Another important artist in our group was Ray Parkin (see Plate 5), one of the founder members of our arts and crafts faculty at Bandoeng. He was a professional sailor and a warrant officer in the Royal Australian Navy and one of the survivors of the Australian cruiser Perth which, in the company of an American cruiser Houston and a small Dutch destroyer Evertzen, took on the whole of the formidable Japanese invasion fleet in the Sunda Strait on the night of 1 March 1942. This tiny force, crippled already by heavy action against superior Japanese naval forces in the battle of the Java Sea, and with its supplies of ammunition low, fought one of the most heroic naval engagements on record.
Ray Parkin, a quartermaster of Perth, steered the ship throughout the action. He was in fact the last man to abandon the cruiser and did so only when his captain, H. M. L. Waller, who went down with the ship, ordered him ‘to get the hell out of it’. All this is recorded in Parkin’s book Out of the Smoke, which is one of the great stories of war at sea.
I met Parkin at Bandoeng, serenely sketching in water-colours in a large, mixed, multi-racial camp which when we were first marched into it struck Nichols and myself and our compact group of resolute men as singularly disorganized, if not utterly demoralized. From the moment of our first meeting Parkin became a close friend and ally. He too did many portraits and illustrations for our Memorial Book until he was sent away with a party of Australians to work on the infamous Burma-Siamese railway, an experience vividly described and illustrated in his book Into the Smother.
About half a dozen of his Bandoeng portraits and sketches survived the war because they were among those carried by Nicolettes to Manchuria and returned to me afterwards.
None of his portraits are used here because they were of men who played no direct role in the story that follows, but I know of no one more qualified by experience and imagination to grasp what a night of the moon in the spirit of the Japanese meant to starving men completely in their power.
Had I in my possession all the material produced by the arts and crafts faculty of our prison university, this book would have been rich indeed with impressive illustrations, but alas! only a small portion of the work survived captivity. From the beginning of 1943 onwards, as the special Japanese prison administration gained in power and confidence, the conditions of our imprisonment rapidly deteriorated. Our guards became more brutal, our rations steadily diminished, our prisons became more and more congested and our life increasingly uncertain. This melancholy and disturbing decline is to some extent recorded in a guarded prison diary I began to keep on 14 December 1942 and continued until 26 November 1943, a period of nearly a year.
It begins in Afrikaans as follows: ‘Yesterday was my birthday, the first in prison. In the morning I went to Church. In the afternoon a meeting of the trustees of the Memorial Book. Later in the day the rain came down heavily and there was lightning.’
I began it in Afrikaans because I realized that keeping a diary, in however guarded a fashion, was a dangerous thing to do. I thought at first that the Japanese would not know what to make of Afrikaans, but I quickly abandoned the idea because I realized that not knowing would have an even worse effect on our captors than knowing, and would immediately give their suspicious imaginations full rein. My experience had already taught me to fear their imaginations more than their knowledge. I very soon, therefore, switched over into English and kept the diary on the whole confined to recording just enough of fact and statistics, with a slanted and obscure word or two here and there inserted to serve as a spur, I hoped, in years to come, to remembering the full reality of our life in prison.
This diary faithfully records the progressive decline in our dismal fortunes throughout 1943 and the circumstances in November which made me decide that it was no longer either safe to keep a diary or any records on my person.
Earlier in the year, already foreseeing such an end, I had asked Group-Captain Nicolettes, the most senior Royal Air Force officer in our camp, to take some of the Memorial Book material with him when he was transferred from our camp with some Dutch generals to imprisonment at Harbin in Manchuria. He indeed carried the portraits of Donaldson and Cicurel among others in the pack on his emaciated back, out of our camp, and restored them to me some years after the war. They must be among the most widely travelled portraits in existence.
The others were gathered together with my diary, material for our memorial book, and such camp records as we valued, and on the evening of 26 November 1943 they were tied in bundles, wrapped in ground sheets and buried late at night in different places in our camp. As far as I know, only my diary, a small number of illustrations and some copies of Mark Time survived their interment in the dank soil of our camp. The bulk and by far the most precious part of what we had buried mysteriously vanished, even some material which I took the precaution of burying underneath the carcass of a pig which had died that evening. After capitulation, although I myself set a whole company of Japanese prisoners-of-war digging up the soil of our old camp from end to end, neither the skeleton of the pig nor what we had buried underneath it, nor, for that matter, anything else buried anywhere in the camp, could be found.
This to me is a confirmation, slight as it is, of the peril in which we had daily lived, and which can still shake my memory. It shows how much more closely we were watched and informed upon and how, among the mixed population of our camp, we were interpenetrated with spies, to an extent that even my own questioning self, constantly on guard, never suspected. I say this because the pit in which we buried the pig and underneath the pig our valuable consignment of camp documents, also contained a canvas bag full of precious stones which the Chinese merchant whom I mention in the story had confided to me for safe burial. Someone, I am certain, must have informed the Japanese of this fact and so provoked them into looting the grave in secret themselves. If their greed had not conquered their sense of duty, some of us might have been punished for this, surely with death.
On 25 November 1943, already I had noted: ‘Three more people back from Tjimahi [a hospital camp nearby]. They say food situation even in hospital is very bad. They seem to be afraid of a move. Like us they feel their time is up. Mad Harry had a parade for officers which he celebrated by killing cats in their presence. He would throw them high up into the air again and again until they were dead. Don and I had a late night session with our pigs’ (my code for saying that we had been listening in on our secret radio to the news and in particular to an account, I seem to remember clearly, of the American landing in the Gilbert Islands).
The ‘Mad Harry’ mentioned was our troops’ nickname for one of the worst of our Korean guards. I had recorded this incident because in the past, whenever something of importance was about to happen to us, the tension it produced in our guards would seek relief in injury to such innocent animals that might have strayed into the camp and escaped our own daily pot or, if animals were not available, in wrecking such furniture as we had in the camp. Both animals and furniture, I had learnt, were proxies in their imaginations for the prisoners they guarded.
For instance, some weeks before, one of the worst ‘blitzes’ on us had been preceded by this sort of dress rehearsal in which our proxies had been some rats caught by our Korean guards. They had amused themselves torturing the rats, among other ways, by blowing them up with bicycle pumps from behind until they were swollen almost like toy balloons. Laughingly, they would watch the rats stagger painfully around until the release of air brought them relief and enabled them to try and escape, when they would be recaptured, the process repeated and so on again and again until they died. Seeing this, I had known that something evil was in store for us as well.