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Living With Nature

I never ceased to wonder at the marvelous way in which nature seemed to provide everything for the local population, without need of office or factory.

Here, I found out how the Thais illuminated their Kampongs, and made the torches which they carried when they traversed the jungle tracks at night, keeping off wild beasts and showing the way.

There is a certain tree in the jungle, in the side of which the Thais cut a hole about a foot into the trunk and just about large enough to lay a new baby in. The floor of this is dished so that it will hold about half a gallon of fluid. Once the hole has been cut, a constant supply of an oily resin flows in, and I think this was gathered about once a week. The torches were made by soaking palm leaves in the fluid and tying them in bundles a foot or so long, with dry leaves on the outside so their hands did not get sticky. They would burn for about an hour, giving quite a good light, and keeping the mosquitoes away.

Far and away the most versatile and useful of the flora was of course bamboo. Although only a giant grass, its uses were so many that I can only mention a few. It grew in the course of a few months from the ground to a hundred feet high, and some said they could see it growing.

At the end of the season the above ground part gradually died, and eventually fell back to the ground. The fresh new shoots were cut and used as a vegetable. As they grew up to a foot thick, sections were cut from the thickest to make buckets. A longer piece of the bamboo, including two of the dividing joints with the middle joint removed, made a barrel, and three or four inch thick sections, similarly made all the bottles the locals needed. When the Thai went to a wedding party, he carried his bottle of home-made liquor slung over his shoulder with a leather thong.

No saw-mill was needed to cut up planks. Thick bamboo was cut into the length required, the joints smashed with a heavy maul, and when the bamboo was split down one side and opened out, lo and behold, a plank!

All our bed stagings were made in this way, the only drawback being that the thousands of cracks harboured unlimited numbers of the repulsive bed bugs that made nights so miserable. Bed bugs cannot stand the sun, so on our rest days we would take the stagings up and leave them outside in the heat of the day; then we’d bash them with a stick and watch the bugs roll over and die in the sun.

Further up country we found that the bamboo leaves and thin twigs were used as fodder for the working elephants. As we passed kampongs, I often saw women weaving beautiful mats and panniers from thin slivers split from the outside of different shades of bamboo, making most attractive patterns.

The mats, used to form walls of their dwellings, were so cleverly woven that they were wind-proof. A coarser matting was made in the same way, but sewn up to make into rice-sacks. Sharp knives could be made by slicing a segment from a fairly thick plant, and I was told that in Malaya, the ceremonial knife used in circumcision by the Moslems was of bamboo.

Bundles of bamboo were tied together to form huge rafts, and these were coupled one behind the other to form trains, which were poled down the river with heavy teak logs slung underneath. Teak is so heavy that it will not float. These bamboo 'trains' had a crew of two, and as they floated down the fast flowing stream the crew jumped frantically from raft to raft, staving off from the bank round the continuous bends.

If a rat were trapped in the end of a long bamboo, and made to tunnel its way through the sections to come out the other end, a good water-pipe was produced, and these were used in many places to carry water down from mountain streams to the Kampongs. Several kinds of musical instruments were made from bamboo, drums, xylophones and woodwind instruments

The most ingenious and interesting of all the things I ever saw made from bamboo was far up country in a very remote and isolated community. It worked on the same principle as the diesel engine, believe it or not, and was probably invented hundreds of years earlier.

This instrument was made from just two pieces of bamboo, each about four inches long. The smaller one was about an inch diameter outside, and the other was sufficiently thicker to slide over the smaller one; one of the dividing joints was left at the end of each piece, the other end open, so that when one was slid inside the other, air was compressed in the chamber that was formed.

The purpose of the artifact was to provide a means of ignition. To operate it, a pinch of charred kapok fibre was put inside the chamber, the two parts slid sharply together with a blow from the hand; when they were drawn apart the kapok would be glowing red. This was quickly tipped out on to tinder and blown into a flame.

Thus it could continue. I believe that life would have come to a standstill out there without the ubiquitous bamboo.

After a month in Wun Lung, I had made sufficient progress with my under-water swimming to be able to travel half-way across the river without coming up for air.

On April the fourteenth, the first steam locomotive came puffing into the nearby station. A plate on its side indicated that it had been made in England in the year 1900.

Recently the embankment had began to sink in many places, and we worked late now in trying to keep up with the task of ramming in extra ballast under the sleepers to compensate for the shrinking earth.

In action, our Capt. ‘Dare-Devil’ Danton, had fearlessly roamed in no-man’s land, Tommy-gun in hand and batman at heel. Many times we saw him slink past our positions and wondered how he escaped being hit. He was now senior British officer in this camp, and seemed to get on extremely well with our captors.

The night following the locomotive’s arrival, we heard noisy celebrations in the Japs’ quarters, and at about ten o’clock Danton came staggering out well and truly ‘plastered’. This did not help the reputation he was acquiring of being ‘Jap happy’.

He later told us that he was simply trying to put himself in the position of being able to influence our captors on our behalf. I suppose he found it difficult to know where to draw the line, but apart from one repetition a few days later, that was the only occasion I ever saw anything like this happen.

We had quite a lot of men of Dutch nationality with us in this camp. They had been captured on Java, Sumatra, Celebes, Ambon, and others of the islands that go to make up what was then called the Dutch East Indies. They told us they weren’t soldiers at all really, and that after the capitulation they had donned military uniform in the hope they would be treated better as prisoners of war.

However, I was given to understand later that there was much resentment, and even hatred of them from the native Indonesian population, because they had hitherto acted as heavy handed masters; so they had been afraid these would wreak vengeance on them at the first opportunity. (One recalls the reputed plea of the old black slaves, ‘Don’t sell me to a Dutchmen, Master!’)

When, later on, trainloads of conscripted, Javanese passed our camp, they spat and shook their fists when they saw the Dutch, who had attempted to communicate with them.

Holland is, of course, a small country, and before the war it had a comparatively big empire, the climate of most of which was hostile to Europeans. The Dutch soldiers stationed there were mostly unable to find wives from home who were prepared to live out there, so the government had adopted a policy of encouraging the men to marry natives, and the offspring of such unions were granted the status of full Dutch nationality.

Somewhat different from the South African Apartheid. Provided one had Dutch nationality, there was no colour-bar in their empire. Citizenship was also granted to any native who performed an outstanding service to the Dutch.

Thus, there was one fellow in the camp who was pitch black and unable to understand a word of English or Dutch. He was a native of Ambon, and had saved the life of a Dutchman. No-one could speak Ambonese, a completely different tongue from the Malay spoken in most of Indonesia, so he led a very lonely life.

I was given to unsderstand that the Ambonese, unlike the indolent and unwarlike Javanese, were a tough and warlike race, resembling moor the Ghurkas in their behaviour.

Of course, had the Dutch been really progressive they would not have made the critical distinction between the ‘natives’ and those with Dutch citizenship, which had been the cause of most of the bitter hostility now shown, and caused them in the first place to welcome the Japs with open arms. That hostility was to continue after the war ended, with succeeding governments refusing to co-operate with the Dutch.

Many of our men, however, were also prejudiced against coloured men, and did not take too kindly to sharing huts with ‘natives’, especially as they had such different habits from us.

For instance, instead of using toilet paper, they would employ a bottle of water to wash their bottoms, pouring with the right hand and washing with the left, which, being regarded as unclean, was never employed in handling food.

I personally thought this to be at least as hygienic as what we did. Again, their relationship with the Japs was quite different from ours, as they would bow low to every guard, and cringe when spoken to; this was, of course, just of the way of the East: 'The bow that bends with the wind does not break'.

In spite of being brought up in a similar climate to that of Thailand (or was it because of it?), the men with Indonesian blood had nothing like the stamina of our men. Neither were their constitutions as robust as ours, and a condition that might have laid one of us low for only a few days would produce an inertia which sapped their will to live, and they were soon dying three times as fast as the British.

They were pitifully helpless when laid low by anything, and would creep round from one man to the next vainly pleading "Can you ‘helup’ me?".

I learnt to speak Dutch because many of them would say 'No spick English' when I set them a task, so that our boys had to do their task as well as their own.

I made many friends among the the educated Duch, one of whom lent me his New Testament, and I had my own. He first taught me the pronunciation, which is regular in Dutch, and with a little help I managed to learn the language quickly my comparing the two texts, sentence by sentence.

On the twenty-fifth of April, a party of Chinese coolies came into the camp, and were billeted in our hut, separated from us only by a thin bamboo screen. They indicated to us that they had been press-ganged. They took over the railway job that we had been doing, and we were put on the job of carrying rice from the river barges, and loading it on to trains.

That evening I peeped through the partition separating us from the Chinese and saw that most of them were smoking opium. They smoked in pairs, one pipe loading only lasting for a few seconds.

There was quite a rigmarole involved with specialized equipment. The pipe itself was of earthenware, shaped more like an electric light bulb with a small hole in one side, and a long stem of bamboo fixed in the narrow end. There was also a candle, a thin sliver of bamboo, and a bamboo pillow. The opium was like a lump of sticky toffee.

The smoker lay down on his side, head on pillow, candle a foot away from his face. The server rolled a piece of opium into a ball the size of a small pea and stuck the sliver of bamboo through it; the pellet of opium was then pressed into the hole in the side of the pipe, and the sliver twisted and removed carefully in order to ensure that a hole was left through it.

All was now ready for the great event, and the server put the pipe into the smoker’s mouth, holding the bowl over the candle in such a position that the opium started to bubble. Then the smoker sucked on the pipe with one long breath, and then it was all over. A minute or so later the roles were exchanged. To my surprise no-one went into a trance, or even dropped off to sleep, so I don’t know where the phrase ‘pipe dreams’ comes from, unless they were waking dreams.

On the third of May we were told that we were to pack our kits ready to move up country again the following day. Now that I was proficient enough to swim the river underwater (coming up only once for air), I realized that this evening would be my last opportunity. The other side had always been a mystery to me, as I often obtained glimpses of movement among the trees, but never quite knew what went on over there.

As I swam across that evening for the first time, I was only intending to escape if a very favorable circumstance presented itself, especially as I had only the clothes and possessions on me with which I came into the world.

Unseen by either the Japs or our own people I reached the comparative security of the trees on the opposite bank, and lay still for a minute getting my breath back.

These long swims were a strain on my malaria-affected spleen, and I always felt uncomfortable for a few minutes after making them. Then I arose and followed a jungle path running for a hundred yards downstream, parallel to the river.

Abruptly this entered a clearing, and before I could dive back out of sight, I saw that I had been observed by a Thai sitting on the verandah of a kampong in the middle. He beckoned to me to come over, and remembering the small fortunes the Japs were offering for live or dead escapees, it was not without some apprehension that I approached him. I climbed his ladder feeling somewhat conspicuous also, because I was naked!

It was quite a large kampong; mine host arose and beckoned me through into the first room, where to my consternation two Thai ladies were sitting cross-legged on the floor. I followed their example with alacrity, hands in lap, trying to make my person as inconspicuous as possible.

One woman was young, attractive, and as was the custom before the Japs arrived, bare-bosomed. I assumed that she was the wife. The other was elderly, so I assumed that she was mother or mother-in-law.

Although they both giggled self-consciously when they first saw me, they soon started chattering away to each other, clearly wanting me to feel at home, and I was surprised to realize how little embarrassment I was feeling, naked in the presence of two strange women. It would have been a different kettle of fish back home among ‘civilized’ folk.

The man offered me a slice of large paw-paw (papaya) hanging on the wall. It was cut with the same huge knife from his side that would be used for fighting wild beasts. Once given the status of ‘guest’ l knew that I was safe from the Japs. We conversed for a while in the usual sign language aided by the few Thai words that I now knew.

By the fading light I suddenly saw that about half an hour had passed before I realized it, and I told my host that I must return across the water before dark. I was given a farewell glass of rice-spirit, and departed to a chorus of farewells from those delightful people, returning uneventfully across the river after my first slice of freedom since River Valley.

On parade at eight fifteen the next morning; waiting all day ready to move off; loaded on to a steam train at ten o’clock that night; moved off at three o’clock in the morning. We travelled in the open railway trucks for the rest of the night, at ten miles an hour for much of the way, as we climbed the gradients, fueled by wood.

This wood was stacked by the embankment, cut and put there in heaps of one cubic meter by parties of prisoners. We stopped every ten miles or so to take on a few more of these ‘cords’ of firewood. At six o’clock in the morning we arrived at Arrow Hill station, having been without sleep all night. After a dollop of cold rice apiece, we stepped out once more into the unknown.

For twenty miles we marched. I had felt strangely tired as we started out; before we were half-way I felt as though I was carrying twice the half-hundredweight it really was. Many times I fell down and Jimmy pulled me to my feet. For the last few miles I moved as in a trance, not able to think of anything except the fact that I must keep going and not get separated from my friends.

Reaching Tarso I dropped down into my allotted space, lying there in my clothes and unable to rise and take my rice. I remember vaguely that we were under canvas, and that as the rain started to teem down during the night the tent wall above me leaked. By the time dawn broke both I and my kit were soaked through.

All my stuff was still wet as I staggered out on parade again the next day, ready for another long march We moved out of camp at three p.m. but for the first mile or so I hardly knew what I was doing. Jimmy was carrying the four heaviest of my books, which were among the treasures I’d found in River Valler rubbish dump; and I had his half-blanket.

I had been at the head of the column during all our other marches; as this column gradually strung itself out, the fact suddenly penetrated through to my befogged consciousness that I was at the back with the stragglers for the first time, and with dismay I frantically looked round for Jimmy. We had heard of the men who fell by the wayside on marches up country being shot out of hand by the guards, to save the bother of having to send them back.

Despairingly I tried to summon the strength to hurry and catch my mucker up, but staggering like a drunken man, I finally collapsed on the track, semi-conscious. I do not remember being picked up and put on a truck for the four kilometer trip back to Tarso.

As I began to be able to think again, I was filled with the strange terror of utter loneliness. Jimmy and I had supported one another through trouble and sickness ever since we arrived in Thailand; now I was to be dropped among strangers, and penniless too, for the first time, as Jimmy was carrying the purse.

Never had I allowed myself to be without money before, always keeping back a few Tickel for emergencies, and since mucking in with Jimmy I had insisted on holding back most of our cash for the inevitable rainy day.

In Tarso I was put in a hut full of Dutchmen, and later was able to attend a sick parade, together with hundreds of other prisoners.When I eventually reached the poor overworked doctor he diagnosed a relapse of malaria.

Tarso proved to be a filthy place, mostly populated by the sick, who, like myself, had fallen by the wayside. They were preyed upon by a large group of lead-swingers and racketeers. When I was able, on the seventh of May, I wrote in my diary, "Hope I can soon get out of here and back with our own boys . . ."

Had I known what our boys were advancing into it is doubtful whether I would have been so keen to join them. However bad Tarso might have then seemed to me in my depressed state, it would have been like a haven to those lucky enough to return to it from those terrible camps up near the Burma border.

I heard later, that after many days of grueling marches the survivors of our party from Wun Lung arrived at their destination in very bad condition. The Japs had difficulty in getting rations through to them, and they lived on nothing but an inadequate supply of plain rice.

As they pushed on through malaria infested primeval jungle, men died daily. Then, when all were at their lowest ebb, that most dread disease of all, cholera, appeared among them.

Cholera, untreated, will dissolve away half a strong man’s body in less than a day; it is so contagious that contacts are almost sure to contract it, as the virus can survive even boiling water.

During the weeks that the disease raged through the camp, hundreds of our friends died, until there were hardly sufficient men left to perform the essential task of burning the bodies of the victims. The Japs left them unguarded, in the custody of the germs, and retired a few miles upwind to wait while the disease burnt itself out.

Thus, on the only occasion of my POW life when I fell out on a march, it was to save me from making the acquaintance of arch-enemy Cholera, whose touch meant death. I had been ‘kept’ once more.

I spent only two days in Tarso, and then paraded to return to Kanburi. We waited on the station until seven o’clock that night, and then boarded a train which moved off three hours later. Japs do not bother about feeding sick men, so we received no food for thirty hours. The train stopped for a long spell in Wun Lung station, and I began to feel a little like my old self again.

In my kit was my pair of long drill trousers, clean and pressed, held in readiness for the day we were freed. I unpacked these, and awaiting my chance, when no guards were in sight made a dash to the Chinese cookhouse.

I sold my slacks to the Chinese cook for two Tickel, and he also gave me some rice and Chinese pickles. With food inside me, and funds to keep the wolf from the door, I now felt decidedly better, as I regained the train undetected.

Passing Chunkai, we waved to our fellows there; I was not looking forward to Kanburi, which I remembered as a dirty camp, undisciplined and with a passing population. To our surprise we stopped at the first station after Chunkai, and were told to get out of the train. This was not Kanburi. The guards marched us to a camp a few hundred yards away, and handed us over to the British Camp Commandant, a Lt.Col. Toosey.

Chapter 27

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