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Up to the present our work had been easy, but from now on we noticed a gradual change in the tenor of our guards. In the early days the Japs had been so elated with the unhinderd progress of their armies towards India, that they behaved with comparative tolerance toward us most of the time, expecting The Imperial Japanese Army to continue their advance through India, and meet up with their allies in Europe.

It must have begun to dawn on them that it was not all going to be a walk-over, and that it could be years before they rejoined their families in Japan. As their advance slowed down, the worst types among our guards began to vent their spleen on us at the slightest opportunity.

The first real sign of the change of tempo was when we were taken off the easy jobs and set the task of breaking up old concrete with sledge hammers in the direct sun all day, with rest periods halved. Any of us caught slacking, whether because of ill-health or laziness, was made to stand to attention with sledge hammer held overhead at arms length, a severe punishment with the shade temperature in the hundreds.

Notwithstanding the risk, I still found opportunities to sneak off to the dump, and at this time found myself a good sharpening stone. I kept it all my POW days, and it was the nucleus of a fine set of tools which I eventually made. It also kept my razor sharp later on.

We were paraded night and morning now for ‘Tenco’. Japanese roll-calls were comic opera affairs. We had to fall in fives instead of the usual twos or fours; our guards were so bad at arithmetic that they could not count us in any other way. Even so, great difficulties were encountered. Two or three of them would together pass along the line marking us off in tens; then, when they came to a blank file at the end with perhaps one, two, three or four men in it they would argue and write out sums in the dust with their sticks.

It was sometimes half an hour before the task was accomplished to their satisfaction. They would often agree among themselves that all was not well. ‘More one man’ they would shout. Then I would have to go along the line with them counting all over again.

At roll-call on the morning of the twenty-ninth of April, our senior guard reverently announced that as it was the birthday of His Imperial Majesty the Emperor of Japan, we were all to have a day’s holiday.

I did my washing, and then went through the wire to drink to freedom in coffee in my Chinese friend’s cafe. Dusk was falling as we paraded as usual for evening roll-call, and it soon became clear that the Japs had celebrated in stronger stuff than coffee. In the end our guard asked me to count our men myself, and I was able to report ‘O.K., koo-joo (ninety)men to tenko’.

We all had to learn to count in their tongue, ‘Nippon-go’ as they called it; ichi, nee, san, see or yon, gou, rocou, sichi, hachi, koo, joo; joo-ichi, joo-nee etc. Grammar seemed simple, and to me appeared to be like not much more than stringing words together. ‘I have cigarettes’ was ‘Watakushee tobacco aru’, the opposite, ‘Watakushee tobacco nay or arimaseng’.

To pose a question they added ‘ca’ to the statement, thus ‘Have you a cigarette?’ became ‘Anatah Tobacco-ca?’ As soon as they learned a few words of English, they added ‘ca’ to them to form a question. They used our words with their simple sentence construction; thus when one of them wanted to tell me that in future we must notify them each day what the morrow’s requirements would be, he said, ‘Gunzo, tomorrow want, today ask.’

They were always interested to hear how many children, especially boys, we had. Newcomers, seeing my venerable white hairs, would almost invariably ask me at the first opportunity, ‘Gunzo, you children-ca?’ When I explained that I was not even married, they would usually make sympathetic clucking noises. Not only was I not married, but, fortunately, I had not even left a girl behind in England.

The next major difficulty was that our cooks ran out of fuel. We only used wood, and rice takes quite a lot to boil it in our three foot diameter cast-iron ‘quallies’ (like shallow woks), and we received the ultimatum from the cooks; ‘No firewood brought back from working parties, no food.’

From then on everyone had to try to pinch a piece of wood from somewhere each day; beams went out of our roof, bits of staging disappeared, and our lunch-breaks outside were spent looking for odd pieces of wood to bring back. Singapore is a densely populated island and had been short of firewood for many years, so I guess the Japs could not give us what they did not have.

It was the seventh of May, and as the guards had a ceremonial parade before a visiting general, we were given another ‘Yasume’ day. I was busy in camp, so did not have time to make my usual trip through the wire.

That afternoon the camp patrol spotted footprints in the mud where I and others had been crossing to freedom. They lay in wait and caught three or four of our chaps trying to get back inside. They were taken away by the ‘Kempi-Ti’ military police, dreaded equally by both us and the ordinary Jap soldiers. We never saw or heard of them again, but the usual treatment was first torture to obtain the names of any contacts, followed by execution.

I had drunk my last cup of Chinese coffee, as the Japs reinforced the wire, and removed the lorries so that all the boundary could be seen at all times by the guards. From now on they held ‘Tenkos’ at odd times, and were even more fussy in making sure that there were no absentees.

Some of the guards let us count in English, as the newcomers from Changi had not yet learned Nippon-go. We numbered down the ranks ‘one, two, three, four . . .’ our guard knew no English, and we still had a few wags ‘... nine, ten, Jack, Queen, King’. There was a roar from behind as an English-speaking Jap officer heard the sequence. ‘No-good enah, Bagero!’ etc. A few cuffs, and it was all over; but from then on counting had to be in Japanese, and anyone who did not know his number was clouted.

For a few weeks, we had a skip of reject fish issued on alternate days. These were creepy-crawlies from the bottoms of the fishermen’s nets, and varied from hideous devil-fish, to small octopus-like creatures. We boiled them all up together into a fish broth.

There was never continuity of food, mainly I think due to lack of organization on the part of the Japs. We were told also that Camp Commandants received a fixed sum of money for each prisoner, and any savings they could retain counted as ‘perks’. This probably accounted for the fact that in some camps food was so much better than in others.

I had now been two months in River Valley, and felt part of a community. Once we got this sense of ‘belonging’ in a camp, no matter how bad it was, we were always loath to leave, on the principle, I suppose, of ‘the devil we know’.

Life was however wearisome in the mud and squalor, with disease now a major problem. Pellagra (an ugly and irritating skin disease caused by lack of vitamin ‘B’), sores, ulcers, dengue and other tropical fevers were rife. Things would have seemed better had there been useful work to do, but our work now seemed to be more a punishment than anything else.

Marching home from work one day, we passed a green space with three trees growing on it. To each tree was tied a Chinaman, and each of them had a caption over his head, reading ‘Thief’, ‘Robber’, and ‘Pilfer’. They were covered in blood and bruised beyond recognition; the center one appeared to be only about twelve years old. As they hung there they looked like a depiction of The Crucifixion. Our guards told us they had been there all day.

The dump was still getting my usual visits and at this time I brought home a bundle of hessian with which I made a bed. and partitioned my bed-space off to form a ‘room’ for a bit more privacy. I christened it ‘The Nook’, and a name-board over the door put the finishing touch.

I could now work on my next project, away from prying eyes. Having found a pair of earphones and a load of wire on the dump, I was determined to make a wireless. Batteries were unheard of, so it would need to be a crystal set. During the next few weeks I made my coils, and from the ‘useful’ items in my kit completed my set, right down to crystal-holder and cats-whisker. From then on, although I tried hundreds of different kinds of rock, being always on the look-out for likely pieces, I was never to find anything that produced the slightest ‘Grerk’. In the end I had to dump my abortive effort.

We had our first air-raid warning the day after I commenced ‘Operation Wireless’. We saw no planes, but our guards were shaken as I think they believed that all Burma and India were in their hands (or so they had told us), so there should have been no airfields near enough to mount air-raids on Singapore.

A rumor began to circulate to the effect that we might soon be allowed to write home. We had worried ever since our capture that no list had been sent to the Red Cross to let our people at home know that we were alive. In the event, it was to be several years before my parents received a year-old card telling them that I was safe and well.

Until then, all that they had was their original notification from a government department that I was missing, believed captured. By that time my mother was about the only one left who still believed that I would return. She continued to write to me weekly for nearly four years, but only a few of her letters got through, and those that did were always over a year old.

I had by this time grown a fine curly beard but one day I felt sores coming among the hair-roots, so went to see our medical orderly. While awaiting my turn I saw a man being treated for impetigo; he was having the scabs pulled out with tweezers from among the stubble, and the stubs he was losing at the same time were causing him much pain, and tears were rolling down his cheeks.

I left the queue, and went back to my hut. Early next morning, before my comrades were awake, I fetched water, and with my razor hacked off my long hair and beard, and then shaved my face and scalp. I had no mirror and the blood flowed. When finished, my head and face looked like crazy paving; but I was clean-shaven and bald.

After breakfast, we paraded as usual for roll-call. I was the first thing the Japs saw. ‘New-ca’? one of them asked. I pointed to the number on my shirt, and he peered at it in disbelief. Someone had exchanged the patriach for a lad in his early twenties. Half a dozen guards gathered jabbering around me, but I think that it was all my cuts that finally convinced them that it was really me.

That day I returned to the dump to remove a piece of ebonite that I had seen attached to some other equipment. This dump was about a hundred yards across, and as I started to emerge, ebonite in my haversack, a couple of the Kempi-ti who had been lying in wait some way off spotted me.

I turned and ran as fast as I could in the opposite direction from our party. When I was out of their sight, I ran in a wide circle and finally dropped exhausted among our men while our guards still appeared to sleep. My rapid breathing had subsided somewhat by the time the Kempi-ti appeared and ordered a roll-call. Our guards were as relieved as we were to be able to report that we were all present.

They did not search us; had they done so I would have found the piece of ebonite difficult to shrug off; my hut would have been searched, and my embryo wireless discovered. Had I not that morning shaved off my flowing hair and beard, the Kempi-ti could not have failed to have recognized me, the only Snow-White in the camp.

I may not be able to convince the reader, but I know that it was more than a coincidence that I was preserved through all those years to come home whole.

From that time on, Japs patrolled the area, and spot checks were made during the day to ensure that no-one was missing. I did not visit the dump again. That night I completed the wireless, fixed the aerial along the ridge of the hut, and buried the earth wire under the floor. I only needed my crystal now, that was all; but the work and risk had been in vain.

A few months later a group of our men in Thailand were caught using a home-made wireless. They were tortured for a week in a futile attempt to make them divulge the source of the components, then thrown into the ditch outside the Kempi-ti’s hut and left to die.

In running barefoot from the Kempi-ti, I had torn the flesh on my big toe, and when this swelled up and festered I had to stay in camp for a few days. Having salvaged a conti pencil and some paper on one of my visits to the dump, I now found time to do some drawing, and was in demand drawing wives and sweethearts from snapshots.

Pte. Birch across the gangway first put the idea into my head when he drew a sketch of me stalking up the road on a work-party, with flowing hair and beard, and wearing the ridiculous long shorts which were army issue to protect the legs from mosquitos and leeches.

Chapter 17

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