The Railway Man

CHAPTER EIGHT

THE SIX OF US were led into a reception area where there was an obviously well-practised routine. We were told to strip, and stripped totally of all our miserable things, clothes, books and pictures. All I was allowed to keep was my long spoon and my pair of spectacles, which had survived everything, though hardly intact; they were held together with surgical tape and gentle handling. I always treated them as though my life depended on it – which it did, in some ways, for semi-blindness added to what I had gone through would surely have been the last straw. At least I could trust the witness of my eyes, at a time when what I heard was often humanly incredible.

I was still wearing my splints, but a warder inspected my hair, which was now long and tangled, along with all the others’, and our ears. I never found out what strange information he was expecting to find in men’s ears, though presumably he was checking for hacksaw blades in our anal passages when he poked around in there.

We were each given an extremely small pair of shorts, a shirt, a cap and a so-called towel, which was not much bigger than the shorts. Each of these items had been worn out, patched and worn out again, as though a whole company of men had slept in them. We felt ragged enough when we walked into that prison, but these clothes made us look like castaways. They took away our shoes; of washing materials and toothbrushes we had none. I wondered whether our kit would truly be kept in store for when we were released in five or ten years’ time.

Finally we were told that our names were abolished and that we were to have new identities. Mine was rokyaku ju-go, which sounded splendid but translated merely as No. 615. The former Prisoner No. 1 was slipping fast. They made us memorize and repeat our numbers over and over again until we got them right, and all of us managed except the hapless Bill Smith, who could never cope with even a single word of Japanese. The warders gave up on him.

These gaolers appeared to be Japanese military prison service men, wearing white epaulettes to distinguish them from their regular colleagues outside. Others, including many of the warders, it would turn out, were ordinary Japanese soldiers convicted of disciplinary offences. Even to be a warder in Outram Road was a punishment.

The initial ceremony of degradation over, we were marched outside. We headed in a line out of the reception area into a cell-block. I noticed a large letter ‘D’ at the entrance. As we came into that long gloomy hall, with iron stairs stretching before us and galleries up above us in what seemed like level upon level, I was aware of a total silence. Our bare feet and the guards’ boots were the only sounds in that high arcade. There were cell doors on each side, and another floor of cells above that, but I was too agitated to notice properly whether there was a third floor. The hall looked more or less as I imagined a British Victorian prison would look, on the inside, with cliff faces of cells opposing each other across empty space. The air in the hall was close, as though it were a morgue rather than a place that held living men.

Fred Smith and I were put into Cell No. 52; the others into Nos. 53 and 54. The guards told us, with menaces, that talking was forbidden, even between men sharing a cell, and that attempts to communicate between cells would be punished severely. The door was then shut, and we looked around our new home. It was totally empty: a stark oblong space, about nine feet long, six feet across and with a very high ceiling. The walls were peeling, had once been thickly painted in white and were utterly blank. The door was solid and steel-clad, with a rectangular slot like an English post-box. There was a small window, very high up in the end wall, through which we could see the sky. It seemed to be a nice day outside.

We were very, very tired. The anti-climax of the trial and our survival was still having its effect and we wanted to rest and to be left alone. I could not remember when I had last slept in a real bed, so I lay down on my side on the bare cement floor, and immediately went to sleep.

Fred and I were woken by the door banging open; a guard handed in a set of three wooden planks and a strange wooden block and a blanket for each of us, followed by a wooden latrine bucket with a lid. We were puzzled by the wooden blocks, until we realized that these were our pillows. Our cell was now fully finished.

Later in the evening there was a rattling at the cell door; the slot was banged down and a bowl of rice, a small saucer of tea and a pair of chopsticks for each of us were handed in through the slot. Even on our first day, the complete absence of colour, of sound and variation were such that the arrival of this wretched meal was an event. We tried to make it last as long as possible, but eating a bowl of overcooked rice can only take so long.

The first day ended like that, with barely enough food to keep us alive and nothing like enough to dull the appetite. I thought I already understood hunger, but this was a new level of craving. Fred and I spoke in whispers, trying to make sense of our deprivation, wondering whether they seriously intended to leave us in this condition for our entire sentences. We were waiting for sleep, expecting to be switched into darkness when the electric light bulb high above our heads was turned off; but it stayed on all night, and we fell asleep in the glare of our empty cell.

No-one had told us where we were; indeed had Bill Smith not identified the place as Outram Road we might have been left wondering where we were for a long time. All we knew was that Outram Road had been the main civil prison in Singapore until the new gaol at Changi was opened late in the 1930s. It was now clearly being run as a punitive military prison, an extreme version of what the British Army would call a ‘glasshouse’.

We were kept in our cells almost all the time. The only interruption to this incarceration was that on most days, at different times, the cell doors were opened for a form of roll call. We were each required to call out our numbers, and we all managed this except Bill Smith. Sometimes someone else would call out his number for him; sometimes he would reply ‘Twinkle, twinkle, little star’, which the warders seemed to find acceptable.

The main events apart from this were the delivery of the so-called meals three times a day. Each consisted of rice and tea, or at least a quantity of slightly discoloured hot water which looked like tea. This was our main fluid intake for the day, and thirst usually preceded it by many hours. The rice came in a large aluminium bowl, the tea in a small enamel dish. The other big moment was the handing out of the latrine bucket to a squad of prisoners supervised by guards, and the return of the bucket, emptied and washed, later in the morning.

One morning, at last, Fred and I were taken out of the cell apparently for some purpose other than the roll call. When we reached the open yard at the end of D Block we realized that we were here for exercise, but what we saw was a glimpse of the underworld. In the yard were about twenty prisoners, most of them apparently unable to walk. Some lay flat out; some were crawling on their hands and knees. Several were totally naked. Almost all had one thing in common: they were living skeletons, with ribs and bones protruding from shrunken flesh. Since we had not seen ourselves in a mirror or looked objectively at each other for a long time, it was a terrible shock to realize that we must look like these damned creatures – or soon would. One man was blown up like a balloon, his face so inflated that his features were unrecognizable. This was what advanced beri-beri looked like, while others seemed to have the disease in earlier or less severe forms, but still with dreadful body swelling. Their skins were raw, pustular and peeling; some men were covered in angry scabby patches. We thought these tragic figures must be British and Australian, but they were almost beyond recognition.

Fred and I were told to join a small group of nearly naked prisoners, who were being exercised by a Japanese soldier. The exercises consisted only of standing still and waving our arms about, by number, in response to the instructions ‘ich, ni, san, shi, go, rok, shich, hach’, and periodically walking around in a circle. The six of us from Kanburi were in better shape than those POWs who had been any length of time in Outram Road, and we hardly felt robust. Very occasionally, when we were out in that yard, we were allowed to have a wash. There were taps in the walls of the yard; there were buckets, but it was forbidden to touch them without orders. So these filthy, scabrous men walked or crawled within a few feet of the water that could have cleaned and eased them even a little.

Without my cellmate, a sight like this might have destroyed me. But Fred Smith was an absolute hero, and I have never forgotten him. I can still quote his army number from memory: 1071124. He was an incredibly fit, strong man, shorter than me but very sturdy, and he survived the cumulative mistreatments astonishingly well. He could never understand why, although he had been interrogated three times at Kanburi, he had not been tortured or beaten. So certain did it seem that he was going to get what Thew had been given that Lance had passed him his short puttees, and he had wrapped the strips of cloth around his body under his shirt to make a thin barrier against the pick-helves; but perhaps because some Japanese officer decided that a mere artilleryman could not be central to the conspiracy of signals and ordnance officers which they had imagined for us, Fred never had to test his cotton armour.

Fred was a good and considerate companion. His father had been an engine driver – the irony was lost on me at the time – at Stewart’s Lane rail depot in south London. He had grown up around there, and just before being posted to Singapore had been assigned to the Coastal Battery at Pembroke Dock, in West Wales. Because he was an artilleryman, a regular soldier with experience of coastal guns, he had been sent to help man the mythic 15-inchers on the southern coast of Singapore Island. He would talk about his wife and son, and his worries about his wife’s neglect of his son, and I detected some bitter suspicion of his wife’s fidelity beneath the coded language men used in wartime about their loved ones.

Fred was an uneducated working-class man, a ‘rough diamond’ in the language of the day, but in the situation we found ourselves in rank and class counted for nothing. Character, decency and loyalty counted for more than previous good fortune or the possession of a commission. Fred was simply a good man. (Only once, in all my time at Outram Road, did I ever pull rank. I told two characters to stop arguing with each other, afraid that they would draw down the Japanese guards and pay heavily for their irritation and boredom. They ignored me. It would take more than an officer to put a lid on the anger these men were forced to swallow every day.)

We looked after each other as best we could, and watched each other’s physical deterioration carefully; but the only physical weakness that I can remember Fred ever revealing, despite the thin starvation rations and the filth, was a terrible boil on his back, below his shoulders and out of reach of his hands. It got so bad that I kept showing it to the guards, and it became a huge angry red swelling threatening to poison Fred’s blood. One day, without warning, a Japanese man came importantly into our cell clutching a naked razor-blade, the kind used for shaving. This was the medical orderly. He looked at Fred’s back with as much interest as he would have devoted to a cockroach and ordered him to lie flat on his stomach. With a swift gesture he cut an X into the abscess. Blood and pus spurted on to the wall and floor of the cell. Fred didn’t make a sound.

The worst new enemy which we faced, even compared to the dirt and hunger, was perhaps the most formidable of all: silence. It was often absolute. There could be a sick, deadly hush throughout the entire prison, so quiet that you could hear the metallic twisting of a key in a lock echoing up the levels to the long roof. A warder’s boots would make a booming sound on the stone floor, and I would be afraid that the sound of a whisper would carry all the way along to him.

For they were serious about their decree of silence. It seemed particularly sadistic to make us share a cell and forbid us to speak to each other and at the same time deprive us of books and distractions of any kind. There was precisely nothing to do in that room.

Sometimes the slot would fall open when we were talking quietly and a voice would shout at us in Japanese to shut up; at other times the door would be thrown back and a guard rush in, his sheathed sword whipping down on our heads and shoulders like a hard rod, the shock worsened by fear that the blade of the sword was only a thickness of leather away from slicing us apart.

By listening to the sound of the warder’s fading footsteps or hearing their voices we could tell when we were more or less safe for a few minutes, and talk in low tones. We worked out what the arrangements were for warders’ shifts and meal-breaks, and learned to tell where they were from the strength of the sound their feet made on the floor. Our hearing seemed to grow more acute in the silence. Before long, we were able to identify each warder by his footsteps. We seldom found out their names, instead identifying each by some nickname: Horseface, or Mary – a guard who we thought effeminate for his very quiet feet, who we hated. He was one of those who wore rubber-soled boots to deaden the sound of his coming.

We were here because we had broken a taboo on listening to forbidden words, and their ban on talking had an obscene aptness about it, whether they were aware of it or not. We had survived two years in the camps only by endless talk; and our need to know what was happening around us was now greater than ever.

When we were taken to work we were usually on different squads, in different areas, and so Fred and I could swap notes of the snatches of whispered conversation we had had, and talk about what we had seen. Everyone on these work-details was trying as hard as possible to talk to everyone else, and the regime of silence was undermined by these countless small dialogues.

Our conversation was necessarily about our most immediate surroundings. Who has been moved into the cell down the corridor? What are people being made to work on now? Who are those new arrivals? Is Bill at death’s door? Why is a prisoner sitting bolt upright in a bath out in the yard at the end of the block?

Piecing together information, very slowly, very gradually, was like rubbing at a dirty window with a tiny rag, making blurred peepholes that allowed us to catch glimpses of the world outside D Block, but also confirmed to us how bad our situation was, how dangerous it was to be in Outram Road at all. We did not know what the death rate was, but we knew that some people had got out and had never been seen again. Nobody knew where they went to, whether there was an even worse cell somewhere -underground in the dark, perhaps – or whether they were murdered. All we knew for certain was that we were living with risk day after day in this vast tomb.

By the middle of December 1943 we had established that Outram Road consisted of parallel blocks, and that the military section occupied two of them, Blocks C and D; beyond a very high wall were the other blocks, which were being run by the Japanese Army as a prison for civilians, for what crimes we could not then imagine. As far as we could tell, there were about thirty prisoners in our block. The infallible indication that a cell was occupied was its inclusion in the list for a latrine-bucket visit in the morning. Everyone in the block seemed to have been convicted by Japanese court martials of ‘anti-Japanese offences’ ranging from escape attempts and sabotage to more spectacular crimes. The rumour was that one man was here for attempting to steal an aircraft and fly it towards Allied territory.

We also discovered that in the past some men in our block had become so ill that they had died quietly in their cells, from a combination of disease, brutality and starvation. And still the most tantalizing information was that occasionally prisoners who were on the point of death were sent away from the gaol altogether. The best rumour was that they were sent to Changi, to a special hospital there. The other rumours came to seem less important, remote probabilities compared to the certainty that nothing could be worse than where we were.

If it seems absurd to send prisoners to gaol, what our captors were in fact doing was consigning us to a lower circle of hell. This was a place in which the living were turned into ghosts, starved, diseased creatures wasted down to their skeletal outlines.

But as always, whether on the railway or in the camps, there were people who were humane enough to take risks to help us. Some of the Japanese prison staff tried to do nothing to add to our squalor and unhappiness. I remember that the same Gunso who had guarded us before our trial in Bangkok ended up in Outram Road shortly after we arrived, and that he personally removed my splints when the bones of my arms seemed to be set.

They took away my long spoon but only after I had assured him that I could manage without it. But some of his colleagues were bored, slovenly and brutal Japanese private soldiers. They were randomly abusive, and could beat us at will for minor or imagined infractions of the rules. There was a good deal of this casual violence.

Among the warders, we were astonished to discover that there were two men who appeared to be English. Before long they identified themselves in whispers through our door-slot as Penrod Dean, an Australian Army officer and John O’Malley, a British signalman. They had been among the first POWs to be sent to Outram Road and had been nominated by the Japanese as tobansj or trusties. They collected food from the kitchens, making deliveries to the cells and collecting the empty dishes. So far as was practicable they looked after the interests of the prisoners, slipping us extra rations or insistently bringing illness to the attention of the indifferent guards, at least making it more difficult for them to ignore us. I saw O’Malley carry paralysed men into the sunshine of the exercise yard in a desperate attempt to keep them alive, cradling those frail creatures of skin and bone in his own emaciated arms.

But there was very little a toban could do in the face of such systematic neglect. We had no toothbrushes, for example; my teeth were ruined by the middle of 1944. We were allowed no shaving kit either. A month or so after we arrived we were taken for a haircut. A Japanese barber set up outside a cell on the ground floor and every prisoner in turn was ordered to sit in front of him. He grasped my neck in his left hand and took up a large set of clippers in his right, and started snipping the hair on the nape of my neck, working the clippers around and up and across my head in a single movement, down my sideburns to my beard which showered its wirier hair on to the softer filaments of my head, never lifting the clippers once. I could feel the cold metal bumping on my exposed skull, which felt as fragile as an egg. It was like being shorn by a skilful, rough sheep-farmer. That shave was the only regular hygienic attention we received.

In return we were expected to do irregular work. There was no pattern to it, because I think that they wanted us to spend as much time as possible in blank isolation. The work could involve floor-washing, gardening, carrying firewood to the cookhouse or – the task we dreaded most – cleaning the Japanese toilets. The condition of those rows of holes was appalling. There is something unbearably sickening about cleaning other men’s ordure.

Or else they would ask us to shift 100 kg sacks of rice, which was crippling work for men in our condition. But the most bizarre task was one that allowed a group of us to stay together for a while in the sunshine out in the yard. The guards produced a great heap of rusty and extremely dirty army equipment which we suspected had either been stored in the open or had been salvaged from a ship. There were mess-tins, and buckets and containers of all kinds, caked in rust and dirt. Our job was to clean all these and restore them to pristine beauty. The trouble was that the only tools we were given were large rusty nails, bits of wire and handfuls of earth. With these primitive resources the Japanese expected sparkling results.

A dozen prisoners were gathered in the open, sitting on concrete under a lean-to attap roof that deflected the fierce heat a little. We sat cross-legged, hunched over the filthy utensils. If somebody looked sideways instead of down, a guard would lean over and punch him in the face.

Even under these circumstances we managed, with care, to talk. I had always been close to Mackay, and we sat beside each other while we scraped junk metal with wire in the hope that gleams of steel would start to appear beneath the grime. For much of the time we worked naked, partly to try to get fresh air around our unwashed and itching bodies and partly because we had very little to wear anyway. One day I noticed that Mac, who had been a well-built man, had become so thin that his anus stuck out like a short pipe.

I then discovered that I could close my hand around my own upper arm and that my stomach was very close to my spine; there seemed to be no solid body on me anywhere. My ribs were sticking out. I asked Mac how I looked, and he said that I looked like a skeleton with skin stretched over it. I had become one of the living dead who had so frightened me when I first came to Outram Road. I knew then that I was close to death, and that I had to get out of Outram Road at all costs.

It wasn’t only the decline in my physical condition that led me, eventually, to take the risk of making myself deliberately worse so that they would have to move me. The balance of probabilities seemed just to be in favour of the assumption that they were not quietly murdering the sick prisoners, and I convinced myself that the percentage prospect of survival if I stayed was virtually nil; but this rationalism was beside the point: beyond reason or calculation, I wanted out of this place.

Certain events weakened me, but toughened my resolve. Early on, on Christmas Day 1943, I was given a fish head with my evening rice. I ate the head, but I could not manage to eat the eyes. They lay on my plate, little tough jellies staring up at me. I longed then for the winter feast of northern Europe, for my family and for my mother in particular, and the contrast between my memories of them and this tropical black hole was acutely depressing.

I found a definition for ‘hunger’ when I was sent on a rare errand without a guard to take an empty pan to the cookhouse, and as I was walking through the main hall I saw a single grain of rice on a cell doorstep. I went over and picked it up and ate it.

Then there was the itch. We were used to diseases of the skin, which were rampant in the camps because of the lack of soap, but this was an itch the like of which neither Fred nor I had encountered before. The slightest touch on one’s skin produced an urge to scratch savagely. To succumb to this temptation was disastrous, and made the itch worse than ever, so we sat motionless with our skins on fire.

The itch developed into a horrible skin condition, perhaps an extreme form of scabies. Each of us in turn found little pimples appearing on our skin. To begin with they were clear and transparent; then the clear liquid turned into yellow pus, the pimples burst, erupted and the fluid dried into horrible yellow scabs. Picking them off meant losing a patch of skin. I myself lost every inch of skin on my body with the curious exception of the skin on my face and the tips of my fingers and toes. Worse still, as fast as one picked off the scabs new eruptions appeared. Those men who were too ill and weak to move and were unable to do anything for themselves gradually became encased in a brownish-yellow crust of pus, a spectacle that still wakes me at night, the nausea still fresh.

O’Malley and one or two others voluntarily took on the task of cleaning up the most helpless men by patiently picking off the encrusted scabs and washing their bodies in cold water. What they did deserves the adjective ‘heroic’ as much as bravery under fire.

Partly as a result of their efforts, the Japanese began to take note of the disease. A liquid which they described as ‘creosote’ was brought into the block in large containers, and they produced a few metal tubs. Those of us who were badly infected were allowed to have what was almost a bath, our first in several months, though still without soap, in the yard outside the block. I sat in a tub for hours. It did not noticeably improve my skin, but the feel of the water lapping around me was worth the pretence.

When the ‘creosote’ did not work, the Japanese administration gave us a paste or ointment which looked suspiciously like saddle-soap. We were told to strip and to coat every inch of our bodies with the ointment, telling ourselves that at least it might suffocate the tiny maggots or whatever it was that was causing the trouble. Perhaps it did; or perhaps the epidemic had run its course, for the disease slackened off soon afterwards.

By the end of April 1944 my three British fellow-officers. Bill Smith, Jim Slater and Morton Mackay were all seriously ill, and Harry Knight, the Australian major, looked no better. When I caught glimpses of them I was terrified for all of us. Only Fred Smith seemed to retain some strength despite the starvation diet. The guards sent a stretcher party one day and removed three of the others, but left Fred, Harry and me. The fact that we could totter across a yard must have excluded us. I was now the only officer left in the entire block, apart from Knight.

The old anxiety and fear surged back with renewed force. Although we had a sentence, we could not imagine this term of imprisonment coming to an end. The uncertainty was gross and desperately stressful. We didn’t think we could survive years of this, and even if we did there was no guarantee of being ‘released’ into anything but a larger and perhaps relatively more humane prison camp. We were prisoners within a world that was itself a prison. That larger sentence of servitude was completely indeterminate, for who could say when the war would end? And if the Japanese won it, what would they do to us?

I found this uncertainty particularly difficult. I was afflicted with the strange combination of a vivid imagination and a need to locate myself exactly, to be sure of where I was and where I was going – I had the character of a mapmaker, a listmaker, of one who knew about dates and classes and varieties. Being thrown into the pit and not knowing whether I could ever find a ladder to climb out of it did me no good at all. Without reading, writing or bearings of any kind I felt that I was living through the end of whatever time had been given to me; the delirium of the last days was closing in.

We could not measure time, let alone occupy it. Our time was now entirely theirs. We could identify Sundays because the guards took time off on Sundays, and O’Malley or Penrod Dean could sometimes identify the hour or date for us, but that was never enough. When the evening came, there were twelve hours of utter emptiness to get through. Outside it was dark; inside, the electric light was on continuously. During those long nights I sharpened my desperation to get out, even though it felt like jumping from a window in the dark, not knowing where I might land. And in the end, I used time itself against them.

They gave me my chance when they took the unprecedented step of separately identifying extremely sick men and classifying them as ‘byoki’. They were then placed in a group of cells on the ground floor furthest from the door of the block.

I had discovered that I could drive up my pulse rate by deep and accelerated breathing, so producing a state that frightened my cellmate and even me; and that there was one exception to our complete lack of any means of measuring time. In very still and very quiet conditions the faint chimes of a clock somewhere in the distance could be heard, though it was a long time before I was aware of it. I imagined it as a public clock on some tower, for it struck the quarters as well as the hours.

I disciplined myself to count the little beats of blood in my wrist for fifteen minutes at a stretch. It was not that hard, really; what else did I have to do? Forcing myself to concentrate on nothing but my pulse – the effort alone probably put me into a kind of agitated trance, and I was already near hallucinating from starvation and weakness. They had taken all sense of normal, filled time away from me and I focused my panic in on myself in a fever of self-control.

I would count carefully all the time I was doing this and divide the resulting figure by fifteen, giving the pulse rate per minute. The normal rate is about 76; I got mine up to a figure which was so high that I could not count properly and I was confident that I could repeat this whenever I wanted to do so.

One day, when I was lying down and there was a warder within earshot, I worked my pulse up, cried out and twisted and clutched myself. My performance had an effect: the warder took a look at me and had me carried down to one of the ‘sick’ cells. And so I lost sight of Fred Smith, who seemed resigned to survival in Outram Road and whose extraordinary resilience could not be disguised long enough even to pretend weakness. He had supported me to the hilt and told me I was doing the right thing, but I hated leaving him alone in that horrible bare cell.

In the sick cells the doors were left open during the day, which was a slight improvement, and you did not have to take part in work squads. I was joined in the cell by an Australian called Stan Davis, who was not officially sick – he was supposed to look after me, and save the therapeutic energies of the medical orderly. Stan probably knew as much about medicine as that individual, in any case, and when we were able to talk we plotted the best way for both of us to get beyond the sick cell to the hospital at Changi – if indeed it was not a dangerous mirage. Stan was another radio man, even luckier than we had been. A private soldier in a motor-transport company, he had been part of a group operating a radio in the POW camp in Sandakan, in British North Borneo, and planning an escape. This group really had been in subversive communication with local civilians. The Japanese shot his officer. Captain L.C. Matthews of the Austrahan Army Signals.

Stan and I agreed that I would eat all the food which came into the cell other than rice and that Stan would eat all the rice, and nothing but rice, and we swore that we would stick to our diet until the end, whatever it might be. My resolution was not as suicidal as it may sound because by May 1944 the food had improved slightly, and the rice now came with a few soya beans or fragments offish, but I very quickly became even thinner while Stan got more and more bloated, and looked as though he had real wet beri-beri.

We each made exaggerated shows of trying to move about, taking care to fall over or otherwise to collapse whenever we left the cell, and so after a while we were spending twenty-four hours in the cell with nothing but determination to drive us on. We had nothing to distract us from our self-destructive will to live, and only the faint chiming of that mysterious clock to mark the passing of time.

Stan and I exchanged anecdotes of the campaigns in Malaya and life in Borneo, the fall of Singapore and the early days of captivity. He had been brought up a Catholic in Western Australia and entertained me with stories of the fierce angry discipline handed out by the Christian Brothers, a religious order that specializes in teaching poor children; and he spoke about distances I could barely imagine, deserts taking weeks to cross and farms measured in square miles. I tried to find a way of explaining lowland Scotland to this hard man of the outdoors, for whom life in these cells must have been terribly constricting; we compromised by reciting poems like James Henry Leigh Hunt’s Abou Ben Adhem, which seemed to declaim something beautiful and defiant to us:

‘What writest thou?’ – The vision raised its head. And with a look made of all sweet accord, Answered, ‘The names of those who love the Lord.’ ‘And is mine one?’ said Abou. ‘Nay, not so,’ Replied the angel. Abou spoke more low. But cheerly still; and said, ‘I pray thee then, Write me as one that loves his fellow-men.’

I tried to sleep as much as possible, but it was difficult to find a comfortable position. When the body is so thin that your prominent bones stick out like handles there is no ease to be had on three wooden planks, and my hips were still in poor shape. I would drift into a kind of coma, full of dreams and hallucinations and waking impressions that were clear and completely unreal. As at Kanburi after the beatings, my mind was churning and spewing disconnected fragments of learning and memory; bits of rage at our treatment at Kanburi came up, the cages, the beatings, the repetitious stupid refrain of Lomax you will tell us’ and the little interrogator with his thuggish friend. I felt I had been dead, I had been sentenced to death, ‘Lomax, you will be killed shortly’, I was suspended between life and death in my delirium. Often it was a brain fever spinning out automatic rhymes and strange biblical nursery verses. One of these at least I wrote down later:

At the beginning of time the clock struck one Then dropped the dew and the clock struck two From the dew grew a tree and the clock struck three The tree made a door and the clock struck four Man came alive and the clock struck five Count not, waste not the years on the clock Behold I stand at the door and knock.

There were non-stop, intensely tactile visions, so real that I could smell and see the places they presented to me: a procession of ocean-going ships slipping down the Clyde past Greenock; the unbelievably delicate evening light of the West Highlands; a summer lake in Kashmir, with vast snow mountains above it. My mind wandered back along the roads I had cycled in my search for steam engines, but it was a jagged, confused and chaotic reprise of those long journeys. I walked with S.’s hand in mine on an Edinburgh street past dark high buildings with glimpses of steps plunging down into old courtyards.

I had one vivid and frequent dream with a scene that seemed utterly perfect and unattainable, a vision of impossible beauty. It was the image of an old English garden in summer, near a cathedral, with banks of honeysuckle and roses under oak and willow trees, the cathedral spire rising above them. It seemed so entirely real, and at the same time a romantic painting of such a scene, as though I was looking at it from the side so that the smooth lawn swept away from me in a great green triangle. There was an old brown-red brick cottage hidden in the trees; it felt like order and wealth and safety.

The visions became more frightening and grotesque. One evening, the long wall of the cell began to dissolve. The cracked cement and the brickwork melted away. Far away was an immense figure, standing erect with many waving arms, emerging from a heaving sea of flame and smoke, and growing larger, until it seemed to fill the entire view. It seemed to be standing above a lake, and the surface changed into distinct waves, and then into human figures tiny against the mass of the giant. They seemed to be worshipping, chanting, praising, calling out ‘Kali, Kali, Kali’. I felt sheer terror as the figure’s eyes looked down directly at me, the terror mounting like choking until I woke up to find myself looking at the bare light bulb and the cell walls.

After two months of dogged persistence in our dreadful routine, and by then we were both in a bad way, I made another attempt to frighten the warders by working myself into a crisis, my pulse racing and my body shaking-and this time the symptoms hardly needed to be simulated. It’s not too difficult to feign imminent death when you already look like a corpse. Stan called a warder, who looked at me, and then called someone else. He may not have wanted a death on his watch without checking with a superior.

Usually, they shut the cell door at night, but that night they left it open and a warder looked in several times to check on me. I acted up enthusiastically whenever I heard him coming. The following morning there were sounds of an unusually large group walking towards our cell. It turned out to be a stretcher party. I was bundled on to the stretcher, calling out for Stan to be taken too, but they stumbled out of the cell without him. Once again I was leaving a friend.

I kept my eyes shut, but could tell that we made our way down the central hall, across the sunlit yard and into the administration offices, where I was dumped on the floor. My kit was loaded on top of me and the stretcher was lifted again, out into the open air. I could hardly believe it when I realized that I was being put into the back of a vehicle, an open truck of some kind. I was about to learn what happened to the men who had gone out of here before me, and take the consequences of my leap in the dark. The truck drove off.

I could look up through half-closed eyelids and see the sky, and smell the air of a city again. The sun was warming and the vault of blue looked imponderably beautiful and limitless. I heard Chinese voices, Malay voices when the truck slowed, even women and children’s voices - the first I had heard for a long time.

The truck seemed to leave the traffic and traffic noises and drove through what smelled like countryside. I was beyond fear, but I hoped dully that I was not being driven to some lonely execution ground. After about half an hour there was a silent length of road, then a right-hand turn, another short road, a near stop, another right-hand turn which interrupted the sunlight – and then, an English voice. Almost immediately, the stretcher was lifted off the truck, I was transferred to another stretcher and carried away.

I opened my eyes fully for the first time. I was still a prisoner, and around me I saw the functional and naked walls of a modem gaol. But this was what I had been trying to achieve for months: I was inside Changi at last.