Accordingly Mad Harry’s behaviour, and the news brought in from Tjimahi, must have decided me that the end of our ‘golden age’ had come, because my last entry on 26 November begins: ‘This is my last entry because I can no longer afford to ignore the signs. I believe that we may be moved at any moment to Batavia and from Batavia, Heaven knows where. A definite phase of our lives as P.O.W.s has come to an end. I wish this could have been a franker document. I do not think anyone could picture from it how humiliating our treatment has been, how in a land of plenty, had it not been for our own efforts, we would long since all have been dead of malnutrition. If our own side had been beaten in this war, I do not think we would have lived. We are lucky to be alive still. We have had no chivalrous consideration ever from our captors but – something of this but may be in this diary – I do not know.’
There follows a farewell message to my wife and family, and a request to them not to forget that we had fought a good war in a good cause and the remark that ‘our imprisonment has taught us all the more how good our cause is’.
I go on then to say that a typical Japanese prisoner-of-war evening is gathering. I observe that in the officers’ lines one of the most dreaded of the Japanese warrant officers, Gunzo Hoshino, to whom I gave the nickname of ‘Star of the Field’, and a couple of his Eurasian informers, were conducting a search of the Dutch quarters.
I end the diary: ‘It is raining very hard – the thunder clouds are sitting on the top of Tangoeboehan-praauw [the mountain called “ship upside-down” mentioned in the story]. My address is 13, Cadogan Street, London sw3. Will anybody who might find this diary please return it to Ingaret Giffard there.’
By some miracle, the mildewed little book was recovered by an officer of the Indonesian Nationalist Forces who knew me and returned it to me, together with some of the illustrations used in this story.
Prologue
I would not have thought it possible I could ever have forgotten that an anniversary of the utmost significance for me fell on 6 August. Indeed, so profound a part of my memory had it become that hitherto, without any conscious help from me, my eyes had only to see that dateline on my morning newspaper and the memory of what it all had meant in my own life and the life of our time would erupt like a volcano in my imagination. And yet, there it was: I had forgotten the date until the moment I walked into that television studio in America at about six o’clock in the evening of Wednesday, 6 August.
I was due to be interviewed about Africa in some current affairs programme. All day long my mind had been trying to concern itself with my native continent. It is a concern which normally comes to me easily. Yet, on this occasion I had been aware of some unusual resistance in my mind to directing itself to the problems of Africa, no matter how urgent they appeared on the surface. The meaning of this resistance only became clear when I arrived in the studio and saw the man who was already in the process of being interviewed on the same programme for the ten minutes before I myself had to appear. He was Japanese, a man I guessed to be about seventy years of age, with close-cropped grey hair. He was small even for a Japanese who had been born in the time of the great Emperor Meiji, when the Japanese on the average were smaller than they are today, and his smallness somehow was emphasized not only by the contrast with the tall, robust young American who was interviewing him, but also by his desperate struggle to speak English on a subject so obviously charged with emotion for him. The smallness struck me as singularly poignant, almost as if it were universally symbolic and personified how small and in need of help we all are in the face of the great reckonings life keeps on forcing on us, like the one of which he was trying to speak. He and his interviewer sat there on a raised platform in front of me – the most powerful lights of the studio focused on them. By contrast the greater part of the studio was in darkness, silent except for the sibilant and limping English of this shrivelled little Japanese gentleman, and, as the sight of him brought this volcano of which I have spoken to the boil in my imagination, I felt almost as if I were looking not at a scene contrived in the physical here-and-now so much as something lit by some strange ectoplasmic glow in the innermost chamber of my own mind. I do not know which was the greater: the violence of the eruption that followed or the feeling of personal dismay which accompanied it, since if I could forget, how could anybody else ever be expected to remember that day as I had known it? It was, of course, the anniversary of the dropping of the first atom bomb on Hiroshima, and the young American interviewer was extracting, with skill and delicacy, from the little old Japanese gentleman his experience of that great and terrible day.
He was, he said, a doctor. Both he and his wife were Christians. He was at work in his surgery and his wife was in the Japanese equivalent of a drawing-room, sitting at her harmonium. He could hear her playing a Christian hymn – no, he no longer remembered which particular hymn it was because his mind was on medical things and he heard it only in snatches. In any case, the shock of the horror that followed had been so great that to this day he found it difficult if not impossible to remember what had happened immediately before. Besides she had not been at the harmonium long when the bomb fell. She and his four children in other parts of their house were killed instantly; he, miraculously, was spared.
He said this with a nervous sort of smile, which I doubt if anybody else who noticed it understood, but which moved me almost to tears. It was the kind of smile which comes almost by reflex to the Japanese, who attach so much importance to good manners, in order that it should lighten for others the impact of the news of any personal tragedy which they may have had to impart. My long experience of this remarkable people has taught me that, the greater the tragedy, the greater the compulsion to make light of it before the world. I stood there then for some seven more minutes while he was made to tell in great detail his experience, from the moment the bomb fell to what he finally saw when he crawled out of the ruins of his own house to look for help in the shattered city outside. The detail needs no repetition here because it has all been minutely recorded, is well known, and is the one part of the story told over and over again, to such an extent that it presents itself on the scene of the contemporary mind as it would have been presented on millions of television screens in America that evening as being the full story of that great and terrible day.
As I stood there caught between the turmoil of my own associations with that day and the horror of Hiroshima, it suddenly seemed to me to be important that both Hiroshima and Nagasaki, which followed, were only part of a greater whole and that this whole, as far as I knew, had never been adequately reported. I began to feel that I must hasten to do so before it was too late. The imagination of our time, particularly the imagination of the young who have been born since Hiroshima, know only this part of the story. As a result, we accept, like this young American interviewer – he could have been no more than five at the time of Hiroshima – that this tragic Japanese version is an authentic microcosm of the macrocosm of the whole truth, This aspect suddenly seemed of such overwhelming importance to me that there in the studio I was compelled to immediate action.