Nagase’s reply supplied little new information, for he had been briefly in Saigon at the end of October 1943 and by the time of his return we were already in ‘the monkey houses’, as he described those cages in the Kempei’s backyard. He thought that they had not been tipped off, but that they were looking for radios, and that they were apprehensive that we were communicating with Thais outside the camp (their great fear was that there were so few of them to hold so many of us in subjection). He thought, finally, that Captain Komai, who was hanged after the war, gave the orders for the beating. He added: ‘I know his son lives in the north of Japan, having dishonour.’ He closed by saying that he wanted to meet me partly so that our meeting would explain ‘the stupidity’ to the world, especially to those Japanese ‘who still want to have aggression toward foreign lands’.
It took us a year to arrange our meeting. Neither Patti nor I are wealthy, and we are both retired, and it is difficult to afford expensive air travel to South East Asia. (My arms and hips are in such a state that the cramped conditions of economy-class seats make long flights impossible.) We hoped that we might be able to obtain funding from the Sasakawa Foundation, which encourages understanding between Britain and Japan, but delayed doing so because there was still a possibility of the documentary film being made, and though I was now more sensitive to the danger of turning myself into an entertainment and wanted to meet Nagase independently of whatever our television friends wanted, I insisted that the film should be made for the Medical Foundation, which would play a large part in the documentary.
Nagase and I wrote to each other, but it is difficult to carry on a sustained correspondence with someone you have only recently stopped hating enough to kill, and sometimes all the old resistances welled up. I was frank with him, telling him that I found it difficult to write to him, and he was kind and understanding, always replying promptly to my letters. We wanted to meet in Thailand and afterwards he wanted me to come with him to Japan at the time of cherry blossoms in Kurashiki, which he assured me were very beautiful.
In the end, believing that Nagase and I could not wait much longer and that the world of film would wear us down, I went to the Sasakawa Foundation and they agreed to help to finance our trip. They also felt that the proposed documentary would have some effect in promoting their aims of reconciliation and understanding, and agreed to loan money for that too. I agreed, as long as the Medical Foundation could own the film when the costs were recovered. With these organizational contingencies at last out of the way, I was ready to face my old enemy eagerly and in good heart.
CHAPTER TWELVE
BANGKOK WAS NOT the city I remembered. After the nine-hour flight in refrigerated comfort the heat closed around us as soon as Patti and I emerged from the plane.
Escaping the heat was easy; this time I was an honoured guest, and they had sent an air-conditioned Rolls. Bangkok’s skyline was now all semi-skyscrapers and glass buildings. I remembered a deathly emptiness in the streets and our prison truck making a great deal of noise; now there were six-lane freeways with an endless honking column of cars and lorries. It reminded me of TV pictures of Los Angeles. Everything seemed so hot and slow despite the busy rush of vehicles. It took us no less than three hours to reach our hotel from the airport.
Two days later, feeling tense and irritable as the moment came closer, we set off for Kanburi. Bangkok Noi Station is on the west side of the city, another once-great cavern from the steam age which, in its time of glory, linked Bangkok to Singapore. Those days ended in 1927, with the opening of a new bridge across the Menam River, and the station became a backwater – an appropriately stagnant place from which to send trains to the Burma-Siam Railway. The trains still run from here to Kanburi and beyond it to Nam Tok, but there the line peters out less than a third of the way to its original terminus in Burma, and Bangkok Noi has become a little more neglected. But a thriving market stretches alongside the station, women traders selling everything from fruit to pieces of vivid coloured cloth, and has expanded on to the old carriage sidings and the tracks themselves, where we browsed along the stalls. The last time I had walked through a railway station in Siam it was with a rope around my middle, my arms in splints and the possibility of a death sentence ahead.
The train to Kanburi, a big diesel locomotive pulling seven coaches in blue-and-white livery, runs through flat, fertile land crossed by irrigation ditches and green with rice, fruit and palm trees. I looked at the countryside intently, but it gave back little enough to help prepare me for what I was doing; I was remembering the past while hoping for a different future in the years that remained, and it was not easy to reconcile the two.
At Nong Pladuk, the train passes through a little station with one platform, very neat, tidy and bright: boxes full of red and yellow flowers and small shrubs in wooden barrels give it the look of a model station, a toy. There is no trace of the camp to the north of the line, behind the platform, where the first POWs from Singapore set up the first camp for the construction of the railway. But on the south side of the line, in sidings tattered with dry grass and weeds, there are rows of covered goods vans like those used for moving POWs up the line. Some of them have almost certainly survived and stand there in the heat with their doors open, as they used to when they were underway packed with thirty prisoners and their baggage.
Above the sidings there is an old-fashioned wooden water-tower on stilts. This is the original built by the Japanese Army for watering the engines, mainly those imposing C56s; here is where they were gathered, fuelled and repaired. I saw one of the first big fleets of them on my way to Bangkok for our trial.
To the west of Nong Pladuk near Ban Pong the single track divides in two; the line on the left is the old main line to the south, which ends at Singapore; the line to the right is the proper beginning of the Burma-Siam Railway. It looks peaceful today, a clean and well-kept track swinging off towards the wild uplands of Kanchanaburi Province and Three Pagodas Pass, the border with Burma. Just before the two tracks diverged I looked hard at the ground beside the railway on the north side. The railway stores and the temporary workshop camp were just beside the line. Thew made the first radio there, and brought back his stolen Buddha to our hut. There isn’t a trace of the camp now; pleasant houses, gardens and a large school seem to occupy the same ground.
From Ban Pong to Kanburi for thirty miles the line runs through villages and more fiat rich land, even a few factories with their own sidings: a use has been found for this section of the railway, at least. As the mountains rose up wooded and indistinct in the haze, we reached Kanburi. The big railway workshops have disappeared like everything else, and I stared at the nearly empty sidings as though I could make some evidence appear, but I saw none.
Out in front of the station, on a deserted piece of track, stood a magnificent old locomotive. It was a Garratt, an engine legendary for its mighty hauling power in the last decades of steam, a giant handsome workhorse with two sets of eight-coupled wheels; why it had been placed here I couldn’t imagine, but it had the aura of a great piece of human effort and it awakened all the old passion in me. The big Garratt’s iron strength looked fragile against the green of the trees and plants aroimd it in this hot, damp weather, the sheer power of the forest which had so appalled Nagase when he was searching for graves in 1945. There is some fatal sadness about these machines in the tropics: they embody so much failure and tragedy, and decaying beauty.