Donaldson, who was in the know, thought he had an answer. The Japanese lieutenant commanding the camp at the time had, among his own private supply of loot from the world outside, one of the most luxurious and up-to-date radiograms. It stood in a room leading off from his office, where he went from time to time to inspect his horde of treasure ready for shipping home on the day of the victory he confidently expected. He either had one of the most fastidious senses of property in existence or such a pride in maintaining what were obviously also prestige symbols of the highest value to him (like the large refrigerator and of course the gramophone in his store), that he was continuously calling on us to provide technicians to examine them and make quite certain that they were still in good working order.
Donaldson himself, who came from a Royal Air Force unit of signals and knew something about these things, was his favourite choice. I have already mentioned how valuable Donaldson’s gift for getting on with the different peoples of South-East Asia, and in particular with the Japanese, had been to us. It was never of greater value than now. In the course of discussing with him what we needed to put the radio right he said at once, without hesitation:
‘Why, it’s very simple, I can get all these things from the camp commander’s radiogram.’
I remember demurring and saying something to the effect that if he extracted the parts from the gramophone and it did not work at all when next the Japanese commander tried it out, even the Japanese, ignorant as they were in technological things that a Western schoolboy would take for granted, could not fail to discover that some vital parts were missing. Their suspicions, already quickened to a degree we had never experienced before, would erupt, and the camp would be subjected to searches even more intensive than any we had yet known.
Even if they did not discover the missing parts, I dreaded far more what they might uncover in the rest of the camp, quite apart from Max al Kahdri’s secret radio and the other instrument I suspected of being worked by other recent arrivals in our midst. I thought such a search could well have consequences far more dangerous to us than the lack of news of how the war was going.
I would have preferred going to al Kahdri and asking him to supply us with the information we needed, but Donaldson replied to my doubts that he would not be such a fool as to remove the parts we needed from the gramophone without replacing them with our faulty ones. He would merely, he said with another schoolboy grin, ‘effect an entry’ – as the British police term burglary – into the camp commander’s office and when he was sent for, as no doubt one day he would be, by the Japanese commander, he would carefully examine the gramophone and if necessary persuade the commander that some of its parts had deteriorated and needed replacement, and get him to obtain them from the world outside.
This thought obviously pleased Donaldson immensely because I remember his smile of schoolboy mischief and his saying: ‘That way we will not only please the lieutenant but make certain that we have another supply available in case our set goes wrong again.’
So one night the three of us, the New Zealander I have mentioned, Donaldson and I, crept out of our mosquito nets. Donaldson’s net was next to mine, the New Zealander’s was in the corner farthest away but nearer the gates of the camp. His role was to sit at the entrance to the quarters with his feet in a basin of water as if he could no longer endure the pain of neuritis which malnutrition had inflicted on so many of us.
This consequence of malnutrition was known to the troops as ‘burning feet’. It could be so painful that one often saw men kept awake by it, sitting all night long with their feet in cold water in order to relieve the pain. The sight of the New Zealand officer in this position therefore would not have struck any passing guard as unusual. In his position nearest to the gates his particular task was to listen for sounds of any night patrol gathering to enter the camp. Should that happen, he was immediately to get up and walk towards the latrines, pass by me and tap me on the shoulder and then go on to join the twenty-four-hour queue patiently waiting their turn at the far end of the camp.
I myself was to stand in the shadows of the wall immediately outside the room which housed the camp commander’s trove of loot. I had arranged that, in case of danger, I would tap three times on the window-pane and Donaldson would remain hiding in the room until I rapped three times on the pane again. I myself, having given him the first warning, meanwhile would do what the Australian officer had done and join the queue outside the latrines until the danger had passed. Should there be a surprise night search and the whole camp be turned out of their barracks I had undertaken to get the whole group of officers within my room to flock and mill around the incriminating window, and so provide a screen for Donaldson to come through it without being detected by the guard.
There were obvious snags in all these arrangements but it was the best that we could do. To Donaldson’s and my amazement we found the window to the room unlatched. Donaldson raised the window silently, as if he had been a professional burglar all his life, went through it, closed it as silently and vanished from sight.
He was gone for close on half an hour, I think, and it was a long, long half-hour indeed. At first the camp was so silent that I heard nothing but the news of the natural world without: frogs croaking, not in the Greek fashion like the fateful ‘brek-ke-kex-kex’ of Aristophanes, but in the Sanskrit, the original language of the myths and legends that dominate the Javanese imagination to this day, and which was inherited by the islanders some thousands of years before from their Hindu conquerors, the creators of the vast vanished Empire of Modjopait.
By the irrigation ditch I saw the fire-flies come and go in the darkness, like stars through a muslin midnight mist. Above me a shooting star appeared and sank slowly and solemnly down towards the east, on one of the longest arcs of red light I have ever seen, before it too was extinguished. Down in the plains below from time to time I could hear plainly a night-watchman, on duty at the entrance to his frail hamlet of wood and thatch, beat beside some star-filled paddy water a message of ‘all is well’ on the large hollow bamboo gongs used for this purpose. After a while, fainter and further away, I would hear another neighbouring hamlet reply in kind. Indeed nothing could have sounded more peaceful and reassuring and yet the sense of the danger of what we were doing was so acute in me that I found no comfort in it.
I must have been standing there for some twenty minutes, the tension in me mounting, wondering why Donaldson should take so long – although he had warned me that, working in the dark at so complicated a machine, he would inevitably need time – when suddenly the noise of a car approaching the gates at great speed broke the silence. The car drew up at the gates abruptly, the brakes screaming from the friction of the speed at which they had been applied.
A loud ‘Kerei!’ – Attention! – rang out from the guard commanders.
I heard the guard tumbling out hurriedly, forming up outside the gates and slapping the butts of their rifles as they came to attention. This sort of thing had happened before and could mean that either the camp commander had arrived for a perfunctory inspection of his guard to satisfy himself that they were doing their duty or for a blitz search of the camp. On this occasion I immediately feared the worst. At any moment I expected the New Zealand officer, who was in a position to hear and interpret the detail of sound that followed better than I could, to appear and tap me on the shoulder; and then to see Donaldson, who must have heard the sounds as clearly as I did, and was in the most vulnerable position of all, coming through the window with his work uncompleted.