At night John dreamed. He had many dreams in Changi. They were rarely sexual; it seems that there was little energy for them. Instead it was images of hatred that bulged in his brain at night: fantasising how he might escape, or, better still, humiliate and destroy his persecutors. All other thoughts, sex included, were sublimated into this: how to flee the enemy or destroy him. But preferably destroy. These were the droplets of acid that ate away at John as he slept.
By day he schemed to protect precious medicines from the Japanese. These medicines, especially morphine and antibiotics, were concealed about the camp. One such antibiotic was M&B 693, which was ‘carefully hidden against Nip spot searches’. Years after the war, John’s hardness towards his captors was still raw:
The Nip and Korean guards were always getting the clap down in Lavender Street in Singapore Town and they were absolutely terrified of fronting up to their own MOs [Medical Officers] because the Nips had a very effective way of treating VD. You were immediately shipped off to the front line. They knew we had M&B and they would come pleading for a bit but it was far too precious to let the little bastards have any.
Although John spent his entire three and a half years in Changi, many Allied soldiers didn’t. The Japanese saw Changi as a repository of men, a storehouse of labour to supply an endless line of workers for the building of the Thai–Burma railway, and for brutal labour camps spread across an archipelago of islands from Borneo to Japan. From about the start of May 1942 the Japanese sent men to work on the Thai–Burma railway.
Lloyd Cahill was one of the men sent with ‘F’ force to work on the railway. Lloyd had just completed his intern year as a doctor at St Vincents Hospital in Sydney when he left Australia for the war. He met John Cade in Changi:
John, I knew him well. John was senior to me. He was a very good fellow. I regarded him as one of the best medical officers I had anything to do with. I just found him an honest, decent fellow who was out to do whatever he could to help people. Most of the doctors were good, John was outstanding.
When interviewed for this book Lloyd’s cognitive faculties were sliding fast. His memories were patchy of his time as a doctor on the railway. That was, until he was shown a photograph—one in a book of George Aspinall’s black and white photographs. When the first page fell open, nonagenarian Lloyd Cahill lunged forward, eyes sparkling: ‘There it is! My old hospital!’ He was referring to ‘Cholera Hill, Shimo Sonkurai Camp number one’. It was hardly a hospital: just a couple of tents and a few bamboo structures. Lloyd pointed out the bamboo table where operations were performed, and the tent in which the dead bodies accumulated: ‘We had to do all sorts of things; amputations, with no anaesthetic; they were just held down while we did it. The Japs—some of them were awful bastards. Cruel. They had no idea at all. We had nothing at all . . . we’d go out and find a dog and kill and cook the dog. I was down to about five and a half stone.’ Then, just as quickly as he’d come to life, Lloyd sank back, his sudden recognition of his old camp on the railway surprising as it was moving to witness.
One of John’s grim responsibilities, forced on him by the Japanese, was to vet suitable men for these labour camps; to cull from their ranks the men who were to be sent to work on the railway. It was a task he never forgot; it was, it seems—when we listen to his wife’s recollections—a scar on his life for which he perhaps never entirely forgave himself. John was one of many doctors who fought for their men and tried to protect them from Japanese brutality. And, it is more than likely, he did so with his customary humility and courage. But years after the war, John was tormented by these men who’d left Changi under his authority, and returned wretched, if indeed they returned at all. Jean remembers her husband’s anguish:
My poor husband was horrified when he was asked to recommend people to work on building the railway. [At first] he thought he was sending them into the fresh air, but they were put in death camps and beaten and starved, and he felt he should have looked after those men better.
At various times John commanded the cookhouse. And when it came to nutrition he was a no-nonsense doctor.
I was asked by the cooks to condemn a batch of rotten fish. I said ‘You stupid bastards. We won’t get any replacement. It’s rich in protein and maggots. Thrash it within an inch of its long departed life, sieve out the bones and maggots and serve it as fish soup. It won’t kill you but it will nourish you.’
There were numerous ways to try to replenish vitamins. The local grass—lalang—was a crude source of vitamin B. It was collected in armfuls with scythes and reaping hooks. Bundles of the grass were then churned in a mechanical device the engineers had scraped together from cannibalised metal found in the camp. From the outside the contraption looked a bit like a brickies’ cement barrel. Inside, the grass clippings swirled about, shredded by a device that was a cross between a coffee grinder and a lawn mower. Out cranked a slurry of tens of thousands of gallons of liquid grass. The men detested its foul taste and often refused to drink it. John, smiling in remembrance, recalled that this grass soup ‘was a light orange colour, rich in riboflavin and as bitter as hell. Known locally as “Tiger’s piss”, it helped, but not nearly enough.’
In spite of the huge effort that went into making ‘Tiger’s piss’ and convincing the troops to drink it, hundreds of men were stalked by nutrition-related illnesses. As well as beri-beri and pellagra, men came down with painful rashes and skin fissures in just about every body crease imaginable. Some were plagued by the sensation of burning feet, and an illness called ‘barbed-wire disease’ that resulted in irritability, lassitude, depression and difficulty concentrating.
The doctors in Changi convinced their military chiefs that more should and could be done to prevent and treat nutritional deficiency diseases in the camp. What they came up with was well ahead of its time and, to this day, stands as an impressive example of captives using medical research to resist imprisonment and attempted extermination.
First, they calculated as precisely as possible the nutritional value of the foods available in Changi: including the very inadequate supplies provided by the Japanese and what little they passed on from the Red Cross; what the captives could scrounge through the black market; and what they produced themselves from grass and the like. Then they investigated the nutrient deficiency diseases and their occurrence in the camp to help them work out exactly what vitamins and minerals might be missing or out of balance in ‘the rations’.
What they did then was almost unique for the times anywhere in the world, let alone in a prison camp. Throughout Changi, men were divided into test and control groups and randomly assigned supplements like yeast in the form of Marmite, or vitamins in the form of rice polishings, including the often-discarded outer coat of the grain. The aim was to see what worked best. Walter Sarkies, an Australian POW, captured the essence of these experiments in a cartoon. In the process he implied that allocation of supplements may not have been even-handed, with officers more likely than lower ranks to get Marmite. Whatever the truth of the matter, discipline and organisation were critical in moulding and executing the plan and delivering help to those in need.
One of the hospital wards, for the most seriously ill, went under the facetious nickname, ‘the fattening pen’ and was reserved for patients under six stone, John remembering that ‘we used to try to channel in little titbits to them’. At one point, when John was in command of the cookhouse, it was his responsibility to escort the sergeant of the cookhouse to make certain ‘the goodies’ didn’t disappear en route to ‘the fattening pen’. On one such walk he observed, unsentimentally, how the ‘puppies of the Nip guards’ were plopped into this potpourri of food to enrich the miserable offerings. By then, John was so inured to the hardship of life he thought nothing of this delectable addition to his needy patients’ food.
In later years, John often reflected on the bizarre items he dropped into his mouth to survive as a POW: ‘It’s amazing what you will eat when you are starving.’ On one occasion
he tried a banquet of snails but gave them up: ‘whatever you did to them they always tasted like boot leather’. Outside the barbed perimeter of Changi, the jungle teemed with wildlife, and although much was foreign to Australian sensibilities, when wildlife was sliced and roasted, few questions were asked. John took a fancy to snake. ‘Some boys brought back a small python after a scavenging expedition under guard and gave me a 1 inch steak—delicious—just like chicken.’
Back at The Righi, as the war stretched on, Jean also made do with whatever came to hand. It was not the only time life had been hard; she’d known austerity before. Jean had grown up in Adelaide, the only daughter and youngest of four children, with chooks clucking and scratching about the backyard. She recollected stories from her childhood of how her grandmother chased down and decapitated chickens. When interviewed in 1999, Jean shuddered in remembrance:
We kept them in the backyard for a few weeks; and we’d feed them up. My grandma, my mother’s mother, could quite happily kill a chook and defeather it. Grandma evidently stretched its neck out along a board, and cut its head off.
With Christmas on the horizon, Jean knew that something special was expected; roast chicken for her boys would be ideal. So Jean set about the job of erecting a chook house in the backyard. She headed to the local hardware store and bought what she thought she needed: wire-netting, nails and planks of wood. She carted them by herself into the backyard and set about the unenviable task of construction. ‘I had no one to build a little pen for the chooks; and I had no idea how anyone got a little fowl house to stand up, but I did have a paling fence . . . I did this with the aid of my Johnny looking over my shoulder.’ Once her toil was done she bought a couple of chickens from Victoria market and waited.
As the days until Christmas diminished, her anxiety rose. Soon it would be time to slaughter a fowl. Vainly she tried to fortify her resolve with childhood memories, as if somehow her grandmother’s act of slitting a chicken neck was a genetic gift passed on through the generations. Thinking she might yet get a reprieve she sought help from John’s father but was dismissed with a surly: ‘Make sure you do it properly. If you don’t do it properly it will run around with its head off . . .’ Jean, miserable, returned home and set about the act. ‘I decided my boy Johnny shouldn’t watch Mummy kill the chook, so I did it when he wasn’t about.’ Remembering how she grappled with the terrified frantic fowl, her voice breaks and mortified tears fall. ‘I found it so very hard to hold . . . to get its silly head down . . . but I did it. I did it. Do you know . . . I was crying out “Why should I have to do it!”’
The injustice of her lot tormented Jean during the war years, even in the tiniest of domestic tasks. ‘Many a time I was wiping dishes, and one of the boys would ask for something. As simple as help turning on a tap. It was too hard, too stiff for their little hands. My eldest boy would be at the sink and call out, “I want a drink of water” and all I could think was “Somebody turn on the tap!”’ Jean’s silent screams went unheard during the war. Her war was waged in the kitchen and the backyard, imprisoned by circumstance and the perimeter of her Melbourne suburban home. At one point, seeking to atone for what she imagined as her gender deficit when it came to ‘boy things’, she tried her hand at building ‘a little billycart . . . I’d got the tacks from the newsagent’. As she ruefully admitted, the tacks lay down rather than stayed upright. In winter she inexpertly ‘tried to teach them how to kick a football. When John came home from the war he said: “but you don’t kick like that” . . . apparently I kicked it with my toe . . . .’ Her war was the loneliest of wars.
Jean’s isolation and dread about her husband’s fate was relieved only sparingly during John’s five-year absence. She received just two postcards from him during his Changi incarceration: nothing more than the highly censored standardised lines that POWs were occasionally permitted to send. These mutilated cards made Jean’s heart lurch. In some ways, receiving this desultory fare only sharpened her pain. ‘I knew it was John’s . . . the signature . . . no one could write John’s signature. It was always so tidy. One just said, “I am well, John” . . . and the family went crazy. But I looked at the date and it was 15 months since it was sent. For all I knew my husband mightn’t have been still alive.’
9
We know that John, sporadically, received letters from Jean during his Changi years, although, sadly, the whereabouts, or even the survival, of her letters is unknown. The evidence for John having received these letters comes in jottings he made in a small book he kept from this time. The book—Easy Malay Vocabulary—is pocket-sized and suitable for hiding and John’s squiggles cram every corner, like graffiti on a billboard. It is a treasure-trove, telling us a lot about his Changi days.
The book itself is nothing much to look at. An unprepossessing volume, its canvas binding is frayed and its pastel blue cover stained with the damp and dirt of his years in Changi. The book remains a family favourite, preciously harboured by John’s children, and today sits unobtrusively behind the glass pane of a book cabinet. A piece of paper is tucked inside. On it is written: ‘Papa John’s language book—full of card game scores with his fellow mates/prisoners. WW II, ’41–’45.’ And yes, he played card games; plenty of them, if the numbers of carefully lined pencil columns is anything to judge by. Bridge was his favourite game. But the book points to a lot more than casual pastimes.
This small book reveals John’s mind as extraordinarily active. At one point he draws a detailed graph with about 30–40 vertical lines, crossed with another 30–40 horizontal lines—it is his form of Changi graph paper. And then, as any secondary school mathematics student will see, he makes a series of calculations using a geometric series. What was he nutting out? A problem of nutrition? Then we find he has sketched a crude syringe—like a da Vinci sketch of an unbuilt flying craft—with an internal coiled spring visible. It looks all the world as if he might—using the cast-off bits and pieces around him—construct such a syringe to use on his patients. John was a handy man and could turn his hand to just about anything. A syringe like this was a snap. Just as dire circumstance sharpened the need for clinical observation in the absence of more formal investigations; so too did it sharpen the ingenuity of improvisation in solving day-to-day problems of caring for sick men. John’s syringe was almost certainly just one of many ingenious ideas hard-pressed men cranked out to survive.
At another point he draws what looks like a sophisticated water tank, surrounded by lines of calculations. Perhaps a design for some clandestine engineering project? Then, on another page, he details the caloric value of porridge, bread, butter and jam. At first glance it suggests the fantasies of a malnourished man, but more likely it is evidence of John’s involvement in the nutritional experiments undertaken in Changi. His writing remains crisp and precise. Despite his malnutrition and at times vitamin-bleached brain, his measured hand remains the same.
On page 122, we come across an unexpected passage. He writes:
Overjoyed getting your December message. Keeping well, working Hedley’s [Col. Hedley Summons, an Australian officer and a close friend of John’s who was appointed head of Roberts Hospital during 1942] hospital with old friends. Fondest love to you sweetheart. Daddy’s dear boys, parents, brothers, friends.
So it looks like he’d just received a letter from Jean. And when he read it, he thanked his God and tucked it ‘lovingly in [his] breast pocket’.
The knowledge that the Japanese were losing the war was invaluable to the POWs; this life-sustaining information came to them via radio. They just needed the odd wireless here and there to pick up the news. John, towards the end of his life, recalled the importance of knowing what was happening in the war outside Changi:
After the Battle of the Coral Sea in about April 1942 we knew that Australia was safe and after the Battle of Midway . . . we knew that Japan was doomed . . . The reason for this was that we had secret radios operating throughout and marvels of ingenuity they were. One was hidden in the he
ad of a wooden broom. On another occasion a young soldier came up to me and asked whether I could lay my hands on a spare stethoscope.
The stethoscope was to listen to the soft broadcast of a wireless interred in the cavity of a wall, away from prying Japanese eyes and ears. What John—circumspect and unassuming—did not mention was his own exceptional bravery in dispersing the news received by the concealed radios. For the full story on how John did this, we have Private Bill Flowers to thank.
In surviving Changi photographs, Bill Flowers stands in the sun like a sapling, an overly tall soldier, bare-chested and all toothy smiles under a slouch hat. He looks like the kid next door, because that’s exactly what he was. He spent most of his time working in and around the hospital, so he knew John Cade intimately. John’s bravery in dispensing the BBC radio news left an indelible trace on Bill’s mind. This is how Bill tells it:
John was eventually second in command of the unit . . . a great officer. He wasn’t a demanding type of person but had the ability to get things done . . . now we weren’t permitted to have radios. But there were secret radios in Changi that were operated from which BBC news then could be spread around the camp. John would bring us this news.
John Cade used to travel from the hospital area in Changi, which was at Roberts Barracks to headquarters . . . which meant going through one access gate in the wire at the hospital, travelling along the road to the headquarters area, past Japanese guard posts. One would never know when one might be stopped . . . and might be searched. John Cade used to come back with notes on the BBC news . . .
Finding Sanity Page 7