We walked back to our quarters in Changi. For over a month I regained a measure of freedom and space, but Selarang had been a watershed. It was an important twist in the spiral of capitulation and cruelty. Nothing was ever quite the same again. Then on 25th October, after watching thousands more men leave for what we were now certain was a vast railway project, I joined the exodus myself.
I was ordered into a covered goods van with about twenty-five other men, the big door of the van open for air as we rolled through the vivid green and mud of the fields. Occasionally we would pass through miles of that depressing neatly-planted rubber. We sat on the steel floor or on our kit, talking and dozing. The train rumbled north up the west coast, with occasional stops for what we coyly termed ‘essential purposes’, and as we crossed over into Siam on the east coast the beaches came into view. Out in the water were chimneys of rock covered with greenery standing erect like great mouldy teeth.
On our slow journey up that neck of land twice as long as England, I read Olaf Stapledon’s essay in prophecy Last and First Men, written in 1930. Its oratorical flights of scientific fantasy were hard going in that hot, crowded wagon, but Stapledon’s vision of global conflict ending in ‘a crescendo of radio hate, and war’, of Europe destroyed and of a cycle of Dark Ages, was full of strange premonitions. He wrote the book in the person of one of the Last Men, speaking across the ages to us in our chaotic century in a voice of warning, at the moment when the earth is doomed by the radiation of a ‘deranged star’. It was easy to imagine apocalypse in those years, but living it was turning out to be painful and squalid.
At Prai station, when we halted for food, I went up to look at the engine and discovered that it was a Japanese class C56 locomotive. I knew a little about it; knew it had been built in Osaka, and that it would have had to be altered to the narrower metre gauge for service on the tracks of Malaya and Siam. The Japanese were clearly here to stay, if they were shifting their trains to their new empire. I found myself, despite my aching limbs and tiredness, despite the grinding uncertainty about where we were going, admiring the quality of the engineering and the finish of the big engine with its smoke deflectors around the front of the boiler, and its six magnificent driving wheels. I couldn’t deny my fascination even now.
On a long stretch between Sungei Patani and Alor Star, in the north west of Malaya, I realized that I needed a latrine very urgently. My purpose was becoming extremely essential. We had not got so much as a bucket in our wagon. I told my immediate neighbours, and within minutes I was being held out of the open door of a moving goods wagon by four British Army officers while I relieved myself. I was not a hearty physical person, and this public intimacy was unbearably embarrassing. I still remember it as the most undignified experience of my life.
After a journey of more than a thousand miles from Singapore, the train ran into Ban Pong station. We were ordered to disembark, horribly stiff. I was now a railway man whether I liked it or not.
Ban Pong was a big village which had the merit, for the Japanese Army, of being the closest point on the Siamese railway system to the coastal plain of southern Burma, more than two hundred miles away over the mountains. It had become the nub of the planned new Japanese railway system, connecting Singapore with Bangkok and on to Phnom Penh, Saigon, Hanoi and China. All these lines would be linked up to Burma, and ultimately to India. The village was now a boom town, with extensive camps and hutments, its railway station jammed with trains, the river clogged with boats. Nearby at Nong Pladuk there were sidings, shunting engines, strange four-wheeled bogies and a lot of activity around the station.
So much became clear to us as time went on. At first, all we saw were open-fronted shops in buildings made of teak and mahogany, attap huts and stone colonial houses. Children and chickens ran about the streets, small elegant women in bright clothes tended little stalls piled with vivid red and green chillies, mangoes and pawpaws. We passed one such market under some trees near the station. Ban Pong seemed to have one long main street, with some other streets zigzagging off it. On the outskirts were the usual cultivated areas, patches of wild scrub, and the forest.
We were marched along a road for a little way. There was a camp of long, low huts of attap, and it was obvious even from the road that the end of each hut sloped down into a muddy lake of floodwater. The far end of each hut must be a stinking malarial pool. We were allocated among these huts, in which men crowded into the higher parts, their sleeping spaces reduced to a couple of feet, in order to get away from the water. This was named, with deadpan banality, the Wet Camp. It was obviously a lethal place.
After a few days, a group of about a hundred of us were sent a quarter of a mile away to another camp. This turned out be a workshop, staffed by Japanese mechanics and engineers, and we would be assisting them with repairs. It was a respite for us.
There were four officers in our group: Major Bill Smith, Captain Bill Williamson, a lieutenant called Gilchrist and myself. There was also a senior warrant officer, Sergeant-Major Lance Thew of the Royal Army Ordnance Corps.
We were not an especially well-knit group. Smith and Gilchrist were much older than us, members of the Straits Settlement Volunteer Force, raised from among the planters and merchants of Singapore and their employees. Many of them played brave parts in the fighting, but there was always a certain reserve between them and the regular army, a feeling that their enjoyment of the good life had made them careless about the defence of Singapore, and I never found much in common with these two with whom I was now forced to share a hut.
Major Smith had been a low-grade Colonial Service officer and was the kind of character whose lack of intelligence is cruelly punished in extreme conditions. A tall, angular figure, he had difficulty understanding what was happening to him, and was excluded instinctively from any decision-making. We took to calling him ‘Daddy’. Gilchrist was a very small person in his fifties, and had no worthwhile military experience or other skills; he was one of those men who in the harsh conditions of captivity could quickly and unfairly be judged not much good at anything.
With Bill Williamson I hit it off much better. He was a pleasant, unassuming and very competent person, and acted as the camp adjutant. He got things done, and when I saw he was learning Japanese I knew we could get along. He lent me his Japanese grammar and helped me to identify some of our gaolers’ basic vocabulary as they walked past our hut or shouted at us in the open areas of the camp. I made sure that Williamson and I were in adjoining bed-spaces.
Sergeant-Major Thew was an extremely capable technician, for whom the army was merely another outlet for his lifelong passion for mechanics. He had a little radio shop back in Sunderland, and he made and repaired radios for the Ordnance Corps before his capture. He was well built, a powerful looking man, and had a scarred face, but he had acquired the scar in a wartime accident and the streetfighter’s appearance belied his other-worldly character. He loved the craft of radio telegraphy, and dreamed of radios as I did of trains. He was an extraordinary and luckless man.
Our single long hut could hold about a hundred men and was little more than ingenious tents made from local vegetation: bamboo and attap, a big leaf-palm, tied together with a rope-like creeper. The floor was trodden earth, which became hard and solid, but under each bed-space was still raw clay, which sprouted even in the dark and weedy things poked up through the planks of the bed. The cool dark spaces also sheltered wriggling and crawling life, of which the most terrifying were scorpions and snakes. Williamson and I used to walk around the camp, talking about books and languages, and I once idly tugged on a creeper hanging from a tree; the snake I found myself holding was luckily some harmless python.