We arranged a security system in the main hut. POWs apparently engaged in reading or doing their woodwork were stationed in strategic places, on the lookout for guards, while Thew worked in his bed-space with assistance from the others. We finished one night, and Thew crawled under his blankets and tuned his primitive detector. He had a pencil in his hand, I remember, and he emerged smiling from ear to ear with some scribbled notes. It had worked beautifully. He had heard the crisply modulated English voice of the announcer cutting through the static.
The radio was primitive, little more than a crystal set, tuned to a single frequency and incapable of sending a signal; it was also a simple masterpiece. It was about 9 inches long by 4 inches wide, and fitted snugly into a coffee tin with a false top, which we filled with ground nuts. It sat there innocently by Thew’s bed, a rusty silver tin can hiding the valves and condensers.
The routine was the same each evening. Prisoners would be detailed to stand around the camp and warn us about the approach of any Japanese, many of them not even being told why they were doing it. Thew would couple the set to the aerial, which was hidden in the rafters, switch on the apparatus and burrow down under his blanket with the headphones on. He was always the operator, since he was by far the best person to deal with any tuning problems if the signals were lost or distorted. The news bulletin took about ten minutes, and he would note down the main items with his pencil as he listened. The precious scrap of paper was handed around a small group afterwards, as Thew dismantled the set and placed it back in its hiding place. I still remember his strong, careful handling of the crude little machine, the tenderness of the true craftsman.
We were stealing back information from our captors. We heard about the victories of the Solomon Islands, of New Guinea and Guadalcanal, and that the Germans had been stopped in Russia and driven back in North Africa. From November 1942, when our radio started operating, we felt again that we might eventually be liberated, that we were on the winning side.
Lance Thew could be a hair-raising innocent. We were free to ramble around the area, and often came upon small Siamese settlements. Thew had stumbled on an ‘empty Buddhist temple’, as he put it wonderingly, with a small gold-leaf-covered statue of Buddha in a dusty niche, and a few dead flowers around the image. He helped himself to the statue: a nice souvenir of Siam. When we discovered it in his bed-space, we ordered him vehemently to return it. We were afraid of some frightening chain of repercussions; less rationally, we dreaded the fixed smile of the deity and the feeling of bad karma that grew around him. I wondered later, and not idly, whether what happened was a kind of punishment for this blasphemy.
Perhaps what Thew did was just another symptom of our devil-may-care attitude, our defiance of the Japanese and of imprisonment. We still felt invincible. Surrender hadn’t brought weakness and submission.
All that winter, however, the long trains kept coming to Ban Pong station, a mile to the west of our workshop. Covered goods wagons packed with filthy, hungry men were pulled from Singapore and unloaded their freight of captive labour. The chugging Japanese and British engines had to use, in place of coal, the local wood, which sent up a characteristic thin and aromatic smoke, and at least twice a week we would see trails of it drifting over the trees when the noise of an arriving train had died away and the locomotive would be standing in the station, quietly expiring. The railway was burning men.
CHAPTER FIVE
THE OFFICIAL MEDIATOR between gaolers and prisoners at Ban Pong was a young Japanese interpreter with an American accent, whom we called Hank the Yank. He was a friendly enough man, and when early in February 1943 he came and told us that we should be ready to move the following day, the instruction caused no more than the usual spasm of anxiety. At least we knew where we were going: Kanchanaburi, a town about thirty miles to the north west of Ban Pong on the new railway’s route to Burma over the Three Pagodas Pass. We were now pretty certain that the railway was destined to reach Moulmein in Burma, where the river Salween empties into the Gulf of Martaban. Relieved, therefore, that we were not being sent much further up the line, from which horrific rumours were already coming back as the work parties went deeper into the wild hilly country of Kanchanaburi Province, we packed our gear with aggressive good humour. We had our cookhouse equipment, our medical stores such as they were, and our bits of ftimiture – the odd stool or home-made table, a little unit of shelving made from discarded boxes: things we had scavenged and put together over the past few months to make our huts orderly and bearable.
We were cocky, taking risks and laughing at our captors because we did not yet fully understand the nature of the risks we were running. Life could still seem the kind of game it always becomes when young men are cooped up together and before they discover they are trapped. We almost flaunted our stolen goods. I had a saw strapped to the outside of a canvas bag which I had acquired before leaving Changi; we had whole workboxes of tools hidden in our baggage: chisels, hammers, screwdrivers, that soldering iron… If it had been a matter of cutting through bars to escape this prison, we would have flown away long ago.
We piled into a lorry driven by a British private soldier. I sat in front, with a Japanese guard between me and the driver. A small convoy of vehicles turned westwards out of the camp, leaving the bamboo fence and the long hut behind us. Halfway to Kanchanaburi, or ‘Kanburi’ as it was universally known among the English prisoners, our driver slipped his foot on the clutch in the sticky heat and bumped into the lorry in front of us. The Japanese guard went berserk, screaming incoherentiy at the driver, pushing him out of the cab. I got down carefully on the other side, keeping my distance but looking at the guard intently.
This was a man full of rage and fear and resentment. No older than me, and outnumbered by his prisoners, he nevertheless had absolute power over us and now he was close to losing control. Retribution would be his, no matter what we did. He went on berating the driver. I thought about the stories, about the nurses’ bodies in the surf at Banka Island. He gripped his rifle so that his knuckles paled under the olive brown of his skin. But he calmed in time, and no blow was struck. He ordered us back into the cab and the lorries moved off again.
Until now, all our contact with Japanese violence had somehow been at second hand, for even the severed heads of the poor Chinese back in Singapore were not a direct threat to us as British prisoners. I had never, until that moment, seen any fellow prisoner threatened with assault, though of course the tracklaying gangs were being grossly abused simply by the nature of their work. It is true that I had seen men forced to stand hour after hour in the full blaze of the sun for some infringement of camp discipline; but no direct physical attack. I felt now that I had come very close to violence that morning. It was hard to tell if this was one unstable man, or whether his nerves were fraying because of some larger calamity; perhaps a foreknowledge of eventual defeat. This weird confrontation on the road, with the green of the big mango trees and nipah palms for a backdrop, seemed a step further towards danger, and away from the shreds of civilization and comfort we were still clinging to. Milepost zero of the railway was just east of Ban Pong. I began to fear that the higher numbers would be negative ones, measured on a brutal new scale.