They brought back the first NCO. He would bang on the table with a big wooden ruler, waving it threateningly to get my attention. ‘Lomax, you will tell us.’ He was becoming more and more aggressive.
One morning I was taken into that room and there on the table, spread out carefully, was my map. It looked so fine, so neatly done. The NCO and the interpreter stood at the window with their backs to me. The room was silent. They left me standing there for a long time.
Then they turned and from both of them came a storm of fake anger. They had obviously known about it all along, but were now trying to shock me. This is a very good map… why did you make it? From where did you steal the paper, where did you get your information? There must be other maps from which you got your information… Where are they? Were you planning to escape on your own? With others? Who are they? And then they kept returning to one thing: who we were planning to meet up with, whether there were villagers who had promised to help us, whether we received instructions by wireless, whether any villagers had radios. Were you in contact with the Chinese? And so on.
The young interpreter was now getting deeper into his role as interrogator, as though he were enjoying it. They were really worked up. I could feel their frustration at being sent around in circles by my stubborn refusals. There was a violent electricity in the air.
They wanted to know why I had drawn the railway on my map. I tried to convince them that I was a railway enthusiast, that I had made the map so that I would have a souvenir of Siam and the railway, and know where the stations were. They could not imagine that this was partly true: I had not lost my instinct to record and list and trace. I spoke to them about trains, loaded them up with information about British standard gauge and how interesting it was to see a metre-gauge railway in operation, and the problems of exporting locomotives designed for one system to countries with different systems. The interpreter struggled to find the right terms, about gauges and boiler sizes and engine weights.
He kept saying to me: ‘You are railway mania?’, meaning, I think, ‘maniac’ or ‘fanatic’, his voice expressing genuine, angry puzzlement, and then he would try to explain this incredible excuse to his colleague, who looked darker and more brutal by the minute.
Suddenly the NCO grabbed my shoulder and pulled me out, half stumbling, the relentless force in his powerful arm, his fingers pinching my flesh where he grabbed my shirt. I remember seeing the yard, and the river bank, and the wide brown river flowing past as we stood there. I remember seeing the cages, and noticing Major Smith and Mac and Slater, and seeing that Thew and Smith were now in cages too. But I was told fifty years later, by someone who should know, that I was first taken to a bathroom, and that there was a big metal tub in it, full of water, and that my head was shoved under the water again and again. I believe my informant, but to this day I can’t honestly say I remember this. Nothing: a strange selective filter allows us to hold some thing back from ourselves. But I do remember the rest.
A bench had been placed out in the open. I was told by the interpreter to lie down on it, and I lay on my front to protect my bandaged arms by wrapping them under the seat. But the NCO quickly hauled me upright again and made me lie on my back while he tied me to the bench with a rope. My arms were loose. The questioning recommenced. The interpreter’s voice: ‘Lomax, you will tell us why you made the map. You will tell us why you made a map of the railway. Lomax, were you in contact with the Chinese?’
The NCO picked up a big stick, a rough tree branch. Each question from the small man by my side was immediately followed by a terrible blow with the branch from above the height of the NCO’s head on to my chest and stomach. It is so much worse when you see it coming like that, from above, when it is slow and deliberate. I used my splinted arms to try to protect my body, and the branch smashed on to them again and again. The interpreter was at my shoulder. ‘Lomax, you will tell us. Then it will stop.’ I think I felt his hand on my hand: a strange gesture, the obscene contrast between this gesture almost of comfort and the pitiless violence of what they were doing to me.
It is difficult to say how long the beating lasted, but for me it went slowly on for far too long. The NCO suddenly stopped hitting me. He went off to the side and I saw him coming back holding a hosepipe dribbling with water. From the facility with which he produced it and the convenient proximity of a water tap I guess he had used it before.
He directed the full flow of the now gushing pipe on to my nostrils and mouth at a distance of only a few inches. Water poured down my windpipe and throat and filled my lungs and stomach. The torrent was unimaginably choking. This is the sensation of drowning, on dry land, on a hot dry afternoon. Your humanity bursts from within you as you gag and choke. I tried very hard to will unconsciousness, but no relief came. He was too skillful to risk losing me altogether. When I was choking uncontrollably, the NCO took the hose away. The flat, urgent voice of the interpreter resumed above my head, speaking into my ear; the other man hit me with the branch on the shoulders and stomach a few more times. I had nothing to say; I was beyond invention. So they turned on the tap again, and again there was that nausea of rising water from inside my bodily cavity, a flood welling up from within and choking me.
They alternated beatings and half-drownings for I know not how long. No one was ever able to tell me how long all this lasted, and I have no idea whether it finished that day, or there was more the following day. I eventually found myself back in my cage. I must have been dragged there.
After dark – perhaps that same evening, or was it some other evening? How can I be a reliable witness about time? – the Kempei NCO made a special journey to my cage and handed through the bars a mug of hot milk, made from sweetened condensed milk. This was an incredible delight, but even at the time I knew it was not an act of kindness: it was a way of maintaining ambiguity, of keeping a prisoner off-balance.
The interrogations stopped. One morning, without warning or explanation, our cages were opened and the small interpreter took charge of us. Our kit was brought out of the building and into the yard. All seven of us were told to pack one bag, for we were moving again. This was a further shrinkage of our belongings and of our humanity. We asked a lot of questions, but there were no replies from the young translator-interrogator. A truck drove up, with a number of guards on board.
We had to show the interpreter what we were packing. I showed him my Bible, and he nodded. Then I displayed a mounted photograph of my fiancée. He decided that space was at a premium, carefully tore the photograph from its mount, threw the frame away and handed me back the photograph.
Then Slater asked: ‘Can we take money with us?’ I was too disturbed to work out whether he meant it satirically or not. The interpreter replied: ‘You won’t need money where you are going.’
As I was climbing aboard the truck, with Mac’s help, the interpreter walked up close to me and said gravely: ‘Keep your chin up.’ He stood there in the yard, a tiny figure standing among the larger regular soldiers. The truck pulled away.
During the journey we were able to speak quietly beneath the noise of the engine as the guards spoke among themselves. We spoke about our interrogations; I told them about my treatment with the hosepipe. Their warmth, and the solidarity of their anger, was worth so much. There was an extraordinary urgency about this whispered conversation: we were sure that this time we were about to die. Slater’s incurable hopelessness seemed the right attitude to all of us.
But instead we were taken to Ban Pong station, thirty miles away, back to the beginning of the railway, and got off at the east-bound platform. It looked as though our destination must be Bangkok.