Answering these questions was easy enough, but trying to make them understand the truth I was telling was a different matter. I was floundering in the gap between their knowledge and mine, and was suddenly the victim of my whole upbringing and culture; for my interrogators were from a relatively backward society. It is hard to imagine this now, after half a century of astonishing technological development in Japan, but in 1943 the Japanese Army was a technically primitive organization, reflecting in this the partly feudal state of its homeland. The two men sitting across the table from me simply did not know enough to judge what I was telling them, which was that the technical problems of making a transmitter were too great, and that no group of prisoners with the pathetic materials available to them could work a miracle.
At some point they brought in a different NCO, the first one having failed to get the answers they were looking for. So far they had not laid a finger on me, but the endless disorienting abuse relayed by the impassive young man, the barrage of ludicrous questions and the deprivation of sleep were bad enough. I sat hour after hour balancing my broken arms on my thighs, longing for rest. It all became a featureless blur, eighteen hours a day from what seemed like early in the morning till well after dark. Once or twice they woke me at night and brought me to the room. The endless wearisome repetition wore on and on. There was so little inflection in the interpreter’s voice, it filled my dreams with its flat repetitive questions.
I thought that I must be the first English person he had spoken to, after his training. His first interlocutor in another language a person he is helping to break down: would this make him feel proud? I hated him more and more. He was the one asking the questions, driving me on. I was sick of the sight of him, I would have killed him for his endless insistence, his boring mechanical curiosity about things I thought he would never understand.
I remembered all that POW talk about the moment when you are absolutely doomed and you take one of them with you. It was easier said than done with two broken arms, but it came to me all the time now and I wanted to do it. It was the interpreter I would have tried to kill.
I could not spin them a yam, of course, or go into complete fantasy because I feared their violence when they found me out. I did not know for sure what they knew, only what they wanted to know; my task was to give them sufficient information to satisfy them without incriminating any other person. You have a fraction of a second in which to think up answers and I felt so close to disaster all the time, through one careless word. They wanted to know who our contacts were, how the information was sent up the railway, who we were buying parts from, so I would say that it was a man who wore a shirt without insignia so we could not tell what unit he was in; that it wasn’t me who passed on the information, it was another soldier in another hut whose name I didn’t know; that we left a note outside our hut and never saw who picked it up.
I was trapped. I did not think at the time that there was anything heroic about refusing to give information, or the names of my friends, but I was certainly stubborn, and perpetually vigilant. I had to say something, and yet if I had given the slightest indication of the membership of the wider network they could have rolled it up, torturing each man to reveal his contacts. Gunner Tomlinson would have been forced to reveal the names of the men to whom he gave the edited news-bulletins, and these innocent Hsteners to the BBC at fourth hand made to suffer. So far, I seemed to be the only one in our group being questioned in such detaiclass="underline" I was in the net because they thought that the Royal Corps of Signals was the organizer of all communicative evil.
It is a strange feeling, being sentenced to death in your early twenties. It made me feel relaxed, in a strange way, to know that I was living on borrowed time. Yet day after day the psychological torment continued. With Pomeroy and Howard in mind, I did not expect any other outcome except – at best – a few Japanese soldiers facing me in the forest, being tied to a post, then a volley. It occurred to me that my family would never be able to find my grave.
They left me my imagination, and it was a worse tormentor than they could ever be. I expected death, but had no clear image of an ending that would make sense to me. I was now living in a world without rules – they could make up their own, and there were no grids or points of reference at all. The world I knew was one in which regularity was almost sacred, a world of predictable and marvellous organization; arrivals and departures were significant, but ultimately controllable events. Mine was a world in which all kinds of communication were revered and I had become dedicated, in my own way, to improving and understanding it. All this had been burst apart by violence. Communication and movement between places had fallen into the service of horror in the place where I found myself.
When I was not being questioned I lay in that cage. We had not been allowed to wash or shave since we arrived here, and I was now filthy. My cage was worse. I was not allowed to visit the latrine at night, and we were living on a rice diet. I think it was Slater, in the next cage to mine, who was not being interrogated very much, who badgered the little interpreter as he passed his cage and persuaded him that it was not good for them or us that we should have to foul our mugs and cages. We were eventually given closed lengths of bamboo to pee into during the night. But I never saw the interpreter outside that hot wooden room. Slater and I could not compare notes because of the constant presence of the guard; in any case, the less we told each other the better we knew it would be.
There was no light at night and I just lay across the floor of the cell, unutterably depressed. I tried to keep count of the passage of time by making scratches on the wall of the cage with a fish bone which I found in the rice. Squadrons of mosquitos from the river droned all round and over me during the hours of darkness and the only possible sanctuary from them was inside the blanket, but that was so suffocating that I had to endure the bites of the insects instead.
In the nightly delirium I had weird exalted visions, lying there in my shorts and shirt with my long-handled spoon for company. My mind was turning into a machine that produced texts, words and images, cutting them up and feeding them to me in disconnected and confused snatches, slogans, scenes, fantasies. I became a screen with bits and pieces unfolding across me. Sometimes the messages had a sound, quite loud; sometimes they were intensely visual. Most of them were religious, or at least came full of immense and comforting majesty; they were based, mainly, on the most exalted literature I knew, which was that of the Protestant seventeenth century: phrases like
At the worst moments time became completely separated from my inner world of pain and sleeplessness. Once I came out into the yard, after what I thought was an all-night interrogation and saw the dawn light oiling the river at the end of the yard, filling our cages with luminous shadow. Then suddenly it went dark and I realized that I had been watching the sun set.