The noise of crashing wood and metal in that huge silent gallery was frightful. I roared with pain and relief, and sprawled out at the bottom mixed up in the heap, trying to look as contorted as I could. My spectacles survived even this, and were still wedded to my nose. I was hurting, but I could not take the risk of checking how much damage had been done.
I heard both Japanese and English voices. Willing and gentle hands, obviously English or Australian, picked me up and carried me off to my cell. My bearers laid me out on my planks. I did not want to move but I wriggled just enough to check that I could move my fingers and toes, and they seemed to be in working order; I had been terrified of damaging my spine. I was badly and painfully bruised, but even my ribs still seemed to be in the right places. I had got off very lightly – perhaps too lightly for my own good.
Guards came in to have a look at me. I kept my head still. One of them took my pulse and poked about my chest and legs.
Another figure arrived, out of range of my eyes deliberately narrowed to focus on the blotchy ceiling. I lay there, ignored the evening meal and remained semi-conscious for most of the night. I was determined not to move; lying motionless became steadily more and more uncomfortable.
Days and nights followed each other. It is incredibly difficult to remain in a single position for so long, but I was waiting for the Japanese guards to start imagining strange paralyses wasting my body until I was beyond suspicion of malingering. My Indonesian cellmate was magnificent, attending on my rigid figure uncomplainingly, helping me to eat and drink. I asked for the latrine bucket to be brought to me, since it would be unwise to be mobile enough to stagger to the other end of the cell. Sometimes he washed me down, when he could get some water.
Two weeks passed, miserable and difficult weeks; I was beginning to find the near-starvation difficult, especially as I was deliberately rejecting food that I could see and smell. Sometimes I ate a little, just to keep my shut-down faculties alive. But nothing eased the abrasion of bones on skin without fat – I felt encased in a paper-thin membrane irritated and chafed by the very act of lying still. The urge to move was unbearable. All that time I wore the same shirt and shorts, which became dirty rags congealed to my body.
As a step towards forcing the issue I allowed my rice bowl to drop with a clatter one evening, spilling the white grains over me and the floor. I lay on my back and tried to urinate. It isn’t that easy to foul yourself voluntarily; but eventually and degradingly, persistence was rewarded and a large puddle expanded across the floor.
The guard on that shift must have noticed something, for after only a few hours the medical orderly appeared. He nudged and pinched me and then walked away.
The following morning a stretcher party picked me up and brought me to the administration block. I was dumped on the floor. The medical orderly appeared at my side. I was careful not to turn my head, lying in profile like a lanky mummy. A metal instrument tinkled as he picked it up, and then I felt sharp pressure and a prick inside my mouth, a needle jabbing into my gum. It felt like a long needle piercing my jaw. I could feel it forcing through on to the bone, filling my face with iron. As this was clearly the medical examination I had to remain deadpan for another few minutes; if I had reacted I would have ruined weeks of plotting.
He drew out the needle, and soon my kit was dumped on me, as before, and I was moved on to the stretcher and loaded on to a vehicle. Once again there was the long run past Kallang, the right-hand turn, the slow run of about a hundred yards and another right-hand turn. When I heard a Scottish voice say ‘It’s Lomax again!’ and recognized the speaker as Robert Reid, late of 5 Field Regiment at Kuantan, the voice of the Angel Gabriel could not have been more welcome. Within minutes I was among friends in the hospital block.
The physical and psychic relief was once again immense. This time I was determined that I would leave Changi as a free human being or not at all. I discovered that the date was 10th April 1945. Bradley and Macalister were still there, Bill Smith, Alex Mackay and Jim Slater too. But the malevolent shuttle between the two prisons kept working right to the end. Macalister, despite his terrible preventive measures, was taken back to Outram Road four days after my arrival for the second time at Changi.
Bon Rogers was as calm and dedicated as ever, a man living out his medical oath. He put me on a grass diet. I did not actually have to chew the stuff, but had to drink at least a pint of grass *soup’ each morning. It was a revolting liquid, but like everyone else privileged to receive it, I drank it down.
They also gave me the hot bath treatment. In the open yard a domestic bath was set up with an attendant who went back and forth fetching hot water for each new bather. His task in my case was to help me remove some of the near-solid scum and dirt which I had again brought with me from Outram Road.
I got back into the routine of HB2, reading and talking. Sometimes in the evenings the Australians Russell Braddon and Sydney Piddington came into the ward to talk. They were experimenting with telepathy and asked for volunteers to attend their demonstrations. It was eerie, in a darkened prison block, to see them guess the contents of a prisoner’s pockets or the name of a man’s wife, calling up invisible energies as mysterious as radio waves had been to me as a child. We were probably appallingly credulous, but what they did seemed to us real magic in those last months of the war, as the tension mounted towards a barbaric last stand by the Japanese military rulers.
Bon Rogers told us that in Europe the Nazi armies were nearly destroyed and Berlin was under attack from east and west. But around the overcrowded blocks and yards of Changi there were rumours of trenches being dug nearby, of preparations for mass murder. When we heard that Rangoon had been captured on 3rd May, our exhilaration was poisoned by fear. Now, surely, was the moment of Japanese vengeance.
As though I had created a gap in the scheme of things, after all my efforts to fake an accident, I had a real accident that may have saved me from being returned to Outram Road. The only way we could get salt was by distilling it from seawater. Every day a party would go down to die shore, fill up old oil drums and bring seawater back to camp, which was then distributed among the blocks. We got a quantity one day in HB2 and I volunteered – I had learnt nothing, after all – to boil it down to salt. I had an army mess-tin, and an old electric fire element twisted to make a hot ring linked up to the mains, and eventually I had a tin threequarters full of semi-liquid salt and assorted grit.
Sitting on the edge of my bed, I was adjusting the apparatus when I caught my arm on the long handle of the tin and tipped it off my makeshift electric ring. It landed neatly on my right knee. The salt sludge, which was near boiling point, flowed like lava down my leg, taking the skin with it. The pain was so intense that I lost touch with the situation for a while, but I remember Jim Bradley tenderly dabbing the salt off" with warm water, and an orderly injecting me with morphine, and then floating in the clouds. It was a long time before they took the bandages off.
One evening early in August Bon gathered us round him on our beds and told an incomprehensible story, which he could not credit himself. He said that a new type of bomb had been used over Japan, that it had destroyed the city of Hiroshima, that it was a weapon of terrible power developed in secret by the Allies, and that there was talk of surrender, but none of us believed it. False optimism was at a premium in Changi by late 1945.
The Japanese medical inspections continued even now. On 9th August eight men were judged fit to return to Outram Road and that evening the reports from the secret radio spoke of another bomb of almost cosmic power and another Japanese city destroyed. I was passed over in the selection.