King Rat

FOREWORD TO THE NEW EDITION

by Michaela Clavell Richards

Darling,

This letter is number 205. We have had no news of you since your letter dated February 1, 1942, posted from Singapore. We’re praying for your safe return.

I’ve started each letter off the same, so if you’ve read the above before, forgive me. But it’s difficult, not knowing if this one will reach you, if any of them have….

When my father walked out through the gates of Changi prison to freedom, six feet tall, ninety-eight pounds, and twenty-one years alive, he was handed a small but bulky bundle of papers and the news that his beloved father was dead. For three years and eleven months my stubborn half-Irish grandmother had written weekly letters, via the Red Cross, to a son reported only as “missing, captured in Java.” For almost four years the bundle had grown, saved and collected by the Japanese. And never delivered. Without reply she had written to a prisoner-of-war camp in Singapore, where ninety-nine out of every hundred men died, courtesy of malaria, malnutrition, cruelty, and dysentery. Miraculously spared these, my father survived despite starvation, appendicitis, bullet wounds, jungle sores, and even a broken nose, received while defending his hut’s honor and its pregnant coconut tree.

King Rat was born from the ashes of this experience.

He wrote it during a screenwriters strike in 1963. Unable to work at his then trade, my mother suggested somewhat forcefully that instead of just lying about, he write a book on his experiences in Singapore. Six weeks later King Rat was completed. Expertly edited by Herman Gollob, it was published without the additional pages included in this edition. Pages that give a glimpse of seven women’s lives during the war — girlfriends, mothers, and wives of men in the camp. Perhaps, at the time, it was felt inappropriate for a harsh and groundbreaking novel of survival to include women’s equally harsh stories. But my father knew it was everyone’s war, and that no man, woman, or child was spared.

When we were children, my sister and I were told and retold stories of our family’s experiences in the war. My mother, at sixteen, would sit with her mother on the rooftop of their London house at night, watching the bombs drop and burst rather than cower in the airless shelter below. If it had your name on it, it would find you wherever you were.

Like many other women in England and around the world, my father’s mother went to work for pay and rations. Granny Clavell, shop steward, electrical engineer, and welder by day, volunteered as a Red Cross ambulance driver by night, delivering bomb victims, mainly women and children, through demolished and unlit streets to overcrowded makeshift hospitals. Aunt Joan, Father’s youngest sister, at eighteen a Wren with top secret clearance, served under Mountbatten in Ceylon, making her way from England by sea, enduring dengue fever and saltwater showers on a condemned Indian cattleboat while German U-boats patrolled the seas like hungry sharks. Aunt Meg in England, his eldest sister, sergeant at arms of a military transport yard at Boscombe Downe, a high security facility where experimental planes and bombs were manufactured and tested, drove through the black night without headlamps, maps, or street signs, delivering important personnel safely to their secret destinations. The stories were high adventure to us. No one had died. No lost limbs. We could see no scars.

We were still too young to understand that the invisible terrors of war also ravage the soul — and that fear for loved ones, or oneself, can maim and imprison as surely as any bomb or barbed wire. At home or in Changi, villain or hero, man or woman or child, all fought to survive. To live. This, then, is their story, complete and as my father wrote it. Dedicated to his memory, and to all who have survived their own private Changi.

Changi was set like a pearl on the eastern tip of Singapore Island, iridescent under the bowl of tropical skies. It stood on a slight rise and around it was a belt of green, and farther off the green gave way to the blue-green seas and the seas to infinity of horizon.

Closer, Changi lost its beauty and became what it was — an obscene forbidding prison. Cellblocks surrounded by sun-baked courtyards surrounded by towering walls.

Inside the walls, inside the cellblocks, story on story, were cells for two thousand prisoners at capacity. Now, in the cells and in the passageways and in every nook and cranny lived some eight thousand men. English and Australian mostly — a few New Zealanders and Canadians — the remnants of the armed forces of the Far East campaign.

These men too were criminals. Their crime was vast. They had lost a war. And they had lived.

The cell doors were open and the cellblock doors were open and the monstrous gate which slashed the walls was open and the men could move in and out — almost freely. But still there was a closeness, a claustrophobic smell.

Outside the gate was a skirting tarmac road. A hundred yards west this road was crossed by a tangle of barbed gates, and outside these gates was a guardhouse peopled with the armed offal of the conquering hordes. Past the barrier the road ran merrily onward, and in the course of time lost itself in the sprawling city of Singapore. But for the men, the road west ended a hundred yards from the main gate.

East, the road followed the wall, then turned south and again followed the wall. On either side of the road were banks of long “go-downs” as the rough sheds were called. They were all the same — sixty paces long with walls made from plaited coconut fronds roughly nailed to posts, and thatch roofs also made from coconut fronds, layer on mildewed layer. Every year a new layer was added, or should have been added. For the sun and the rain and the insects tortured the thatch and broke it down. There were simple openings for windows and doors. The sheds had long thatch overhangs to keep out the sun and the rain, and they were set on concrete stilts to escape floods and the snakes and frogs and slugs and snails, the scorpions, centipedes, beetles, bugs — all manner of crawling thing.

Officers lived in these sheds.

South and east of the road were four rows of concrete bungalows, twenty to a row, back to back. Senior officers — majors, lieutenant colonels, and colonels — lived in these.

The road turned west, again following the wall, and met another bank of atap sheds. Here was quartered the overflow from the jail.

And in one of these, smaller than most, lived the American contingent of twenty-five enlisted men.

Where the road turned north once more, hugging the wall, was part of the vegetable gardens. The remainder — which supplied most of the camp food — lay farther to the north, across the road, opposite the prison gate. The road continued through the lesser garden for two hundred yards and ended in front of the guardhouse.

Surrounding the whole sweating area, perhaps half a mile by half a mile, was a barbed fence. Easy to cut. Easy to get through. Scarcely guarded. No searchlights. No machine gun posts. But once outside, what then? Home was across the seas, beyond the horizon, beyond a limitless sea or hostile jungle. Outside was disaster, for those who went and for those who remained.

By now, 1945, the Japanese had learned to leave the control of the camp to the prisoners. The Japanese gave orders and the officers were responsible for enforcing them. If the camp gave no trouble, it got none. To ask for food was trouble. To ask for medicine was trouble. To ask for anything was trouble. That they were alive was trouble.

For the men, Changi was more than a prison. Changi was genesis, the place of beginning again.