The Day Gone By (58 page)

It was during this trip that an incident took place which I wish with all my heart that I could lose from mind. In those days the railway carriages in India were huge and solid and stood very high off the ground. (For all I know they still do.) In my recollection, the distance from the sill of a carriage door down to the ground was a good seven feet. On this account, during halts, when doors were opened, iron ladders used to be placed against the doorway openings into the train's corridors. They were not steep, and most people - most Europeans, anyway - used to descend facing forwards. This was mainly because one usually found oneself descending into a jabbering crowd of beggars, hawkers, porters and the like. If you had your back to them, your pocket could be picked before you knew what had happened. Coming down face forwards, you had to shove your way to the ground, firmly refusing to dispense alms and cigarettes or to buy fruit, eggs, chapatis and the like.

One evening during our week-long journey, we had stopped at some station or other between Karachi and Delhi, and I had decided to stretch my legs on the platform for five or ten minutes. As I was descending the ladder, a boy aged about twelve or fourteen, with an open cotton bag slung round his neck, pushed his way through the throng on the ground, made his way a rung or two upwards and flung his two arms up into my face. He had no hands. What he thrust into my face were the stumps of his wrists.

I recoiled in sickened shock and went back into the corridor. Some little way along it I met our Indian liaison officer, Captain Gokral. I asked him what possible explanation there could be of this horrible experience. ‘The boy's too young to have been a soldier and too young, I'd have thought, to have been involved in any sort of industrial accident or -'

‘Oh, Captain Adams,' he interjected, ‘when you've been in this country a little longer you'll come to realize the kind of things that happen here. The boy will have been deliberately mutilated to excite pity. Somewhere in the town there will be a man like Mr Fagin making use of ten or more such boys. If they don't bring back enough money each evening, they don't eat.'

Does God know about this? I thought. During the last forty and more years it has never taken much to recall it to my mind. Captain Gokral was right: on that day I learnt a heavy matter about the world.

Arrived at Bombay, we went into camp at Kalyan, as very many have done before us. So it was here that we experienced our first monsoon. The monsoon was actually coming towards its end when we moved into Kalyan camp, but what we had of it was quite enough. And there was little or nothing to do, except to wonder what form our attack on the Malay peninsula was likely to take. I whiled away some of the time by going into hospital at Poona with an abscess of the nipple. When I came round from the anaesthetic, the Indian surgeon who had done the job was sitting beside my bed. ‘Well,' he said genially, “didn't know much about
that,
did you?' I never learned his name, but I've always remembered what a nice chap he was, and how solicitous and kind. That was the time when Brigadier Poett took the trouble to come and see me.

Back in camp, one evening in early August, I was having a casual drink with Tommy Farr when I happened to say something about the Mikado and our forthcoming activities.

“Doesn't look as though we'll be making his acquaintance now, after all, does it?' said Tommy. ‘However d'you mean?' I asked.

‘Well, haven't you heard about this new bomb they've dropped?'

I hadn't. Tommy told me. He himself felt sure that it could only push Japan into surrender. Myself, I didn't know what to think. During the next two or three days we were told very little, but sitting in our muddy, sodden camp, we wondered and speculated. On 9 August the Allies dropped the second atomic bomb, on Nagasaki. The war was over. We weren't going to have to fight the Japanese now. How could any reasonable person in our position not feel glad and thankful for the bomb?

Quite soon afterwards the brigade boarded a ship called the
Chitral
and sailed for Malaya. It had been decided that, since the Allied attack had already been worked out and organized, the simplest way to carry out the reoccupation of Malaya would be for all units to do what they would have been going to do anyway, but without, of course, any contribution from the Japanese.

5th Brigade duly landed on the shores of the Malay peninsula, and I recall how, while clambering down from the
Chitral,
I hurt my left thumb rather painfully on the metal gunwale of the landing craft. (The landing craft was bouncing up and down in a choppy sea and the gunwale came up and hit my open hand, hard.) We marched about ten miles inland and passed the night in torrential rain and a rubber plantation. No one slept: you couldn't. I came to realize that prolonged exposure to this sort of rain would be bound to make anyone, however fit, unserviceable. Jungle warfare was something to feel grateful to have been spared. No wonder 14th Army veterans tended to be touchy on the subject.

Next morning we found ourselves the centre of a crisis. We were
white
! It was imperative, for political reasons, that the first Allied troops to enter Singapore should be white and not Indian. Apparently this vital matter had hitherto been overlooked. We, at the moment, were the nearest white troops to Singapore; so we must re-embark and sail there forthwith.

And so we did; and a foul march back to the ship it was, on foot, through the sweltering humidity and the rubber groves. The salt tablets with which we had been issued were palatable and refreshing, but even so a lot of people dropped out along the roadside. We simply weren't used to these conditions, we husky European parachutists.

I rather think it was on 3 September that we landed at Singapore. We weren't the only white troops to arrive. There were other units — as many as could be rushed in at short notice — veterans of the Burmese war. Initially, these didn't take too kindly to 5th Parachute Brigade, who had only been in the Far East for about five minutes. Such feelings, however, were soon swallowed up in the general reaction to what we found on entering the city - incidentally, the third capital in which I had happened to have been with the first relieving troops.

We were not, of course, expecting acclamation, as in Brussels or Copenhagen. This was not a European capital. However, from my own direct, first-hand experience I can assure the reader of one thing. The inhabitants of Singapore were beyond all argument glad to be rid of the Japanese. They had had three-and-a-half years of the Dai Nippon Asiatic Co-Prosperity Sphere, and as far as they were concerned you could keep it. There had been precious little prosperity, and no prospect of any.

Most of us were already mentally inured to the poverty, squalor, disease and beggary common to Oriental cities. I had myself experienced not only Karachi and Bombay, but also Cairo and Alexandria, Jerusalem, Amman, Ma'an and, of course, in weekly doses for a year, Gaza, that celebrated couple of shit-bins and a camel. Yet all these places had been, in their own ways, going concerns, and were inhabited by people pursuing traditional styles of life which collectively they more or less accepted. You knew where you were and felt that at least there was a certain stability about local ways and daily life, even if those ways were not ours.

By contrast, you felt at once that throughout Singapore there was something badly wrong; a dislocation which seemed to permeate everything. The place might be compared to a run-down engine which was being mishandled and likely at any moment to seize up for lack of oil or water or because of flat batteries. It was like a city in a fantasy film, a city run by some sort of intelligent apes with just about enough know-how to keep things going at the roughest level. To start with, inflation was over the moon, but although that was one of the basic factors it wasn't, of course, among the visible, tactile first impressions which struck us at the outset. Everything was worn-out or broken: nothing worked properly and no Japanese seemed particularly aware of it. John Smith (who was, you will recall, Brigade Signals officer) told me that the whole telephone exchange was in the most awful state. I myself, as Brasco, couldn't find a single refrigerator on the Island in working condition: the Japs just weren't interested in refrigerators, let alone in air conditioning. (The Island, by the way, is about the same size and shape as the Isle of Wight.) Other specialists - Sappers, R.E.M.E. and so on - reported similar states of affairs on their respective fronts.

The brigade's first task, of course, was to get the Allied prisoners out of Changi jail. As the world has learned, their condition was very bad indeed: too bad to try to describe. They were divisible into the dying, those who would soon die, and those whose lives would be shortened on account of what they had suffered.

Indifference, callousness and cruelty are three different things. Most of the horrible suffering we saw was really due, I think, to indifference: that same indifference which had left the refrigerators and the sewage works to break down. The Japanese were indifferent to mortal illness. You can see the like any day in the treatment of animals by deprived or backward people all over the world. These prisoners were not animals, however, but human beings. It was hard to believe, except that it was there before your eyes, that one group - any group - of human beings could be indifferent to another group to a degree which had brought about such suffering as this.

So much for the Japanese collectively. Those who actually had the task of guarding and dealing with the prisoners, however, needed, to achieve this result, to be more than indifferent. They needed to be callous - to administer the suffering day by day and not to care about it. Finally, a third category had to be actually cruel - that is, to inflict torment and suffering, over and above that brought about by starvation, squalor and neglect, and - yes, I'm afraid - to enjoy it.

Of course we were angry. Wouldn't you have been? I have avoided dealings with the Japanese ever since: the only dignified way, really, of keeping in check the feelings aroused by that terrible business. Though if a Japanese asks me sincerely for forgiveness, I will forgive; as I know certain other people have. And before you laugh, reader, at the absurdity of the very idea, let me tell you that I
have
been asked for forgiveness, with sincerity, by Germans; more than a few. One lot were Christian pilgrims to Coventry: they were carrying a brick, which they showed me, from Dachau, to be built into the new cathedral.

I am not going to try to describe what it was like dealing with the released prisoners, or organizing such immediate relief as we were able to administer before the specialists took over. The Brigade as a whole had other necessary things to be seeing to — so many that you wondered whether they'd ever be done - but until further notice all medical officers and medical staff on Brigade strength remained on duty at the jail and the hospitals.

As I have said, one of my closest friends at this time was the Brigade H.Q. medical officer, Tommy Hanley (who was only about my own age, twenty-five). That evening, in his continued absence at the jail, I grabbed a billet for us and got his gear more or less laid out along with my own.

Tom himself came in about midnight, exhausted. There was no electric light (you have to realize that at the outset there were no services at all in Singapore, even the water not being reliably potable until treated), but my batman, Tommy Hearn, had managed to scrounge a Tilley lamp and some paraffin, and we conversed while Tom did his best to relax and finish his unpacking. The humidity was appalling and we were both sweating to an extent which made an ordeal of any activity whatever.

‘Do you know, Dick,' said Tom, ‘if I had my medical books here - the ones I left in London - I could write an article which would burn the covers off
The Lancet?
Medically speaking, it's almost unbelievable. There are diseases down there which no European has contracted in living memory and hardly any living European can ever have seen at all.'

‘How do you diagnose them, then?' I asked.

‘Oh, it's not hard to diagnose,' replied Tom. ‘Not hard at all. The symptoms - once I'd told you what they were you could pretty well do the diagnoses yourself. They - well, they thrust themselves upon your attention, so to speak.' I could see that he was trying not to cry. ‘Of course,' he went on at length, ‘I'd foreseen for a while back that it was going to be very bad, but not like this.'

‘Is it - well, copable with?' I asked.

‘They're flying in antiseptics and all the other stuff they can from Ceylon, round the clock,' answered Tom. ‘And flying patients out, too, of course: all the ones they reckon can stand to be flown. Medically speaking, this is something that'll probably never be seen again. Anyway, let's finish up that rum and get to sleep.'

The following morning Brigadier Poett sent for me personally, thereby cutting through at least two ‘usual channels'. As I've said, he was well-known as a getter-onner when he wanted something done.

‘You're the Brasco,' he began.

‘Sir.'

‘There isn't a ‘fridge on the Island that works.'

‘Sir.'

‘But there
are
any number of ‘fridges, I'm told.'

‘Sir.'

‘From now until it's complete, your job is to get a working ‘fridge into every officers' mess in the brigade.'

‘Sir.'

‘Any questions?'

‘Yes, sir. Do I get any technical help?'

‘You can commandeer anyone or anything you think you need, on my authority. As for
what
you do, that's up to you. Now get on with it.'

I got. I had my jeep, my Brasco's corporal (a rather colourless individual) and Tommy Hearn, a batman/driver who certainly wouldn't have disgraced C Platoon. It seemed to me that the first thing we needed was someone who knew why the ‘fridges didn't work, and what was required to make them work.