‘Who wants it?’ he called.
A fat man was first in with his plate. The cook flipped the steak onto it. ‘What’ll you have with it?’
‘More steak.’
‘Gawd, mate, you’ve got half a Hereford there already,’ the cook growled. ‘Give someone else a go. Who’s next?’
The fat man waddled away. The steak filled his plate and drooped over the edges.
Even though his skinny body seemed to be crying out for nourishment, Jim Bodero hadn’t joined the others milling around the barbecue. He saw the fat man’s helping and felt sad. It would have fed his entire hut on the Burma Railway.
Jim closed his eyes. He was back in 1942. Around him on the hard bamboo sleeping platforms were fellow skeletons, prisoners of the Japanese. Many lay unmoving as death approached, others remained still because any movement shot stabs of pain through their wasted bodies. Ulcers had eaten into their limbs, beatings by sadistic guards had left broken bones and tropical diseases had ravaged their bodies.
The men wore loincloths of canvas or any other scraps of cloth they could find. Their nakedness emphasised the fleshless arms and legs, the bellies that had become empty indentations under xylophone-like ribs, the cheeks that were dark caves into which eyes had sunk.
They were all starving. The Japanese needed a railway built to provide a supply link between Burma and Siam, and the skeletons were the workforce, slaving in scorching heat from daylight into the night, fed a daily fistful of rice with an occasional stale Indian army biscuit and a morsel of rancid fish. The rice, dotted with weevils killed by the lime the Japanese added when they found that it was infested, turned a smelly yellow-green mess when it was cooked, but apart from a rat or two or the occasional bird, it was all there was to eat. And starving men couldn’t be fussy.
Food was a fantasy for everyone, especially Peter Murphy.
Jim Bodero, his eyes closed, could see him lying there rubbing the sunken hollow beneath his protruding rib cage.
‘Back home right now, I’d be getting stuck into a medium-rare an inch thick, with lashings of onions and creamy mashed spuds’, Peter was saying. And I’d be washing it down with an ice-cold frothy.’
Peter ducked as someone threw the remnants of an army boot.
‘Bloody hell, Pete, cut it out will ya?’ the thrower wailed. ‘I haven’t tasted steak since Moses played full-back for Jerusalem.’
At that time, they’d been prisoners for nineteen months and beef was a distant memory, but now that Peter had started them all reminiscing about food, they couldn’t stop. They talked of the pie, green with mould, they’d eaten after finding it in a deserted house when Singapore fell, the rissoles they’d made out of a bucket of yak blood, the rotten horsemeat crawling with maggots they’d scooped off before eating it.
Jim was brought back to the present by a plate thrust under his nose and a man’s voice saying, ‘Here, mate, have a go at this.’
A huge t-bone steak, sizzling in its juices, filled the plate.
Jim took the steak, but knew he couldn’t eat it. Like every other prisoner, he’d dreamed of the sumptuous meals he’d have when he got back to Australia, but when he did finally get home, his stomach, shrunken by years of starvation, refused to accept much food. He ate like a sparrow, and remained skin and bones.
Jim looked at the steak on his plate. No man needed that much.
The wind blew a sheet of newspaper towards him that had been brought to light the barbecue and he picked it up. He couldn’t get out of the habit of saving paper. Scraps of it had been valuable on the railway.
A headline caught his eye: ‘Japanese Buy Huge Queensland Beef Property’.
Another one! That’s the third this year, Jim thought sadly. He could hear the Japanese guard telling him, ‘Japan will own Australia, even if it takes a hundred years.’
Now, piece by piece, they were buying the land he and his mates had fought to save. It made a mockery of their wartime suffering.
Jim pushed the plate away, sick in the stomach.
He wished Peter Murphy was here. He’d have plenty to say about this.
However, Peter wasn’t available for comment.
He lay in a shallow grave beside the Burma Railway, having starved to death.
POSTSCRIPT
BY CHILLA GOODCHAP, A POW MATE
Jim Bodero died in Lismore in northern New South Wales on 28 January 1991. He never regained his health or his weight after his release following years as a prisoner of war. When he died, he was still the walking skeleton he’d been when the atom bomb that was dropped on Nagasaki brought about his freedom.
I was a medical orderly attached to his work party in the coalmines of Japan, and had direct contact with him until the end of hostilities in 1945.
For about eleven months, he worked seven days a week as a coalminer at Sendryu on the island of Kyushu. Although his health deteriorated badly, the Japanese allowed no food rations for sick prisoners of war. To exist, he had to continue working to obtain the two small cups of rice that were issued to the prisoners daily.
Jim was injured in a mine collapse and suffered damage to his eye and body. As the medical staff had no supplies with which to treat patients, his frame and nervous system were badly affected, and he became a frail walking skeleton, but he was forced to continue working down the mine.
After the war, he returned to Rockhampton, where before enlistment he and a partner had operated one of Central Queensland’s most prominent dairy farms. His health prevented him from continuing in this field.
Still painfully thin and suffering his agony in silence, he returned to his original trade of newspaper linotype operator. Later, he was to move to Lismore to ply his trade with the local newspaper. He lived in Lismore until his death.
Jim Bodero had never smoked when I first met him, but he took it up on the way to Japan in the Japanese hellship Awa Maru, the only ship in the convoy to reach its destination.
Crammed into the hold for six weeks while the ship weathered numerous torpedo attacks from American submarines, Jim turned to the smoking habit, as did I and many others. Who could blame us?
During two years as a POW working on the railway line in Burma, he suffered extensively from beriberi, malaria, dysentery, pelagra, tropical ulcers and skin diseases. Jim Bodero copped the lot. I was astounded that he lived for as long as he did. His will to live was amazing. Uncomplaining, he endured so much pain.
Repeated warnings to give up smoking had no effect. I think the habit gave him some solace from his ailments.
Jim Bodero’s experiences as a prisoner of war transformed the athletic healthy frame of a sportsman and infantryman into a shadow of his former self, a thin, frail man who was destined to die regardless of his stubborn determination to live.
Copyright
First published in Australia in 2018 by Big Sky Publishing Pty Ltd as The Hell Pits of Sendryu
First published in Great Britain in 2018 by
Pen & Sword Military
An imprint of
Pen & Sword Books Ltd
Yorkshire - Philadelphia
Copyright © Jim Brigginshaw, 2018
ISBN 978 1 52674 010 6
eISBN 978 1 52674 011 3
Mobi ISBN 978 1 52674 012 0
The right of Jim Brigginshaw to be identified as Author of this work has been asserted by him in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.