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 alclass="underline" 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.