In order to encourage in particular this vital sense of continuity in our prison camp, our arts and crafts faculty was charged with the duty of collecting material for making a memorial book, which we intended to publish at the end of our imprisonment. Dutch, English and Australian artists were encouraged to draw and paint anything which they thought memorable, for illustration in the book. The portraits and pencil illustrations in this book are all part of the work they did.
So Plate 1, the portrait of Wing-Commander W. T. H. Nichols, was done by Sid Scales, a New Zealand officer in the Royal Air Force and a Catalina reconnaissance pilot in South-East Asia. He was an unusually gifted draughtsman with a particular aptitude for caricature. This portrait of Nichols was one of a series of cartoons he did for us under the heading of ‘Campicatures’.
The portraits of Cicurel and Donaldson, as well as the pencil sketch, were done by a Dutch artist, a private in the Dutch Colonial army called Kees van Willingen, who was a member of our prison faculty and a person to whom we owed much. Van Willingen and Scales between them did portraits of everybody who was of any interest and meaning to our life in camp, with the exception of myself. In fact I am the only senior officer of our Bandoeng group who was not drawn.
As the officer responsible for all this side of our life in camp, despite all their urging, I refused to have my own portrait done. I had no rational reason but only an instinctive motive for my refusal – a feeling that the more ‘non-personal’ I was about my role in camp, the better I would be able to perform it. Looking back, it seems to me, I feared that having my portrait done would be putting myself and what I was trying to do in a more egotistical dimension than the one in which I saw my role. There is therefore no contemporary portrait of myself available. The nearest I could get to this period in time was to use the photograph of myself which appears last of the plates. It was taken some two years after the war, when I was on my way back from my post as military attaché to the British minister in Java, to report to the War Office and the British Government in London.
Plate 6, ‘Al Kahdri’s secret radio’, is a snapshot given to me by Max al Kahdri some months after the end of the war. Although I have called it ‘Al Kahdri’s secret radio’, he was not the chief person concerned with it. The inspiration of the group of gallant young officers who made this radio and ran it so successfully in camp came, if I remember rightly, from a young Dutch fighter pilot who had been shot down in an air battle over Malaya and had been badly burned. I regret that I cannot remember his name and give him personal credit for what his group accomplished.
This radio set, unlike ours, was built into two Dutch military water flasks cut vertically down the centre and hinged at the bottom. In the daytime the earphones were dismantled, removed and safely hidden away in the camp so that if they were discovered they would have looked like some sort of scrap left behind by the Dutch before capitulation. The top halves of the flasks were then clamped back into their normal position and restored to their canvas containers.
We ourselves, in evolving our own secret radio, had gone through this phase and built a radio in field flasks, but had quickly abandoned the method when I learned from a secret source that a Dutch working party on its way out from Java had been searched before boarding their ship. A radio was found in their field flasks and both the owners of the flasks and the officer in charge had been decapitated for what the Japanese regarded as one of the most serious crimes of which a prisoner could be culpable.
I believe that Max al Kahdri and his group were extremely lucky to have escaped detection, particularly in view of the close watch kept on them by the spies I mention in my story. To this day I am certain that if our imprisonment had continued only a few weeks longer, they too would have been discovered and undergone a similar punishment.
The pencil drawing by Kees van Willingen above the caption: ‘Three more years to go and already the marks of Belsen upon them’, (Plate 4), is a sketch he did one evening in August 1942 of a group of British prisoners-of-war in the old Dutch military gymnasium in which they were barracked and where, despite their emaciated condition, they played pathetically at boxing with each other in the evenings.
The illustration above the caption: ‘One of the writer’s “beloved Aussies”’ (Plate 7), is from the cover of a newspaper we produced every day of our ‘golden age’ and called Mark Time.
This newspaper too was part of our strategy for quickening the feeling of continuity in the minds of our men which I have mentioned, as well as a stimulated sense of belonging, and an awareness of both knowing and being known. It was, too, our best means of keeping at bay the rumour-mongering which had such destructive effects among the Dutch and to which I refer in the story.
In it we published daily translations of the news from the official Japanese newspapers and such journals in Malay as we could obtain. We translated this news in a way which would have appeared faithful to foreigners but to anyone whose language was English would have had quite another content. This content, without our saying so to the camp in general, came from our knowledge of the real news obtained on our secret radio. Knowing the real news enabled us to direct our readers so that they could interpret the Japanese and Malay reports about the progress of the war more truthfully.
With the news went reports on the daily life of the men at their work and of events in the camp. There were also illustrated magazine supplements filled with short stories, feature articles, poems and essays about the world without and the life from which our men from all over the Commonwealth had come. As the supplies of paper left behind by the Dutch were consumed, all our writings were increasingly produced on Japanese lavatory paper.
I regret that I do not remember the name of the first editor of Mark Time. He was with us only for a very short while and was not one of my or Nichols’s group, but I remember him well as a person – a Yorkshireman and a gunner – a young man of character with a voice that seemed to ring straight out of Shakespeare’s England. When he left us with the first working party to be sent away from Java, the editorship was taken over by an Australian officer, Pilot-Officer Webb, a professional journalist. Webb from the start ran Mark Time superbly, with the help of a Royal Air Force corporal, now Group-Captain, Michael Dyer, who had a lively gift for writing. When Dyer too left us in a working party for Japan, Webb carried on Mark Time brilliantly with various helpers until its ‘untimely’ end.
We called the paper Mark Time because of a joke I made at the first meeting I had with the men who helped me to organize all these activities in the camp. Someone at this meeting had remarked how in Java there were apparently no seasons and how not only life in prison but nature itself seemed to stand still. I had commented: ‘Yes, time in Java reminds me very much of Lloyd George’s description of Ramsay MacDonald’s behaviour as a statesman. Lloyd George, in the British House of Commons, rebuked MacDonald one day with the remark that “the honourable member for Lossiemouth – Ramsay MacDonald – reminds me of nothing more than a person marking time with sufficient agility to give the appearance of a man moving forward”.’ There was a laugh and the Yorkshire gunner suggested instantly that we should borrow from Lloyd George and call our paper Mark Time,