Presumably the Japanese had suddenly realized that in D Block they had a potential labour force which was not only docile but which did not have to be paid. About thirty or forty men were taken out on most days in trucks to excavate tunnels in a hillside some miles away, preparations for some suicidal resistance to invasion. We did not feel good about those tunnels.
They also enlisted us as gardeners. There was now a high-ranking officer in Outram Road, a Colonel Parker of the Indian Army. He and I were assigned to the care and manuring with our human dung of the vegetable gardens which ran down the outside of the blocks, and supplied the kitchens. The smell of faeces was overpowering in the heat as we watered and hoed and pulled up vegetables. The stink permeated our clothes as I moved doggedly along the rills with this senior, rather patrician figure by my side.
They once took us to the potato garden and told us that we could help ourselves, but the potatoes were not ripe and we contented ourselves with eating the tops, which someone later told me are poisonous. They did not seem to do our stomachs much additional harm. Parker remarked that we must be the first British Army officers to be turned out to graze a potato patch.
The sheer horror of the prison had only diminished. It was still a ghastly place. The daily routine was still composed of near-starvation, brutality, frustrating and heavy work, lack of medical attention and confinement in our cells for fourteen hours a day. The psychological burden of living under an arbitrary regime was still too heavy for comfort. The slight improvement in health had created a new problem: the prospects of getting out on grounds of illness were drastically reduced.
I was determined to do it again, for all that. I loathed the thought of dying in this cesspit and began to consider alternatives. Escape over the wall was probably feasible, but a half-naked, ragged and crazy British prisoner on the roads around Singapore would be extremely conspicuous.
I tried to plan rationally, to list the attractions of various possibilities and eliminate the unattractive options. The basic problem was information, or rather a lack of it. Despite the usual chain of whispers, serious communication was out of the question. It was still nearly impossible to find out who was in the gaol; new prisoners would appear and familiar faces disappear without warning.
It was very unusual to be ordered to go on an unsupervised errand. One day I was told to go to the next block to pick up some buckets and as I turned a comer there was Lance Thew, similarly unaccompanied. We stood in that silent yard in amazement at each other’s presence. The fluke of meeting without guards allowed him to tell me quietly that the Japanese had kept him behind after the court martial to repair their radios, in a fairly comfortable workshop where he could probably have seen out the war tinkering with radio receivers and transmitters, but he didn’t fancy that and had escaped. After *taking a look around Bangkok’ he realized that his chances of getting ftirther were not very good, and gave himself up. Thew was a man who didn’t just tempt fate, he thought he knew its frequency and could tune in to it, but now he too was in Outram Road.
I decided that one of the best steps I could take towards escaping once more would be to get on to the Binki Squad. The squad consisted of six or eight men who were called out from their cells every morning, and collected from a store the broad wooden stretchers on which they carried the latrine buckets, and then opened up a manhole in the yard outside D Block. On a command, the squad broke up into pairs and set off, visiting every occupied cell on their routes. While prisoners were supposed to set their buckets on their doorsteps, they did not always do so, and with three or four pairs of prisoners on the move simultaneously and only one guard, there were opportunities for quick spoken exchanges. The binki men had access to water, and information, and they had mobility.
I told one of them that I would like to join the squad, and a few days later I was called out and told to join the group just going on duty, apparently replacing someone who was ill.
I got used to the smell of full latrine buckets swinging on the stretchers around my shoulders. Over the next few weeks I slowly and patiently established from my brief conversations with prisoners, bending down over their stinking buckets of waste, that there was no scope at all for getting out through sickness, but that one or two people had been taken away following accidents at work.
I also discovered that there was something up on the first floor which was off limits to other prisoners. We were never allowed to go up there, except on latrine duty. The cell doors there were shut all the time. In the silence you would have expected small sounds to betray the presence of other men, but even though the guards were heard to go up the stairs we never heard so much as the rattle of a bowl. Yet somewhere up above us, we were convinced, were comrades of ours undergoing a punishment even more extreme than the one that applied to us.
I had almost nothing to do but think, and so I thought about escape all the time; it became the single overriding concern of my life. But for a long time nothing useful came to me.
I kept thinking about the stairs. At the end of the main hall, furthest from the main door, was the large iron staircase leading up to the first floor. No prisoner had ever mounted them during my first period in Outram Road, but now there were those mysterious and very special prisoners up there. Only one pair of binki men was needed to collect their latrine buckets, empty and return them. I arranged to have a place on the first floor gang.
For several days I examined the stairs closely. The treads were made of iron, English cast iron, but there were no backs to the steps. I counted the steps obsessively as I walked up and down, and checked my arithmetic to make absolutely sure. I needed to know the exact number of steps, as though the numbers held some promise in themselves. I came to the conclusion that if I were to trip or fall on the 17 th step from the ground, which was almost at the top of a straight run of steps, I would have a long way to bump down to the bottom, which might do enough damage to make an official accident without killing me. Then I thought that if I were to include the stretcher and the latrine buckets in my fall, the accident would be much more impressive. In my desperate urgency to escape I was quite prepared to stage the fall on the way down, which would leave me awash in foulness. I decided, however, to arrange the accident on the upward journey, with the load of cleaned empty buckets.
I nerved myself hard. I planned it, as I liked to do with everything; for several days I rehearsed loading empty buckets on the stretcher so that there would be as much weight as possible at my end at the right moment; getting behind the stretcher, stepping on the first step with the right foot, counting the steps, then, while putting my weight on my right foot on the 17th step, putting my left foot through the open back of the step and falling.
One morning I woke up and decided that I was going to throw myself down the metal prison stairs that day. As we left the yard, I wedged my spectacles as securely as I could behind my ears, jammed my cap on tight to protect my ears and the glasses, and entered the block. I told the man in front of me not to hold on to his end of the stretcher too tightly and to let go altogether immediately he felt it being pulled out of his hands.
We moved sedately through the main hall and came to the bottom of the stairs. I counted as we went up, then as we neared the turn of the stairs, with my right foot on the 17th step I lifted my left foot towards the 18th, shoved my leg through the open back and pulled the stretcher down on top of me with its load of empty buckets and hds.