The railway man : a pow's searing account of war, brutality and forgiveness (7 page)

The following day, our convoy of about twenty ships drew up its anchors and with a minimum of noise, no ceremonial blasts on the sirens or crowds on the harbour walls, headed out into the open sea. We were not told where we were going, and after we had left the Firth of Clyde, running out into the north channel between Ireland and Scotland, we hadn't much idea where we were - except that we were sailing roughly north west into the Atlantic. It was difficult to be sure even of the number of ships in our company, because the convoy occupied such a large area of the ocean. Nor were we told the names of the grey warships that occasionally glided up out of the fog.

In this state of official ignorance, our time was filled for us. Every morning hundreds of young men would be out doing PT exercises on deck. After the first few days the deck grew hot under the thin soles of our gym shoes, and the sun higher in the sky. We were no longer sailing north west, and had turned south. Somewhere off to the east lay the coast of Africa.

The Signals contingent went over to a training routine, keeping ourselves and our men busy by organizing courses and reminders about how to keep an army's communications clear and efficient. In the evenings we tried to run entertainments, using whatever talent we had available: songs, revues, mild ribaldry, but all held in check by the total absence of alcohol. And of course there was not a single woman on board; even the nurses were male.

We were setting off to sail around the scarlet map of the Empire, and we talked endlessly about where we might end up. As it turned out, we were preparing ourselves to face the wrong enemy. Our assumption was that we would have to defend the north-west frontier of India against a German attack through Persia; no other enemy seriously crossed our minds.

I shared a cabin with a friendly young fellow signals officer, Alex Black, and got on well with him. We talked about the business of what we were doing, as all colleagues do, and gossiped about men and officers. Enforced companionship can be a hell for some people, but these years were made bearable for me partly because of the comrades that the war chose at random for me. I vividly remember eating green ginger for the first time in my life aboard that ship, and sharing it with my cabin mate.

The warmth of the weather was now tropical, damp and intense. The day came when it was announced that we were about to put in at Freetown, in Sierra Leone. This was a real event for us; young people from the backgrounds that most of us came from had never been 'abroad' before in our lives. We were now well and truly travelled, if sitting on board a liner in the bay at Freetown counts as abroad.

Unfortunately only very small ships could be accommodated at the Freetown quayside, so most of the convoy had to anchor a long way out. But not so far that I couldn't see and even smell the land, the docks, the palm trees just back from the harbour, the damp jungly smell coming out on the breeze, like rotting vegetables in the dusty green heat. I saw a very distant train heading up-country on the far side of the city. I knew that this was the famous 2 foot 6 inch gauge main line railway, probably the only one of its kind in the entire British Commonwealth. The little white drift of smoke from the engine seemed to hang in the hot air.

It became oppressive on board ship, hotter and more humid each day. The exercises and routines became exhausting; the coast more tantalizing, the smell more disgusting because we could not move around the city that was generating it. We were not sorry when the entire convoy resumed its journey. Our immediate destination could now only be South Africa.

About five days later I was detailed as Paying Ofificer for the Signals draft as we sailed along the South African coast towards Cape Town. So when the spectacular docking of so many big ships was accomplished, I was below decks handing out cash to men eager to get ashore.

Cape Town was a festival of goodwill. Soldiers were taken to people's houses, were celebrated and had drinks bought for them. After four weeks at sea it was quite an experience. But I wandered off one afternoon and headed, inevitably, for Cape Town railway station, an addict hoping for a surprise. As no other member of the ship's company or the troops seemed to share my interest, I was on my own. I certainly got my surprise. On a plinth in the station was an ancient locomotive, a small tank engine built by Hawthorns & Co. in Leith in 1859. It was the first locomotive ever to work in the Cape Colony, and was probably the oldest surviving Scottish engine in the world.

If it seems odd to find solace in an old steam engine after a month at sea, on the way to God knew where and in the middle of a world war, all I can say is, well, you weren't there and didn't see it, and I had my passion to tend. It was a lovely old tank engine, a beautiful piece of machinery on firagile ungainly wheels with surprisingly delicate coupling rods. It looked almost too dangerous to drive, a mad inventor's toy. I admired it in the middle of that hot Afirican station for a long time.

Two weeks later we were in Bombay, and I felt for the first time the shock of the East. Six weeks before, I had been in cold grey Scarborough. The intense dry heat, bustle and colour of India were overwhelming. Within yards of the air-conditioned hotel where I was billeted there was utter poverty. I saw hundreds of sleeping bodies each night in the streets. I could barely absorb the sensations with which I was bombarded.

Before I could get settled into Bombay and get used to walking on the Malabar Hill, amid the splendour of official British India, I was despatched on an epic train journey of my own. The Frontier Mail, the flagship of the entire railway system, took me on a trip of almost 1400 miles up the subcontinent to Rawalpindi, near the foothills of the Himalayas at the angle made by the plain of the Punjab and the mountains of Afghanistan. The stops were a wonderful litany of the Raj: Ratlam, Nagda, Kotah, Bharatpur and Muttra; Delhi, Chandigarh, Amritsar, and Lahore; and firom Lahore, the final 180 miles up and across the Punjab to Rawalpindi. My main concern was not losing my revolver, a precaution drummed into us as soon as we arrived in India, for there were revolutionaries on the loose. If you lost your gun you as good as lost yourself. Yet I never felt threatened, despite this fear of rebellious subjects, travelling on my own in a train full of hundreds of Indians. Our dominion seemed so secure.

I settled into a passable imitation of the Indian Army officer's life in Rawalpindi, with its old buildings, its seemingly unchanging way of life. I had a bungalow normally occupied by a colonel, and they gave me a bearer and a dhobi. As the freshest graduate of the Officer Cadet Training Unit, I was up to date with the latest radio practice and became a lecturer in telecommunications to my brother officers and men.

I also had to learn to ride, for the Indian Army still travelled on horseback. Their old army radios, especially, were transported by troops of horses and mules, and we used the heliograph, a tripod with mirrored discs, anywhere you could get a visual line between two points in sunlight. I felt that I was slipping back gendy into an older way of military life.

One of the Indian Army's most agreeable traditions was that it allowed a great deal of leave. When mine came, I decided to go to Kashmir. I sat beside the driver of a 'bus', which turned out to be a lorry with very unforgiving suspension - this was the 'first class' seat - for 200 miles as we ground up into the hills, up the great U-shaped bend of the Jhelum Valley and into Srinagar. I had come to the most beautiful place in the world.

The mountains were unbelievable masses of rock and snow merging with the sky, and the Vale of Kashmir seemed to this child of northern Europe like a fertile garden of Eden: the luxuriance and accessibility of fruit I had never even heard of, the abundance of trees and flowers. I booked a small house-boat at the southern end of the Dal Lake and for a week lived in an idyll, eating well, walking in the Shalimar Gardens and at night sitting out on my boat alone under the sky which was dense with layers of stars.

I rode as far up into the mountains as I could from Pahlgam, which is itself 7500 feet above sea level, with a party of English missionaries. We were mounted on horses with mules carrying our baggage. Beyond us were the Karakorams and Tibet. For two days we pressed on up the Lidar Valley until on the second evening we reached Shisha Nag, a magnificent isolated sheet of water more than two miles above the sea. The valley above us was blocked by a glacier. I remember the sun, the cold, the enormous river of ice in the air above me glittering as I ate hard-boiled eggs and boiled ice for water.

In the early morning, the snow on the mountain peaks was caught by the sun, turning pink before the light penetrated to the valley floor. Then there was the silence. I do not think I have ever before or since heard such peace and deep silence. There were other kinds of silence later, but they were tense and sick with anxiety and violence.

Kashmir filled my mind. Later, it went some way to keeping me whole. If I had had no idea of perfection, I don't know if I would have come through.

My orders, when they came, were to take charge of the signal section of the 5th Field Regiment, Royal Artillery, then stationed at Nowshera, eighty miles away on the north-west frontier. The regiment was being built up for 'tropical service'. There was one Scot for whom India seemed quite tropical enough, but I was now a loyal cog in His Majesty's machine.

The regiment was an old-established one, and had expected to stay on guard at the Empire's most romantic outpost for a while yet. Instead it was hastily mobilizing, under strength with its sixteen 4.5 inch howitzers, and deficient in all kinds of equipment. Soon after I got to Nowshera, the regiment took delivery of brand new tractors for its guns, Karrier KT4 'Spiders', which were ordered to be painted green. Knowing officers predicted that we were headed for Malaya.

On 11th October the guns and vehicles left Nowshera for Bombay in three special trains. Mobilization took a lot of trains, and the innocence of railways, if not of the machines themselves, was complicated for me by realizing more and more how essential they were to the conduct of war. Then, on 17th October, General Wakeley, the commanding officer of the 7th Indian Division, took the salute at a farewell parade on the huge square in front of the barracks.

In the course of the parade Wakeley announced that we might have to fight the Japanese. No senior officer had ever suggested this in public to his men before, in my experience, and it gave a frisson of excitement and aggression to the occasion.

General Wakeley went on to say that we should try to fight the Japanese at night, as they suffered from night blindness.

When the band of the Lincolnshire Regiment played us out of the siding at Nowshera the following day on our special military train, we did not know that we were very nearly blind ourselves, being led by the blind.

At Bombay harbour a few days later we saw an imposing liner approaching the quay. It was the Orient Line flagship Orion, another wonderful example of the democracy of war: our travels were now all on special trains and requisitioned luxury cruisers.

I was the last to board the ship, after midnight, and the captain didn't want me even then. I had in my charge several crates of carboys of neat, undiluted, full-strength sulphuric acid which we needed to keep our radio batteries topped up, for if they were less than ftilly supplied they gave less than full power. The captain needed this particular Jonah in the way that he needed a Japanese torpedo. But our regimental commander somehow persuaded him that the security of the entire British Empire in the Far East depended on me and my acid, and eventually, watched by the entire cheering regiment, my crates were swung inboard in a net by the ship's derrick.

After a brief stop at Colombo, the main port of Ceylon, we sailed eastwards, suspecting that we knew what our mysterious 'tropical' destination was but in fact kept properly in the dark. On 6th November, green hills, jungle-clad from their summits to the sea, appeared to starboard, our southern side, and we could make out a similar coast to the north. We were clearly sailing through a bight between substantial masses of land: the Straits of Malacca. Singapore it had to be.

The Orion docked at Keppel Harbour, in the south of Singapore Island. If our journey had been a secret, our arrival certainly was not. A band of the Manchester Regiment was waiting on the quayside playing 'There'll Always Be An England' and other tunes with gusto, the trumpets and tubas and cymbals making their huge summery brass noise. It was triumphant and joyful. A crowd of dignitaries was there: port officers, civil servants, officers. Someone pointed out Lieutenant-General

A.E. Percival, the General Officer Commanding Malaya. He was the man in charge of The Fortress, and we had come to help him defend it.

A month later I was living in a khaki canvas tent in a camp by the edge of a road on the east coast of Malaya. It was a pleasant sandy area fiill of coconut palms, half a mile from the beach. Behind the camp stretched endless regular acres of rubber trees with their thick glossy leaves.

The fine rain was constant in the warm heat, and almost soothing. This cluster of guarded tents was our Regimental HQ, and the thirty signalmen were the heart of the camp. We had our radios set up, their low hum a constant background noise. A man was always sitting in front of each set, headphones to hand, ready to receive or transmit. We were at work. The place was called Kuantan.

We were waiting for an assault by the Imperial Japanese Army and Navy, which we knew were out there on the sea over the horizon, for we were now formally at war with them.

Early on the morning of 8th December I was sleeping in a trench when a messenger woke me to show me a message with the ominous priority 'O ii U'. This was the code for the highest possible priority signal. The Japanese had attacked all over the Far East; a dreadful attack on Pearl Harbor in Hawaii, all the US battleships destroyed, an air raid on Singapore, and at Kota Bharu two hundred miles to our north, near the border of Malaya and Siam, they had stormed ashore from small boats and landing craft.