Four Fires (79 page)

'Later I meet a bloke in Changi named George Plunkett, who it turns out was in that ditch in Jurong Road. There was twenty of them taken there by the Japs and trussed up and executed. He told me how one of his mates, "Titch" Burgess, regained consciousness. In the killing frenzy, a bayonet thrust that was meant to kill him had severed the rope they'd used to tie him up. Badly wounded, Burgess managed to untie Plunkett and three others. They all had deep stab wounds and sword cuts to the neck. Plunkett had been bayoneted thirteen times in the back. They managed to somehow get themselves out of the ditch and a Chinese family took them in. Three of them survived, but "Titch" Burgess, the bloke who'd saved their lives, had lost too much blood and died.

'Soon enough we come across what was left of Brigadier Taylor's Infantry Brigade HQ. They were strung out along Reformatory Road Ridge above Bukit Timah. We'd no sooner reported in when the Japs attacked and every able-bodied man, including the staff officers, were ordered to counter-attack across Reformatory Road.

'Let me tell you, it was on for one and all. Up to now the Japanese had always been the enemy, you know, the other side, I even had a grudging respect for them. But after seeing them blokes in the ditch, I now hate the little yellow bastards. I reckon the others feel the same because now it's a matter of grenade and bayonet. Only with us six, it's the knife and we get stuck in. We cut our
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way through the buggers and have the rare satisfaction of seeing them running backwards. I'm no hero but there's six Japs coming at me, and me and Blades Rigby with a knife coming at them.

They take one look at us carrying nothing but a blade and they turn and run for their lives. I'm convinced after that that Blades is crackers, stark starin' mad. The bastard just ain't scared of no one and they've seen it in his eyes.'

I'm smiling inwardly at this, little Tommy and his mates mounting a knife attack and the Japs, all bug-eyed, seeing their fierceness and running. I can see it in my mind and I admire him. But then he's squinting at me, reading my thoughts.

'Mate, you're probably thinking it's like the films, Errol Flynn, blokes fighting hand to hand, knives flashing. It ain't like that. You're in there and you can't think. If you think, you'll run, so you just charge and fight and hope your training and instinct will take over. It's a sort of fighting frenzy you're in, afterwards you're so scared you can't lift your arms and you're sobbing and can't stop shaking. I remember sitting on a forty-four-gallon drum after that fight, me arms like lead, shaking like a leaf and I look down and, right up to the elbows, I'm covered in Jap blood and it's still wet.'

'But you didn't run away, you fought them, didn't yer?'

Tommy doesn't reply. 'Next day Brigade HQ, which is where we now are and where I meet a few other blokes from in the 8th Division, retreats down Holland Road and then we move to the outskirts of the city. What's left of us, that is the 22nd Brigade, are hardly enough to form one battalion of three hundred soldiers. Let me remind you, a brigade is around three thousand men and now there's two hundred, maybe a few more stragglers comin' in every day.

'The rest are all dead, wounded, lost or cut off. Transport, supply and service personnel are now making up the numbers. Like X Battalion, they know bugger-all about hand-to-hand fighting.

That's the point, sometimes the front between the enemy and us is twenty yards. It's not difficult to see we're pushing shit uphill with a broken stick.'

Tommy pauses and I can see he's wearing out but I don't want him to stop, there is so much telling yet to be done. 'You're tired, Dad, would you like to stop?' My heart is beating faster.

'Please, please don't let him stop,' I think to myself.

'She's right, mate, just need to take a piss, too much char.'

Tommy returns a couple of minutes later and settles back into his sleeping bag. 'Now, where was I? Oh yes, we're into the outskirts of the city. If I make it through the day, I'm gunna sleep in a dry place, maybe even a bed. It seems a funny thought, our chances of seeing the dark of another night are pretty slim but you can't think about that. What's it Nancy always says? Yeah, that's right, "Hope springs eternal".

'We enter the outskirts of the city and it's a repeat performance, the Japs just have too many fit fighting men and us too few. Their artillery is pounding the shit out of the city and bombs are falling everywhere. The japs own the skies and it's a considerable advantage. Pretty soon they overrun our hospital at St Patrick's College at Katong and we set up two makeshift ones at St Andrew's Cathedral and the Cathay building, both of which are well within the Allied perimeter.

Later we learn that when they take Alexandra Hospital they murder the wounded along with the doctors and nurses. Some of the wounded men were taken outside and used as bayonet practice while the Jap soldiers laughed at the fun of it all.

'We were beginning to realise that the Japanese take no prisoners. That they regarded surrender as cowardice, which was a bloody good reason to keep fighting. I reckoned at the time I'd rather die facing the enemy than be trussed and on my knees so some little yellow rice-munching midget wearing thick spectacles can behead me with the family sword. No, that's a lie! You don't think like that. That comes

after.

'But we knew in our hearts it was only a matter of time before it
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was all over, there's nothing we could do to stop the rampage. On the afternoon of the fifteenth, General Percival surrenders. I don't know why he bothered, we were convinced we'd all be killed one way or another. But at 8.30 p.m., on the fifteenth of February 1942, the guns stop and hostilities cease. The fortress that couldn't be took has fallen in just seven days. We'd seen enough of the mongrels to know that whatever was to come it wasn't gunna be no Sunday School picnic.

'What followed was this big Japanese parade with their soldiers marching or riding in trucks or tanks or in streams of cars taken from the civilian population, every vehicle bedecked with the flag of the rising sun. They're yelling and blowing their hooters and laughing, like a bunch of larrikins outside the movies on a Saturday night. We watch them, too tired to look away. If, during that week of fighting, I slept in a dry place I don't recall it, mostly because I don't ever remember sleeping except under the rock when X Battalion was ambushed.

'But now, with the surrender, the real slaughter starts. To the , everyone is the enemy, even the civilians and in particular

the Chinese. They hate the Chinese something terrible, more even than us. The poor buggers had already suffered enough. The city was a bloodbath, 70,000 civilians were killed. The bombing had been responsible for a lot of the destruction but once inside the city the Japs are merciless, rounding up women and children and lopping heads off looters and anyone they don't like the look of.

There are bodies and parts of bodies lying piled up in the streets, infants, women and children as well as men. They lie on front lawns, on the steps of the bigger buildings, the monsoon ditches are piled full of them. In some streets and pavements the surfaces are so black and slick with congealed blood, from the blood oozing from bodies piled up to make roadblocks or to be burnt, that you didn't dare walk there.

'Pretty soon the bodies start to rot in the tropical heat, the gases bloating the corpses The Japanese would wait until the stomachs were huge, blown up like a balloon by the gases roiling inside the dead, then they'd hurl a hand grenade in among them or pepper them with bullets so the bloated stomachs would explode and spray intestines and everything else thirty or forty feet into the air. Bits of body hung off roof gutters and telegraph wires. They thought this was huge fun. There was shit and human parts, blood and rotting human flesh everywhere you turned. We had no hope of burying the dead. We had to leave the job of cleaning up to the maggots and flies. All we could do was try to care for our own wounded.'

Tommy is silent and I've got my head bowed. My imagination is working overtime to try to understand what Tommy's just told me, to try to see it in my mind's eye. I'm glad we haven't eaten nothing because I reckon I'd be sick. I can't offer him another cup of tea because if I do there'll be nothing left for the trip home. 'A mug of water?' I ask him and he nods. I rinse the mugs, then fill them at the cold part of the stream. I know that what's next is Changi, I've read a bit about Changi where the prisoners were taken and I'm expecting more of the same Maybe it was Changi where Tommy got his shoulder and jaw and eye bashed.

To my surprise Tommy now says, 'Mate, tell you the truth, the march out of the city to Selarang Barracks at Changi I hardly remember. We were that happy to be alive and getting out of the stinking city, away from the smell of rotting corpses, I reckon my mind drew a blank. I was that exhausted anyway, probably didn't even know where I was. We'd scrounged a bit of gear here and there and I'd changed my uniform for one on a dead bloke as mine was in tatters. I took his kit as well, keeping only me slouch hat which had a bullet .hole through the crown where a Jap rifle had come close to parting my hair. I remember finding this pork-pie hat somewhere, so I stowed mine in my kitbag and wore the pork-pie. Lots of the blokes were wearing civilian headgear, pukka-sahib helmets and one bloke I saw was wearing a female wig. We was laughin'

and jokin' as we marched, Christ knows why, there wasn't nothing to laugh about, 'cept of course
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we were still alive when a lot of our mates weren't. But the six of us are still there and unhurt, which is a flamin' miracle and good reason to be happy.'

I find it strange that in all Tommy's telling and with what all them six have been through together, he's never given their names, except for Blades Rigby. 'You've never mentioned the names of your mates, why's that?'

Tommy looks up, 'Suppose you think it strange, eh? I've only named the one, Blades Rigby?'

'Yeah, you seemed to be good mates?'

Tommy nods his head, 'Never any better. Only mate I ever had better than any one of them was John Crowe.' He squints, 'I'm scared to say their names or how they died, they's locked into me head, if I say their names they might fly away.' He looks up, 'It's not something I can explain.' He looks down again between his hands which are resting on his kneecaps, his legs inside the sleeping bag, his arms out, one hand holding the mug of water. I'we never done no mourning for them, see. Never put them to rest in me heart.' He says it softly so that I only just hear him. Then he looks slowly up at me, 'After them I knew I could never make a new friend, that if I did, he would die violently before his time, just like they done.'

I can't say anything to comfort him, to tell him it ain't true, that it's all in his imagination, because of course I think of John Crowe, Tommy's oldest and only real friend in Yankalillee, someone who had known him as a kid and had been there for him after he came back from the war. John Crowe has died violently, the Red Steer wiping him the face of the earth. Shit! Tommy thinks John Crowe's death was because of him, because of their friendship. I have to say something to try to help him.

'Dad, it doesn't work like that!' I protest. 'They were soldiers, they knew they could be killed any day!' 'Yeah, I know.' 'It's just in your mind! You have to let it come out. You have to say

their names!'

Tommy doesn't look up for a long time, then he does. 'You know something, Mole?'

'What?'

I'we tried, I can't remember them. I can see them plain as anything, their faces, the way they laughed.' He looks up, there are tears running down his cheeks, 'But I can't remember their fucking names! Them blokes saved me life more than once and I can't remember their names!'

I get out of my sleeping bag and sit down beside him and put my arm around him. It's the first time I've held him in my whole life. He's still skin and bone, still the same drover's dog Nancy met at the railway station when he come out of the repat hospital. I can feel his thinness against my chest and along the inside of my arms, the bone through the sinew and skin. Tm sorry I said that, you don't have to do nothing. Let your mates stay buried in your heart, best place for them to be, best memorial they could have.'

Tommy sniffs and pulls away, 'Christ, a man's a bloody sheila. Can't even tell a story proper without blubbing.' He wipes his hands across his eyes and then his fist under his nose.

'There's a bit of rabbit, it's cold but it's something to chew on. You'll feel better with something to eat.'

Tommy sniffs again, 'Nah, better keep it, need it termorra.'

'I seen a couple of possums earlier, ringtails, I'll go get 'em when it's first light. What say, a bit a possum stew make a nice change, eh?' I know Tommy isn't into shooting the wildlife but we've had possum in an emergency before and it tastes good if you cook them real slow.

Tommy laughs, then sniffs, 'You're a bonzer bloke, Mole.'

We chew on the rabbit and I decide to make another billy. It'll leave just enough tea to make him a mug in the morning, though there'll be no sugar. The moon is now past the canopy opening
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and it's pretty dark, the bush around us is silent except for the burble of the water in the little creek and the occasional crack of a log on the fire where the flames throw yellow slabs of light onto Tommy's broken face.

The cold meal, hot tea and a cigarette seem to pick him up a bit. 'You know when you read about Changi in books and that and on the films, it looks pretty terrible. But after what we'd been through, Malaya, Parit Sulong, that and the past week on the island, Changi was a doddle.

There's nearly 15,000 of us and another 37,000 Poms, local volunteers and some Dutch prisoners of war down the road a bit and, what's more, the Japs decide to behave themselves a bit better now they've got the Chinese civilian population to kill.

'There's one bit of good news. Our commander Major General Bennett's escaped. He's got away in a small boat after the surrender. Most of the officers think it's a poor show that he blew through, leaving them to face the music. Also, some of the blokes are pretty pissed off and are calling him a yellow-belly. But that's not how most of us feel. He fought hard as any of us and was a bloody good leader. By escaping, far as we were concerned, he'd set a good example.