Around the World in 80 Trains

by Monisha Rajesh

  Our entire trip pivoted on punctuality, which contradicted the ease with which travellers usually drifted from one place to the next, driven by the weather, the prospect of sex, or dwindling funds. Were it not for the rigidity of our train bookings – most of which were popular long-distance routes – we too would have lain around in cafes, playing chess, watching the sun rise then watching it set. However, time was only of the essence until we caught the train. Once on board, it ceased to matter. We couldn’t slow down a journey any more than we could speed it up; delays were inevitable, and our arrival was at the mercy of others. From this point on, mealtimes defined our existence, bringing structure to the languor of our days. Now, judging by the smell of fried fish and lemongrass drifting up the carriage, it was already time for dinner, so I roused Jem from his slumber, and asked Joe to keep an eye on our bags while we went to investigate what was on offer.

  A Malaysian student sat sideways in a booth playing Selena Gomez on his phone, while waiters in silk waistcoats carried trays of stir-fried sea bass, and pork in oyster sauce. For the price of a Big Mac, the dining car offered set menus with mains of fried meat and fish, soup, side dishes of duck red curry and chicken green curry, with pineapple for pudding. There were alternatives for vegetarians, and ‘non-spicy’ menus for foreigners, along with bowls of steaming jasmine rice. Alcohol was banned on board, but, as is common on all good trains, the activity still centred on the dining car, where passengers played cards, smoked roll-ups out of the windows, and made friends over cups of tea and Milo. Unlike on European trains – where dining alone is like the modern-day equivalent of having leprosy – lone passengers looked content in their solitude. There was no need for an accompanying phone, book or bottle of wine for them to be visibly at ease as the countryside beat on past the window, the smell of burnt fields carried in on the wind. Wiping up the last bit of red curry with a sweetly sticky glob of rice, I watched the sky turn sepia, the night still warm and alert after dark.

  For the first time in a long while I felt at home. The concept of home was fluid for someone like me. As the child of two doctors whose training had required them to move all over England, I had lived in eight cities, attended six schools, and never stayed anywhere for longer than three years. Putting down roots, then pulling them up again, I was deeply envious of the stability and identity that came from living in one place. It was only in my twenties that I became grateful for how this peripatetic lifestyle had cultivated my ability to make friends, embrace change, and relish travel. More recently though, as race and identity had become hot topics of discussion, I was regularly branded a pretender by both my country of birth and my country of origin, and I had started to consider where I most felt at home. Our flat in London was currently someone else’s: strangers were sleeping in our bed, watching our TV, cooking with our pans, and looking in our mirrors where our faces used to be. In a few months’ time they’d be gone, and we’d return to a flat that smelt of someone else’s food and laundry, our letters piled high by the door.

  By 10 p.m. we had far outstayed our welcome and wandered back to the carriage to where our seats had been unlocked and converted into berths, folded up and pulled down to create one small and one enormous berth that could easily sleep two. Slotting our bags into the smaller, overhead berth, we crawled into the bottom one together, spreading out blankets and making a den. Joe had already climbed up to bed, and waved from his berth, having changed into a pair of striped pyjamas.

  The following morning, I woke to a scream and a bowl of chicken congee hovering beneath my nose. It was barely 6 a.m. and we’d forgotten that, while enthralled by the dining car and its menu, we’d ordered breakfast to our berths. Sitting up with one eye open, I took the bowl from a bony brown hand, the steam from the broth seeping up my nose. The hand appeared again, holding two plastic cups of freshly squeezed orange juice followed by a couple of straws. Now grateful for the intrusion, we ate in silence, watching as farms and villages embraced the new day. While the rest of the carriage was curtained off, we moved into the dining car, enjoying the stillness of the morning. No one else was awake and we relished the opportunity to imagine for a short period that we were the only ones on board. With a cup of milky coffee, Jem opened up his copy of The Railway Man by Eric Lomax, and I took out my copy of Prisoner of Japan by Sir Harold Atcherley.

  A week before leaving London, I had sat in the living room of Sir Harold, a ninety-seven-year-old delight, who lived on Sussex Square, overlooking Hyde Park. Tall and alert, with translucent skin, Sir Harold had spent a morning with me discussing his time as a Japanese prisoner of war. In April 1943 he was one of 7,000 members of F Force, transported in successive trains from Changi in Singapore to Banpong in Thailand to construct the Burma–Thai railway – better known now as the ‘Death Railway’. Hoping a rail link between the two countries would facilitate their invasion of India, the Japanese had seized upon the ready-made workforce of Allied prisoners who languished in Changi prison, deemed too sick and unfit to work elsewhere. Under the guise of moving them north to ‘health camps’, where there were supposedly greater food supplies and an opportunity to recuperate, the Japanese subjected the men to forced labour. After arriving in Banpong, the prisoners spent the next four weeks being marched for more than 200 miles to Kanchanaburi, where they were put to work building the railway. Driven by wire whips, bamboo rods and beatings, the British, Dutch, Australian and American prisoners, along with conscripted nationals from Burma, Malaya and Thailand, toiled for up to eighteen hours a day, eating nothing more than 250 mg of rice and a handful of beans. Stricken by cholera, beriberi, dysentery, dengue and pneumonia, and suffering tropical ulcers that often led to fatal amputations, the men built 257 miles of railway track in fourteen months – 372 including branch lines and sidings – with one death for every sleeper laid.

  With disbelief, I had listened to how the cheerful nonagenarian had survived the horrors that killed an estimated 12,300 prisoners of war and 90,000 Asian labourers. By the time Sir Harold was transported back to Changi in December the same year, more than 3,000 members of F Force had died, and another 3,000 were hospitalised, leaving just over a hundred men deemed fit for work, Sir Harold included. He was sent to build a runway for Japanese kamikaze pilots.

  ‘Not many people know, but that runway now lies directly under the present Changi airport,’ said Sir Harold, rubbing the top of his walking stick. ‘Those pilots were almost madder than brave – or both. There were two squadrons there, and when they took off to attack, the chances were that they wouldn’t come back.’

  Sir Harold remained at Changi until the end of the war, describing the period as ‘not too bad’, ‘sort of a nine-to-five job – although we still didn’t have much to eat’.

  For his memoir, Sir Harold had pieced together his war diary from 1942–45, with a glaring gap during the eight months he was working on the railway. Under the cruel eye of his Japanese guards he was unable to keep up his diary, but surreptitiously scribbled on scraps, which are now preserved at the Imperial War Museum, London. Declaring that he couldn’t remember anything at all of this period, Sir Harold had gently batted away my questions. Although disappointed that he couldn’t offer any more information, I had left with a copy of his book, determined to retrace his tracks as best as I could from Singapore to Kanchanaburi, and to visit the remnants of the railway that still carries passenger trains between Nong Pla Duk and Nam Tok, crossing the bridge on the River Kwai. Our current descent from Thailand to Malaysia and Singapore was really an extravagant piece of research to help us retrace Sir Harold’s journey from Singapore up to Kanchanaburi.

  At the Malaysian border town of Padang Besar, the train was stripped down to two carriages and passengers disembarked for immigration and customs checks, which presented an opportunity to stroll around and look for coffee and amusement. Scouring the menu at the upstairs cafe, I found Joe looking less perky than the previous day, wearing a light dusting of stubble, dark circles under his eyes – the
sign of a night-train novice. I asked him how he’d found the Special Express, and he screwed his eyes shut and shook his head.

  ‘Oh, it’s special, it’s really something,’ he replied. ‘I don’t know why I waited so long to do it. But I’m going to keep on doing it now.’

  ‘No more planes?’

  ‘Well, that depends. But I’m surely going to bring my wife next time, I want her to see everything again with me,’ Joe said, waving his Pentax. ‘I took so many photographs to show her.’

  Together we re-boarded the train to Butterworth, none of us knowing that we were some of the last people who would ever get to enjoy this service. Less than six months later it ceased to exist, terminating at Padang Besar from where a connection on a high-speed electric train covered the final stretch to Butterworth.

  Although it sounded like a hamlet in the Lake District, Butterworth was an industrial town and a major transportation hub from where we caught the high-speed train to Kuala Lumpur, followed by a drawn-out day service to Johor Bahru. So cold that it was impossible to sit in our seats, we spent the seven-hour journey lounging in the dining car eating hot nasi goreng as palm-oil plantations swept by, barely an inch of sunlight passing through their closely packed fronds. Wondering what kind of creatures lurked in the thickets, we got chatting to Christopher, a Tamil Malaysian who had worked in the palm-oil industry for more than forty years. He was sitting on his own eating toast with kaya, nodding with approval at our plates of fried rice and eggs.

  ‘Rats,’ he said, making a pair of pointy ears with his gold-ringed fingers.

  ‘Is that all? No snakes?’

  ‘Sometimes cobras, but mainly rats. Rats are the biggest problem, or should I say, were the biggest problem. They eat the fruit from which the oil is produced. At one time we even introduced snakes to kill the rats, but then the workers were bitten so we had to come up with a different method.’

  ‘Rat poison didn’t work?’

  ‘No, chemicals are too toxic for fruit production.’

  ‘What did you use then?’

  ‘Owls,’ said Christopher, making two circles around his eyes. ‘Barn owls to be precise. It’s a more natural way of managing the problem.’

  ‘I don’t think we really use palm oil,’ said Jem, looking at me.

  ‘I’ve never cooked with it.’

  Christopher burst out laughing. ‘Do you drink Coke? Eat KitKats? Wear lipstick?’

  ‘Well, not me personally,’ said Jem.

  ‘Almost everything you consume has palm oil in it: detergents, make-up, chocolate, ice cream.’

  Behind Indonesia, Malaysia was the second-largest producer of palm oil, and the country was under fire for vast deforestation and the destruction of ecosystems in its quest to keep up with foreign demand for the product.

  ‘How sustainable is Malaysia’s palm-oil production?’ I asked.

  ‘It isn’t.’ Christopher rubbed his thumb and forefinger together. ‘Money is important. Like every country, Malaysia wants to be the big player in the market. Who cares about the environment when you’re making so much money and living in a palace.’

  Christopher got off before us, and we spent the last hour staring into the depths of the jungle, wilting with exhaustion as the successive journeys began to take their toll. Unable to travel all the way into Singapore, where the main station had ceased operation, we boarded a five-minute shuttle service at Johor Bahru that took us across the causeway to Singapore Woodlands, where the journey finally ended under the twinkle and shine of the city.

  There wasn’t an awful lot to do in Singapore, a starchy, characterless city with the superficial appeal of Dubai, and the same brutal levels of heat. Everything was convenient, efficient and sterile, and after three days of roaming around nice hotels, eating chicken rice, and complaining about the heat, we were ready to get back on the train. The grand old heritage station at Tanjong Pagar was no longer in use, so we began the return journey by crossing back over the causeway to Johor Bahru, where I was reminded of a story Sir Harold had told me. When I’d visited, he and his wife Sally had been preparing for the arrival of Mikio Kinoshita, an engineer with the Imperial Army who oversaw workers on the Death Railway. The two had never met before, but Sir Harold had watched a documentary in which the remorseful Kinoshita had expressed a desire to meet any former British POWs, and immediately invited him and his granddaughter to London.

  ‘We invited him because I believe very much that you cannot go on hating people,’ said Sir Harold. ‘If you do, it only damages you, not them. Even more than that, it is really ghastly to refer to a nation or a religion or a group of people – whether they’re journalists or politicians or bankers or what you will – and hating “them”. It’s nonsense, because I should think equal proportions of good, indifferent and lousy people exist in any group, any country, anywhere you like. Anyway,’ he continued, ‘there were a few days where we were being freed, as it were, or rather dumped in Changi, and becoming very impatient to get away, and the Japs were becoming prisoners. They were being marched off Singapore Island in masses over the causeway into Johor Bahru, and I remember one of our soldiers shouting out to his mates – there was a group of them just watching the Japs – and he said: “Look at those poor buggers … now it’s their turn.” And that to me sums up the whole thing. There were plenty of good Japanese and I could go into that longer, but generalising is something I cannot, cannot abide.’ And with that, I knew immediately how Sir Harold had survived the ordeal. He hadn’t allowed the torment to affect him on a personal level, and had refused to let his own anger and frustration get the better of him.

  At Johor Bahru we boarded the same ice-cold train to Kuala Lumpur, and I looked out across the jungle with fresh eyes, trying to imagine what was in the minds of Sir Harold and the other 659 on board his train, as they travelled up the country. Aware only that they were in for a week’s train journey, the men had no clue as to where they were being moved, assuming that the destination was Chiang Mai. However, a few days before departure, a rumour went around that it was in fact northern Malaya. Having gone from reading Flaubert, Austen and Hemingway, and applying boric acid to his blistered feet, Sir Harold was loaded onto a train believing that the reason for the move was a shortage of food on Singapore Island, and that where they were going would have a plentiful supply, along with gramophones, blankets and mosquito nets. Throughout our successive journeys back to Bangkok, I sat up with endless cups of Milo, oblivious to the once-enchanting scenery, reading Sir Harold’s memoir, which detailed a train ride to the depths of hell where most of the men would die:

  Conditions on rail journey, Singapore to Siam. Five days and nights, allowed to get out of train for 30 minutes twice a day. No latrine arrangements, we had to urinate and crap out of the wagon door, being held by others as we did so. Most had dysentery and were very weak so that many who could not get up simply defecated where they lay and conditions in wagons were soon revolting. Little or no sleep at night, very hot by day in all-metal box wagons, too many in each to allow all to lie down at the same time. Appalling stench. Occasional food buying at stations; eggs, papayas.

  A critical segment of the Death Railway had been under repair for more than a month, and unsure if the train to Nam Tok was even running, we came careering in by tuk-tuk to Bangkok Thonburi station at first light, determined not to miss out on tickets, but fearing the worst. Made up of three windows and a few benches under a corrugated roof, the station was empty. Online information suggested the service was due to start that morning, but in practical terms that meant nothing. The shutters were down on the windows, and we hovered around anxiously. We were just over forty trains into the journey, and after having travelled a sizeable distance around the world, I didn’t dare even consider the disappointment of not being able to take the train: it was akin to turning up at the Louvre to find the Mona Lisa on loan. Over the road, a woman was scraping a heavy iron wok, squirting various bottles of nam pla fish sauce and oil into the bas
e, ripping and flinging in handfuls of coriander and beansprouts. A fantastic smell drifted across to where we stood, and we both knew that we were about to have our second breakfast in the space of an hour. A good rule of thumb while travelling is to eat when food is available, because you never know when you might have the opportunity again. In Thailand, this was a ridiculous and dangerous rule to live by. It was impossible to walk more than a few metres without finding a squat, muscly lady with her sleeves rolled up, frying noodles or flipping crêpes. Even on a patch of pavement the size of a postage stamp, if it was possible to light a flame, there would be a vendor grilling satay. As a result, Jem and I had gone the opposite direction of most travellers, and over the previous few weeks, had bloated to the point that we now struggled to fit into our clothes. Still, the weight gain was nothing that a raging bout of diarrhoea couldn’t fix.

  The train was running. Like a rusted old Portakabin on wheels, it rolled in a little before 8 a.m. to applause, causing great fuss on the platform as young Thai families milled around, shouting, clattering on and off the train, bagging seats and rounding up missing children. Held together by rust and hope, the whole thing would have flaked to the ground from a sneeze. The carriage had an unusual layout with a long bench running around the sides and a huge empty space in the middle. Marching down the carriage and banging shut all the windows, the conductor jumped out and raised a green flag as we gathered at the now-closed windows, pulling them all open. Moving off, I sat back overwhelmed with relief and sick excitement as the train ploughed through the city, its horn blaring non-stop. Neither feeling lasted long as we broke down after an hour and sat halted on the tracks, surrounded by dried fields and complaining children. With the wind rushing in through the windows, we’d failed to comprehend the intensity of the heat that was now raging through the carriage, along with an army of mosquitoes taking up residence on vulnerable patches of flesh. In these situations, there was always a self-appointed leader who hung out of the doors, peering up the track, and offering a number of confident explanations about the breakdown, none of which was ever correct. Ton, a father of two little girls in matching orange dresses, assumed the role and jumped onto the tracks while everyone else watched from the windows. Pleased with his audience, Ton returned a few minutes later, shaking his head and waving his hands as a crowd gathered round to hear his news.