On the outskirts of Bandoeng we were pressed into an even smaller prison, called the Lands-opvoedingsgesticht, soon to be renamed ‘Landsop’ by the British soldier, with his genius for converting foreign sounds into convenient terms of his own. This prison was a sort of Borstal which the Dutch had built, both as a prison and a reformatory, before the war to hold approximately a hundred and twenty boys of criminal tendencies. Into these minute confines some seven thousand of us were somehow pushed and expected to live until whatever end to the war the Japanese had in mind.
The congestion was so great that even the Japanese had to acknowledge that life inside it would be impossible unless our new prison were treated like the hold of some kind of ship. They provided us with rough timber, so that in every room we could build layers of wooden bunks on which we slept in narrow tiers from floor to ceiling. But perhaps the fact which illustrates best the density of our concentration is that the men stood in queues twenty-four hours a day all the time we were in this prison for their turn at the latrines, and we had to have on duty constantly a chain of officers and men passing buckets of water filled from an open irrigation ditch, which fortunately ran through the middle of our new camp, so that the latrines could be continually flushed with water. They did this so effectively that the latrines were almost the cleanest part of our prison. Had we not insisted on this as one of the most urgent of our self-imposed disciplines, I am certain we would have had epidemics of diseases that would quickly have deprived the Japanese of the necessity of inflicting on us the end which more and more they appeared to have in mind.
Despite the disorder caused by the move, my link with Kim still remained unbroken for some time longer because of two factors. First, the Chinese with whom he appeared to have such close contact in the world outside seemed to have a trusted representative among the persons who were still allowed to bring increasingly minute quantities of food to sell at the prison gates – unbelievable as this may sound to anyone without experience of the cupidity of our Korean guards and the urge of the under-paid Japanese prison staff to make money out of the commissions and bribes which they got for this pathetic traffic. Somehow, whenever there was anything of importance to impart, this person managed to pass it on to me through the young Royal Air Force officer who organized and supervised the purchase of food on our behalf. Without him this link could never have been maintained.
He was a Scot, Pilot-Officer Donaldson, and a person in whom I had complete confidence. I had met him on the first day of my release from my cell by the Japanese into a general prisoner-of-war camp, an occasion already some three years in the past. He was one of a small band of men under Nichols who had refused to join tamely in the general surrender to the Japanese ordered by the Commander-in-chief of the Allied forces, General Ten Poorten. The General’s own armies in contrast to his small air force and navy offered little resistance to the Japanese invasion. Only one real engagement had taken place on the island, and that was by the British, mostly Australians, aided by an American battery of the famous French 75 guns from Fort Worth. In the spirit which had prompted this stand against hopeless odds, Nichols and his men had made a determined effort to join me and the Australians already with me in the jungles of the Sunda land, in the far west of the island. They had unfortunately run into a Japanese patrol on the way, and had had no option but to surrender. Treated as men in the Japanese category of ‘dangerous prisoners’, they were thrust into the part of an old civilian prison, at a place called Soekaboemi, previously reserved by the Dutch for condemned criminals. There I was forced later to join them.
I do not know where in Scotland Donaldson was born, but he had the qualities of a Robert Louis Stevenson Highlander. He even looked the part. His build, for instance, was that of a man of the Bens, broad-shouldered, of medium height, immensely strong, as full of energy and temperament as Alan Breck ever was. He was good-looking in a truly Gaelic way, with thick black hair, blue eyes and a fair complexion; he was absolutely fearless, a born buccaneer in the better sense of the word, and with an imagination and spirit which thrived on risk. Even if somewhat unpredictable at times, he was passionately loyal to those to whom he had committed his affections. Moreover, in the course of a long period of service in Malaya, he had had the imagination to see how important it was to learn to speak fluent Malay. This was, I believe, just another manifestation of his innate capacity for getting on with Oriental races of all kinds, from the over-sensitive Malays and Javanese to impossible Koreans and complicated Japanese.
He himself was too independent and complex a character to conform completely to service discipline and conditions, and was therefore never a favourite of senior service officers; but both Nichols and I liked him from the start. I trusted him implicitly, and realized that all the qualities which I have mentioned could make him an inspired smuggler. From the start we had put him in command of our camp organization for getting in food from the outside.
We appointed as his chief assistant a young American, who had left the United States soon after the outbreak of war to volunteer for service with the Royal Air Force. He had come to Java as a pilot-officer in a squadron of British Hurricanes. His name was Cicurel, and he was a member of an ancient Egyptian-Jewish family which had considerable commercial interests in the Near East as well as in the United States of America, to which his own branch of the family had emigrated.
This temperamental but indomitable little man, who at an early age had been water ski-ing champion of the United States, seemed to have a natural genius for barter and trade with the sharp-witted Oriental peddlers of food with whom he and Donaldson had to deal. But always under the handicap of having no alternative sources of supply. It was a duty which demanded not only great skill but steady nerves and great courage. Both Cicurel and Donaldson frequently suffered at the hands of Koreans and Japanese, either for incurring their displeasure at the successful way in which they conducted the trading, or just because they were in daily contact and therefore the most obvious targets for any outbursts of spite, bad temper or anger over news of the latest Allied atrocity invented by the Japanese military propaganda machine. Nonetheless, both these young men never failed us. They conducted their part of the little trading allowed us with such skill that, except during the periods of general punishment and fasting inflicted on us from time to time by the camp command, the system survived almost until the end of our captivity. Thanks particularly to Donaldson, who was able to help us later at great peril to himself in another acute crisis, I never lost contact with my Chinese friends outside.
There was one other inestimable link. We had in the camp a wealthy Batavia merchant who, for some reason neither he nor I could ever fathom (except perhaps a suspicion that his sympathies were with the Allies) had been put into a military prisoner-of-war camp. He was Mr Tan: a small Chinese gentleman. Tiny even by the slight Javanese standards of physique, he was one of the most magnanimous and imperturbable spirits I have ever known. I cannot recollect one occasion, however grave, on which he appeared to be in the least put out or in danger of losing his dignity and calm. The respect in which he was held by everyone can be measured by the punctilious manner in which everybody, from the most senior officers to the humblest of privates, unfailingly addressed him – or even referred to him behind his back – as ‘Mr Tan’.