By the middle of December 1943 we had established that Outram Road consisted of parallel blocks, and that the military section occupied two of them, Blocks C and D; beyond a very high wall were the other blocks, which were being run by the Japanese Army as a prison for civilians, for what crimes we could not then imagine. As far as we could tell, there were about thirty prisoners in our block. The infallible indication that a cell was occupied was its inclusion in the list for a latrine-bucket visit in the morning. Everyone in the block seemed to have been convicted by Japanese court martials of ‘anti-Japanese offences’ ranging from escape attempts and sabotage to more spectacular crimes. The rumour was that one man was here for attempting to steal an aircraft and fly it towards Allied territory.
We also discovered that in the past some men in our block had become so ill that they had died quietly in their cells, from a combination of disease, brutality and starvation. And still the most tantalizing information was that occasionally prisoners who were on the point of death were sent away from the gaol altogether. The best rumour was that they were sent to Changi, to a special hospital there. The other rumours came to seem less important, remote probabilities compared to the certainty that nothing could be worse than where we were.
If it seems absurd to send prisoners to gaol, what our captors were in fact doing was consigning us to a lower circle of hell. This was a place in which the living were turned into ghosts, starved, diseased creatures wasted down to their skeletal outlines.
But as always, whether on the railway or in the camps, there were people who were humane enough to take risks to help us. Some of the Japanese prison staff tried to do nothing to add to our squalor and unhappiness. I remember that the same Gunso who had guarded us before our trial in Bangkok ended up in Outram Road shortly after we arrived, and that he personally removed my splints when the bones of my arms seemed to be set.
They took away my long spoon but only after I had assured him that I could manage without it. But some of his colleagues were bored, slovenly and brutal Japanese private soldiers. They were randomly abusive, and could beat us at will for minor or imagined infractions of the rules. There was a good deal of this casual violence.
Among the warders, we were astonished to discover that there were two men who appeared to be English. Before long they identified themselves in whispers through our door-slot as Penrod Dean, an Australian Army officer and John O’Malley, a British signalman. They had been among the first POWs to be sent to Outram Road and had been nominated by the Japanese as tobansj or trusties. They collected food from the kitchens, making deliveries to the cells and collecting the empty dishes. So far as was practicable they looked after the interests of the prisoners, slipping us extra rations or insistently bringing illness to the attention of the indifferent guards, at least making it more difficult for them to ignore us. I saw O’Malley carry paralysed men into the sunshine of the exercise yard in a desperate attempt to keep them alive, cradling those frail creatures of skin and bone in his own emaciated arms.
But there was very little a toban could do in the face of such systematic neglect. We had no toothbrushes, for example; my teeth were ruined by the middle of 1944. We were allowed no shaving kit either. A month or so after we arrived we were taken for a haircut. A Japanese barber set up outside a cell on the ground floor and every prisoner in turn was ordered to sit in front of him. He grasped my neck in his left hand and took up a large set of clippers in his right, and started snipping the hair on the nape of my neck, working the clippers around and up and across my head in a single movement, down my sideburns to my beard which showered its wirier hair on to the softer filaments of my head, never lifting the clippers once. I could feel the cold metal bumping on my exposed skull, which felt as fragile as an egg. It was like being shorn by a skilful, rough sheep-farmer. That shave was the only regular hygienic attention we received.
In return we were expected to do irregular work. There was no pattern to it, because I think that they wanted us to spend as much time as possible in blank isolation. The work could involve floor-washing, gardening, carrying firewood to the cookhouse or – the task we dreaded most – cleaning the Japanese toilets. The condition of those rows of holes was appalling. There is something unbearably sickening about cleaning other men’s ordure.
Or else they would ask us to shift 100 kg sacks of rice, which was crippling work for men in our condition. But the most bizarre task was one that allowed a group of us to stay together for a while in the sunshine out in the yard. The guards produced a great heap of rusty and extremely dirty army equipment which we suspected had either been stored in the open or had been salvaged from a ship. There were mess-tins, and buckets and containers of all kinds, caked in rust and dirt. Our job was to clean all these and restore them to pristine beauty. The trouble was that the only tools we were given were large rusty nails, bits of wire and handfuls of earth. With these primitive resources the Japanese expected sparkling results.
A dozen prisoners were gathered in the open, sitting on concrete under a lean-to attap roof that deflected the fierce heat a little. We sat cross-legged, hunched over the filthy utensils. If somebody looked sideways instead of down, a guard would lean over and punch him in the face.
Even under these circumstances we managed, with care, to talk. I had always been close to Mackay, and we sat beside each other while we scraped junk metal with wire in the hope that gleams of steel would start to appear beneath the grime. For much of the time we worked naked, partly to try to get fresh air around our unwashed and itching bodies and partly because we had very little to wear anyway. One day I noticed that Mac, who had been a well-built man, had become so thin that his anus stuck out like a short pipe.
I then discovered that I could close my hand around my own upper arm and that my stomach was very close to my spine; there seemed to be no solid body on me anywhere. My ribs were sticking out. I asked Mac how I looked, and he said that I looked like a skeleton with skin stretched over it. I had become one of the living dead who had so frightened me when I first came to Outram Road. I knew then that I was close to death, and that I had to get out of Outram Road at all costs.
It wasn’t only the decline in my physical condition that led me, eventually, to take the risk of making myself deliberately worse so that they would have to move me. The balance of probabilities seemed just to be in favour of the assumption that they were not quietly murdering the sick prisoners, and I convinced myself that the percentage prospect of survival if I stayed was virtually nil; but this rationalism was beside the point: beyond reason or calculation, I wanted out of this place.
Certain events weakened me, but toughened my resolve. Early on, on Christmas Day 1943, I was given a fish head with my evening rice. I ate the head, but I could not manage to eat the eyes. They lay on my plate, little tough jellies staring up at me. I longed then for the winter feast of northern Europe, for my family and for my mother in particular, and the contrast between my memories of them and this tropical black hole was acutely depressing.
I found a definition for ‘hunger’ when I was sent on a rare errand without a guard to take an empty pan to the cookhouse, and as I was walking through the main hall I saw a single grain of rice on a cell doorstep. I went over and picked it up and ate it.
Then there was the itch. We were used to diseases of the skin, which were rampant in the camps because of the lack of soap, but this was an itch the like of which neither Fred nor I had encountered before. The slightest touch on one’s skin produced an urge to scratch savagely. To succumb to this temptation was disastrous, and made the itch worse than ever, so we sat motionless with our skins on fire.