If anyone wanted to walk out of the camp, there was very little to stop them, and we had soon explored the whole area. Dense feathery bamboo covered much of the ground; big fruit trees were so abundant we hardly knew what to do with the fruit – mangos, durians, pawpaws. Beyond us to the north and west you could see broken and densely-green hills.
Kanburi and its markets were less than a mile away. We had permission to buy food in the town, so we did not starve, even if the staple diet was still rice and a basic stew. We sometimes bought Siamese delicacies like a fried banana concoction made by peasant women over a pan of hot oil, or dried fish.
It was becoming clearer all the time that the Japanese engineers had decided to take a most difficult route for the railway, and that they were going to stay as close to the river Kwae Noi as possible; this allowed them to supply the labour-gangs by boat. This also meant that they were imposing terrible demands on our comrades, for the limestone hills came right down to the river along this part of its meandering course, and the prisoners and labourers would have to hack through them. Viaducts and cuttings and trestle bridges would be needed to support the track, and would have to be built with axes, saws, spades and hands – and nothing else. We were not sorry to be where we were.
We could still find humanity among our gaolers. In Kanburi there was a very reasonable officer called Ishi, a Cambridge graduate by his own account who, whether or not he had ever been near the fens, spoke excellent English. He liked to talk engineering with us, and even to argue about the war. We could ask him what was happening, and he would give us some official version of events in New Guinea, though he admitted that they had already lost the island of Guadalcanal in the Solomons. One day he said in his anglicized drawl that if we were really so interested in the war why didn’t we take out a newspaper subscription? Thinking that we were victims of some deadpan sense of humour different to our own, we gave him the money he asked for – saved out of our ‘pay’. Within a week, we were taking delivery of the English-language Bangkok Chronicle, by post. This paper was now a Japanese organ, full of disinformation, but by reading it critically we could still learn a lot. One stirring article told how German forces were ‘advancing westwards’ in North Africa, which was a strange way for Rommel to fulfill his objective of capturing the Suez Canal. In this way we followed, with increasing pleasure, the Axis retreats in Russia, Africa and Asia. But we should have been much, much, more careful than we were of an increasingly cornered and baffled enemy. At the workshop camp the Japanese with whom we came most into contact were reasonable men. But not all of our captors were decent human beings caught up despite themselves in a war which had taken them thousands of miles from home. We had a pet kitten in the camp, a seductive black stray, and we doted on it. It was a creature more helpless than ourselves that we could look after. One day it was playing in the dust of the compound when a Korean guard was passing. He unslung his rifle with its long fixed bayonet and skewered the little animal, as though he were going to toast it.
We had a radio working again, and the set now had a few refinements. Fred Smith had become our second radio maker. He had stolen an old mains radio from a house on the Bukit Timah road in Singapore and repaired it back at Changi with a few valves which he had also somehow acquired, and before he was sent up the railway had taken his improvised set to pieces and hidden it to evade the Japanese searches. Lance and Fred were using a modified buzzer from a field telephone set with an old battery as a power supply, and after many hours of tinkering they could tune the set to the right frequency and damp down the sound so that the BBC voices were intelligible.
It was still the same ritual every night: the tense guard around the hut, Thew huddled under his blanket, the earnest discussion of the news afterwards. Unfamiliar names on hazily remembered maps: Kharkov, Kursk, the Trobriand Islands. Lines of victory as well as lines of defeat were now connecting us to the world at war.
The news was passed along by trusted men, through hundreds of different mouths, around the workshop compound and up the miles of railway track to the real death camps. We made sure that one reliable man. Gunner Tomlinson, was placed on the ration train going up the line and briefed him on what to tell the men suffering there. It was difficult for them and for us to distinguish truth from rumour, to know how much to believe. Who knows how the news was distorted as it went along, how truth became legend and vice versa; but having these scraps of information was a wonderful boost to our morale and to our sense of connection with the world we had lost. The radio meant more to prisoners than anyone can imagine: it literally gave meaning and normality to our lives; now we felt we knew what we were living for.
Reading was an important part of that normality and dignity. I had a Bible, an Authorized Version, which I read constantly. Later, I swapped it with an Australian called Harkness for the Moffatt edition of 1926. I still have it: the book survived everything. The once-black boards are worn down to soft grey fibre, with smudges of black ink traceable on it; the spine board is gone. It was underlined almost throughout by Harkness in blue fountain-pen, meticulous neat small capitals annotating every column of every page of every book of the Bible. The widow pages at the end of each book are covered in the same tidy blue script. My own Bible in Ban Pong and Kanburi was annotated in the same way as I read the New Testament consecutively through with a bookmark, again and again.
The Book of Revelation continued to exalt me. ‘I am Alpha and Omega, the beginning and the ending…’ Its vision of apocalypse and of last things, of a world falling apart only to be recomposed in light and happiness, had been at the heart of the Chapel’s belief and of those long sermons at Charlotte Street. Nothing since my arrival in Malaya had persuaded me that disaster could not strike; that empires could not disintegrate; or that human beings could not find themselves helpless in extreme situations.
Perhaps only prisoners held at an enemy’s pleasure, without fixed term or rules, can understand Job’s bafflement with his God:
I am full of confusion; therefore see thou mine afliction; for it increaseth. Thou huntest me as a fierce lion; and again thou showest thyself marvellous upon me. Thou renewest thy witnesses against me, and increasest thine indignation upon me; changes and war are against me.
We could not talk about many intimate things together, but we could talk about religion, even though most of my fellow prisoners were members of the Church of England and I was a member of a Baptist sect. I recall exchanges of passionate letters between young men in the camp exhorting each other to greater spiritual effort. It was a way of encouraging the best in our humanity, and it all helped us to survive.
I still wanted to learn, to improve. I remember making careful notes on Hindustani on green scrap paper, neat columns of vocabulary and tenses; and even collaborating with my friend Williamson to learn some Japanese. We mastered a bit of basic vocabulary, enough to help us catch some of what the guards were saying.
The year 1943 wore on, the balminess of spring giving way to the ovenlike temperatures of summer. We grew almost accustomed to the humidity, the rains, the rich black mud which they created, and we maintained our elusive inner life which the Japanese couldn’t touch. We were now used to walking around half-naked, our thin bodies browned in the sun, and to the permanent itch and rawness of ingrained dirt on the skin that comes when there is never enough soap to go round.
The camp at Kanburi was uncomfortable and oppressive; on the whole, however, it was a ‘good’ camp. Almost all the work was skilled; there were few calls on us for outside work, and relatively little hard labouring; the Japanese in charge were, as at Ban Pong, engineers rather than professional Imperial Army soldiers, some of whom were ideological fanatics, or Korean camp guards who took out on their prisoners the contempt with which they were themselves treated by the Japanese; and we could get to Kanburi and its precious food markets in half an hour.