13
DIGGER, IN THE methodical way that was habitual to him, kept track of each day that passed. He could tell you, if you were bothered to know such a thing, what day of the week it was, in which month; how long it was now till Christmas (how many weeks and days), how long since they had left Changi, how many days and nights they had taken on the road up, how many they had been at work on the line. It mattered to Digger that this bit of order should be maintained in his life. In a place where so much had been taken from them, perhaps permanently, this business of time-keeping, which was after all something the Japs had no control over (it was between you and the sun) represented a last area of freedom to him, a last reminder too of what had been essential to the way they had lived back home.
It was no small thing, this capacity to place yourself accurately in time, this bit of science it had taken so many centuries to get right. It was worth holding on to, gave a form to what otherwise might run right through your hands.
So in his monkish way, which Doug teased him over, Digger could be relied on, when any question of times or dates came up, to deliver an answer on the spot.
The surrender? That had been Sunday, 15 February 1942. Not long after, third week in April, they left Changi for the Great World — Mac had died on 7 June. (This was a date in Digger’s personal calendar. He did not mention it; but three times now he had kept the anniversary.) In October, the 4th to be exact, they had gone back to Changi, and on 22 April the next year, 1943, had begun the long journey into Thailand: five days and nights on the train, crowded into cattle wagons, then a series of night-marches through jungle camps where cholera was raging, twenty nights in all. From then till the day they started back down the line and crossed the border again into Malaya was a hundred and eighty-nine days. Eighteen months it was since then. Just on.
Other things, big and small, had been happening in the world. Most of it they knew nothing of. The dates Digger recorded, the periods — Changi, the Great World, Thailand, Changi again — that was their war. It was three years and six months since they had become prisoners.
He knew well enough how little these measurements told. The days were not equal. Nor were the hours. Nor were the minutes, even.
That minute and a half in the godown, for instance, in which Mac had been killed — there was no way of fitting that into a system that needed sixty minutes to an hour and twenty-four hours to a single revolution of the earth. Some of those days they had worked up there, speedo, as the body recorded them, had been centuries, strung out in an agony for which there were no terms of measurement at all. He knew all that.
Their history took place in its own time. But it had to be fitted to the time the rest of the world was moving through or you wouldn’t know where you were, outside your own sack of nerves. The two rimes didn’t fit. They never would. Digger knew that as well as the next man. But you kept both just the same and made what you could of it.
So it was three and a half years, just on, as the calendar showed it. August 1945.
14
ALL THE SIGNS now were that it was coming to an end, might even be over already, days, even weeks ago, so that in fact (in one version of it) they might already be free. If that was true their watches would be showing the wrong time. They had no certain news, but something had happened. You could feel it.
For the past six months they had been at work on a series of tunnels the Japs were digging across the strait in Johore Baahru, a protection for their troops in case of invasion. Vic was with Digger, and Doug had been there too till he got caught in a cave-in and lost an arm. The work was dangerous. They tunnelled into the side of a hill with just picks and shovels, shoring the walls as they went; but the earth was waterlogged after the rains and there were many accidents, the air in the tunnels was foul, and the heat so fierce that they could work for only minutes before they were gasping for breath. If one tunnel collapsed they started in on another just yards away. Now there was this rumour that it was all over anyhow.
Some fellows said no, it couldn’t be. It wouldn’t end. If it did the Japs had orders to kill the lot of them. They knew too much of what had gone on. They would be herded into the tunnels and machine-gunned or walled up there. That sort of talk, Digger argued, was madness. They couldn’t have got this far, come through so much, those hundred and eighty-nine days for instance, to be gunned down like dogs.
He was used to the wild speculations that spread among them. For years now they had been living on them. Like the great sea battle they had got so excited about just after they arrived in Thailand, which had raged for days and days with terrible casualties and would certainly now bring an armistice. Off the north coast of Western Australia, that was supposed to have been, near Broome; the whole Jap navy done for. Only it must have taken place nowhere at all, or in some bloke’s head, because nothing more was heard of it.
Sydney was wiped out by incendiary bombs. The Japs were at Coff’s Harbour, and Menzies, pig-iron Bob, had flown to Manila to sue for peace. That was another bit of news. What had come of that?
The Japs had set up a puppet government at Townsville. Artie Fadden was at the head of it. Artie Fadden!
The Russians had moved into Manchuria. The Yanks had invaded Japan from mainland China and were in the suburbs of Tokyo. It was a matter of days now — two weeks at the most.
This phantom war, whose triumphs and defeats they clung to because their lives depended on it, would in some ways remain more vivid to them than the real one, when at last they learned of it; or they would go on confusing the two, uncertain which was which.
It was an odd thing to have lived and died a little in a history that had never actually occurred; to have survived, as some of them had, on the bit of hope they had been given by the fall of Yokohama at Christmas 1943, or succumbed, as others did, in the gloom that descended when a few weeks later Churchill died and New Zealand surrendered, both on the same day.
Occasionally, by accident, some fact out of a quite different set of occurrences would get through to them and they would be utterly bamboozled. What were the Japs doing in New Guinea if the Americans were already swarming over the home islands?
They lived off rumour, and rumour, often enough, sprang out of some man’s sleep. So what could you believe?
This latest thing, for instance, that it was already over. Best to take it with a grain of salt — that was Digger’s view. Let it get your hopes up, if that’s what you needed, but don’t put money on it.
Still, it affected them as everything did, and in different ways.
Some men who had hung on till now, bad cases of malnutrition or beriberi, just gave up and died. It was good news as often as not that finished a man.
Others seemed dazed. The prospect of going home again scared them. They couldn’t imagine how they could ever settle to it. How they could just walk around the streets and pretend to be normal, look women in the eye again after what they had done and seen, ride on trams, sit at a table with a white cloth, and control their hands and just slowly eat. It was the little things that scared them. The big things you could hide in. It was little ones that gave a man away.
Vic was one who thought like this. The more the rumours spread and the closer it got, the more fiercely he rejected the possibility.
‘They’re fooling themselves,’ he told Digger. ‘They’re mugs.’ He was vehement about it. The optimism of some people infuriated him.
‘We’ve heard all this before. It won’t end. Not like this, it won’t. It can’t end.’