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

CHAPTER FOUR

THE DAY AFTER I saw our conquerors, the British forces left in the city were ordered to walk to Changi, site of a prison and a settlement around it, in the extreme east of the island. Changi was fifteen miles away.

We set off from Fort Canning, carrying whatever we could in backpacks and the few vehicles we were allowed. Our long column stretched for more than half a mile and as we walked out into the open we could see other lines of soldiers, marching in strict step, converging from side roads on to the only main route into Changi. Soon we were a dense mass of jostling overloaded men, trying to keep good order and dignity. This was the British Army marching to its humiliation.

A defeated army is a strange thing. Our awesome killing-machine was obeying the orders of an enemy we couldn’t even see – there never seemed to be more than a couple of dozen Japanese guards at Changi. When we got there we were allocated living areas, our cooks set up their pots in tiny domestic kitchens in the bungalows of the vanished civilians, food and medicine was gathered in. Keeping the troops ‘occupied’ became an obsession, and soon grass-cutting, drain-clearance and gardening became the main activities of fighting men. Small craft workshops sprang up: I ordered a little wooden case for my spectacles, one of the best purchases I have ever made. Everyone knew to whom he was responsible; there was no-one who could say that he did not know who he belonged to. But the entire purpose of our mighty collective existence – the defence of the Naval Base and British power in the Far East – had been snuffed out.

What replaced our previous motive force was uncertainty, creeping in and growing stronger day by day, a negative force feeding on anxiety and fear. Before, we’d had the spring of aggression to keep us moving; now there was a kind of nervous elastic pulling us backwards. We still wanted to fight: but our bitter young energy had to be bottled up. We began to experience the overriding, dominant feature of POW life: constant anxiety, and utter powerlessness and frustration. There was no relief from these burdens, not even in sleep. So we filled the days organizing ourselves and our men, underemployed and angry.

An eerie peace prevailed for three weeks, during which I did not see a single further Japanese. There were still a few revolvers and rifles at Changi, we were still an army, but we shuffled around harmlessly waiting for our masters to dispose of us. Almost the first decree they made was to remove the sense of time by which we lived: they announced that Tokyo time was being introduced, which meant advancing clocks and watches by 1.5 hours. We therefore had to rise earlier, in the dark. I cared about time (and found a kind of beauty even in timetables); I needed to be precise about when things might be done. I hated them taking time away from us. Time was to become an issue between me and the Japanese.

I was living for the moment with other Fortress signals men in a little bungalow, with a splendid view out over the sea to the east, an enormous tantalizing space in which we were lost. Here were tens of thousands of Allied prisoners-of-war dumped on the seashore, with not a chance of sailing away.

Our odd kind of normality was shaken one morning on parade when we were addressed by Colonel Pope, the OC of Southern Area Signals. He said that many of us had never seen a Japanese yet, that they had left us entirely alone since the surrender and that this was beginning to give us a false sense of security.

He then said that he had taken statements from a batch of POWs who had just arrived at Changi about what had happened at Alexandra Hospital, the main military hospital at Singapore, when Japanese troops had overrun it just hours before the surrender time. They had massacred the doctors, nurses and patients, even on the tables in the operating theatres. Survivors were dragged outside and finished off with bayonets.

The Colonel had another story that he wanted us to reflect on, told by POWs sent from Sumatra and the islands. Some of the small ships that had left Singapore just before the fall had been loaded with medical staff and wounded men. One of these boats had been sunk near the shore of Banka Island. Among the survivors were a large number of Australian Army nurses, all women, who struggled ashore and were rounded up, ordered to walk back into the sea and machine-gunned in the surf. The Colonel said that his information was that dozens had been killed.

The report about the nurses took us across a threshold into a new area of foreboding. It was still hard for us – there was no reason why we should have been able – to grasp the fact that we might have to explore human brutality to its limits. But nurses are venerated in armies, with a romantic reverence, so the killing of the nurses seemed inconceivable. Colonel Pope’s conclusion did not need to be more than laconic. ‘We have not seen much of them. This does not mean they are not dangerous.’

Soon after that parade, the Japanese staged a ceremonial humiliation on a vast scale. Every able-bodied prisoner had to line a route which included all the main roads in the Changi area, 50,000 of us standing two deep, strung out for miles around the camp. A cortege of open cars drove past, preceded by a camera crew in the back of an open lorry. They were making their propaganda film for home consumption, and we were the extras. I’m sure it looked impressive, all those men in uniforms which were already becoming a bit ragged, and some men dressed just in grimy shorts and vests, forced to attend to a few Japanese generals as they cruised by in their requisitioned British cars.

It takes time to break an army. Each new tightening of the leash is experienced as a degrading restriction; it all seems slow and insidious, though in retrospect I can see that they reduced us very quickly. In late March, for example, they decreed that Allied officers must no longer wear badges of rank. Instead we were to wear a single star on our shirts, just above the left breast pocket. This was a way of saying to us that our hard-won distinctions were of no interest to them, that we were simply two classes of prisoner.

In fact, as the spring came on they made it plain that prisoners were of interest to them under only one category: labour. Having concentrated us, they now began to pick us off in useftil batches. They called for more and more working parties in Singapore, and in early April summoned over a thousand men ‘for duty overseas’. This first unwilling regiment of labourers was sent off to an unknown destination under the command of a British colonel.

As if to underline how little we could do about this, or any other insult, on 14th April I was standing outside our bungalow with some signals men when a great fleet of Japanese warships came over the horizon, sailing westwards. In line astern, their guns jutting proudly and their funnels raked, the grey ships passed us on their way through the Straits of Singapore. There seemed to be no end to the line – battleships, cruisers, destroyers and smaller gunboats; an entire battle fleet steaming past Fortress Singapore as though it owned the sea. I remembered how deeply struck I was by the sight of our own ships in the Clyde little more than a year before, how invincible we looked. It felt bitter to have to review this enemy armada from a patch of grass wearing a star sewn roughly on to my worn shirt.

When the Japanese called for a working party for ‘a Japanese project’ in Singapore at the end of that month, I volunteered. I would keep on breaking the golden rule of soldiering, but I was restless and the unknown was better than the oppressive routine at Changi.

They made us walk twenty miles to a former Royal Navy hutted camp at Kranji, to the north of the city. For the next two months we marched out of our camp every morning, up the Bukit Timah road, past the Ford Motor Company factory where Percival had made the formal surrender of his garrison, and up the side of Bukit Timah Hill.

One morning as we left our quarters we saw, off the side of the road, six severed heads set up on poles. They were Chinese heads. At a distance, they looked like Hallowe’en fright masks; every morning, we marched past them. It was known that the Japanese were carrying out purges of suspected Kuomintang plotters in Singapore, and it is hard to explain now how this display of medieval barbarity did not shock us more. We felt immune to it; these heads were trophies of an inter-Asian conflict, we were British soldiers – and could not imagine that cruelty does not discriminate once it is unleashed.

On the hill, which was covered with dense undergrowth and timber, we had to cut down the trees, clear the scrub and creeper and build a road up towards the summit; then slice the top off the cone of the hill and level it. This was to be their gargantuan war memorial in Singapore, visible from all over the island. I’m glad to say I never actually saw the finished pile, not even a photo of it. It was blown up in 1945. The work gave me eight weeks of relative freedom to move around when I was not showing working parties of men from Bradford how to dig a trench in such a way that they were not up to their ankles in mud. This was far from the worst experience of captivity: the Japanese used the British chain of command, we got things done and they left us to get on with it. But the labour was heavy: ripping up the long roots of tropical fruit trees which dug into the earth like hard matted hair took great bursts of concentrated energy. The edges of cut bamboo opened skin with the ease of razor blades and the wounds went septic very fast. You could damage a lot of men by making them do this kind of work for a long time; it never occurred to us that anyone would try.

I was preoccupied with other things. One night I walked out of our quarters with a former Shanghai police officer called Wyld who had somehow ended up in Singapore in time to be captured. We were going to meet a Portuguese (and therefore neutral) civilian called Mendoza, to whom we had been recommended by Lim, a Chinese boy who sold us eggs. We walked very carefully in the dark through the gardens and plantations of a former European residential area.

Mendoza lived in a fine bungalow on the main road to the hill we were transforming. After some guarded small talk, Wyld put a gold ring carefully on the table in front of him and made our proposal. We wanted to be put in touch with the local Chinese sympathetic to the Kuomintang and to be smuggled to China, or at least the Burma Road, which ran along the top of Siam and Burma into China.

This was a crazy venture, much more dangerous than I could have imagined at the time. But Wyld was a superb linguist, and Chinese was one of his gifts. We thought that this would get us through.

It gradually dawned on us that the boundary keeping us in was as much psychological as it was physical; that we could walk for miles in the pineapple plantations around Kranji without seeing a single Japanese, that we could sell stolen Japanese equipment to the local Chinese traders, but there was nowhere to go to: north of us was the long peninsula, separated from Burma and therefore from India by high mountains choked in forest; south or west were the occupied Dutch colonies of Java and Sumatra; east, nothing but the sea.

Behind our billet was a little hill. One large POW climbed it every evening, just before the daylight failed, in as stately a manner as he could. He hooded his eyes with his hand like a pantomime scout, gazed around the whole horizon with great solemnity and called out in a remarkably loud voice, ‘I see no fucking ship.’

If the state of Limbo, which some religions recognize, is characterized by this sort of helpless mockery and despair, and populated by ghosts suspended between human life and hell, I think I will recognize it when I see it.

In June we finished our work of levelling and earthmoving, and were sent back to Changi. We never heard from Mendoza, who now of course had no way of contacting us. I returned to a dwindling camp. In our absence the process of slow strangulation had tightened its pressure. They were now taking huge drafts of men away, thousands at a gulp. Twenty-five covered goods wagons packed with POWs left from Singapore Station; three thousand Australians were sent away by ship; a thousand taken to Japan. Every month more were taken away.

We lived in a world of half-verified information, smuggled news and above all, of rumour. The stories that circulated around the camp added to our pervasive anxiety. Always you wanted to believe that the worst could not be possible.

The rumour coming back now was that these huge work-details were wanted for a grandiose scheme. The Japanese were building a railway. Some inhuman visionary on the Imperial staff in Tokyo had dreamed up a way of avoiding the Allied destroyers and submarines in the waters around Malaya. The Japanese needed, we could guess, a way of getting supplies from Japan to Burma and on to India, which they were surely planning to invade. So they decided to build a railway across the spiky mountain chain between Burma and Thailand, a route so terrible that our British colonial engineers, as I knew from my reading, had rejected it as too brutally hard. I could not believe it; nor could I believe that I had become a prisoner only to be sent to work on a road for the machines that had given me such intense pleasure when I was free.

The final emasculation of the army took place in the late summer. First we were beheaded. Lieutenant-General Percival and the Governor of Singapore, Sir Shenton Thomas, and all officers above the rank of lieutenant-colonel, were removed in a single transport; in all, four hundred top brass disappeared, sent to some mysterious destination.

There were now about 18,000 of us left. A new Japanese commander had been appointed. General Fukuye Shimpei, and he made his mark by issuing an order that every remaining POW had to sign a ‘non-escape form’. Only four prisoners signed. To show us that he meant to be taken seriously, Fukuye shot four prisoners on the beach near Changi. Allegedly, they had tried to escape. Of course we heard about all the cruel details; Fukuye intended that we should. He had ordered Colonel Holmes, our most senior remaining officer, to appear on the beach in the late morning of 2nd September with six of his colleagues. The four POWs were tied to posts in the sand; a firing squad of members of the Indian National Army, the renegade nationalist force supported by the Japanese, were led out in a calculated piece of political theatre. British soldiers were to be shot by their former subjects. The first shots failed to kill them; slow volleys finished them off as they lay on the bloody sand.

Less than an hour later, while this story was flashing around the camp, the Japanese ordered every single prisoner to move to Selarang Barracks, near Changi. The order added that anyone not there by 18.00 hours would join our comrades on the beach. In the blazing afternoon we walked two miles, carrying our sick, our heavy cooking equipment and our supplies, to this modem barracks built for a single battalion of Gordon Highlanders.

The barracks consisted of seven three-storey blocks around three sides of a parade ground. There were soon over 16,000 of us crammed into a space designed for 800; and 2000 seriously sick men were still in the big Roberts Hospital. Our discipline and organization meant that every unit was given a place somewhere. Every inch of space was occupied. Bodies covered the entire parade ground; sat hip to hip on the flat roofs, crowded on to balconies, stairwells and barrack-room floors. The latrines filled up. We dug through the tarmac of the parade ground to make more, but nothing could quench the overpowering smell of human excrement piling up, the congestion of sweat and discomfort. Fragmentary pieces of food were passed around. There were no proper cooking facilities, so we began to improvise them; there was one water tap for the population of a town.

On the second night, which was also the third anniversary of the outbreak of the war, the Australians organized a concert. Lit by oil-lamps, their ‘choir’ stood at one side of the parade ground and sang ‘Waltzing Matilda’, the lonely anthem of isolated men. Every voice in the square took up the refirain, a chorus of 16,000 sending the wistful, defiant air out past the barrack blocks into the darkness. ‘There’ll Always Be an England’ followed, and the recital finished with a crashing version of ‘Land of Hope and Glory’. What would Elgar have made of these thousands of voices rolling out to the beat of his surging march, as Japanese guards paced around the edge of the light with bayonets fixed?

The following day, our situation was clearly intolerable. Our medical officers pointed out the dangers; worse still, the Japanese administration announced that they intended to move all the patients from Roberts Hospital to join us. They were prepared to let loose epidemics among this mass of men and condemn the sick to death. Colonel Holmes issued an order instructing us to sign the piece of paper. We lined up in front of tables and did it. It read: ‘I, the undersigned, solemnly swear on my honour that I will not, under any circumstances, attempt escape.’

We walked back to our quarters in Changi. For over a month I regained a measure of freedom and space, but Selarang had been a watershed. It was an important twist in the spiral of capitulation and cruelty. Nothing was ever quite the same again. Then on 25th October, after watching thousands more men leave for what we were now certain was a vast railway project, I joined the exodus myself.

I was ordered into a covered goods van with about twenty-five other men, the big door of the van open for air as we rolled through the vivid green and mud of the fields. Occasionally we would pass through miles of that depressing neatly-planted rubber. We sat on the steel floor or on our kit, talking and dozing. The train rumbled north up the west coast, with occasional stops for what we coyly termed ‘essential purposes’, and as we crossed over into Siam on the east coast the beaches came into view. Out in the water were chimneys of rock covered with greenery standing erect like great mouldy teeth.

On our slow journey up that neck of land twice as long as England, I read Olaf Stapledon’s essay in prophecy Last and First Men, written in 1930. Its oratorical flights of scientific fantasy were hard going in that hot, crowded wagon, but Stapledon’s vision of global conflict ending in ‘a crescendo of radio hate, and war’, of Europe destroyed and of a cycle of Dark Ages, was full of strange premonitions. He wrote the book in the person of one of the Last Men, speaking across the ages to us in our chaotic century in a voice of warning, at the moment when the earth is doomed by the radiation of a ‘deranged star’. It was easy to imagine apocalypse in those years, but living it was turning out to be painful and squalid.

At Prai station, when we halted for food, I went up to look at the engine and discovered that it was a Japanese class C56 locomotive. I knew a little about it; knew it had been built in Osaka, and that it would have had to be altered to the narrower metre gauge for service on the tracks of Malaya and Siam. The Japanese were clearly here to stay, if they were shifting their trains to their new empire. I found myself, despite my aching limbs and tiredness, despite the grinding uncertainty about where we were going, admiring the quality of the engineering and the finish of the big engine with its smoke deflectors around the front of the boiler, and its six magnificent driving wheels. I couldn’t deny my fascination even now.

On a long stretch between Sungei Patani and Alor Star, in the north west of Malaya, I realized that I needed a latrine very urgently. My purpose was becoming extremely essential. We had not got so much as a bucket in our wagon. I told my immediate neighbours, and within minutes I was being held out of the open door of a moving goods wagon by four British Army officers while I relieved myself. I was not a hearty physical person, and this public intimacy was unbearably embarrassing. I still remember it as the most undignified experience of my life.

After a journey of more than a thousand miles from Singapore, the train ran into Ban Pong station. We were ordered to disembark, horribly stiff. I was now a railway man whether I liked it or not.

Ban Pong was a big village which had the merit, for the Japanese Army, of being the closest point on the Siamese railway system to the coastal plain of southern Burma, more than two hundred miles away over the mountains. It had become the nub of the planned new Japanese railway system, connecting Singapore with Bangkok and on to Phnom Penh, Saigon, Hanoi and China. All these lines would be linked up to Burma, and ultimately to India. The village was now a boom town, with extensive camps and hutments, its railway station jammed with trains, the river clogged with boats. Nearby at Nong Pladuk there were sidings, shunting engines, strange four-wheeled bogies and a lot of activity around the station.

So much became clear to us as time went on. At first, all we saw were open-fronted shops in buildings made of teak and mahogany, attap huts and stone colonial houses. Children and chickens ran about the streets, small elegant women in bright clothes tended little stalls piled with vivid red and green chillies, mangoes and pawpaws. We passed one such market under some trees near the station. Ban Pong seemed to have one long main street, with some other streets zigzagging off it. On the outskirts were the usual cultivated areas, patches of wild scrub, and the forest.

We were marched along a road for a little way. There was a camp of long, low huts of attap, and it was obvious even from the road that the end of each hut sloped down into a muddy lake of floodwater. The far end of each hut must be a stinking malarial pool. We were allocated among these huts, in which men crowded into the higher parts, their sleeping spaces reduced to a couple of feet, in order to get away from the water. This was named, with deadpan banality, the Wet Camp. It was obviously a lethal place.

After a few days, a group of about a hundred of us were sent a quarter of a mile away to another camp. This turned out be a workshop, staffed by Japanese mechanics and engineers, and we would be assisting them with repairs. It was a respite for us.

There were four officers in our group: Major Bill Smith, Captain Bill Williamson, a lieutenant called Gilchrist and myself. There was also a senior warrant officer, Sergeant-Major Lance Thew of the Royal Army Ordnance Corps.

We were not an especially well-knit group. Smith and Gilchrist were much older than us, members of the Straits Settlement Volunteer Force, raised from among the planters and merchants of Singapore and their employees. Many of them played brave parts in the fighting, but there was always a certain reserve between them and the regular army, a feeling that their enjoyment of the good life had made them careless about the defence of Singapore, and I never found much in common with these two with whom I was now forced to share a hut.

Major Smith had been a low-grade Colonial Service officer and was the kind of character whose lack of intelligence is cruelly punished in extreme conditions. A tall, angular figure, he had difficulty understanding what was happening to him, and was excluded instinctively from any decision-making. We took to calling him ‘Daddy’. Gilchrist was a very small person in his fifties, and had no worthwhile military experience or other skills; he was one of those men who in the harsh conditions of captivity could quickly and unfairly be judged not much good at anything.

With Bill Williamson I hit it off much better. He was a pleasant, unassuming and very competent person, and acted as the camp adjutant. He got things done, and when I saw he was learning Japanese I knew we could get along. He lent me his Japanese grammar and helped me to identify some of our gaolers’ basic vocabulary as they walked past our hut or shouted at us in the open areas of the camp. I made sure that Williamson and I were in adjoining bed-spaces.

Sergeant-Major Thew was an extremely capable technician, for whom the army was merely another outlet for his lifelong passion for mechanics. He had a little radio shop back in Sunderland, and he made and repaired radios for the Ordnance Corps before his capture. He was well built, a powerful looking man, and had a scarred face, but he had acquired the scar in a wartime accident and the streetfighter’s appearance belied his other-worldly character. He loved the craft of radio telegraphy, and dreamed of radios as I did of trains. He was an extraordinary and luckless man.

Our single long hut could hold about a hundred men and was little more than ingenious tents made from local vegetation: bamboo and attap, a big leaf-palm, tied together with a rope-like creeper. The floor was trodden earth, which became hard and solid, but under each bed-space was still raw clay, which sprouted even in the dark and weedy things poked up through the planks of the bed. The cool dark spaces also sheltered wriggling and crawling life, of which the most terrifying were scorpions and snakes. Williamson and I used to walk around the camp, talking about books and languages, and I once idly tugged on a creeper hanging from a tree; the snake I found myself holding was luckily some harmless python.

For nausea, little could surpass the big hairy centipedes which seemed about a foot long, if you could imagine them ever lying still and straight enough to measure instead of undulating and trembling. Lesser creatures we learned to take in our stride: cockroaches scurried like metal mice and if you stepped on one with a calloused bare foot it burst with a sound like a plastic bottle. The thatch was riddled with beetles, ants and spiders, dropping on to our sleeping bodies at night.

Since Nong Pladuk was the point of origin of the new railway, the yards were full of tracklaying equipment which needed constant repair at Ban Pong, given the breakneck speed at which it was being used. The equipment consisted of road-rail lorries, which could run on flat road surfaces or on railway tracks, and what at first looked like long low wagons on which rails were stacked. In fact these wagons were a couple of four-wheeled bogies held together by bolting in position two ordinary steel rails. This created a rigid eight-wheeled wagon body on which rails and sleepers were loaded, and pushed up the line behind the tracklaying gangs. When they had emptied it, they would dismantle the two rails holding it together and lay the bogies by the side of the track, and the inexorable tractor would push up another wagonload until all the wagons were empty. The bogies would then be replaced on the track and pulled back to Nong Pladuk for the next load.

The pace of work was intense, the prisoners driven by Japanese guards under a hot sun on a patchy diet that was just about adequate in Ban Pong, where food was relatively easily available outside the camp, but got progressively poorer the further up the line you went. The tracklaying gangs were thus unknowingly working themselves to death.

A flat-bottomed steel rail weighed about 70 pounds per yard, and usually came in 24-foot lengths. A rail is therefore a massive thing for hungry men to lift and manoeuvre into position, and one rail followed another relentlessly on this criminal folly of a line. The steel rails were spiked directly to the wooden sleepers by hammering in big steel nails. This is brutally heavy work: exhausted and ill-fed city boys and dragooned Asian labourers did not have a chance. Rest periods were rare, and any slackening was met with abuse or violence.

Railways have always broken the bodies and spirits of their builders, I knew that already: the Panama Railway cost the lives of one in five of its workforce; the railroads across the Rockies had demanded appalling sacrifices; the Alpine tunnels were considered to be death traps, even for the well-fed peasant boys who built them. Yet the Burma-Siam railway was unique; to a mind haunted by images from biblical times it recalled the construction of the Pyramids; it was not only the last cruel enterprise of the railway age, but the worst civil engineering disaster in history.

Of course I write this in retrospect, but even when I reached Ban Pong I knew there was something careless and therefore evil about the project. Though my own luck still held: all I had to do was to help repair the lorries, the bogies and the engines. We were working for Japanese railway fitters, turners, welders, most of them humane men interested in getting a job done, and their workshops were not cruelly managed. I could respect them and they let me and my comrades alone.

Some way out of camp, however, you could see the reality of a hand-built railway. Soon after I got there I walked out one day -1 had been appointed Messing Officer by Major Smith, or rather by Williamson acting through Smith, so I could move around fairly freely in search of food – and came to a place where a gap had been torn out of a hill. Hundreds of half-naked men were passing the earth in baskets to one end of the cutting, and were using the soil to build an embankment on the far side, one big basket between two struggling men. There was scarcely a piece of machinery among them, they were working with saws and axes and picks. They were clearing bamboo clumps fifty yards wide, feathery bamboo with deep roots that had to be torn out by hand with ropes, and chopping out tropical hardwoods with blunt implements. I knew from Bukit Timah Hill what that was like: a fight with tools. Perhaps some of Stalin’s canals were built like this; few railways have been.

In order to keep our group fed, I used some of the ten cents a day we were paid by the Japanese to buy food from the local peasants and traders. Rice, cooking oil, some eggs and bits of fish; fresh vegetables when we could afford them; and sometimes a few ducks or even a pig. Flesh could only be paid for in the wages of theft. I used a 44-gallon drum, with one end replaced by a door, as an oven; we had huge shallow iron bowls for cooking masses of rice.

Occasionally I would have to go down to the town with a couple of men and a Japanese guard. He turned these occasions into an outing for a different kind of sustenance. He would stop us at a coffee shop and hand me his rifle and disappear into the back of the shop. I would stand there in the shade at the front of the store, a prisoner holding my enemy’s loaded rifle as he visited a whore. Out in the hot sun, Siamese villagers walked by, the street stretched away to the edge of town. The guard knew and I knew there was nothing I could do with his gun and that I had nowhere to go.

It was at Ban Pong that I discovered an uncanny bureaucratic oddity. Bill Williamson and I were called to the Japanese administrative office one day. The Japanese officer had a huge stack of POW registration forms, several thousand of them, piled on his desk. I saw that mine was on top of the heap. I had been allocated Serial Number 1; the numbers allocated ran well into the 20,000s. It made me feel exposed, important in a way that I would have shunned. In the lottery of war soldiers talk about their numbers coming up and this singularity was an unpleasant joke.

We were surviving, but that was not enough. All that energy which the surrender had stifled was still there, we were rebellious and eager to know what was happening in the war. We wanted to know if the tide had been turned; we wanted to win, even if only vicariously. Since we were young and clever and knew about machines, since most of us had been reared on enthusiasm for popular mechanics and loved the idea of transport and communication, we did the logical thing, and started to build a radio.

Enthusiasts had taken bits of radios from Changi, broken down and scattered among a number of men so that each had only a tiny piece to be responsible for. We also had headphones. But making one was still like assembling a mechanical jigsaw puzzle. We settled on an incredibly modest attempt to build a battery operated set that could receive All India Radio from New Delhi. But even this was a tall order. We had to reinvent wireless telegraphy, scouring a tropical prison camp for the materials we needed. We bartered stolen Japanese tools with a local trader for valves. I worked out the optimum length for an aerial for receiving the correct wave-length of the station; but we could not afford to display a full length antenna, so we had to make do with a ‘quarter-wave aerial*. Men would be given strange tasks: to find flat unfolded silver paper, or small pieces of flat aluminium; or lengths of wire of a certain gauge; or quantities of wax. No-one asked any questions; the prisoners’ discretion was wonderful.

Thew was our radio maker. He was in many ways a dotty amateur scientist, absent-minded and insensitive to risk. Making a radio at that time required a lot of soldering, and arrangements were made in the cookhouse for the soldering iron to be heated under conditions of great secrecy. But how can you carry a red-hot iron in secret? Thew once solved the problem simply by forgetting where he was. He walked across the main square holding the glowing iron, as though for a prisoner-of-war the most natural thing in the world was to be wandering around with this essential tool of electronics in his hand.

We arranged a security system in the main hut. POWs apparently engaged in reading or doing their woodwork were stationed in strategic places, on the lookout for guards, while Thew worked in his bed-space with assistance from the others. We finished one night, and Thew crawled under his blankets and tuned his primitive detector. He had a pencil in his hand, I remember, and he emerged smiling from ear to ear with some scribbled notes. It had worked beautifully. He had heard the crisply modulated English voice of the announcer cutting through the static.

The radio was primitive, little more than a crystal set, tuned to a single frequency and incapable of sending a signal; it was also a simple masterpiece. It was about 9 inches long by 4 inches wide, and fitted snugly into a coffee tin with a false top, which we filled with ground nuts. It sat there innocently by Thew’s bed, a rusty silver tin can hiding the valves and condensers.

The routine was the same each evening. Prisoners would be detailed to stand around the camp and warn us about the approach of any Japanese, many of them not even being told why they were doing it. Thew would couple the set to the aerial, which was hidden in the rafters, switch on the apparatus and burrow down under his blanket with the headphones on. He was always the operator, since he was by far the best person to deal with any tuning problems if the signals were lost or distorted. The news bulletin took about ten minutes, and he would note down the main items with his pencil as he listened. The precious scrap of paper was handed around a small group afterwards, as Thew dismantled the set and placed it back in its hiding place. I still remember his strong, careful handling of the crude little machine, the tenderness of the true craftsman.

We were stealing back information from our captors. We heard about the victories of the Solomon Islands, of New Guinea and Guadalcanal, and that the Germans had been stopped in Russia and driven back in North Africa. From November 1942, when our radio started operating, we felt again that we might eventually be liberated, that we were on the winning side.

Lance Thew could be a hair-raising innocent. We were free to ramble around the area, and often came upon small Siamese settlements. Thew had stumbled on an ‘empty Buddhist temple’, as he put it wonderingly, with a small gold-leaf-covered statue of Buddha in a dusty niche, and a few dead flowers around the image. He helped himself to the statue: a nice souvenir of Siam. When we discovered it in his bed-space, we ordered him vehemently to return it. We were afraid of some frightening chain of repercussions; less rationally, we dreaded the fixed smile of the deity and the feeling of bad karma that grew around him. I wondered later, and not idly, whether what happened was a kind of punishment for this blasphemy.

Perhaps what Thew did was just another symptom of our devil-may-care attitude, our defiance of the Japanese and of imprisonment. We still felt invincible. Surrender hadn’t brought weakness and submission.

All that winter, however, the long trains kept coming to Ban Pong station, a mile to the west of our workshop. Covered goods wagons packed with filthy, hungry men were pulled from Singapore and unloaded their freight of captive labour. The chugging Japanese and British engines had to use, in place of coal, the local wood, which sent up a characteristic thin and aromatic smoke, and at least twice a week we would see trails of it drifting over the trees when the noise of an arriving train had died away and the locomotive would be standing in the station, quietly expiring. The railway was burning men.