It was days before he could work again, and when he did start working, he hadn’t fully recovered from his previous injuries when a piece of coal flew from the blunt pick he was using and hit him in the right eye. Before the shift was over, the eye was inflamed and painfully sensitive to light. It became worse in the daylight when he was finally able to come to the surface. The only relief came from keeping the eye covered.
Australian medical officer Lieutenant Goodman shook his head when he saw the eye injury. ‘Sorry’, he said, ‘but you’re going to lose the eye if it doesn’t get proper treatment, and we have no medical supplies… unless….’ He went to his near-empty cupboard. ‘Unless we try this.’ He held up a tube. ‘It’s an ointment, but it’s so far out of date it’s probably lost any effectiveness it had. It’s certainly not an eye ointment, but we’ll try it if you’re willing to take the risk.’
‘Let’s give it a go’, Bodero said. ‘What have I got to lose but an eye?And I’ve seen enough of this place with it.’
Goodman applied the ointment, something he was to do many more times. For a week, there was no improvement, and both doctor and patient almost gave up, but then the pain stopped and the torn cornea started to heal.
‘Well, what do you know’, the surprised medical officer said. ‘I might just patent this remedy.’
The Japanese doctor who had previously rejected Bodero’s internal injuries because they weren’t able to be seen put Bodero on the sick list for the eye injury because he could see this one. Amazingly, the Japanese also paid him compensation for the damaged eye. Nobody could remember any other instance of them giving a prisoner of war injury compensation. He also was given the daily food rations allocated to working men, even though he was on the sick list. The mining company also continued to pay him the miniscule daily amount the prisoners earned for hoking their coal.
‘I still can’t see too good’, Bodero told his mate Barnstable, ‘but I reckon the eye was a stroke of luck. The spell I’ve had off work has given my other injuries a chance to heal.’
The prisoners weren’t the only ones to suffer down the mine. They often saw skips being brought to the surface carrying the corpses of Japanese. The sight of mangled enemy bodies evoked no sympathy, but it was a grim reminder of what could happen to anyone underground.
One day when the prisoners were being transported from the cage to their work, the cable car ran into a rock fall from the roof. It was brought to an abrupt halt and the men were ordered to clear the way before they started work on the coal. As they threw rocks aside, the Japanese prodded the roof with long bamboo poles, dislodging other chunks that were about to fall. It was dangerous, but the Japanese and their workers had become well-trained in dodging falling rock.
The extra work clearing the tunnel was appreciated by the prisoners. It was roomy there, they were able to work standing upright and the delay was time they would have otherwise spent crawling to the coalface for more cramped work.
‘You know, Jim’, Fred Barnstable said, rivulets of sweat coursing down their skinny bodies as they swung their picks, ‘we shouldn’t be too critical of the mine. It’s snowing up top and it’s warmer down here.’
‘Warmer! That’s the understatement of the year’, Jim told him. ‘If hell’s any hotter I’ll refuse to go there.’
Work parties marching from the camp to the mine provided daily entertainment for the local Japanese civilians. Crowds would line the roadside, enjoying the prisoners’ humiliation. A few, mainly women, showed compassion. They’d grasp a marching prisoner’s hand and press a few grains of corn or a couple of peanut kernels into his palm. It was a surprise to learn that not all Japanese had a hatred of the white race.
The Honeypot Ladies showed an interest in the white men’s skeletal bodies. The Honeypot Ladies was the name the prisoners had bestowed on the Japanese women who emptied the contents of the deep latrine trench that ran the width of the camp. They pulled a two-wheeled cart carrying their ‘honey pot’, a huge wooden vat into which they’d ladle the trench’s noisome contents. When the pot was full, they’d haul it out and use the contents as fertiliser on vegetable gardens.
Their arrival always seemed to coincide with the prisoners’ bath time. The coal-blackened men would be in the communal brick bath, almost the size of a swimming pool, and the women would interrupt their ladling to stand giggling and gesticulating at the naked men. Sometimes a Japanese guard would give one of them a push that sent her in among the bathers. There would be much squealing and scrambling, but the Honeypot Lady was in no danger. The prisoners were in no physical shape to take advantage of her.
After their evening meal in the huge mess hall, the men were confined to their quarters. The nights, or days, depending on the shift they were working in the mine, weren’t restful for the exhausted men. Electric lights flooded the glass-walled rooms at all times to enable the guards to check on numbers as they made their rounds. Fleas and bugs also prevented sleep as they feasted on the prisoners’ depleted blood supply.
The fleas and bed bugs, which were enormous, would emerge from cracks in the cane matting and by morning they’d be so engorged with blood they could barely hop, and the prisoners’ bodies would be covered in red, itchy bite marks.
Often, the men’s sleep was further disturbed by guards shaking them awake with the trumped-up charge that they hadn’t left their sandshoes in a neat row at the entrance to the room. Most times the footwear had been deliberately kicked into disarray by an earlier guard on his rounds, but the second guard, who’d be well aware of this, would mete out the snowball punishment. This involved a prisoner being made to hold a snowball in each hand as he stood to attention for hours with arms raised. If the snowball was not held tightly enough, the guard would squeeze the prisoner’s hand to make sure it hurt. The torture was even more painful when it was imposed unjustly for the fictitious sandshoe breach.
The Japanese guards were all young, and had been brainwashed into believing they were a superior race with the right to humiliate lesser people. To them, the white prisoners were lesser people.
The prisoners should have been suspicious when the Japanese told them they could make a garden in the limited space of the camp. They even provided cabbage plants and pumpkin seeds. These were duly planted, and they thrived until winter arrived and the plants disappeared under a blanket of snow.
It seemed to be the end of them, but when the snow melted, the plants reappeared and warm sunshine gave them a new lease of life. In time, they became huge heads of cabbage and large pumpkins. The thought of cabbage and pumpkin soup to go with the rice and tasteless, indigestible saccaline seed was almost too much for the men.
The vegetables were ready to harvest when the Japanese confiscated the cabbages, giving the prisoners only the tough outer leaves. The pumpkins disappeared into the guards’ kitchen and were never seen again.
The Japanese produced some more plants, and suggested the prisoners repeat the process. They did, but this time they made sure they beat the guards to it. The cabbages and pumpkins were only partly grown when they were harvested and eaten raw.
The garden was replanted again, but the Japanese had a guard make a daily count of the juvenile pumpkins on each vine. If one was missing, the prisoners’ rations were cut for two days.
They missed the pumpkin meals, but derived a lot of pleasure from seeing a Japanese guard crawling around the garden, pencil and notebook in hand, counting pumpkins.
In another attempt to supplement their rations, the prisoners pooled any money they had and asked the Japanese if they could buy a couple of suckling pigs.