大象传媒

Half of our number developed dysentery during that second day, and my bucket and tin came into their own. The other trucks held men in a very much worse state. I was in charge of our truck, and had great difficulty in restraining our boys from eating the tins of food which had been issued for us to carry on behalf of the whole party. Nevertheless, it says much for them that none were eaten in our group.

We caught glimpses through cracks, of the country through which we were travelling, and there seemed to be dense jungle most of the way. There were a few clearings occupied by a 'Kampong' or native hamlet, and at least one town, namely Kuala Lumpur.

We also passed a few lakes, where prosperous tin companies had dredged for the richest deposits of alluvial tin in the world, that had made our Cornish tin mines uneconomic and redundant. The plants we saw all stood idle.

As we moved through the territory, we never knew when we actually crossed the border into Siam, or Thailand as it now is. That word means 'Land of Freedom', but it was not to mean that for us.

No evil is allowed to last for ever though; thus even that journey had to end, and at six-thirty on the morning of the sixth of November our train finally stopped at a small station, and we were allowed out of our dreadful trucks for good.

Two very scruffy Jap soldiers lined us up, counted us and then marched us off along a dirt track. One of them brought up the rear, the other marched at the head of the column with me.

My one plied me with questions the whole route, wanting to know the names of every part of the female body in order that he might not be at a loss for words if he were lucky enough to be part of the army of occupation when England fell. He did not seem to think that time was far off either. Needless to say, he got no straight answers.

We knew not where we were, but as the nameboard at the railway station was written in a script that was new to us, we knew at least that we must be in Thailand.

Soon, however, we arrived at a camp comprised of rows of long attap and bamboo huts, an empty one of which was allocated to us. I gratefully unloaded my kit on the floor and sank down on to the bamboo sleeping platform with much relief.

There were a lot of other prisoners in the camp; they told us that it was called 'Banpong', and was a staging camp, from which parties were constantly being sent to work on a railway. This, we were told, was gradually progressing further and further into the inhospitable Thai hinterland.

Forced native labour was being used in constructing some stretches of the track, the remainder was being built by P.O.W.'s. The line would eventually run from Bangkok, through Thailand into Burma, and on to Moulmein.

Banpong initiated us into the state of things that prevailed in many places where we were to live from now on. It had been long occupied by men who had ceased to care. Our hut was absolutely filthy, littered by rubbish, scraps of food, and even excreta; all because no-one had enough authority to organize a party to clean things up.

We were now in a different climate from Singapore, and in the monsoon season. According to the residents it had been raining for weeks, almost without ceasing, and except for a few high spots, everywhere was ankle-deep in mud.

I was one of the youngest and 'greenest' of the senior N.C.O.鈥檚, and often felt that I was given the worst jobs because I was less likely to complain than older soldiers, many of whom deeply resented the intrusion of our new R.S.M.

When, therefore, he gave me the task of cleaning up our hut and its surroundings, without tools and with a gang of 'browned-off'men who had only just emerged from those deadly cattle trucks, my heart sank within me.

However, as I seem to keep asserting, all bad things come to an end, and although far from co-operative, none of my men actually refused to do what I asked, so that at last our area was made fairly clean, and I was allowed to take my men over to the camp well to draw water to wash for the first time for four days.

At the well it was a case of no bucket no water, so once again as the only one apart from our cooks with a bucket, our boys were pleased to have me with them.

There was a long queue of men waiting at the well, as it had to supply the requirements of the whole camp, which was quite a big one. It was, incidentally, one of the few Thai camps that was not adjacent to the river. While awaiting my turn I heard someone swearing over losing his bucket down the well the previous day, and this set me thinking.

Our cooks were very short of buckets and if this chap had not retrieved his, it was likely that there were others down there. Arriving in turn at the well-head, I peered in, and saw that the water was about twenty feet down; but it would of course be deep, as we were in the middle of the monsoon. Also there were no steps in the walls.

However, I noticed that there were grooves every eighteen inches or so where the concrete rings, from which the well was constructed, met and did not fit very well. I whipped my clothes off, and telling my men to stand guard and let no-one drop anything down, I started to descend.

The well was about thirty inches in diameter, and by inserting fingers and toes in the grooves I finally reached the water. I could not feel anything with my feet, so I propelled myself downwards by pressing outwards and upwards with my hands; the water must have been at least twenty feet deep, and by the time my feet encountered a heap of tinware at the bottom, I was seeing flashes of light and my chest was bursting. Hooking one foot under a pail handle, assisted by my hands I shot to the surface like a bubble, and gasped in the fresh air.

Thai wells are not equipped with rope and winch like those at home. Instead, a long bamboo pole is suspended down to the water, the top end being hinged to the end of a see-saw like arrangement. The see-saw fulcrum was a long way out of center, and it was the long end that was fixed to the vertical pole. On the short end there was a heavy weight attached; by lifting the short end of the see-saw only a few feet, the pole descended the whole depth of the well, and the counterbalancing weight helped to lift the bucket full of water very quickly and easily to ground level.

Although it took up a lot of room, it seemed much more efficient than our traditional way of doing the job. I therefore hooked my salvaged bucket to the suspended pole to be retrieved by my friends at the top. I was able to repeat my dive six times before lack of breath made me give up, and this provided a good heap of buckets for the quartermaster. I also found a canvas bucket, and as I thought that this would 'come in handy', I kept that, until it was stolen by a marauding thief during the night a few weeks later.

That night men came in from other huts, and told us more of the way things were going on out there in the jungle, and what they told us was not very encouraging. Banpong was the first real P.O.W. camp connected with this stretch of the railway, work on which we were told had commenced some months previously. It followed more or less the course of the Menam river as it descended from the hills which separate Thailand from Burma.

The embankments and cuttings were being cut through thick jungle, and all by hand, without mechanical equipment of any kind. A camp was constructed every few kilometers along the proposed course; as a stretch of line was completed the gang from that camp would have to march off, leapfrogging other gangs, to arrive at a new camp site and start work on a new task.

In peace time, thousands of Tamils had been recruited from Southern India to work on the rubber plantations and tin excavations in Malaya. The Japs had conscripted these, and some camps were manned by them.

They were a poor undernourished people, and it was said that they did not live very long in Jap camps. Other camps were manned by conscripted Chinese coolies, and as even the Japs could not make these men work without their opium, they received a weekly ration of it.

Remaining camps were manned by P.O.W.s, including many from Java and Sumatra of Dutch nationality, and mostly of half native blood. We were told that news filtered through occasionally from up country, and it seemed that thousands had already died up there.

The dirty conditions in Banpong camp itself were mainly due to the fact that the men consisted of odds and ends from different units, who therefore retained no regimental pride or discipline.

Chapter 23

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