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On my birthday, the sixth of February, I marched out of Tamarkan for the last time, never even to see it again; destination Chunkai, where we arrived at six o’clock that evening.

The R.S.M. sent for me the next day, and asked me if I would take over the job of group canteen purchaser. This consisted only of purchasing two eggs per day for each sick man from our regiment in the camp, and giving them out personally; I had no money of my own and found the practicalities rather awkward. Therefore I borrowed twenty Tickel from Sgt. Horrocks, who seemed to be one of the favoured ‘permanent residents’ of Chunkai, and in business in quite a big way.

This loan enabled me to buy eggs in bulk, and more cheaply than the hand to mouth system I had originally been expected to operate. I could not help wondering how a fellow prisoner was able to acquire such huge sums as Horrocks clearly had.

Now the Japs decided to take the remaining officers, and send them all to Kanburi further down the line. Officers had been looked upon as ‘they’ by most other ranks up until now. This was partly because they received money from the Japs which they were in theory to pay back after the war out of their officers’ pay. It was also because the officers lived always in separate huts and ate on their own, and that we always thought they were living better than they possibly actually were.

In fact I am quite sure that our officers did all they could to help us at all times, and allocated some of their cash in the larger camps like Chunkai to the welfare of the sick.

When we realized that the last of our officers were really going to be taken right away from us, they suddenly became ‘we’s’ for the first time. As they moved out of camp it was a sad parting. We all knew that the end of the war could not be all that far off, and many believed that the Japs would shoot us all when they realized the end was approaching.

They knew these officers were our leaders, and were probably removing them because leaderless men would, they thought, be easier to dispose of. It was with sadness therefore, and with many a moist eye that we said good-bye.

I was still having one relapse of fever after another, and soon had to give up even my little canteen job. A blood-slide showed both S.T. and B.T. malaria, and I was able to do little other than rest. On the twentieth of February, I was told to be ready to move out of Chunkai to go further down country, and the next afternoon we marched into Kanburi.

Before they would allow us in the camp we had to unload a trainload of firewood. In the camp we sat by our kits all night, awaiting a train to take us further on our way.

The next morning we were told to stand down, and I got two hours’ sleep.
Going to the well to fill my water-bottle, I saw that since our last sojourn someone had made a big set of bamboo pumps with great ingenuity, and water was now pumped up from the well in bamboo pipes and stored in big tanks.

After spending yet another night awaiting our train, at four a.m., on the twenty-third we climbed on board at last. After a wait of three hours we steamed slowly off, passing through Banpong (our first port of call when we came to Thailand), and on to Ratbury, where we saw that another bridge of steel and concrete had been blown up.

Here we spent the afternoon carrying sacks of tapioca for the Japs, many of us so weak that we needed four men to a sack.

That evening, we crossed the river by barge (the bridge being destroyed), and were made to mount up onto the curved metal roofs of cattle-trucks similar to those in which we had arrived from Changi.

We were given a dollop of cold rice each on the roof, and then the train moved off on what was to prove a very dangerous journey. We should have used our rice ration to stick ourselves on those roofs. As it was we linked arms and hung onto each other like grim death, as the train bumped and swayed over the uneven track, and we steamed South towards Malaya.

We all considered ourselves very lucky to arrive safely at our destination at ten o’clock in the evening. Having dumped our kits by the , we sat on them until one a.m., before being marched away by our guards.

We knew by the stars that we had been travelling South, so we could be in either Southern Thailand or Northern Malaya. We later found it to be the former. Another thing we were not to know, was that we were marching to our last sojourn in a P.O.W. camp before the war in the Far East eventually ended.

Arriving in our new camp after a long march, in my debilitated state I felt about all-in, and from seven in the morning when we arrived, until mid-day, I lay more or less out for the count. I was brought round by my friends at mid-day to receive a plate of rice with sugar sprinkled on it.

For the first time I became cognizant of my surroundings, and saw that there were no huts for us, and that I had been lying in the open.

Luckily we were in the dry season, although for those of us with fever and almost continually recurring rigors, it was not much fun to be sleeping on the ground outside.

Our first job was to be hut-building, but I was unable to help much, as I was now entering into a three-month period of virtually untreated malaria, often delirious for days on end, and remembering little about it all.

One thing I do remember clearly, though. A week or so after completing it, we were all lying in our new hut when a frightening and oppressive stillness descended over everything.

Gradually we began to hear a strange rushing sound coming as though from far off. Louder and louder, until it became a roar, and suddenly all hell broke loose, as with an unholy din, our hut was wrenched from the ground, and it sailed high up into the sky never to be seen again.

Men were lifted into the air as the bed stagings went up, and were dumped on the ground yards away. Just as suddenly the wind ceased, and rain came down in torrents. We had experienced our first hurricane. I hope it will be my last.

I found a piece of attap about two feet square and held it over myself to keep the worst of the rain off. Nightfall had been approaching when the catastrophe commenced, and I stayed under my ‘umbrella’ until morning.

With the dawn we were able to see the extent of the devastation. Not a stick was left standing in the whole camp. There was no cookhouse and therefore no breakfast. Most of the men’s blankets had disappeared, everything and everyone was soaked; we looked a very sorry spectacle.

The work of replacement was put in hand at once, priority being given to hospital and cookhouse huts, and before another week had passed everyone had a roof over his head again. Not however before many of the fever cases developed pneumonia, and over half the population of the camp became too sick to work.

When the huts were completed for the second time, the first outside work-parties left the camp. When they returned they told us they were clearing the jungle five kilometers away to build an aerodrome. They had a rough lot of guards, and several were beaten.

This camp was at the time called after the nearest village, Pechaburi, (although none of us was sure of the correct way to spell it). We were without a water supply, and those able to walk that far were escorted by guards once a day nearly a mile into the jungle, where water was bailed out of a muddy stream, and carried back to camp.

Those of us not well enough to go were dependent on comrades for their water, and I was able to lend my bucket (very precious in this camp) on the understanding that I had half the water; so I was able to wash myself down every day, even though I only used a pint of water in my mess-tin. Another sick man would always use this after me, so its consistency by then can be guessed.

A party of Aussies started to dig a camp well near the cookhouse. Well might they be called ‘Diggers’. Working like Trojans, and in shifts, twenty-four hours a day, they gradually worked downwards into the rock-hard soil. I had never seen our men work so hard.

They dug it like a nine feet square mine-shaft, and there was soon a big heap of soil. Within three weeks they were over thirty feet down and had reached water. It came up yellow as mustard for the first few days, and the cooks had to leave it to settle before it could be used.

The well did not provide enough water for the whole camp, so a party of ‘Pommies’ (Aussie slang for the English, reputedly because of the rosy cheeks of the immigrants, before the Australian sun burned them brown), volunteered to dig another one in another part of the camp, and when that was working we just about managed, by rationing the water carefully.

Pechaburi was the first camp during our stay in Thailand where there was no river for miles around. Kampongs in Thailand, and the camps themselves, all threw their refuse into the river, and as we began to recover our health in Pechaburi, we began to wonder whether our sterile well water was a factor. As the months went by there were fewer and fewer deaths, and our health generally did improve greatly.

After three months in the camp I at last shook off my malaria, and had no relapses. Looking back, I feel that it was little short of a miracle that, without medicine and an adequate diet, I could have recovered at all from the very low state I had been in only a few months before; especially as it is said that malaria cannot be cured without drugs, and I had none during that period.

The bones that had skeleton-like bulged from my knees, hips, shoulders and ribs, gradually became covered with flesh again as I regained my ability to eat.

Not that I had ever given up hope. No matter how many of my friends I saw carried out feet first, I never seriously considered the possibility of my joining them. A confidence from outside myself seemed somehow make me feel that I was different from the others who were dying; although time seemed to be standing still, I was quite sure I would return home in the end.

By this time it seemed as though we had been in captivity for untold years; visions of home had become more and more difficult to conjure up, and then only as a dream. Where we now were, was the only reality.

During the period in which I had been so ill, my diary had gone by the board for the first time since our capture, so I do not have the date of the day in May when at last I was pronounced fit to go back to work.

I had always hated staying in camp, so even though it meant working under the Japs again, I was delighted to be detailed for work on the aerodrome party the following day, and confidence returned. I wondered how they had managed without me to look after them!

Arriving at the site, I was surprised to see hundreds of acres had already been cleared and roughly levelled, and that a modern American bulldozer was parked at the edge under the trees. It was spotless and shone like a new shilling.

I asked a neighbour if it had to be cleaned up after work every day, and with a laugh he told me that it was never used, the work being done with picks, rakes and chunkels, all by hand. The bulldozer was started up every morning to make sure it worked, then polished and left.

It was the only bulldozer they had, having been captured in Singapore at the same time as had we; now, no-one was going to risk breaking it and incurring such wrath as would probably entail being flayed alive. This machine could have done more work than all the prisoners in the camp put together, but it remained a museum piece.

There was, however, one sop to progress in the shape of two ancient British steamrollers, with fireboxes enlarged to burn wood. They were lubricated with pure castor oil, and lots of this had already been smuggled back to the camp for our doctors to use.

The runways on the aerodrome were being made from rocks, which parties of prisoners were breaking up with sledge hammers, and the steamrollers were being used to level and consolidate these.

We had to walk five kilometers to work carrying our tools, and then spent all the day in the sun working like ants on the ‘drome, levelling the ground with our picks and chunkels; then there was the same journey back 'home' again.

After the months of inaction, the first day had been a grueling one for me, and I was glad to put my feet up on our return that night.

However, we did not get our rest without first experiencing some trauma; on the usual roll call, which took place before we were dismissed, it was discovered that one of the prisoners had escaped from his working party.

The Japs threatened reprisals in the form of dire punishment should anyone else escape, and our own camp authorities asked us not to attempt to, as the sick in camp would be those most likely to suffer. In any case, the end of the war could not be far off now.

Nevertheless, it was not to be long before three more British, and then two American prisoners also escaped. (This was the first camp in which I had encountered Americans; they kept themselves to themselves, and I did not get an opportunity to ask where they had come from.)

Chapter 38

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