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It was the third of March, and we had now spent twelve days in Changi camp. That evening I was warned to be on parade at eight o'clock the next morning, as I was moving camp to Singapore with a working party.

I had by now acquired quite a large heap of things that ‘might come in useful’, and when next morning I tried to pack it up into a form which I could march with, I found that I could hardly lift it off the ground; some things therefore had to be discarded, including my charcoal stove.

We moved off on our twenty-mile march with the sun blazing down on us, and before the journey was accomplished on empty stomachs, I was sorely tempted to shed some more of my heavy load. However, by assuring myself for the last eight miles or so that we must be nearly there, I finally made it, kit and all, at three o'clock in the afternoon.

We were told that we were in Farrow Park, which, although then surrounded by barbed wire, had in peace-time been a polo ground. Before resting, we dug latrines, made fireplaces for the cooks, and erected bell-tents the Japs provided.

Next morning before breakfast, we mustered for our first ‘Tenko’, which is Japanese word for roll-call, and after eating our rice, we moved out to begin our task, which proved to consist of removing burnt-out cars from the highway, where they had lain since the capitulation.

Our six guards seemed to behave quite reasonably, and we did a fair day's work. We had no food to eat, and at midday suffered the mortification of seeing the Japs eat their beautiful white rice. (Our rice ration consisted of broken reject grains, and was off-white in colour.)

Back in the camp that night, we found that the guard duty had been taken over by big black-bearded Sikhs. These chaps had been serving in the British Army at the fall of Singapore, and now had changed sides; it probably amused our captors to put these men in charge of us now.

Some were vindictive and spat or lashed out with rifle butt if we approached them. Others said they were only serving their new masters because they had been told they would be shot if they refused. They told us they would desert when they had a chance. The Japs really despised them; they soon took their rifles away, and made them carry staves.

The following day our work changed to carrying sand, and as we still had no food with us at midday, the guards shared their meal with us. This comprised one wooden bucket of fish-flavored rice, and one of sweet milky rice.

The fourth day was spent cleaning up an old Aussie camp, and I dug up two wide-brimmed Aussie hats out of the mud. They were both damaged, but I put them aside to take back to camp. We also dug up some tinned food, which the guards allowed us to take back to share with the others that evening.

These guards were really quite good to us; one of them disappeared for half an hour, and when he returned he gave me two sergeants' shirts and a mess-tin. Again they shared their food with us, this time rice and bacon, and it tasted like food for the gods.

Some of our men made it a point of honour to say nothing good of the Japs, and even went so far as to call anyone who said otherwise ‘Jap Happy’, which was our word for a quisling. Within my experience there were good men among our enemy. I never ceased to wonder that we were not treated worse than we were, considering the way the Japs and Chinese had been treating one another during the preceding years.

Then again, the Japanese method of imposing military discipline was brutal in the extreme; any soldier may beat up anyone below him in rank, right down to the two-star private beating up his one-star comrade; it was mutiny and death to retaliate.

Those wounded in battle must try to get themselves killed, and finally, rather than be taken prisoner, commit the ‘Hara-Kiri’, literally, the belly cut. Those who were too ill to go on duty were put on half rations as they were of no use to their emperor. I think that after years of this treatment most of us would have found ourselves affected.

We were told that living under the constant threat of earthquakes for centuries past had contributed to their hasty tempers and instability.

We also had some ‘bad eggs’ in our army. I well recall some of the regular soldiers with whom I had served in the commandos the year before. If half the tales they told of the way they treated the ‘wogs’ (as they called most other races) were true, then our colonizing troops between the wars were pretty well as bad as the Japs at their worst.

Back in camp that night, I made a composite double crowned hat from the two I had found earlier in the day. This most probably saved my life on at least one occasion later on in the Thai jungle. I wore it for the remainder of my days as a POW.

The next day our guards, the best Japs I ever met, left us and were replaced by harder nuts, who marched us back to Changi through the hottest part of the day, almost without respite.

On our return ‘home’, we were greeted with the news that we were to move out of the huts, which had by now been made quite comfortable, and were to erect tents for ourselves in a sand-pit a quarter of a mile away. We spent the next day digging fresh latrines and leveling out spaces for the tents. The sergeants, however, were allocated an old native hut in the corner of the pit for their sleeping quarters.

Our C.S.M., Tommy Beatty, who had been so badly wounded in the battle, now returned to us from hospital, and I was delighted to see him recovered.

Having a good look round our new area when we had finished our work for the day, I came across what was to me a new kind of tree. It was covered in nuts, which were not unlike ‘conkers’, but the kernel exposed on removing the shell was black with white spots. I tasted one, and it tasted good, so I gathered as many as my pockets would hold. On the way back to our hut I met Tommy, and told him of the nut-tree, advising him to help himself before everyone found out about them.

I munched about fifteen of these nuts during the half hour before our evening meal, which was always our main meal of the day. This evening we had rice and bully-beef gruel by way of a special treat. I was usually ravenously hungry, so was surprised to find that my appetite had completely disappeared before I was half-way through supper.

As I stared forlornly at the contents of my mess-tin, I suddenly felt very sick, and the truth dawned on me that I had probably poisoned myself with those nuts. I was rather a joke with my comrades for the ‘rubbish’ that I ate.

Quietly so as not to attract attention, I tried to make an unhurried exit. ‘Ullo, ullo, ullo, what's up with Snowy?’ came an obnoxious voice from my left, ‘surely 'es not leavin' 'is grub?’. As my withdrawal became a rout I left my food to the scallywag, and set full sail for the latrines.

Tommy Beatty sat on the pole beside me for the whole of the next four hours I spent over that latrine. He had only eaten six of the nuts, and had to sit there all night. They turned out to be castor-oil nuts, and not poisonous, but we were lucky not to have burst the newly healed wounds in Tommy's abdomen.

These nuts were dried and threaded on a skewer to use as candles by the local population, as I discovered later. The evenings are fairly evenly dark throughout the year in Singapore, as the equator is not far away.

We had been back from Farow Park for only four days when I was warned to be ready the next morning to move off to Singapore, to go on another working party. As we paraded at dawn, we hoped to do the worst of our marching before the heat of the day set in, but it was two hours before our guards came for us, and after another hour's wait in front of Changi jail, we began our journey in earnest.

However, it poured with rain the whole way, and by the time we arrived at our destination, River Valley Road, we had nothing left that was dry. Before we left Changi, we had been told that we were an advance party to prepare for the rest of the group who were to follow, so we had to put down our wet kit and start work immediately.

Chapter 13

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