The Railway Man: A POW's Searing Account of War, Brutality and Forgiveness

CHAPTER NINE

IT IS UNLIKELY that many people have regarded a notorious POW camp as heaven, but I felt that that is where I had arrived within a few hours of being at Changi.

When I finally opened my eyes, with almost superstitious caution, I did not see a single Japanese soldier. I was surrounded by the concerned and grinning faces of ragged British and Australian prisoners. My stretcher was the centre of caring bustle and activity and after a few minutes I was carried into the ground floor of a two-storey block which my bearers called HB. I was in the safest possible hands, in the care of sympathetic and supportive British and Australian servicemen. Then I began to cry, an uncontrollable cascade; tears of relief and joy.

I was given a bed, a real iron bed with a mattress, sheets and a pillow. The bedding was hardly needed, given the sweltering atmosphere of a Malayan summer, but the feel of cotton on my filthy skin was beautiful. Someone brought me some real tea. Then they began to appear around my bedside, bags of skin and bones I was half-convinced had been dumped by the Japanese on some city rubbish heap: Bill Smith, ‘Mac’, Slater, explaining that they were in the upstairs ward and that HB was one of the two hospital blocks inside the gaol and was reserved for us, for men from Outram Road. I would be moved upstairs shortly, they said. It was an astonishing coming-together, and I felt a calming wave wash over me, knowing that we had all survived so far.

A man called Jim Bradley introduced himself. I thought I had not met him before, until he explained that he had been in solitary confinement in Cell 41 in Outram Road and had been carried out on a stretcher just before Christmas. I remembered the stretcher which had been carried through the main hall of Outram Road that day, bearing a stick figure with a huge matted black beard, as though the hair had grown wild as the body wasted. Bill Anker also came up, and Ian Moffatt and Guy Machado, who had all been carried out of solitary cells, in each case with their faces lost in a mass of hair and beard. No-one was allowed to cut the hair of those in solitary confinement. There were more petty levels of cruelty than I had imagined.

At first no-one bothered about medical attention for me, but I didn’t feel neglected: being in Changi was the best psychological lift that a body could wish for. My bed was just inside the ward, near the entrance; it was a little like being in bed on a railway-station platform, with crowds and movement to and fro. Yet I slept well that night, from utter exhaustion, and from the effort of talking loudly and freely to so many people.

HB was run by an Australian Army doctor from Hobart called Bon Rogers. He was an outstanding and truly dedicated man, remembered by thousands of POWs who passed through Changi.

When he examined me in the morning, the first thing he did was to weigh me. I was put on an old scales and discovered that I weighed 105 pounds, about 60 pounds less than my normal, pre-war weight. Rogers gave me a course of vitamin pills, and prescribed milk and even the occasional egg for me. This was a really rich diet: the food that came into the hospital was the best that Changi could provide, but it was still mostly rice.

Just being there was the real cure. With the relative peace, the predictability of the routine, a little extra food, the cleanliness, the kindness of the male nurses, and the comradeship and support from the other refugees from Outram Road, I slowly but steadily began to gather strength and to put on a little weight.

The Japanese had, I discovered, restored my Bible to me. They were as meticulous about prisoners’ property as they were careless of their bodies. I even got my watch back. But when I tried to reawaken the spirituality I had always experienced in reading that sonorous seventeenth-century prose, I found that I had nearly forgotten how to read, and the page was a blur; my eyes could not focus properly. I had not seen a single word of print for over seven months. My acquaintance with language had shrunk to the letter ‘D’.

I was reduced to spelling out the captions and garish headlines in a bound volume of Lilliput, a gossip and pin-up magazine of the day, and later a children’s spelling book, from which I slowly copied out simple words. I had lost my mind, and spent days digging about for some memory of script. To my intense relief, the skill of reading came back fast.

After a few days I was moved upstairs to HB2. There were ten of us in that ward, five on each side of a central passage. At the end furthest from the door were the nursing staff and, equally imponant, the shower heads. I luxuriated in the abundant, clean, cold water that came on twice a day, for there were times in Outram Road when the stink of one’s own body and its rotting covering seemed ineradicable. Just to stand with water pouring over me was lovely. In the ward there were also, at the entrance, two lavatories, real WCs with flushing mechanisms that actually worked.

Despite the cramped conditions and our shattered emotions we got on extremely well; there was never so much as an outbreak of bad temper. We had all travelled a very long way along the valley of the shadow of death and we had all emerged, so we had no time for small irritations. Some of us had taken extreme measures to get out of, and extreme boldness had put some of us into, Outram Road.

Jim Bradley, for example, had escaped from Song Krai, a camp at the very top of the railway. He was among ten prisoners who had walked into the jungle and into Burma, where high ridges ran at right angles to their line of march to the sea. It must have been like stumbling up and down through uncurbed bush on the sides of steep rocky trenches. Five of the party died in the wilderness; the survivors were captured. They were about to be shot out of hand at the prison camp, but Captain Cyril Wild, who had been Percival’s interpreter at the surrender of Singapore and had been banished to this last ditch of the prison world, addressed a passionate and eloquent appeal to Lieutenant-Colonel Banno, the local Japanese commander. Jim was only alive thanks to the fluency of Wild’s Japanese.

Jack Macalister’s life was even more charmed. He was the Australian flyer we had heard about at Outram Road. Shot down over Timor, he had attempted twice to steal a Japanese plane, with the help of the local resistance; on each occasion he hadn’t succeeded in taking off. Escapers, radio spies, stealers of planes: crucially for our harmony, we knew we were all still in extreme danger. The prison chiefs at Outram Road would never forget, or be allowed to forget about us. As far as they were concerned, we were simply in Changi to gain enough strength to be recalled to finish our sentences, and we were thus in a strange conflict. Bon Rogers wanted us to regain our health, and so did we, but the last thing we wanted was to be well enough to return to Outram Road. We were ghosts on holiday.

There was in any case a limit to what could be achieved in the hospital at Changi. Some of us could not get our limbs to work properly. My arms were in bad condition, as I discovered for myself when I tried to write or move my fingers quickly without lifting my arms high. Some men’s eyes had been weakened dangerously: those who had lost their glasses suffered from near-blindness. Stomach illnesses were endemic. Slater had appalling dysentery. Nevertheless, slowly, our physical condition improved.

Bon Rogers came around every morning in the best hospital tradition, exuding authority and reassurance, and he took the closest personal care of us. The nurses gave us whatever medicine was available. I was given an enormous daily dose of rice-polishings in a kind of broth. These are the fibrous husks of rice, removed in the normal processing of white rice and contain vitamins and roughage. They were difficult to consume, so light and dry that they floated in a heap on the surface of water. However, I packed the ticklish flakes down diligently.

On his rounds, Dr Rogers also began to give us snapshots from the war. Since we had been in Outram Road the English and Americans had landed in Europe, the Russians had forced the Germans back towards Warsaw and the Japanese were being wiped out in the Pacific and pushed back in Burma and China. This was exalting news, but it was not unmixed with fear. Only if the war came to an end quickly had we any real chance of survival, but even then we were worried about the vengeance the Japanese might exact if they saw defeat on the horizon in the form of an invasion fleet. Even if the Allies started bombing Singapore in earnest, there might be reprisals on prisoners, and on convicted criminals among them first of all. The best we could do, therefore, was to live a day at a time, but no matter how hard we tried, and no matter how soothing our finends at Changi tried to be, we could never throw off the permanent burden of continuous fear that the warders from Outram Road were liable to appear at any moment to conduct their own so-called medical examinations.

It was clear to us, though we were careful not to ask or learn anything we did not need to know, that Bon Rogers was not getting his victory bulletins from obliging Japanese guards. Where the radio was and who was operating it were interesting secrets, but we prayed that the group running it would be more careful, or just luckier, than we had been. It was one more proof of how hard it is to shut down speech.

In the afternoon we tried to read and to rest. There were enough books in Changi to provide an amazing and eclectic library, endlessly circulating until the books fell to pieces: religious tracts, Victorian novels, the works of Hugh Walpole, Somerset Maugham, the Powys brothers and Arnold Bennett, moving from hand to hand in a hot, sweaty prison-city. For the population of Changi never fell below about 3000, and frequently rose to 5000, and because the Japanese allowed the POWs to run it internally more or less at their own discretion, there was more cultural activity here than in most small towns.

Changi had stamp-collecting clubs, debating societies, literary circles, even a dry land yacht club for commodores nostalgic about the sea. Everyone was using memories to support themselves and entertain each other.

Up on the second floor of HB, we could not take part in debates about the shape of the post-war world or the meaning of evolution, but we certainly had books. There was a book bindery at the prison, and the tattered volumes were kept together with heavy, home-made gums made from rice and water or stewed bones, and patched up with cannibalized prison records, of which there were reams. Charge sheets for Indian privates written in copperplate in happier colonial days became the endpapers of works by Bunyan, Blake or Defoe. The adhesive still feels solid, heavy, and crude, but also very strong; I have some of these books with me now. They are the most well-thumbed, eroded books I have ever seen, worn to a softness and fragility, and made compact by sheer use, but they seem indestructible.

One of the books I still have is a Gibbon’s stamp catalogue for 1936, Stamps of the British Empire, Part One. I remembered how not long ago I was spreading out hundreds of these stamps on the floor of an Edinburgh house with a young friend. The thought of the order and beauty of these franked bits of serrated, squared paper was extraordinarily comforting to me: there was once a world of regularity, puncaiality and neat categories. I made careful pencilled notes on African and Malayan stamps, columns of different prices, colours, devices and monarchs’ heads. It was a therapy of lists; it was a way of forgetting arbitrary, unpredictable hell.

It was during this time in Changi that I swapped my Authorized Version of the Bible for the Moffatt translation which I still have, because I was curious about this new and celebrated edition, and so Harkness got my tiny marginal commentaries and underlinings and I got his. Between rereading the Bible, learning Hindustani – which I was also trying to do, from a grammar – and classifying things in order to remember them, the afternoons and the months passed quickly for me.

Bon Rogers told us that as a safety measure we must never go out in daylight, but he allowed us out for walks around the gaol after dark. It meant we were still in a prison within a prison, but the restriction was worth it. There were no Japanese inside Changi – except when they came in to seize a prisoner or negotiate with the senior officers – so Bradley and I made slow circuits of the complex while we looked up at the night sky and breathed the air of our heaven. Outside the walls thousands of Allied prisoners were living at Selarang, at Kranji and in other makeshift camps, but we were dangerous, so we were in the prison itself. Our favourite walkway was the road between the inner and the high outer walls, because it was so secluded; it made a blank concrete channel, and it was like walking along the bottom of a drain. The Japanese were at the main gate, but not on the walls, and we walked unmolested for hours.

For many prisoners, Changi was a dreadful place: only Outram Road made it seem homely to us. I was relieved to see the shockingly swollen figure of Stan Davis, ill with beri-beri, arriving at Changi soon after my own arrival; and Harry Knight was carried in on a stretcher one day. This reminded us that we were on leave from obscenity. He was at rock bottom; barely recognizable, his frame reduced to weak bones in loose pale skin, his eyes sunk in his head. Rogers had him moved immediately to another hospital wing inside Changi, but within ten days Harry was dead.

Jack Macalister thought that his own recovery had gone far enough to be dangerous. He talked to one of the medical officers, quietly and privately, and one day they put their plan into operation. It was all done calmly, as though the MO were about to give him an injection. Jack sat on a chair and held a length of 2-inch steel pipe vertically over his left foot. The other man lifted a big hammer and smashed it down on the open top of the pipe. Macalister was in bad pain as the MO wrapped his foot in plaster, but he had bought himself an extra few weeks of companionship and humane treatment.

Knight’s death prepared me all too well for leaving what Macalister was determined to keep. The POWs on duty at the prison entrance would instantly send a message to HB if any of the Japanese from Outram Road appeared, so that we might have at least a few minutes’ warning in which to arrange ourselves. On 25th January 1945 the blow fell, and the warnings were useless. A party of Japanese, including one who we thought might be a doctor of some kind, came without warning into the hospital block. Their medical officer, accompanied by Bon Rogers, walked around every bed on both floors and looked closely at the occupants. Dr Rogers outlined each person’s medical history and listed their various ailments and demonstrated their disabilities. Unfortunately, I was betrayed by my own cursed vitality. I was looking quite well that day, for a sick prisoner, and the Japanese officer decided that I was well enough for Outram Road.

Within a matter of minutes I had to pack my kit, say goodbye to the fortunate ones and climb on to a truck where, for the second time, the Imperial Japanese Army Prison Service took charge of me.

We drove quickly into Singapore and headed straight for Outram Road. I had expected this for weeks, but the thought that my clean, relaxed body would shortly be reduced to scrapings and dirt, and that my time at Changi was about to pass away like water was unutterably lowering. The truck drove up to the huge doors J they opened like the jaws of a beast and shut with me inside.

I knew the routine; stripping off, laying small items on a table, handing everything over for storage, and being inspected and examined in every orifice.

They allocated me a new number. This time I was No. 540, otherwise Go-hyaku yon-ju. I wondered what had happened to the last 540, whose number had come and gone. Then we were taken across to D Block. I knew the way. I was allocated a cell almost opposite No. 52, my old address, and found that I was sharing with a young Indonesian from the island of Celebes, or Sulawesi.

We communicated haltingly, for his English was not good, but we got on well together. He was the first Asian person I had ever been close to as an equal, and so my forced education in other ways of life continued. He had been a Dutch East Indies soldier in Sumatra, and the Japanese had suspected him (rightly, as it turned out) of membership in a resistance group. He was lucky to be alive at all. He talked about his village, about the fishing and farming his people lived off. I told him about the Shetlands, of which his island seemed a tropical reflection.

Some things had changed for the better in Outram Road. Cell doors were now open nearly all day, although this meant that we had to be even more careful about talking. The food had improved a little. The worst of the diseases which we had had to suffer a year earlier seemed to have been eradicated. Meals were now taken in silence at a long table in the middle of the main hall. Most prisoners were out of their cells for a good part of the day.

Presumably the Japanese had suddenly realized that in D Block they had a potential labour force which was not only docile but which did not have to be paid. About thirty or forty men were taken out on most days in trucks to excavate tunnels in a hillside some miles away, preparations for some suicidal resistance to invasion. We did not feel good about those tunnels.

They also enlisted us as gardeners. There was now a high-ranking officer in Outram Road, a Colonel Parker of the Indian Army. He and I were assigned to the care and manuring with our human dung of the vegetable gardens which ran down the outside of the blocks, and supplied the kitchens. The smell of faeces was overpowering in the heat as we watered and hoed and pulled up vegetables. The stink permeated our clothes as I moved doggedly along the rills with this senior, rather patrician figure by my side.

They once took us to the potato garden and told us that we could help ourselves, but the potatoes were not ripe and we contented ourselves with eating the tops, which someone later told me are poisonous. They did not seem to do our stomachs much additional harm. Parker remarked that we must be the first British Army officers to be turned out to graze a potato patch.

The sheer horror of the prison had only diminished. It was still a ghastly place. The daily routine was still composed of near-starvation, brutality, frustrating and heavy work, lack of medical attention and confinement in our cells for fourteen hours a day. The psychological burden of living under an arbitrary regime was still too heavy for comfort. The slight improvement in health had created a new problem: the prospects of getting out on grounds of illness were drastically reduced.

I was determined to do it again, for all that. I loathed the thought of dying in this cesspit and began to consider alternatives. Escape over the wall was probably feasible, but a half-naked, ragged and crazy British prisoner on the roads around Singapore would be extremely conspicuous.

I tried to plan rationally, to list the attractions of various possibilities and eliminate the unattractive options. The basic problem was information, or rather a lack of it. Despite the usual chain of whispers, serious communication was out of the question. It was still nearly impossible to find out who was in the gaol; new prisoners would appear and familiar faces disappear without warning.

It was very unusual to be ordered to go on an unsupervised errand. One day I was told to go to the next block to pick up some buckets and as I turned a comer there was Lance Thew, similarly unaccompanied. We stood in that silent yard in amazement at each other’s presence. The fluke of meeting without guards allowed him to tell me quietly that the Japanese had kept him behind after the court martial to repair their radios, in a fairly comfortable workshop where he could probably have seen out the war tinkering with radio receivers and transmitters, but he didn’t fancy that and had escaped. After *taking a look around Bangkok’ he realized that his chances of getting ftirther were not very good, and gave himself up. Thew was a man who didn’t just tempt fate, he thought he knew its frequency and could tune in to it, but now he too was in Outram Road.

I decided that one of the best steps I could take towards escaping once more would be to get on to the Binki Squad. The squad consisted of six or eight men who were called out from their cells every morning, and collected from a store the broad wooden stretchers on which they carried the latrine buckets, and then opened up a manhole in the yard outside D Block. On a command, the squad broke up into pairs and set off, visiting every occupied cell on their routes. While prisoners were supposed to set their buckets on their doorsteps, they did not always do so, and with three or four pairs of prisoners on the move simultaneously and only one guard, there were opportunities for quick spoken exchanges. The binki men had access to water, and information, and they had mobility.

I told one of them that I would like to join the squad, and a few days later I was called out and told to join the group just going on duty, apparently replacing someone who was ill.

I got used to the smell of full latrine buckets swinging on the stretchers around my shoulders. Over the next few weeks I slowly and patiently established from my brief conversations with prisoners, bending down over their stinking buckets of waste, that there was no scope at all for getting out through sickness, but that one or two people had been taken away following accidents at work.

I also discovered that there was something up on the first floor which was off limits to other prisoners. We were never allowed to go up there, except on latrine duty. The cell doors there were shut all the time. In the silence you would have expected small sounds to betray the presence of other men, but even though the guards were heard to go up the stairs we never heard so much as the rattle of a bowl. Yet somewhere up above us, we were convinced, were comrades of ours undergoing a punishment even more extreme than the one that applied to us.

I had almost nothing to do but think, and so I thought about escape all the time; it became the single overriding concern of my life. But for a long time nothing useful came to me.

I kept thinking about the stairs. At the end of the main hall, furthest from the main door, was the large iron staircase leading up to the first floor. No prisoner had ever mounted them during my first period in Outram Road, but now there were those mysterious and very special prisoners up there. Only one pair of binki men was needed to collect their latrine buckets, empty and return them. I arranged to have a place on the first floor gang.

For several days I examined the stairs closely. The treads were made of iron, English cast iron, but there were no backs to the steps. I counted the steps obsessively as I walked up and down, and checked my arithmetic to make absolutely sure. I needed to know the exact number of steps, as though the numbers held some promise in themselves. I came to the conclusion that if I were to trip or fall on the 17 th step from the ground, which was almost at the top of a straight run of steps, I would have a long way to bump down to the bottom, which might do enough damage to make an official accident without killing me. Then I thought that if I were to include the stretcher and the latrine buckets in my fall, the accident would be much more impressive. In my desperate urgency to escape I was quite prepared to stage the fall on the way down, which would leave me awash in foulness. I decided, however, to arrange the accident on the upward journey, with the load of cleaned empty buckets.

I nerved myself hard. I planned it, as I liked to do with everything; for several days I rehearsed loading empty buckets on the stretcher so that there would be as much weight as possible at my end at the right moment; getting behind the stretcher, stepping on the first step with the right foot, counting the steps, then, while putting my weight on my right foot on the 17th step, putting my left foot through the open back of the step and falling.

One morning I woke up and decided that I was going to throw myself down the metal prison stairs that day. As we left the yard, I wedged my spectacles as securely as I could behind my ears, jammed my cap on tight to protect my ears and the glasses, and entered the block. I told the man in front of me not to hold on to his end of the stretcher too tightly and to let go altogether immediately he felt it being pulled out of his hands.

We moved sedately through the main hall and came to the bottom of the stairs. I counted as we went up, then as we neared the turn of the stairs, with my right foot on the 17th step I lifted my left foot towards the 18th, shoved my leg through the open back and pulled the stretcher down on top of me with its load of empty buckets and hds.

The noise of crashing wood and metal in that huge silent gallery was frightful. I roared with pain and relief, and sprawled out at the bottom mixed up in the heap, trying to look as contorted as I could. My spectacles survived even this, and were still wedded to my nose. I was hurting, but I could not take the risk of checking how much damage had been done.

I heard both Japanese and English voices. Willing and gentle hands, obviously English or Australian, picked me up and carried me off to my cell. My bearers laid me out on my planks. I did not want to move but I wriggled just enough to check that I could move my fingers and toes, and they seemed to be in working order; I had been terrified of damaging my spine. I was badly and painfully bruised, but even my ribs still seemed to be in the right places. I had got off very lightly – perhaps too lightly for my own good.

Guards came in to have a look at me. I kept my head still. One of them took my pulse and poked about my chest and legs.

Another figure arrived, out of range of my eyes deliberately narrowed to focus on the blotchy ceiling. I lay there, ignored the evening meal and remained semi-conscious for most of the night. I was determined not to move; lying motionless became steadily more and more uncomfortable.

Days and nights followed each other. It is incredibly difficult to remain in a single position for so long, but I was waiting for the Japanese guards to start imagining strange paralyses wasting my body until I was beyond suspicion of malingering. My Indonesian cellmate was magnificent, attending on my rigid figure uncomplainingly, helping me to eat and drink. I asked for the latrine bucket to be brought to me, since it would be unwise to be mobile enough to stagger to the other end of the cell. Sometimes he washed me down, when he could get some water.

Two weeks passed, miserable and difficult weeks; I was beginning to find the near-starvation difficult, especially as I was deliberately rejecting food that I could see and smell. Sometimes I ate a little, just to keep my shut-down faculties alive. But nothing eased the abrasion of bones on skin without fat – I felt encased in a paper-thin membrane irritated and chafed by the very act of lying still. The urge to move was unbearable. All that time I wore the same shirt and shorts, which became dirty rags congealed to my body.

As a step towards forcing the issue I allowed my rice bowl to drop with a clatter one evening, spilling the white grains over me and the floor. I lay on my back and tried to urinate. It isn’t that easy to foul yourself voluntarily; but eventually and degradingly, persistence was rewarded and a large puddle expanded across the floor.

The guard on that shift must have noticed something, for after only a few hours the medical orderly appeared. He nudged and pinched me and then walked away.

The following morning a stretcher party picked me up and brought me to the administration block. I was dumped on the floor. The medical orderly appeared at my side. I was careful not to turn my head, lying in profile like a lanky mummy. A metal instrument tinkled as he picked it up, and then I felt sharp pressure and a prick inside my mouth, a needle jabbing into my gum. It felt like a long needle piercing my jaw. I could feel it forcing through on to the bone, filling my face with iron. As this was clearly the medical examination I had to remain deadpan for another few minutes; if I had reacted I would have ruined weeks of plotting.

He drew out the needle, and soon my kit was dumped on me, as before, and I was moved on to the stretcher and loaded on to a vehicle. Once again there was the long run past Kallang, the right-hand turn, the slow run of about a hundred yards and another right-hand turn. When I heard a Scottish voice say ‘It’s Lomax again!’ and recognized the speaker as Robert Reid, late of 5 Field Regiment at Kuantan, the voice of the Angel Gabriel could not have been more welcome. Within minutes I was among friends in the hospital block.

The physical and psychic relief was once again immense. This time I was determined that I would leave Changi as a free human being or not at all. I discovered that the date was 10th April 1945. Bradley and Macalister were still there, Bill Smith, Alex Mackay and Jim Slater too. But the malevolent shuttle between the two prisons kept working right to the end. Macalister, despite his terrible preventive measures, was taken back to Outram Road four days after my arrival for the second time at Changi.

Bon Rogers was as calm and dedicated as ever, a man living out his medical oath. He put me on a grass diet. I did not actually have to chew the stuff, but had to drink at least a pint of grass *soup’ each morning. It was a revolting liquid, but like everyone else privileged to receive it, I drank it down.

They also gave me the hot bath treatment. In the open yard a domestic bath was set up with an attendant who went back and forth fetching hot water for each new bather. His task in my case was to help me remove some of the near-solid scum and dirt which I had again brought with me from Outram Road.

I got back into the routine of HB2, reading and talking. Sometimes in the evenings the Australians Russell Braddon and Sydney Piddington came into the ward to talk. They were experimenting with telepathy and asked for volunteers to attend their demonstrations. It was eerie, in a darkened prison block, to see them guess the contents of a prisoner’s pockets or the name of a man’s wife, calling up invisible energies as mysterious as radio waves had been to me as a child. We were probably appallingly credulous, but what they did seemed to us real magic in those last months of the war, as the tension mounted towards a barbaric last stand by the Japanese military rulers.

Bon Rogers told us that in Europe the Nazi armies were nearly destroyed and Berlin was under attack from east and west. But around the overcrowded blocks and yards of Changi there were rumours of trenches being dug nearby, of preparations for mass murder. When we heard that Rangoon had been captured on 3rd May, our exhilaration was poisoned by fear. Now, surely, was the moment of Japanese vengeance.

As though I had created a gap in the scheme of things, after all my efforts to fake an accident, I had a real accident that may have saved me from being returned to Outram Road. The only way we could get salt was by distilling it from seawater. Every day a party would go down to die shore, fill up old oil drums and bring seawater back to camp, which was then distributed among the blocks. We got a quantity one day in HB2 and I volunteered – I had learnt nothing, after all – to boil it down to salt. I had an army mess-tin, and an old electric fire element twisted to make a hot ring linked up to the mains, and eventually I had a tin threequarters full of semi-liquid salt and assorted grit.

Sitting on the edge of my bed, I was adjusting the apparatus when I caught my arm on the long handle of the tin and tipped it off my makeshift electric ring. It landed neatly on my right knee. The salt sludge, which was near boiling point, flowed like lava down my leg, taking the skin with it. The pain was so intense that I lost touch with the situation for a while, but I remember Jim Bradley tenderly dabbing the salt off" with warm water, and an orderly injecting me with morphine, and then floating in the clouds. It was a long time before they took the bandages off.

One evening early in August Bon gathered us round him on our beds and told an incomprehensible story, which he could not credit himself. He said that a new type of bomb had been used over Japan, that it had destroyed the city of Hiroshima, that it was a weapon of terrible power developed in secret by the Allies, and that there was talk of surrender, but none of us believed it. False optimism was at a premium in Changi by late 1945.

The Japanese medical inspections continued even now. On 9th August eight men were judged fit to return to Outram Road and that evening the reports from the secret radio spoke of another bomb of almost cosmic power and another Japanese city destroyed. I was passed over in the selection.

Six days later Japan surrendered. Four days after that, the gates of hell were opened from the inside and all the surviving Allied prisoners were brought from Outram Road to Changi. One or two of them died a few hours after they arrived. Fred Smith was all right, surviving twenty-two months in Outram Road without a break, his unyielding stamina holding his shrunken body together, his spirit seemingly unbroken. But then we all tried to be patterns of courage to each other, and the price we paid would not be exacted in full until much later.

That same day a radio loudspeaker appeared on the outside wall of Changi Gaol. Suddenly All India Radio was blaring gloriously out all over the compound, excited British voices describing the scale of the Allied victory. Thousands upon thousands of light-headed, delirious prisoners came from the outlying camps and danced under the walls, their hilarity coming as much from hunger as from joy. The Japanese guards stared at the loudspeaker in disbelief. Hundreds of men sat beneath the speaker cheering every item of news and revelling in the sullen depression of the guards. In HB2 we exulted, but we were aware that the real victory for us was to have survived.

Two or three Liberator bombers came over and dropped a quantity of parcels and medical supplies and crates of food. Then a lone bomber dropped three parachutists. We watched them float down, unclip their harness and walk up to the front entrance of the gaol. They looked terribly young to us: a British officer each from the airforce, the navy and the army, with a priggish and bossy air about them of coming to take charge of us. We did not feel helpless or in need of rescue by such inexperienced young men. The army captain was told by a POW that he had been in school when we were first locked up and that if he liked, we would give him lunch, but that was the only co-operation we were going to give him.

The Japanese retired quietly to their barracks, and handed over their arms. More of our troops dropped from the sky and arrived by sea and found our prison-city organizing and feeding itself and reconstituting itself as an army. They let us get on with what we were doing.

As we restored our contact with the army and the world we began to find endings for some of the stories that we’d had to tell each other over and over, never certain of their proper outcome, for the past three years. The Australian nurses at Banka Island, for example: fifty of them had died, even more than we thought, but two had survived. Primrose, the humane murderer of his own soldier, was not executed but returned to the railway, and he had survived. The silent prisoners on the first floor of Outram Road were men who had attacked ships in Singapore Harbour in September 1943 – just after our arrest – and got clean away, and returned a year later, when they were detected; ten officers and men were captured. They were beheaded on 9th July, near Bukit Timah, a bare month before the war ended; they had provided the occasion for my second exit from Outram Road, and I never had the chance to thank them.

I heard about other radios in other camps, hidden in broomheads, in bamboo tubes and water-bottles, and what had happened to some of the men who made them. We already knew that the Australian Captain Matthews had been executed in Borneo. Now I heard that a captain called Douglas Ford had been shot in Hong Kong for the sort of thing we had done at Kanburi. The name sounded familiar; he had been at school with me in Edinburgh. Ford and Matthews had both operated radios and made contact with civilians outside their camps. If the Japanese had once been sure that we had done the same at Kanburij we would never have come through.

Lance Thew had disappeared again, removed from Outram Road in May. The Japanese must have been desperate by then for skilled radio men. I never saw or heard from Thew again, though I know he survived. But of Bill Williamson, the calm and competent linguist who had escaped our punishment at Kanburi, there was no trace at all. It was as though he had vanished, somewhere up the railway.

I tried to draw up a full record of prisoners who had passed through the military section of Outram Road, determined to log all the names so that others could account for them. I read the medical records and spoke to all the survivors. I wanted to get the facts on paper and into the hands of South-East Asia Command before we were all dispersed. We were being split up and assigned to different units around Changi in preparation for going home. When I started to type, on an ancient manual machine, I discovered that my right arm and hand would not work properly, so I tapped away very slowly.

I also drew up detailed complaints about our treatment at Kanburi, taking statements from the survivors. Major Slater, as the senior officer among us – suddenly ranks mattered again – signed the statement. The Kanburi Radio Affair, we called it in our statement after we agreed a final version; the designation began to seem a kind of euphemism. We were becoming history, and we could tell how close we were to being forgotten already.

The good can be forgotten as easily as the bad, even more easily, so I also typed out a commendation for Signalman O’Malley, that heroic toban from Outram Road. I described what he had done in the unemotional language of an army memo, but it still recalled him carrying paralysed men into the sunshine, caring for the sick and doing his utmost to ease conditions for the damned.

This meticulous, orderly registration of witnesses and participants and descriptions of the criminals was a wonderful displacement of anger and revenge. It still astonishes me that there were not more spontaneous outbursts of summary justice on the guards, but our normality reasserted itself very quickly, and that did not include lynchings.

I kept copies of all these documents. Today they are almost faded, but not quite. O’Malley’s commendation is typed in faint pale violet on the back of an Admiralty telegram form; the complaint against the Kanburi Aerodrome Camp Commander and his NCOs on some heavy green ledger paper, and you can see the jumping keys and how faded the ribbon was. I have a list of some of the civilian prisoners from the blocks at Outram Road which we seldom saw, written on POW toilet paper – a thin, fibrous transparency covered in small pencilled capitals. The typed list of prisoners evacuated from Outram Road to Changi is almost illegible, with neat dotted lines separating the categories, on thin tan paper which once surrounded a toilet roll, the black serifs of the type nearly cutting through it. You can still read the label: ‘Red Cross Onliwon Toilet Tissue’.