One of them was a large, broad, muscular, shaven-headed man wearing the uniform of a Japanese NCO, his face and thickset neck full of latent and obvious violence. The other figure, in an ordinary private’s uniform, was far smaller, almost delicate. He had a good head of very black hair, a wide mouth and defined cheekbones, and looked very unmilitary beside his rounded and thuggish colleague. There was no ease between them; it was obvious who was in charge.
The smaller man opened up, speaking a heavily-accented, uncertain but quite fluent English. He introduced himself as an interpreter whose job was to assist the NCO of ‘the special police’, as he put it, in his investigation into the ‘widespread anti-Japanese activities’ which had been occurring in the POW camps in the neighbourhood. They knew, he said, that these illegal activities were being directed by officers in the Sakamoto Butai.
The NCO then spoke, or rather shouted in a series of short barks, and the small man began his task of translation. Their styles of delivery were, and remained almost to the end, very different: the NCO relishing his own aggression, assuming my guilt and utter worthlessness in the contemptuous way he put his questions, the younger man speaking like a mechanical conversational voice doing its duty, with almost no inflection of interest. He seemed to be a little afraid of the NCO – or perhaps I just hoped that he was even a little as afraid as I was. He now interpreted a long speech in choppy, menacing segments. This introduction was more or less to the effect that ‘Lomax, we have already examined your colleagues Thew and Smith. They have made frill confessions of the extent of their activities in making and using wireless sets in the Sakamoto Butai. They have frilly admitted circulating news sheets. Lomax, they have already told us all about the part you have played, about the collections of money to buy parts from Bangkok for the radios and about your passing on the news to other camps. We are satisfied you are guilty. Some of your fellow POWs have used wireless sets before and they have been caught and executed. Lomax, you will be killed shortly whatever happens. But it will be to your advantage in the time remaining to tell the whole truth. You know now how we can deal with people when we wish to be unpleasant.’
You will be killed shortly… A flat neutral piece of information, almost a conversational remark. I had just been sentenced to death by a man of my own age who looked as if he were a little detached from his surroundings, and who seemed completely indifferent to my fate. I had no reason to doubt him.
I knew that I was the only Royal Signals officer for miles around Kanburi and it had already occurred to me that with my obvious knowledge of communications, they would be particularly suspicious of me; so the indictment delivered by the interpreter was as unsurprising as it was unanswerable.
The questioning started. They wanted to know about my family history: detailed and precise questions about my grandparents and other relatives, my mother and father and their occupations. The room was close, and I was already very tired and sore. The pointlessness of what we were doing began to overwhelm me. Here I was trying to explain the migrations of my Lancastrian and Scottish ancestors to a couple of uncomprehending Japanese men in a Siamese village.
They wanted to know about my work before the war, my schooling, my war record up to the capitulation of Singapore in February 1942. From that date my movements were questioned in really minute detail; when they finally placed me in the Sakamoto Butai, after several hours of halting progress, I had to account for almost every hour of my time.
They also asked about my spare-time activities before the war. I tried to explain my interest in trains and railways, tried to make them understand some of the fascination of living in the country that had started the industrial revolution. The young interpreter’s face was a cold mask of bafflement. They exchanged staccato comments about my response, but moved on.
They moved to larger and, given the circumstances, more abstract questions: Who is going to win the war? Why? Where will the Allied landings be? Then they would shift suddenly to specifics, asking me why we wanted to get the radio news, demanding to know why we could not accept the news given in the English-language Japanese bulletins and in the local newspapers. There would be a banal question like ‘Do you enjoy eating rice?’ And so on, and on, and on again.
Their real interest was anti-Japanese activities in the camp, and still more in any contacts we might have had with resistance forces or agents outside it. They hammered away at this endlessly, and I could see that for them I was a piece in some crazed jigsaw puzzle that linked Singapore, Malaya, Thailand and elsewhere – wherever they were having trouble or there was resistance to their occupation. I knew that to give even the appearance of having such contacts would be absolutely fatal; and of course we had none.
They tried to cross-check whatever they had already got from Smith and Thew, which was not much, so they wanted to know the date on which we first received the radio news, what the items were, and how often we worked the set. I tried to be vague, noncommittal and prolix all at the same time. Then, once, the interpreter let slip that Fred and Lance were in fact still being kept somewhere in the building. It was a brief surge of hope to know that they were still alive.
Where I knew they knew something, I gave them straightforward corroboration, but of course this in turn allowed them to produce a list of apparent discrepancies between my version and previous versions of events, and so it started all over again.
I thought during one suffocating, endless session – it may have been in the afternoon of the second day, though I had lost all sense of time by then – that introducing a diversion might be a good tactic. There was something earnest and studious about the young interpreter, something in the way he seemed to relish – or was I imagining this? – our exchanges about British life and culture. I found it hard to tell because I loathed his endless sing-song questions, his dreadful persistence and smug virtuous complicity with what they were putting me through; I was beginning to feel that he and I had been in this room for months But I asked him anyway to tell me something about the Japanese educational system during some exchanges about my own education, to which they had returned, as though the clue to the crumbling of their imperial ambitions could be found in the teaching of the Royal High School. He volunteered some account of his own schooling, and we had an interesting little chat about language teaching. At that moment, and there were others, he became a hated intimate, a sort of lifeline – simply because we could share a language and a moment of curiosity about each other.
The Kempei NCO slowly became suspicious and began to interrogate the interpreter, who reminded me that it was he who was supposed to be asking the questions. The interpreter was simply meant to be a channel of communication, and when it got blocked or distorted the NCO would shout at him too. Although I felt that the interpreter was in some way a human being like me, I hated them both, hated the interpreter more, because it was his voice that grated on and that would give me no rest.
They were obsessed with radios, of course, but waited a long time before introducing the subject of transmitters. Then they went at me. ‘Did you have a transmitter? Tell us how you would make a transmitter. What materials would you need? If you made a receiver why didn’t you make a transmitter? Lomax, could 3;c»m make a transmitter? You made a transmitter. Tell us what you transmitted.’ It was in these questions that they revealed their extreme ignorance about radio equipment in general, wanting to know how a simple receiver could be converted into a transmitter, for example – which can’t be done.