The itch developed into a horrible skin condition, perhaps an extreme form of scabies. Each of us in turn found little pimples appearing on our skin. To begin with they were clear and transparent; then the clear liquid turned into yellow pus, the pimples burst, erupted and the fluid dried into horrible yellow scabs. Picking them off meant losing a patch of skin. I myself lost every inch of skin on my body with the curious exception of the skin on my face and the tips of my fingers and toes. Worse still, as fast as one picked off the scabs new eruptions appeared. Those men who were too ill and weak to move and were unable to do anything for themselves gradually became encased in a brownish-yellow crust of pus, a spectacle that still wakes me at night, the nausea still fresh.
O’Malley and one or two others voluntarily took on the task of cleaning up the most helpless men by patiently picking off the encrusted scabs and washing their bodies in cold water. What they did deserves the adjective ‘heroic’ as much as bravery under fire.
Partly as a result of their efforts, the Japanese began to take note of the disease. A liquid which they described as ‘creosote’ was brought into the block in large containers, and they produced a few metal tubs. Those of us who were badly infected were allowed to have what was almost a bath, our first in several months, though still without soap, in the yard outside the block. I sat in a tub for hours. It did not noticeably improve my skin, but the feel of the water lapping around me was worth the pretence.
When the ‘creosote’ did not work, the Japanese administration gave us a paste or ointment which looked suspiciously like saddle-soap. We were told to strip and to coat every inch of our bodies with the ointment, telling ourselves that at least it might suffocate the tiny maggots or whatever it was that was causing the trouble. Perhaps it did; or perhaps the epidemic had run its course, for the disease slackened off soon afterwards.
By the end of April 1944 my three British fellow-officers. Bill Smith, Jim Slater and Morton Mackay were all seriously ill, and Harry Knight, the Australian major, looked no better. When I caught glimpses of them I was terrified for all of us. Only Fred Smith seemed to retain some strength despite the starvation diet. The guards sent a stretcher party one day and removed three of the others, but left Fred, Harry and me. The fact that we could totter across a yard must have excluded us. I was now the only officer left in the entire block, apart from Knight.
The old anxiety and fear surged back with renewed force. Although we had a sentence, we could not imagine this term of imprisonment coming to an end. The uncertainty was gross and desperately stressful. We didn’t think we could survive years of this, and even if we did there was no guarantee of being ‘released’ into anything but a larger and perhaps relatively more humane prison camp. We were prisoners within a world that was itself a prison. That larger sentence of servitude was completely indeterminate, for who could say when the war would end? And if the Japanese won it, what would they do to us?
I found this uncertainty particularly difficult. I was afflicted with the strange combination of a vivid imagination and a need to locate myself exactly, to be sure of where I was and where I was going – I had the character of a mapmaker, a listmaker, of one who knew about dates and classes and varieties. Being thrown into the pit and not knowing whether I could ever find a ladder to climb out of it did me no good at all. Without reading, writing or bearings of any kind I felt that I was living through the end of whatever time had been given to me; the delirium of the last days was closing in.
We could not measure time, let alone occupy it. Our time was now entirely theirs. We could identify Sundays because the guards took time off on Sundays, and O’Malley or Penrod Dean could sometimes identify the hour or date for us, but that was never enough. When the evening came, there were twelve hours of utter emptiness to get through. Outside it was dark; inside, the electric light was on continuously. During those long nights I sharpened my desperation to get out, even though it felt like jumping from a window in the dark, not knowing where I might land. And in the end, I used time itself against them.
They gave me my chance when they took the unprecedented step of separately identifying extremely sick men and classifying them as ‘byoki’. They were then placed in a group of cells on the ground floor furthest from the door of the block.
I had discovered that I could drive up my pulse rate by deep and accelerated breathing, so producing a state that frightened my cellmate and even me; and that there was one exception to our complete lack of any means of measuring time. In very still and very quiet conditions the faint chimes of a clock somewhere in the distance could be heard, though it was a long time before I was aware of it. I imagined it as a public clock on some tower, for it struck the quarters as well as the hours.
I disciplined myself to count the little beats of blood in my wrist for fifteen minutes at a stretch. It was not that hard, really; what else did I have to do? Forcing myself to concentrate on nothing but my pulse – the effort alone probably put me into a kind of agitated trance, and I was already near hallucinating from starvation and weakness. They had taken all sense of normal, filled time away from me and I focused my panic in on myself in a fever of self-control.
I would count carefully all the time I was doing this and divide the resulting figure by fifteen, giving the pulse rate per minute. The normal rate is about 76; I got mine up to a figure which was so high that I could not count properly and I was confident that I could repeat this whenever I wanted to do so.
One day, when I was lying down and there was a warder within earshot, I worked my pulse up, cried out and twisted and clutched myself. My performance had an effect: the warder took a look at me and had me carried down to one of the ‘sick’ cells. And so I lost sight of Fred Smith, who seemed resigned to survival in Outram Road and whose extraordinary resilience could not be disguised long enough even to pretend weakness. He had supported me to the hilt and told me I was doing the right thing, but I hated leaving him alone in that horrible bare cell.
In the sick cells the doors were left open during the day, which was a slight improvement, and you did not have to take part in work squads. I was joined in the cell by an Australian called Stan Davis, who was not officially sick – he was supposed to look after me, and save the therapeutic energies of the medical orderly. Stan probably knew as much about medicine as that individual, in any case, and when we were able to talk we plotted the best way for both of us to get beyond the sick cell to the hospital at Changi – if indeed it was not a dangerous mirage. Stan was another radio man, even luckier than we had been. A private soldier in a motor-transport company, he had been part of a group operating a radio in the POW camp in Sandakan, in British North Borneo, and planning an escape. This group really had been in subversive communication with local civilians. The Japanese shot his officer. Captain L.C. Matthews of the Austrahan Army Signals.
Stan and I agreed that I would eat all the food which came into the cell other than rice and that Stan would eat all the rice, and nothing but rice, and we swore that we would stick to our diet until the end, whatever it might be. My resolution was not as suicidal as it may sound because by May 1944 the food had improved slightly, and the rice now came with a few soya beans or fragments offish, but I very quickly became even thinner while Stan got more and more bloated, and looked as though he had real wet beri-beri.