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.