The railway man : a pow's searing account of war, brutality and forgiveness (18 page)

The exercise period was always a relief because there was plenty of water, and we could wash out there in the sun. They even gave us a hosepipe, which in that yard had almost certainly seen some strange uses, and the others would turn the gush of water on to me because I could not lift the hose with my bound arms. The cold water swilling over me washed out some of the sweat and a little of the tension.

On the morning of 22nd November we were abruptly told to smarten ourselves up. They gave us what was left of our kit and we had to get into uniform, as far as that was possible any more, an instruction that rattled us. This sudden formality was disturbing, as change of any kind had become to us in our helpless situation.

We were taken into the main building and into a large room with long windows. Several Japanese officers sat along a table with their backs to the light. They clearly formed a court martial. The president of the court appeared to be a lieutenant-general, wearing the most remarkable whiskers I have ever seen, drooping down far below his chin. Our reception at the railway station was indeed intentional; we were a prize catch.

There was an interpreter, but his English was more halting than my interrogator's had been at Kanburi. He read out the charges. The prosecuting officer wished to make it clear to the judge that the seven tattered characters standing in front of him were the most dangerous anti-Japanese group they had ever had to deal with, that the group was experienced in and had been involved in subversion, sabotage, secret radio-operation, illegal trading with Siamese civilians, organization of escapes, theft, dissemination of British propaganda - and so on. The ultimate accusation was read out with great melodramatic expressions of indignation: we were, collectively, accused of being a 'bad influence'. This catalogue was flattering, and had we not felt sure that they were about to shoot us we would have enjoyed the compliment even more. A stenographer carefully recorded the prosecutor's speech.

An officer representing the defence, who was a complete stranger to us, gave a rather half-hearted address which seemed to be to the effect that we were sorry for our anti-Japanese activities and had not intended to cause trouble. The defence speech was not recorded for posterity.

The presiding general asked us if we had anything to say. Jim Slater spoke up, with considerable courage, and suggested to the court that whatever conclusion they might come to, we had surely been punished enough already. The judge asked what he meant. Slater attempted to describe quickly and neutrally the beatings at Kanburi, pointing to my broken arms and our still visible cuts, and my torture by the Kempeitai. If the judge had not been aware of our treatment before, he certainly betrayed no interest now.

After conferring with his colleagues, the judge pronounced sentence, his whiskers lending the moment a suitably farcical air of gravity. Thew and Fred Smith, ten years' imprisonment each; Bill Smith, Slater, Knight, Mackay and Lomax, five years each.

We were taken back to the cell, and resumed our cross-legged squatting. Our relief was so intense that it amounted almost to joy. For the first time since the discovery of the radio in Thew's bed at Kanburi, the imminent threat of death had been hfted. We sat there no longer like condemned men, and Slater's elation at our reprieve was almost palpable in the stuffy air of the cell. For the first time, we began to think that for us the physical and mental ill treatment might be over.

A few days after our trial, the radio party was told to get itself ready for another move. The guards did not tell us where we were being taken, but they ordered Thew to stay behind, and no amount of pleading and questioning would make them explain his detention to us. This was the second time he had been separated from us, our radio buff, and we were desperately afraid for him. Fred later told me that Thew had blandly informed the white-haired interpreter at Kanburi that he needed a radio because he worked for the BBC. The man had beaten Thew around the head with the flat of his sword. He might have annoyed them too much, once too oftenj or perhaps they had singled him out again for additional torture and questioning; or they felt he was, after all, too dangerous to keep alive. It was dreadful to have to walk out of that cell and leave him sitting there alone.

We were put into uniform again; my five comrades were handcuffed; my arms were still in splints and the guards decided that I was sufficiently restricted without the cuffs. Yet another truck rolled up and we were driven back through the dead streets of Bangkok to the railway station. Our weird group once more attracted a certain amount of attention as we were taken to a waiting train. As I walked along the platform I remember looking with pleasure at a perfectly ordinary, shabby passenger train and hoping that we were going to be allowed to sit on seats, like ordinary travellers, now that we were convicted subversives instead of battered prisoners. Instead we were shoved into the guard's van, which was at least empty and spacious - an improvement on the foul covered goods vans in which we had travelled from Singapore to Ban Pong just over a year before. The escort told us to sit on the floor with our backs to the end of the van. We spread out our kit and settled down. Slater thought we would be taken to Japan; others assumed we would serve out our sentence working, under closer supervision, back at Kanburi or somewhere else on the railway. One of the guards settled the question of our destination by saying: 'Shonan.' Singapore. We were starting all over again.

Singapore is 1200 miles from Bangkok, and there are more comfortable ways of travelling between the cities than sitting on the steel floor of a luggage van for three days and nights. But this was a better journey than most in our experience as prisoners, even though my five companions were handcuffed for most of the way. For once, the Japanese administrative arrangements worked well. Food appeared miraculously at certain stops, and it had obviously come from Japanese cookhouses. We ate exactly the same food as the guards. It was among the best we had eaten for two years.

Bill Smith's frailty singled him out yet again for embarrassment, or perhaps we were simply a little embarrassed by him. He clearly had a slight bladder problem and the regular stops were not enough for him. There was, as usual, no latrine on board to which we were allowed access, and Smith was once in real discomfort. The rest of us immediately began to calculate the speed of the train, the time to the next stop, whether we could risk holding him out the door - a manoeuvre I suggested reluctantly, remembering my own humiliation on the way to Ban Pong - but the train was moving too fast and the other four were afraid of dropping him. Smith interrupted us with great suppressed urgency and begged for a more immediate solution. He could not bear to foul his mug or mess-tin, so someone suggested that he use his footwear. So it was that the poor man urinated into his own boot, which was large enough and watenight enough for the purpose: there was no leakage at all. It is the strangest tribute to the quality of British shoemaking that I can think of.

The journey was monotonous and uneventful, perhaps because we were so exhausted by letting go the tension and uncertainty that had gripped us since our arrest at Kanburi. The guards kept us sitting against the back wall of the coach, so we saw almost nothing of the view, only the occasional glimpse of forest at a sharp angle out of the open door. We tried to sleep as the wagon swayed and rolled, pounding the metal of the rail with the metal of its wheels in that smooth, lunging rhythm of train travel. Unless some violent force intervened, we were as trapped as those flanged wheels on our own iron road.

We reached Singapore railway station on 30th November, in the afternoon, and were picked up by an unusually strong force of guards. We still did not know where we were going. Once the truck was on the move, however, Bill Smith, who had spent years in and around the island and knew the city well, said quiedy that he thought we were heading for Outram Road Gaol.

We pulled up outside high, grey gates set in massive, mock-gothic walls and waited. It looked from the outside as British and as Victorian a prison as any in London or a provincial English town, a reassuring and solid symbol of legality and justice. The huge doors swung open from the inside, the truck drove in and the doors boomed shut. Little did we realize that we had left all justice behind.

THE SIX OF US were led into a reception area where there was an obviously well-practised routine. We were told to strip, and stripped totally of all our miserable things, clothes, books and pictures. All I was allowed to keep was my long spoon and my pair of spectacles, which had survived everjrthing, though hardly intact; they were held together with surgical tape and gentle handling. I always treated them as though my life depended on it - which it did, in some ways, for semi-blindness added to what I had gone through would surely have been the last straw. At least I could trust the witness of my eyes, at a time when what I heard was often humanly incredible.

I was still wearing my splints, but a warder inspected my hair, which was now long and tangled, along with all the others', and our ears. I never found out what strange information he was expecting to find in men's ears, though presumably he was checking for hacksaw blades in our anal passages when he poked around in there.

We were each given an extremely small pair of shorts, a shirt, a cap and a so-called towel, which was not much bigger than the shorts. Each of these items had been worn out, patched and worn out again, as though a whole company of men had slept in them. We felt ragged enough when we walked into that prison, but these clothes made us look like castaways. They took away our shoes; of washing materials and toothbrushes we had none. I wondered whether our kit would truly be kept in store for when we were released in five or ten years' time.

Finally we were told that our names were abolished and that we were to have new identities. Mine was rokyaku ju-go, which sounded splendid but translated merely as No. 615. The former Prisoner No. 1 was slipping fast. They made us memorize and repeat our numbers over and over again until we got them right, and all of us managed except the hapless Bill Smith, who could never cope with even a single word of Japanese. The warders gave up on him.

These gaolers appeared to be Japanese military prison service men, wearing white epaulettes to distinguish them firom their regular colleagues outside. Others, including many of the warders, it would turn out, were ordinary Japanese soldiers convicted of disciplinary offences. Even to be a warder in Outram Road was a punishment.

The initial ceremony of degradation over, we were marched outside. We headed in a line out of the reception area into a cell-block. I noticed a large letter 'D' at the entrance. As we came into that long gloomy hall, with iron stairs stretching before us and galleries up above us in what seemed like level upon level, I was aware of a total silence. Our bare feet and the guards' boots were the only sounds in that high arcade. There were cell doors on each side, and another floor of cells above that, but I was too agitated to notice properly whether there was a third floor. The hall looked more or less as I imagined a British Victorian prison would look, on the inside, with cliff faces of cells opposing each other across empty space. The air in the hall was close, as though it were a morgue rather than a place that held living men.

Fred Smith and I were put into Cell No. 52; the others into Nos. 53 and 54. The guards told us, with menaces, that talking was forbidden, even between men sharing a cell, and that attempts to communicate between cells would be punished severely. The door was then shut, and we looked around our new home. It was totally empty: a stark oblong space, about nine feet long, six feet across and with a very high ceiling. The walls were peeling, had once been thickly painted in white and were utterly blank. The door was solid and steel-clad, with a rectangular slot like an English post-box. There was a small window, very high up in the end wall, through which we could see the sky. It seemed to be a nice day outside.

We were very, very tired. The anti-climax of the trial and our survival was still having its effect and we wanted to rest and to be left alone. I could not remember when I had last slept in a real bed, so I lay down on my side on the bare cement floor, and immediately went to sleep.

Fred and I were woken by the door banging open; a guard handed in a set of three wooden planks and a strange wooden block and a blanket for each of us, followed by a wooden latrine bucket with a lid. We were puzzled by the wooden blocks, until we realized that these were our pillows. Our cell was now fiiUy ftimished.

Later in the evening there was a rattling at the cell door; the slot was banged down and a bowl of rice, a small saucer of tea and a pair of chopsticks for each of us were handed in through the slot. Even on our first day, the complete absence of colour, of sound and variation were such that the arrival of this wretched meal was an event. We tried to make it last as long as possible, but eating a bowl of overcooked rice can only take so long.

The first day ended like that, with barely enough food to keep us alive and nothing like enough to dull the appetite. I thought I ahready understood hunger, but this was a new level of craving. Fred and I spoke in whispers, trying to make sense of our deprivation, wondering whether they seriously intended to leave us in this condition for our entire sentences. We were waiting for sleep, expecting to be switched into darkness when the electric light bulb high above our heads was turned off; but it stayed on all night, and we fell asleep in the glare of our empty cell.

No-one had told us where we were; indeed had Bill Smith not identified the place as Outram Road we might have been left wondering where we were for a long time. All we knew was that Outram Road had been the main civil prison in Singapore until the new gaol at Changi was opened late in the 1930s. It was now clearly being run as a punitive military prison, an extreme version of what the British Army would call a 'glasshouse'.