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We were now to be given an insight into the way our enemies had been educated to treat those of their own race who were no longer of use to their Emperor, and this enabled me to understand even more clearly, the way we were treated by them.

My party was working at a station a few kilometers along the line. The time was mid-day, and we were eating the cold rice we had carried out with us from camp that morning. A train of closed steel cattle trucks, such as we travelled in from Changi, pulled into the siding about twenty-five yards from where we were sitting.

A party of Japs appeared from the station hut carrying buckets of rice, which they placed beside the train, one to every third truck. They went back, and reappeared with buckets of water which they set down beside the rice. Then, walking the length of the train, they slid open all the doors.

These stations had no platform, so there was about a five feet drop from the cattle-truck floors to the ground. As we watched thin legs pushed out of the door openings and weakly reached for the ground. One emaciated creature fell out and remained in a crumpled heap where he had fallen, quite still.

The station Japs returned to their hut without a glance at their comrades in the train. These, our own guards, had not seemed a bad lot as Japs go, and I looked at them in disbelief, when they carried on laughing and joking among themselves as though they had not seen their fellow countrymen dying only a few yards away, for want of a little help.

I asked one of them who spoke a little English, why he was not helping his sick mates. He blithely explained that a good Japanese soldier neither became a prisoner, nor allowed himself to be sent back wounded. He must fight while he was able, and when he could no longer effectively fight, he must commit the hara-kiri, and not become a liability to the Emperor.
For a moment or two we looked at one another. How many times had we said what we would like to do to the little yellow so-and-so’s. How wouldn’t we like to see them suffer. Now, almost to a man, we got to our feet and moved to the train, with the guards’ laughter still ringing in our ears.

We were greeted by a terrible stench as we approached the trucks. Those poor chaps must have been shut in without food or water, and no toilet facilities, for several days. Some were only boys, most under twenty-two years. Nearly every truck contained several dead; many had terrible wounds, undressed and covered in flies.

Others had amputations only covered by field dressings put on in the field. None had been through a dressing station before being bundled into the train. The first truck I looked into had two above knee amputations, yet any of these men who wanted food or water would have to drop to the ground or be shut in that iron hell again without either.

Our men, their prisoners, walked the length of the train, lifting those out who were able to stand, and filling mess-tins and water bottles for the others. When we had done all we could, we returned, nauseated, to our guards. (In a sermon a year or two ago, the then Bishop of Ely gave this little story as a description if the word 'Grace').

About ten minutes later, that was after we had started work again, a Jap drove up in a lorry. Tamils piled out and commenced loading the dead from the train into the back of the lorry. As it drove off into the jungle we could see that the bodies were piled up higher than the sides, and the Tamils were sitting on top of the load.

We soon saw smoke rising from the jungle as the bodies were burned. Our guards told us that they were the lucky ones, troubles finished.

Yet we were tolerated, and fed for nearly four years. During this time they were losing ships in huge numbers, and finding it difficult to keep their own people fed. Yet they provided for us, and indeed, sent many prisoners back to Japan, where they were often looked after as well as their own people. It is all very difficult to understand.

In later years, friends told me that back in Japan, the Japanese civilians were always friendly to the POWs that had been sent there, and none tried to take it out of them, even after the horror of Hiroshima and Nagasaki.

By now, I had got to know the Aussies who were sharing our hut quite well, and a great lot of characters I found them to be. Generous to a fault, thorough individualists, ready to take offense and offer to fight one minute, and the next give you half their blanket. Quarrel with one and you quarrelled with all the others in his gang. They loved to tell naive, tall stories about their tough life in the Australian outback.

They had been jungle clearing, and some of them, not content with the straight handles with which their axes had been fitted, had carved their own, and what a lovely job they made of them. Curved and graceful. On moving camp, they had brought their handles with them.

To tackle a difficult or dangerous job choose an Aussie for a partner; need a company of men to have to try to organize? Stay well away from these chaps. I do not remember seeing one of them as prisoner still wearing his badges of rank, up country.

In particular, I made friends with a tall slender young Aussie named Lloyd Stennett, who had in peace-time worked for Post Office Telephones in the Sydney area. We had lots in common, both being useful with our hands, and having a collection of tools, some of which we exchanged.

In the evenings we would swap yarns, and discuss politics and world affairs. When I was sick he brought me a boiled egg; knowing he had no reserve of money, he had spent half his ten-days’ Jap pay on me.

After the war, I was to correspond with him until his death. His mind never fully recovered from the conditions we were to suffer. He never married, and spent his latter years in an old soldiers' home in Bundaberg

I always supplemented my rations by boiling up any kind of weed or leaf that I found growing in the vicinity, usually first trying a small piece of anything unfamiliar before eating much of it. By now, therefore, I was becoming quite an authority on the edible flora, and comrades often brought new plants for me to try out.

Not that I was an infallible judge of these things, I just happened to have a strong digestive system. However, I still made plenty of mistakes. During the dry season some potato-like tubers were dug up by the embankment, and brought for me to try. There was no top left on them to indicate the kind of plant which produced them, but as they looked and smelled harmless I boiled them up in my mess-tin during the lunch break.

They cooked soft and floury, and as I chewed a mouthful they tasted not unlike real potatoes, so I swallowed. Even as the mouthful went down I began to feel pins and needles in my mouth, and soon mouth, throat and stomach felt as though they were on fire. I put my fingers down my throat, but nothing happened. I said nothing to my friends during the next couple of hours as I endured a kind of fever.

However I suffered no permanent ill effects, and warned my friends not to eat them. Later on I was to find that a plant like our ‘Lords and Ladies’ grew from these tubers.

I was to have a similar adventure from the local fungi. There were the remains of an old cattle stockade in Kinsio, and in the spot where the posts were rotting in the ground, I discovered growing what looked not unlike the European Champignon or ‘Fairy Ring’ mushrooms, which I knew were edible.

Taking a chance I picked a mess-tin full, instead of the usual precautionary sample, and stewed them over the fire we kept burning in our hut to help keep mosquitoes away. Our evening meal was of plain rice, and I poured mushroom stew over it.

My recollections of the next few hours are some of the clearest of all my POW days.
When I had eaten most of my meal, on looking down I saw a regular, and almost pretty pattern of bright pink blotches on my hands as I dipped my spoon in for another mouthful.

Fellow POWs were always ‘taking the Mickey’ at my 'omnivore' habits, and I raised my eyes apprehensively to see if any had noticed what was happening to me. I suddenly felt ridiculously self-conscious, and although I could catch no-one’s eye, I felt that everyone was staring at me.

Looking down at my almost naked body, I saw this strange pattern spreading up my arms. At last, as my friends had so often foretold, I had poisoned myself, and thoughts raced through my brain of the fatal cases often reported in the newspapers back home.

I looked around me again; whatever happens the lads must not know about it yet. As I looked the faces of my friends took on a strange air of fantasy, and my blotches spread all over me, and became brighter.

Although I was able to think very clearly, I still did not realize that the colors appearing on my skin were really a product of my mind, and that it was really something akin to looking at a white object through a prism, and seeing the colors of the rainbow.

Under my bed was a rusty tin containing half a pint of the local rock salt. With slow, deliberate movements I descended from my bed staging, tipped all the salt into my home-made pint mug, and filled it with cold water from my bucket.

Walking down the center aisle of our hut, I had difficulty in not breaking into a run, as I felt thousands of imaginary eyes boring into my back. Hurrying over to the latrine while trying not to spill my salt and water, my legs began to feel wobbly, and by the time I reached my destination I had to lean on a post as I stirred my potion and then tried to swallow it.

The cold water had not melted any of the salt, and the gritty mixture scratched my throat as I swallowed it; all the will power I could muster was needed to force the last spoonful down; but I did not feel the slightest bit sick. I put two fingers down my throat in the accepted manner, but still to no avail. (I only recall vomiting once or twice in my whole life.)

Every moment I felt dizzier, my throat more sore, as the salt worked on the scratches it had made; yet I was still determined not to see the doctor and have everyone know of my discomfiture. After trying to vomit for about ten minutes in vain, another man entered the latrine, and seeing me holding on to the post he asked me what was wrong.

Opening my mouth to speak I found that my tongue would not obey me, and my words came out mixed up and slurred. The man drew my arm around his neck and half carried me to the doctor.

One of the strange facts about the incident is that I remembered every part of what took place so clearly. Dr. Gotla said ‘And what have you been up to Sergeant?’ I tried to form a word but could only slobber.

‘You’re drunk’ he said crossly, having been called out from his meal. I remember how indignant I felt at his accusation, and how frustrated at my inability to refute it. He lay me down and sent the man who had brought me to fetch two medical orderlies.

When they came and took an arm each I seemed to float up without effort, and my seemingly weightless body glided over the ground to the hospital hut. My feet did not feel the ground.

The path along which I was passing was in fact a depressing sheet of brown dried mud with the odd piece of rubbish clinging to it here and there. Now, to my eyes it had ‘suffered a sea-change, into something rich and strange’. Everything had become symmetrical, and all was edged with Technicolor patterns. More perhaps like a bright and beautiful mosaic design, in place of the chaos of reality.

We passed several men I knew, walking up from the river in their loin-cloths. As I looked, each man became a caricature of his former self. One looked like a fat pink pig, another I can still see in my mind’s eye, as he assumed the appearance of one of Bruce Bairnsfather’s grandfather monkey characters. As I looked at each of them in turn I burst into peals of uncontrollable laughter.

Before we reached our destination my ego seemed to detach itself from my body, and I was able, I felt, to travel along beside the poor orderlies who were dragging my ridiculous form between them.

As I was guided into the hut and laid on a bed, the pain of my sore parched throat brought soul and body together again, and I called for water to assuage the unquenchable thirst I was to endure all the coming night.

In between long drinks of water I sang at the top of my voice. My thoughts were pervaded by a feeling of universal love, and I felt so happy that I wanted to tell everyone how stupid it was to fight and quarrel. I had to be restrained from trying to go out and tell the guards that I even loved them.

The orderlies had to sit on my head as the Japs patrolled past the hut that night, lest they hear my uproarious singing and think I had been outside the perimeter and got drunk with the Thais.

Had it not been for my poor throat constantly bringing me to a state of reality, this would have been one of the greatest experiences of my life.

The following day, I was told that I had emptied a two gallon bucket of water during the previous few hours, before dropping off to sleep at about one o'clock in the morning.

Surprisingly perhaps, I had no trace of a hangover the next morning, and apart from the ever-present thirst, I felt perfectly normal. However, the doctor refused to allow me to go out that day working on bridges. ‘Tell no-one about it,’ he said when I told him the cause of my ‘trip’.
‘Your system has coped with the poison as a narcotic; someone else could die after taking half of what you ate’.

The Japs asked my boys the whereabouts of the ‘Gunzo’ who was usually in charge, and some of them reported with glee that I had poisoned myself with mushrooms. When I was once more out with them, every few minutes one of the Japs would bring me old pieces of toadstool pulled from the rotting wood, and suggest I cook and eat it, keeping the while a straight face.

Although I got a bit fed up by the time we finished work, I had learnt for the first time that the Japanese do indeed have a sense of humour.

Chapter 36

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