by Eric Lomax
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 corner 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 further 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 17th 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 lids.
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. O
ne 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 the 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.
Six days later Japan surrendered. Four days after that, the gates of hell were opened from the inside and all the surviving Allied prisoners were brought from Outram Road to Changi. One or two of them died a few hours after they arrived. Fred Smith was all right, surviving twenty-two months in Outram Road without a break, his unyielding stamina holding his shrunken body together, his spirit seemingly unbroken. But then we all tried to be patterns of courage to each other, and the price we paid would not be exacted in full until much later.
That same day a radio loudspeaker appeared on the outside wall of Changi Gaol. Suddenly All India Radio was blaring gloriously out all over the compound, excited British voices describing the scale of the Allied victory. Thousands upon thousands of light-headed, delirious prisoners came from the outlying camps and danced under the walls, their hilarity coming as much from hunger as from joy. The Japanese guards stared at the loudspeaker in disbelief. Hundreds of men sat beneath the speaker cheering every item of news and revelling in the sullen depression of the guards. In HB2 we exulted, but we were aware that the real victory for us was to have survived.
Two or three Liberator bombers came over and dropped a quantity of parcels and medical supplies and crates o
f food. Then a lone bomber dropped three parachutists. We watched them float down, unclip their harness and walk up to the front entrance of the gaol. They looked terribly young to us: a British officer each from the airforce, the navy and the army, with a priggish and bossy air about them of coming to take charge of us. We did not feel helpless or in need of rescue by such inexperienced young men. The army captain was told by a POW that he had been in school when we were first locked up and that if he liked, we would give him lunch, but that was the only co-operation we were going to give him.
The Japanese retired quietly to their barracks, and handed over their arms. More of our troops dropped from the sky and arrived by sea and found our prison-city organizing and feeding itself and reconstituting itself as an army. They let us get on with what we were doing.
As we restored our contact with the army and the world we began to find endings for some of the stories that we’d had to tell each other over and over, never certain of their proper outcome, for the past three years. The Australian nurses at Banka Island, for example: fifty of them had died, even more than we thought, but two had survived. Primrose, the humane murderer of his own soldier, was not executed but returned to the railway, and he had survived. The silent prisoners on the first floor of Outram Road were men who had attacked ships in Singapore Harbour in September 1943 – just after our arrest – and got clean away, and returned a year later, when they were detected; ten officers and men were captured. They were beheaded on 9th July, near Bukit Timah, a bare month before the war ended; they had provided the occasion for my second exit from Outram Road, and I never had the chance to thank them.
I heard about other radios in other camps, hidden in broomheads, in bamboo tubes and water-bottles, and what had happened to some of the men who made them. We already knew that the Australian Captain Matthews had been executed in Borneo. Now I heard that a captain called Douglas Ford had been shot in Hong Kong for the sort of thing we had done at Kanburi. The name sounded familiar; he had been at school with me in Edinburgh. Ford and Matthews had both operated radios and made contact with civilians outside their camps. If the Japanese had once been sure that we had done the same at Kanburi, we would never have come through.