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One of our officers thought he would like to come out on our cemetery party with me on one occasion, and he was therefore nominally in charge. During our lunch break one of the men saw a Thai signaling from the bushes that he would like to buy his wrist-watch, so he slipped out of sight and spent a few minutes bargaining in the bushes as was the custom.

Price agreed, our lad unwisely let go of the watch before getting a firm grip of the cash, and the Thai disappeared with both into the jungle. The poor unwise victim ran over and told his tale to our officer, though goodness knows what he thought could be done about his lost watch then.

To add insult to injury however, the officer put him on a charge, and I was called upon to give evidence against him the next day. The crime with which the man was charged was ‘Communicating with Natives!’ This charge was not, I am sure, to be found in what was then known as King’s Rules and Regulations.

Since being taken prisoner I had not heard one genuine piece of news. We listened to the endless rumors with much interest but giving them little credence. In Tamarkan however, I was told that the ‘pukka griff’ was being communicated to one of the working parties by a ‘well dressed Thai’.

In truth, officers in a camp down the line had rigged up a radio receiver, and when they passed news items from camp to camp the recipient was always told to say that a ‘well dressed Thai’ had told him. This was of course in case the Japs heard what was being said.

The first credible news I heard was at this time, and it was to the effect that a big naval battle had been fought off the coast of New Guinea, and that twenty-four enemy ships had been sunk.

Another piece of news was that a big battle on land had occurred in a place called ‘Orel’, or something like that, and the Russians had knocked out fourteen hundred Jerry tanks. That of course was in the European theatre, as the Russians did not declare war on the Jaoanese until the war was virtually won.

Lastly, we heard that General McArthur had at last launched a campaign in the Far East theatre, believed to be in the chain of islands which runs from Australia to Singapore, including Borneo and the (then) Dutch Eart Indies.

The ‘well dressed Thai’ subterfuge did not, unfortunately, work for long, and when the source of our news was traced, the culprits were tortured for days and then left to die in a ditch.

In Tamarkan I was the senior N.C.O. in my regiment, and was therefore responsible for the welfare of our lads. A few days after hearing our first news, I was crossing the open space where we paraded for work on my way to the hospital huts, where I was going to visit Pte. Buckle and a few other sick men. It was evening but not yet quite dark; too late I saw that I must pass one of the most sadistic of our guards, and he was clearly the worse for drink.

All prisoners had to bow when a Jap passed by, and this always stuck in my gullet. ‘Courra!’ screamed the drunken Jap as he took in my apology for a bow. ‘Engerisso soljah no bruddy good.’ Lifting his thick stick he proceeded to beat me about the head and shoulders. No bones were broken however, and although I was sore for a few days no real harm was done.

This Jap was not liked by his own mates, so none of them came to his assistance; which was just as well, since when there were more than one they vied with one another in inflicting punishment.

Shortly after this, having got several graves in hand, I was sent with my party by truck to Banpong to fetch a load of bamboo poles for hut building. On the way we stopped in a large Thai village, and were left to our own devices while our guards regaled themselves in a cafe. Seeing that we were unguarded, I went for a stroll around the ‘shops’. These were in fact more like market stalls, and the shopkeepers sat or stood behind them.

Not knowing that we were to walk round in public, I had only donned my loin-cloth, and to the natives I must have looked immodest; one of the stalls was hung with garments of all kinds, and an elderly Chinese lady was sitting to the rear of the platform working a sewing machine.

A few yards past this stall I was halted by hearing the clip-clop of wooden clogs hurrying to catch me up; turning, I found the little lady tailoress, black eyes smiling, holding out a strange pair of black Chinese pattern shorts for me. Seeing me hesitate (I felt that I was parading under false colors, as I had a pair of shorts back at the camp), she made signs that I was to put them on right away.

I opened my mouth to explain, but then seeing her sweet smile, I said thank-you instead ('cupchai' in Thai), and put the shorts on. She stood back and surveyed me with pride, but then suddenly ran off; looking in the direction of her startled glance I saw the guards leaving their cafe, so I hurried back to the lorry.

Col. Toosey gave a lecture on ‘Dunkirk’ during the evening of the thirteenth of July, but I was called out half-way through, as a hundred sick had just arrived from Tarso. Two of them had died during the journey, and needed burying in a hurry. We now always kept a few graves dug ready, so, led by our dear Dutch Dominee, our little burial party went forth in the dark.

The following day, two medical orderlies who had been serving the sick up country, and had come down with the Tarso crowd, died of typhoid. This caused much concern, lest an epidemic occur, so another order went out that all drinking water must be boiled, and all eating utensils and mess-tins sterilized. There was, thankfully, no further spread of the disease.

Throughout our days as prisoners, the medical orderlies stuck to their task with faithful devotion, and tended the sick when often nearly as ill as their patients. They had a truly thankless task, with night shifts in the foul ulcer huts, pain and suffering all around them, and no relief to offer; perhaps spending months trying to clean up ulcers without dressings, inflicting pain each day, only in the end to see the limbs amputated. I would not have voluntarily exchanged jobs with them, even when railway work was at its worst.

From this time on there was a continual stream of sick men arriving in the camp from even further up country and in progressively worse condition. They came down in open barges, and the direct sun killed many before they arrived, so the number of funerals held each day soon doubled.

A permanent concert party was now formed in the camp, and performances reached a high standard, with a character named Bobbie Spong performing the female roles so well that we could forget his true sex. The Jap guards attended the shows, and they would applaud vociferously, especially Bobbie’s turns.

The first performance I attended included an invitation to members of the audience to mount the stage and give a ‘turn’. Plucking up the courage to give my first ever public appearance, I ran out at full speed lest my nerve fail me, not wearing my 'clompen' (Dutch for clogs).

There was a bamboo root protruding from the ground just in front of the stage and I did not notice it in my haste. My bare toes felt as though they had been pushed back into my heel as I fell and rolled over on the ground in agony. The crowd roared their appreciation, thinking it to be all part of the show. My song, ('The music goes around and around', Sashmo style') when I recovered enough to sing it, received only polite applause.

For some time I had been having trouble getting work out of some of the half-blood Dutch workers who were now daily on my cemetery party. When I told them what to do they would gesticulate and say ‘No spik Inglis, no understand’.

On one occasion when I had mostly these chaps, and I was left with only a few British who would work, I even tried clouting one of them who I knew did understand what I was saying; however the fellow screamed out at the top of his voice in pretended agony, so that I had to desist before the guard came over and beat the man up in real earnest.

That night back in camp, I decided to try to learn to speak Dutch, instead of reading the delapidated novels which were circulating in the camp. Then I would be able to speak to the lead-swingers in their own language. Walking into one of the Dutchmen's huts I asked if there was anyone who would teach me to speak Dutch, and a one time schoolteacher volunteered to take me on.

He proved a clever and patient tutor. We had no grammar or other text books; however I had a New Testament, given to me by our village Free Church when I went into the forces, and my teacher now lent me his Dutch New Testament. First of all I had to learn by heart the pronunciation of the alphabet, and the rules concerning vowel sounds in open and closed syllables.

Unlike English, Dutch spelling and pronunciation are quite regular (regelmatig), so that once the rules have been mastered, to see a word is to know how to pronounce it (Oh that ours was the same!). Not having much else to do in the evenings I had mastered this part of the exercise within a week or so, and my teacher was surprised how easily I mastered the difficult Dutch dipthongs and gutterals.

Now all I needed to do was, phrase by phrase, compare my English New Testament with the Dutch one, since our Authorized Version and the Dutch are both translated from the same Greek, almost sentence for sentence. I was surprised how easy it was to begin to get the feel of the language by this method, and how much more pleasant it was than learning dreary lists of words from a vocabulary.

By the time I had read through the four Gospels I found myself beginning to think in Dutch. Of course, my neighbors got a bit fed up with my guttural mutterings every night, as part of the exercise was always to read aloud.

After only a month or so, I tried out my learning on a group of Dutchmen, and could not understand why I was laughed at. However, I soon found out that, like my version, the Dutch New Testament I was learning from was couched in an archaic form of the tongue, and that I was in fact saying something like ‘Yea verily, the guard hath said unto me . . .’ and so on.

From now on I joined groups of the Dutch whenever I got the opportunity, and gradually acquired the modern idiom. Within two months there was not much that I could not communicate in my new language, and ‘No spik Inglis’ was no longer heard on my cemetery work party.

A football appeared in the camp with a party from up country, and although I am a rugger (rugby football) man, without a clue concerning the rules of soccer, due to shortage of fit men I was roped in to play in a British versus Dutch match, which one of our officers organized. To my surprise, we won, two goals to nil.

The Japs watched the game with considerable interest, and afterwards gave each member of the winning team a packet of cigarettes and a bar of soap as prizes.

It was at about this time that one of our men had been caught by the Japs sneaking a tin of food from their store, and after beating him up, they made him stand to attention in the blistering sun, in front of their guard room.

After about an hour, it was evident that the fellow was on his last legs, so I walked over to him, and pretending to be furious, shouted invective at the poor suffering fellow for a couple of minutes, before putting my double crowned Aussie hat on his head. The guards were used to seing me coming and going in charge of funeral parties, and did not interfere. They allowed him to go soon after that.

The rainy season now set in, and our bed supports sank down through the mud so that we had to drive in longer ones. During my captivity I had gradually been making myself a kit of tools, starting from the day in River Valley when I found the sharpening stone, one or two old hacksaw blades, a file, and a small hammer in the dump.

For instance, I had annealed one of the blades, cut coarser teeth in it with the file, and made a bamboo frame to convert it to a wood-cutting bow saw. I could exchange the blades so this also served as a hacksaw using the other blade. Up country I had found a small native meat cleaver, and I had cut this into strips to make chisels and a plane blade, and later, made a teak plane to hold it.

Therefore I was now able to tackle many jobs, including tin-smithing, using tin cans from the Jap cookhouse; often in the evening someone would bring round worn-out or broken items of equipment to see if I could do anything with them, and very often I was able to help.

To celebrate the anniversary of their entry into Thailand, the Japs called us on parade, and the head one made a speech in Japanese, translated for us by Capt. Boyle. Those who had performed good service in the camp were awarded small prizes. I was called and given a small hand-towel for my work in the cemetery. I had been without a towel since having mine stolen when at Roberts Hospital.

The Japs now gave us authority to make crosses for all the graves, so all the carpenters in camp were called together and given the job of making these, and carving the names on them. On the twenty-fifth of August, we took all the crosses out to the graves, and after we had put them in their places it began to look more like a cemetery.

The next day I heard that Lance Cpl. ‘Peanut’ Runham, and also Pte. Seamark, both from our mob, were ill in the sick bay, so I went over to see them. Peanut had TB and was coughing blood, Seamark, beri-beri, and general malnutrition.

When Seamark and Cornwall (also one of our boys), died five days later, the doctor entered ‘starvation’ on their death certificates. There were twenty-two men from our regiment at the funeral. The sense of unity and regimental pride among our men lasted until the end.

Out grave digging the next day, ‘Pig’s Eyes’ was back with us, and insisted that he had heard one of the men use a bad word, so he kept us all standing to attention in the sun for a long time waiting for the guilty man to own up.

When this failed to obtain results, he selected six men whose faces he did not like and smacked them all round the face. I am sure that he had heard nothing wrong, but just felt like ‘kicking the cat’ as the Australians would say.

A Thai man had been watching all this, concealed in the bushes. When the guard was not looking he sidled up to me and gave me a parcel of tobacco and cigarette papers to share among the men.

Tamarkan was the only Thai camp where the Japs allowed us to have our Sundays free. The next day was Sunday and it coincided with the birthday of the Dutch sovereign, Queen Juliana. The Dutch spent the day in sports and competitive games, and in the evening they held a very good concert, much of which I was able to understand.

Two days later ‘Pig’s Eyes’ was put in charge of another working party, and accompanied by a British officer. On their return to camp we heard that for no apparent reason the Jap had bashed our officer up, and that he had been brought back to camp in quite a bad way.

The next day, to everyone’s intense delight, ‘Pig’s Eyes’ was himself bashed up by his own N.C.O. for what he had done, and transferred to the less honorable job of working in the Jap cookhouse.

In order to engender a competitive spirit in the camp, our C.O. announced that in three days time, on the ninth of September, an exhibition of Arts and Crafts would be held. I had done quite a few drawings since our capture, so I stuck some of my better efforts on to a piece of cardboard, in preparation for taking first prize.

On the appointed day I entered the hut where the Exhibition was to be held, and my breath was taken away by what I saw. Incredibly good works of art had been produced from somewhere among the men’s kits; I could not have guessed that such talent existed in a cross-section of ordinary people such as we had here.

Everything made from improvised materials, there were both oil and water colour paintings, engravings, woodcuts, statues, ornamental boxes, models of engines and airplanes, and many other things, all executed from memory. My own poor effort was quite insignificant.

Although the Dutch were in numerical minority, I noticed that three out of four exhibits were from them. Our Colonel awarded the many prizes that afternoon at a special ceremony, and all but four went, deservedly, to the Dutch. Needless to say I won nothing. The only things I had which might have stood a chance were my tools, and as the Japs did not allow us to have these, I had been unable to enter them.

Among the full-blooded Dutchmen in the camp was a short and slight old fellow who I only knew then by his nickname, ‘Outje’, which literally was, I suppose, ‘Oldlet’ or ‘little old one’ in English.

He had spent much of his life working among the natives in Java, at the same time learning the healing properties of local herbs. In Tamarkan he was our unofficial herbalist, and was not sent out on working parties, but instead spent his time ministering to the sick. The main trouble he explained to me, was that he could not get hold of the right herbs in camp, and that most of the diseases could be cured, if only what he wanted could be obtained.

One of his main remedies was turmeric root, or as the Dutch called it, ‘Kunier’. It grows in that part of the world, and the plant is very similar to ginger. The root, shaped like root ginger, is one of the ingredients of curry, and its bright yellow juice was what Outje used to massage into the limbs of sufferers from dry beri-beri; from the grated root he made poultices for ulcers, and he also produced a concoction for the treatment of dysentery from it. Outje’s arms and clothes were always stained saffron.

At this time he ran out of this herb, and knowing that I went through Tamarkan village daily on my way to the cemetery, he asked me to try to purchase some for him. He had a Thai dictionary, and told me to ask for ‘Kah-min’. I was also to try to purchase some betel-nut as he could, he said, make a pain-relieving drug from that.

I managed to slip away unseen from our working party a few days later, but the Thai lady shopkeeper looked in blank incomprehension at my effort to pronounce ‘Kah-min’. She even fetched some cronies from next door. I drew a picture of the root on the floor, but they brought me ginger. I made faces to indicate that it was hot and pointed to some yellow material, and one of them recognised my requirement and with an ‘Oooh!’ of understanding, she sang ‘Kah-min’.

I had no more trouble after that, but the shopkeeper explained that as she had none on the premises I was to give her one Tickel and collect the goods next day. True to her promise I was able to take a big parcel of the right stuff back to Outje the following day, much to his delight.

I concealed all the things I purchased from the Thai shop in the blankets and ropes we used for lowering bodies into the graves, as we were occasionally searched by the guards.

We did not have coffins of course, and the dead were sewn up in their own blanket or rice-sack. Once or twice we found bodies had been dug up during the night, and their blanket stripped off. I never knew whether this had been done by local people or by our own boys.

On the twelfth of the month, poor old Peanut died. There was neither cure nor hope out there for anyone unfortunate enough to contract TB. That same afternoon we buried a Scot. We had a piper in the camp, and marched to the cemetery following him as he piped a sad lament.

Even the Japs seemed moved by it as we passed their guardroom, and in the village all the Thais turned out to see us when they heard the strange sound approaching along the jungle track.

We were now issued with another of the printed Jap letter cards, my second to date. I was careful this time to complete mine in capital letters.

On the fifteenth of September a party of prisoners called at the camp to collect them, and a member of this letter party told me that there were four letters addressed to me lying at Canberra camp. So near and yet so far, as we had no means of communication, unless the Jap willed. Men in the letter party also told us they had heard that there had been landings on the continent of Europe, and that we were pushing the Jerry’s back in Italy.

Three days later, during the night the Japs caught five prisoners outside the camp selling chunkel-heads to the Thais; they had been purloined from the Jap tool-store. These men were taken to the Jap office and beaten without ceasing until four o’clock in the morning, by which time they were only semi-conscious.

During the following day, they were again beaten by different Japs every few minutes. By evening, when the Japs took their victims to Kanburi, none was recognizable, their features having by then been kicked out of shape.

Two days later they were again brought back into the camp, and tortured for another whole day. This may have made one or more of the men divulge the names of others involved in the escapade, as the Japs now took another five men from the huts, and tortured all ten of them for eleven days. Three of the latter five were then set free, and the remainder taken away from the camp, never to be heard of again.

While the men were under interrogation, a man from my hut was caught picking up a note one of the captives had poked through a crack in the Jap office wall. He was beaten black and blue and was very lucky in not being taken in with the victims.

A party of two hundred men was now called to leave for Non-Produck, a camp the other side of Banpong. I made a list in duplicate of all men of our regiment in Tamarkan together with a letter to our C.O., who was in Chunkai. I gave these to one of our boys in the party, asking him to drop one copy and the letter off as the train went through Chunkai, and to give the other copy to any of our officers he could find at Banpong when he passed through there. This was done in order that whoever had our letters might know where to send them.

I now noticed that the wooden crosses were beginning to be eaten by termites, so I pointed out to the Colonel that there was not much chance of the names of the dead remaining legible until we were freed. He asked me if I had any better idea, and I offered to punch the names on strips of tin, and to bury them in bottles in each grave; he told me to go ahead.

Within a week I had prepared enough name tags for all the graves, and then I asked our quartermaster to obtain the empty bottles for me. However, he said there were not enough bottles in the camp for my purpose and refused to help.

That evening, with sack over shoulder I walked up and down every hut in the camp calling for empty bottles, and obtained enough and to spare. ‘Are you a Pelmanist?’ asked Lance Cpl. Keys, the quartermaster’s clerk, when he saw the result of my efforts.

The C.O. now told me that all fit men were shortly to leave for up country, but as he needed me for the cemetery work he would try to keep me back. A day or two later about three hundred men left on the first stage of their journey. On the second of October it rained so hard that our hut was flooded.

With the rest of my kit, my diary was soaked, and I went to our cook-house to dry it out. That part which I had written in ink had run, and in later years I was to find it very difficult to decipher. The next day we heard very strong rumors that the war in Europe had been won.

Among the other sick men from our regiment was a Pte. Grace. He was exceedingly ill, and as I went to see him each day, I knew it was miraculous that he survived at all; I have never seen a man lose so much weight and live; chronic dysentery had literally reduced him to skin and bone, and he weighed little more than two stone.

Yet he was always cheerful throughout his suffering, and although the doctor told me that there was no hope for him now, I still hoped that his terrific willpower would pull him through. There was no flesh to absorb the shock of lying on bare boards, and when we buried him a few days later his bones protruded through the torn skin.

I made friends with a Dutchman named Willem Poel, who was in the ulcer ward with a bad leg ulcer. I noticed that he never had visitors, and in a hut with mostly Englishmen he had no-one to talk to. So I got in the habit of stopping for a few words with him when I visited one of our mob in the next bed.

He was well over six feet, slow of thought and speech, and I liked him. He never uttered a sound when he had his ulcer squeezed, although many of the bravest could not help crying out when this job had to be carried out. His infection had started six months earlier, and he was rapidly becoming worse.

Major Moon had now to amputate through the knee joint, to prevent the ulcer encroaching on his thigh. During the next two weeks, Willem had two more amputations before an amputation through the hip finally halted the advance of the disease.

There were no analgesics to relieve post operative pain, and lying on the bare boards the patient often suffered such intense pain that he was affected mentally. Willem was to become so affected, and he took such a dislike to me that he refused to speak after he recovered from his last operation.

On the twenty-fifth of October the Japs told us that the railway was completed up to the Burma terminal, and they gave us a day off in celebration of the event. A sick man arriving brought me news that my ‘mucker’ Jimmy was also back from up country, safe and well in Chunkai. I wrote him a note and gave it to a member of the next party to leave for up country, and asked him to throw it out at Chunkai station as he passed through.

The following day was a great milestone in the days of my captivity; I received six letters from home. There was one from my father, one from my brother Reg, and four from my mother.

One of the letters told me that my sister Marjorie had given birth to a daughter and that they had called her Jennifer Jane. I had been best man at her wedding not long before we went abroad, and now I was an uncle!

The letters were all over a year old, as my niece now must also be. I was one of the few to receive letters at this time, and I spent every spare moment I had reading them over and over again.

Difficult to understand now perhaps, but that first evening all my friends, and even a dozen strangers came to me with a whispered request to read my precious letters. Many of our men, some with wife and children, received no mail during the whole of their captivity.

My mail changed my whole outlook for the next few weeks; they were the first communication from the outside world; we were not forgotten men after all. I slept with the letters under my pillow, and felt them now and again during sleepless hours of the night. During the day I read them over and over again, and when going through moments of depression, I was comforted by the thought of them.

Chapter 29

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