大象传媒

This story was submitted to the People鈥檚 War Site by Three Counties Action for Mark Barker, and has been added to the site with his permission. The author fully understands the site鈥檚 terms and conditions.

BUSH MEDICINE

Meanwhile my foot had not got any better, in fact it had got a lot worse. The whole of the instep was blue and the skin was wafer thin. Eventually I thought I would get something and open it up and get rid of some of the puss that was in it. I saved a razor blade - there weren't many of them about - sterilised it in the fire and nicked the top of it. I've never seen people move so quick in all my life. The smell was horrendous! They scattered like mad, holding their noses. Then I had the job of getting it clean. I got an empty petrol can which had been used for boiling water, boiled some up and when it was cool enough rinsed the foot out. It was amazing to look into the instep of your foot. There was quite a big hole running from the toe to the upper part of the instep and inside you could see what looked like lengths of tape. I suppose they were ligaments, but they looked just like pieces of grey tape, and why they survived the poison I have no idea. I could move my toes and see the ligaments moving with them. I never under stood why they didn't disintegrate, but they didn't.

One day, a Japanese I hadn't seen before came. He was not in uniform, not the normal uniform. He came and looked at my foot, which was still pretty horrendous. He had a look at it and went off and came back with a great big steak, a huge piece of steak, rare. He put it on my instep and covered it up and tied it in place with a few bits of rag torn from the sleeve of my coat. He pointed to the steak on my foot and he warned me in no uncertain terms, that if I so much as took a bite of it to chew!... I mustn't touch it! I must leave it there! After being on my foot I didn't fancy it in any case. But miraculously, I don't know how, it healed up... absolutely healed up. Within a month it was covered over and healed up.

Most people, if they got a cut or a scratch, particularly with bamboo, it often meant they'd have to lose an arm or a leg or something. It was either that or you'd get blood poisoning. Many of them lost legs or arms, but they survived - with difficulty. I don't know how, but they did.
The doctor out there was an Australian doctor, Weary Dunlop. He did some marvellous work. The only things he had to sever a leg or an arm were little hack saws and that sort of thing There was no anaesthetic. You just got two or three chaps sitting on you, keeping you still while he sawed through your bone. It saved many, many lives, because if you got gangrene, it was fatal, but it was a horrendous way to be operated on. Anyway, fortunately my foot got healed up and I was ready for work again.

The last two or three days in the Japanese camp were a bit hairy. One day a Japanese officer came up and handed me a saw and told me to go and saw down a tree and bring some wood in. I think all the broken branches and scraps of wood had already been collected. I found a few saplings and chose one about as thick as your arm and about six foot tall, and I started to saw. I sawed and sawed most of the day and I finally did get through it and I took it back to the camp. The Japanese looked at the pieces of wood, then he looked at the saw. There were no teeth left on it! You couldn't tell the top from the bottom - they were both the same. It seemed I had been trying to saw through a teak tree! He swore at me and wrapped the saw around my ear a few times, and he didn't send me out to get wood any more.

FOOD, GLORIOUS FOOD

The Japanese were very fussy about what they ate. They'd have a truck come with pigs in it, sometimes half a dozen, sometimes more. They wouldn't tolerate anything that wasn't alive or looking good. If it looked sickly or anything like that they'd just sling it out. So these Australians who came with the truck said, 'Do you want a little bit of pork?' and we said, 'Fine!' and they said, 'See this little pig here? We're going to drop him down on his head a few times,' which they did - and they polished him off. Then the Japanese came out to inspect the cargo. They kicked the little one and as it didn't get up they left it there and took the others. The Australians said, 'Hang on a minute while we chop his head off and you can have the head and we'll take the other part', which they did.

I then boiled up a can of water and poured it over the pig's head - his ears especially. I boiled up another can, put the head in and let it cook for twenty four hours, and do you know, it was beautiful! Surprising, the jowls on a pig's head... Lovely!....Just beautiful.... But you had to be careful... Quite a few of us had fresh pork...

UNCIVILISED BEHAVIOUR

Back at the work camp you usually had to go and get your own rations from what they called the River Camp. There was a big jetty there beside the river, where barges used to come and bring the food. You had to go and collect it, what little there was, usually rice. You had to hump it back as best you could. Three miles you had to walk! When you got it back to camp it was put in a big tent, where an old Japanese man used to dole it out.

Several working parties, all within a few miles of our camp, used to come to this tent for their rations. I remember, one day some Chinese came in to collect theirs. When they looked at their rations, instead of a bag of salt he'd given them a bag of sugar. So they argued with the old Japanese, who had a great, big hickory stick with a big knob on the end. One of the Chinese insisted that they needed salt, not sugar (it is much more important than sugar in a hot climate, because you perspire such a lot), so this Japanese fellow just picked up his stick and whacked him on the head three or four times. It sounded like wood on wood - solid. Oh dear! He held his head and got out of there as quickly as he could. I felt so sorry for him. It was sugar that he was given and he didn't want it. It was vital that you had salt.

The Japanese were uncivilised people and they looked dreadful. Most of them had a mouthful of black teeth, spectacles with pebble thick glass and their behaviour was uncivilised. To think men could treat other men as they did, and enjoy it, as they did. That's why in Japanese history books there is no mention of the Japanese war. It's only in recent years that young Japanese who've been abroad have read up the history of the war and realised what happened. No doubt about it, they were a very brutal, uncivilised lot.

CHOLERA

Our camp was only a few miles from the Burma end of the railway line and we would eventually join up with the Burma railway. It wasn't the full-sized railway we were building. It was quicker to build a narrow gauge track. We'd been blasting and blasting to widen a place we called Hellfire Pass, a narrow opening between two rocky outcrops. At the camp on the other side of Hellfire Pass, where the two ends of the railway would eventually meet, cholera broke out. Very bad that was. There was no treatment at all for the cholera, so they just died and they shut that camp down.
Two or three people volunteered to stay there to cremate all the bodies. They built a huge fire with tree trunks and any thing else they could find to get a great big fire going. Speaking to some of the people who were there, they said it was really bizarre to see these huge fires, consisting of masses of big trees, consuming all those bodies. They said that suddenly you'd see an arm come up, all sorts of movements, as the heat got to the bodies. Fortunately we were two or three miles from where the cremations went on.

We'd come to the end of the railway construction by this time, the last bits and pieces, and we were gradually taken back to about half way from where we had originally started. The food in this camp was slightly better than what we had before, not a lot, but a little bit. Gradually chaps, from not having to work, picked up a little bit and looked less like skeletons.

Eventually, within a few months, most of our group were sent back to Singapore, in those same horrendous rice trucks. It was then that, for the first time, I got beriberi. Beriberi is a very bad illness due to starvation diet and lack of vitamin B, and a lot of us suffered from it. You become very weak and when you press a finger into your flesh the dent stays there for some time. I got over beriberi by having friends who were good scroungers.
The camp we went to then, not a very big camp, I think was called Sime Road. There were two very interesting people down there, both nice people. One was George Sprod, an Australian, very clever with his pencil sketches. The other one was - what was his name? Ronald Searle - that's him! The Japanese kept him busy all day long, sketching. When he had a free moment I grabbed this pencil from somebody and got him to do a pencil sketch of me. I don't know what happened to it. I know I got it home, but unfortunately, during different moves it got lost. It wasn't very complimentary, but it was a good record. I don't know where he had been. It must have been somewhere on the railway, but not in our camp.

BACK TO CHANGI PRISON, SINGAPORE

At the end of 1943 we ended up in the same camp where we'd originally started our prisoner of war life, right outside Changi Jail. Same old huts and what-not. Couple of pieces of wire around the camp. You could still get in and out if you wanted to, but... nowhere to go.

There weren't so many of us left in this camp now, very few, but the Japanese came up with the idea that they'd get everybody to sign a form saying they wouldn't attempt to escape. Our officers said, 'No! You mustn't sign that. Your duty as prisoners of war is to attempt to escape if you can'. Really it didn't affect us as there was nowhere to escape to, but we refused to sign. So everybody was put in jail - four to a cell, six foot by four. Fortunately it didn't last very long. A week! In the end our officers said we'd better sign or else we'd be in a great deal of trouble, shut up on top of each other like that. So we did!
Then we were free in the camp again, although there was lots of work to do. The latrines needed bore-holes drilling We had these great big drills that you put in the ground and turned and turned to bore holes fifteen to twenty feet deep. Put a wooden lid over it and that's your toilet! At least it was hygienic.

It was in Changi that I at last met up with the good friend that I had last seen nearly four years before. This was the chap that I had gone searching for in the jungle when I was 'captured' by the Gurkhas. It turned out that he had been taken prisoner in the jungle by the Japanese. Like me, he ended up working on the Burma railway. Both of us were lucky to have survived.

We all made fly killers from the spine of the palm leaves. You strip the leaf off and just keep the spine. Get a dozen spines together and you have a wonderful fly killer! Fewer flies about, less chance of diarrhoea.

The food wasn't very good - same old trash. Most days we would collect every tin, anything that would hold water, pile them onto an old car chassis and push it down to the coast, about a mile away. We'd fill all the cans with sea water, then scrounge firewood - anything that would burn - to take back and build a fire under the water to evaporate it and get a nice bit of salt. Very, important! you lose so much salt in perspiration that you'd do anything at all to get a bit of salt. Some of the chaps would climb the coconut trees to get a few coconuts down - a welcome addition to the diet.

The Chinese and Malays did their fishing in the sea by staking off an area at low tide with bamboo posts, a very big area. At high tide fish would swim in, then when the tide went out a few fish would remain trapped. I couldn't swim but I began to teach myself to float by propelling myself around the fish trap. I grabbed the posts, floated down to the end, turned round and floated back again. If I'd had a bit more time I might have taught myself to swim.

The next job we had was building the airfield outside Changi. Providentially we'd finished with the relentless work now. We had to level the runway off and carry earth from one place to another. The Japanese had plenty of labour at no cost. It was a 1^ mile long airstrip. I think it was eventually completed, but we left before that.

A BRIGHT IDEA

This was the end of 1943 and the beginning of 1944. In the tropics, wherever you are, it's daylight one minute and two minutes later the light has gone. You are left in the dark very suddenly. We had lots and lots of old, American newspapers. which the Japanese had allowed us to bring out of Singapore. They all came in useful, as toilet paper for one thing, and they were something to read. But there were no lights to read by in the huts, so we thought we would do something about it.

Alongside our camp, quite close to the wire, was one of our huge naval guns which had had a shell exploded in the breach to put it out of action. The Japanese used to come up there, all poshed up in their fancy dress, to have their photographs taken. We knew that a narrow gauge railway used to bring up provisions for the people who operated the guns and we had an idea that somewhere, not too far away, there might be an entrance to an underground store. There might still be diesel there that we could steal, bring back in a tin or jar, put a piece of string in it through a hole in a lid... and we would then have some reasonably good lights to read by.

For the next instalment go to Olaf Chapman Part Five (A4919501)

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