping overworked lorries in apparently good mechanical condition, but with an unfortunate tendency to break down a week after they left our hands. I was learning the arts of subterfuge and quiet resistance, and I was becoming a competent thief.
I took on the job of unofficial camp carpenter, making wooden paths so that the frequent rain would not force us to wade through liquid mud. I found that by far the easiest way to acquire materials and tools was to walk into the workshop stores in broad daylight and to walk out again with the goods prominently displayed. I was never challenged. Little did I know that I was profiting by their carelessness, and that it had another darker side to it.
The Japanese were already making us conform to Tokyo time, which meant that we usually rose in the dark. When they also declared that officers had to work, they made me timekeeper and signwriter. My job was to sound the gong in the main workshop as the signal for starting and stopping work. This gong had to be sounded eight times a day, and the clock that was supposed to guide me in issuing my reverberant signals was a small Japanese timepiece perched on a shelf by the generating plant.
I soon realized that the working day could be ten hours long, yet contain less than ten hours. I conformed carefully to the official starting and finishing times in the morning and evening, but in between them I began to fiddle with the clock and as each day passed, each intermediate starting time got later, while the intermediate finishing times got earlier and earlier. Now we were stealing time as well as information from our gaolers. This was a popular and revolutionary approach to labour control, and even some of the Japanese mechanics approved of it. Unfortunately, I was found out, and a Japanese soldier was given my job. My only punishment was to be told to stick to signwriting and painting.
More than anything else, we wanted to delay them, to hinder their efforts, to do shoddy work in such a way that the origin of the nuisance could not be traced back to one man or group. Even people who were working on tasks like stonebreaking – which was considered a ‘light’ job – would work unbelievably slowly, giving the absolute minimum of co-operation. I think every prisoner became a slacker, a saboteur, and of course some of us are doing it to this day, having spent so much time creating quiet havoc in our early manhood.
We could not surrender the hope of escape. The country was, in a sense, a vast open prison, and we thought that there might with luck be a way out through the north of Siam. But in order to go anywhere after the first couple of miles, information would be vital – information in the form of a map.
It was always very important for me to know where I was, to locate myself precisely on a grid: to record, list, and categorize the world around me as far as possible. It was a way of creating certainty in a world now robbed of all certainty. Of all of us in the camp, it was characteristic of me to make the map. As official signwriter, I had access to pencils, and there was always paper for mechanical drawing in the workshop. I took a large sheet of plain paper, over two-feet square, from the chief engineer’s desk. In the storehouse I noticed a small atlas that included much of South East Asia and Siam; I ‘borrowed’ it and slowly copied the relevant pages with a pencil, working on a scale of about 50 miles to the inch. It was too small for practical purposes really, but it gave me such hope as I filled in details gleaned from POW lorry drivers who had been some distance up the railway, and memorized topographic facts from Japanese plans and documents left lying around the stores.
The map also showed the route of the railway, which I was able to work out as we had a chain of informants all the way up the line. The track hugged the river for a considerable stretch, and if we stayed close to both we might be able to scavenge food more easily if we made a run for it. But ma
pping the railway had its own intrinsic pleasures.
This was a clandestine piece of artistry, but at the time the secrecy was instinctive, an expression of prisoner’s caution rather than any real awareness of the risks I was running. No-one had told us not to make maps, yet it was so obviously a deadly business that I took great care to conceal mine. I kept it in a bamboo tube and hid it lovingly. It was covered in neat pencilled place-names, the boundaries of Siam and its rivers drawn as elegantly as I knew how. The paper took on an antique texture, softened, with wavy edges from my handling of it and the moisture it absorbed from the humid air.
* * *
If anyone wanted to walk out of the camp, there was very little to stop them, and we had soon explored the whole area. Dense feathery bamboo covered much of the ground; big fruit trees were so abundant we hardly knew what to do with the fruit – mangos, durians, pawpaws. Beyond us to the north and west you could see broken and densely-green hills.
Kanburi and its markets were less than a mile away. We had permission to buy food in the town, so we did not starve, even if the staple diet was still rice and a basic stew. We sometimes bought Siamese delicacies like a fried banana concoction made by peasant women over a pan of hot oil, or dried fish.
It was becoming clearer all the time that the Japanese engineers had decided to take a most difficult route for the railway, and that they were going to stay as close to the river Kwae Noi as possible; this allowed them to supply the labour-gangs by boat. This also meant that they were imposing terrible demands on our comrades, for the limestone hills came right down to the river along this part of its meandering course, and the prisoners and labourers would have to hack through them. Viaducts and cuttings and trestle bridges would be needed to support the track, and would have to be built with axes, saws, spades and hands – and nothing else. We were not sorry to be where we were.