Daylight told us a more detailed story of what had happened. The storm had cut a swathe half a mile wide. The general effect was of giant straw washed across a tufted field by a flood. It must have been a ‘twister’ to have made such a flat path of devastation, winding back and forth across our only road and completely obliterating it in places.
We were given axes at the railway and began to cut a road back to the fork at the top of the Hill. This was to allow the elephants to get down to the workings. We met eight of them at the top with their loads of water in bamboo bottles.
On the way, we came across a tree from which saddle cloths for the elephants had been cut. It was a red barked tree which had been cut to a depth of two inches and completely circled and stripped in two places six feet wide. The cloths were hung nearby to dry. A number of these are packed on top of the beasts before the rig goes on, which is secured by martingale and crupper, but no girth. This is the same kind of tree we stripped for lashings and ties for the baskets.
The fork, which is the junction of the road up the Hill and the Tarsau–Konyu–Hintok road, was reached and from here we began to cut our way back to Hintok.
Trying to cut sprung and springy bamboo, and hauling it from a tangled chaos of canes, vines and locking thorns, is exhausting work, and even the Japanese had to give us rest periods. It is during these periods I try to write, while looking at what I am writing about. All the smallest creatures of the bush seem to have been upset, and have become unfriendly. At the moment, sweat-covered, I am a mass of walking, crawling, nipping bush bees. They cover my hands as I write.
Clumps of bamboo which stood 80 to 100 feet high yesterday, with each stick as thick as a man’s thigh, now lie uprooted and flat on the ground; or twisted and bent like reeds at points from 10 to 40 feet from the ground. Their engineer-designed, strong, tubular structure is split and flattened, like ribbon, by a force of wind hard to imagine. They are laid along the path of the storm as if to say, ‘He went that way!’
Bamboos tell a clear tale, but the trees seem incoherent. Big ones have been torn out by the roots and each lies with several tons of soil still clinging to it, sticking into the air ten or twelve feet. Trees with twelve-foot girths have snapped like matches – the crowns torn off them, like so many flowers picked between finger and thumb. Some, crashing, have taken others with them: some hang like robbers, swinging on vines from other trees.
We have to be careful cutting into bamboos which are full of wasps’ nests. Jim and George have already been attacked. The bamboo barricades are the toughest job: whole clumps of them have been pulled up by the roots like reeds. Clumps which were 20 feet through, now lie as walls 20 feet high. Ninety men have been chopping all day and only now, as I write in the late afternoon, is the first truck coming through.
*
An ox-cart convoy of Thais stayed all night in the camp. The carts have huge, heavy, wooden wheels with no metal fastenings. But they don’t seem able to carry more than a couple of bags of rice. Among the Thais was one small young women whose black hair was American bobbed. She wore a straight-topped bodice of white, a pair of blue trousers, and she had bare, muddied feet which matched her raven black hair. She was neatly made and stood leaning carelessly against one of the big wagon wheels. A very nice picture: but she was spitting betel freely at her feet.
*
Our Navy band is split up a bit just now. Blackie and Roy are in hospital with dysentery. Jim, George, Izzy and Otto have wangled a job in the Nip kitchen. Good for them as they can pick up some extra food; and the young ones, especially, need this. Last night Otto brought some Jap stew over to me. It was very rich by our standards – meat, fish, beans, pumpkin and pickles. I ate it, but the richness demanded payment of me. Ken, Fatty, Bob, Blackie and myself usually manage to get on the same jobs, out on the railway.
*
Last night, after the storm had quietened a bit, we passed the time ‘just supposing’ – just supposing we were at home doing some of the things which are quite normal here. Like sitting down at the side of the road and removing our only garment – a G-string, or a ragged pair of shorts – and hunting out some of the more troublesome lice. It made a bit of fun to cook up these situations – especially to listen to Otto’s loud laughs.
*
For the time our lives are centred upon the embankment. It is a long curving affair secured by a high knoll at one end and reaching out towards a bridge at the other. It will be about 23 feet high and is known as the seven-metre bank. Basket by basket, tanka by tanka (bag stretcher), we carry the earth which has to be scratched from between the rocks in the jungle, tramping it out to the slowly forming bank. It is real coolie work, and the monotony can only be offset by private thoughts and observation.
Lately big pressure has been put on the work. They want the bank by the wet season. It is at the 150-kilometre post. All day, each pair of men carry load after load with a bag stretcher. Pick up. Carry 25 yards or more. Up the bank. Dump. Walk back … on and on. The way is along tortuous paths which constantly change as the soil-hungry diggers search further and further afield. Some of the unscrupulous take some of the narrow bridges of earth we have left between the boulders. The diggings are a succession of ponds full of tadpoles and covered with frog spawn. In the next hole to us they dug out a twelve-inch centipede whose head was almost the size of my thumbnail. The slimy earth bridges twist and turn on themselves and are treacherous to barefooters carrying soggy loads. All the time there are hostile shouts from the Japs. And, in the monotony, there is nothing more grating than unintelligible noise.
Each man has to move one cubic metre a day. This may not sound much, but under these conditions we find it plenty. I manage to scribble a bit of this in the dinner breaks, and find that it helps.
*
The Japanese are addressed as George, Charlie, Claude, Eustace, etc. The sergeant, Billy the Pig, is a slightly reformed character; but his underlings have taken upon themselves his shed bastardry. They have no idea of pace and try to get us to work at one that would exhaust us in an hour. We cruise at our own speed as best we can. There are many phonetic sounds the Japanese do not have, and they seem to rely on grunts and roars belched from the belly and chest. The men’s tempers are at their lowest ebb at the end of the day after an hour’s grinding walk to the camp and it is then, when they are formed up in five rows for the count parade, that they use the grossest insults on our masters.
Our lot is made a little easier now with a cup of rice coffee as we come in – for we have had only a quart of water all day. After a shower we are torn between the cry of our bodies for rest and the nag of maintenance jobs on them.
*
Today it has been particularly bad. We got mixed up with a lazy crowd of low morale, who cloak their laziness with an affected patriotism that they will do as little as possible for the enemy. It doesn’t trouble them that what they don’t do will fall on their mates.
When we should have been finished and away, we were caught in the rain with more to do. The viscous, red mud clung to our feet like lead, and we slipped dangerously with our loads. The poles of our tankas got slimy and our fingers ached from gripping them. Afterwards the guards found more for us to do, felling trees for ramps. When we went home in the rain – a strange set of soggy, ragged clothes props – I had parted company, at last, with the seat of my rotten calico trousers. At the count, men dawdled and sulked like children just to get their own back on somebody. They blamed the Japanese, and punished themselves.
We got back to the lines only to find that eight tents had been taken – ours among them. Just the platform was left in the pouring rain with all our gear on it sodden with rain. One hundred and sixty men looked like having to spend the night in the rain and were not happy about it. But I was lucky, for Buck Pederson, who takes a special interest in my drawings and diary, was in camp when they took our tent, and he had taken them out and put them in another tent. I was very relieved – for I place a great store by t
hese things. I feel if I can get them back the experience will not be entirely wasted. Memory is not enough.
*
There are odd hazards all about us. One man stood on a five-foot-sixinch banded krait – a very deadly snake. It struck at him and missed, and was eaten for its trouble. One lunch time a man was bitten by a scorpion, or centipede, or snake: I heard three versions. Whatever it was made him vomit but he is still alive. There is also the danger of blasted rock. In the open you sidestep the stone as it comes down. But if you are in the trees you only hear it ripping through leaves and branches. I saw two bamboos cut as if by a scythe, and dived behind a tree like a man who values even this miserable existence. The elephants were halted nearby while some shots were fired. They stampeded – luckily not through us – and were only brought up after three miles.
*
As we came down the Hill, the valley of the Kwai Noi and its barbaric railway were wrapped in a comforting, cotton-wool mass of fog. We were well over a hundred paces from the bank by now. The nearer boulders had given up their last earth, and we had to endure a long carry along difficult tracks. It was a regular, funeral tramp, of corpselike monotony. It was a heavy overcast day – too heavy to sweat much in. The simple fact of picking up the stretcher, and the strain of weight on one’s arms, clogged the mind to a sodden mass like the earth itself. No thought in the mind save … Drudgery … Oppression … At such times we are silent as ants. Often, for the life of me I could not tell you what my thoughts are and I am conscious of nothing, save of my feet jolting up from the ground.
*
A dull day with grey half-light – indigo, green and sepia. Whitish rags of low cloud skirting across the mountains, tearing themselves on the ridges. It is humid and we are hurling rocks down the hillside. Scraping them out with our hands, crowbars, picks and shovels. We strain on great ropes, for all the world like the slave pyramid-builders of Egypt. Our overseers are small, swarthy people. I think of Sabatini’s Sea Hawk and how, on impossible food in the Spanish galleys he grew thews of steel. I think that all my thews grow is tired. But it is quite remarkable how the general health has stood up so far. We are not supermen. We are short on temper. Sides are taken by the have’s and have-not’s, the will’s and the will-not’s. But we are not dead yet. We are diligent ants, heaving and pushing great lumps of rock which, if they had broken loose, would have squashed a dozen of us. Selfpreservation has brought a bit more interest to the job. Also, despite our slave state, we do gain some satisfaction pitting our will against the inorganic – some vanity is served.
*
Contributions to the Regimental Fund, except for the sick who are not paid, have been increased to one-third of our pay, due, I suppose, to the rising cost of dying. So now I have to work two days to get enough to buy a pencil to write this with.
*
On the way out to work we saw four bullock carts and four frowsy Thais sitting on their haunches eating rice from small bowls, with thin long dark fingers. One, an old thin crone with craggy brows and high cheekbones like smooth walnuts, stood with his tattooed back towards us. It was a pattern of straight, horizontal and vertical designs, in a dull blue, which also covered his chest and arms. One of his companions was a boy. All had slept in their narrow carts during the wet night and looked mouldy and mildewed.
*
Our rations have been patchy. Although some meat and dried Chinese cabbage has come into the camp it is not for us. We are told that thousands more prisoners will be coming up through this camp and the provisions are for them. One night, a basket of onions, three baskets of pumpkin, and two of dried cabbage came in. The Japanese took the onions, two of the cabbage and one of the pumpkin; this left us with two of the pumpkin for 800.
It continues to amaze us how we stay alive and go on working. It is the eggs. We cannot thank the Japanese for these, but I suppose we should appreciate their unusual humanity in allowing us to spend our pay on them.
Some say that, because of this underfeeding and lack of clothes, we may be paid our normal subsistence pay by our Service, after the war is over. [This was never paid by the Australian Government.] As our clothes fall apart, we try to salvage enough for a simple G-string. As far as the Japanese are concerned, we are expected to exist only on small quantities of inferior rice. Hijacking from the Japs gets us a bit of meat and cabbage. The actual total issue per man over the past ten days has been 12 ounces of vegetables. Coming home tonight I was, as ever, ravenously hungry. I was thinking, gratefully, of my plain rice ration. When we got back to the engineers’ for the count, all we could smell was the aroma of Nip cooking. It was torture.
*
Our food when the weather is wet is not improved by conditions in the cookhouse – a shallow pit some 15 feet by 30, without a roof or wall, and with only a skeleton-frame. On either side are the shallow, hemispherical kwalis, iron cooking pans, each about four feet in diameter, set over dug-out fireplaces. Their rims are almost flush with the gritty red earth. The rain beats down through the smoke-blackened rafters, splashing sooty flakes into the kwalis. The beating rain also bounces up from the red, soot-blackened mud, spraying it into the tepid rice. Soon the floor of the kitchen is under water for the cooks to slosh around in. If there is too much rain, the water rises and puts the fires out. That we get anything under these conditions, is something of a wonder.
So far we have had only a few hours of rain at a time. As our tents go, one by one, we pack more and more closely into the rest. What will happen in the Wet?
*
Today we received the sickening news that there is six tons of mail at Tarsau. Of course it must be all rot … but, it might be true.
Liberation in Java
Betty Jeffrey
Betty Jeffrey was an army nurse with the 2/10th Australian General Hospital, which arrived in Singapore in early 1941. A year later she was one of the 30 nurses who survived the sinking of the Vyner Brook. She survived three days in the water, and then the Banka Island massacre where 21 nurses were murdered in one of the most disgusting atrocities of the war, before being imprisoned on Sumatra in various camps.
After her prison camp was liberated in 1945, Jeffrey was still very ill (not that you would know it from reading her diary) and was in hospital for two years. With fellow survivor Vivian Bullwinkel, Betty Jeffrey established a memorial to the Australian nurses who died during the war, the Nurses Memorial Centre in St Kilda, Melbourne, which opened in 1949.
Her diary, kept at great risk, was published as White Coolies in 1954, and made into the film Paradise Road, directed by Bruce Beresford, in 1996.
Betty Jeffrey died in 2000, aged a heroic 92.
*
August 24th, 1945! The war is over. Who will be first here to take us home? We are free women! [The war ended on August 15th, 1945, but prison camps were not informed of this.]
August 26th, 1945. I was having a grand attack of malaria the day we heard, and couldn’t write the wonderful news in my diary, but what happened was this:
A message was sent round the camp saying that Siki would be making one of his speeches up on the hill at 3 p.m. The rumours were getting stronger every hour and the excitement in the Indonesian block was terrific. They were certain the war was over. We all hoped Siki would tell us our rumours were true, but deep down inside we thought it would be his usual rubbish. After all, the end of the war would be a tremendous event, and why should it happen this day?
Some people said the war must be over, because the Chinese who brought in the rations said tabi mem, which is ‘good morning’, for the first time in years. We were usually termed ‘orangs’, which are pretty low types in any language.
Nobody could be bothered going up the hill to hear Siki, but after a while Blanchie and Flo Trotter wandered up just to put in an appearance. The rest of us went on with our chores or our malaria.
After a while Katrine, a Chinese girl who lives with the nuns next door, ran past and said to Sister James and myself, ‘War is fini
shed at six o’clock tonight and big gate opened!’ and ran on. We still thought it a rumour and didn’t bother to tell the other girls, but we both had an odd, excited feeling inside us which refused to settle down. In a little while somebody else ran past and said the same thing, then Blanchie and Flo arrived back positively beaming and breathless, and said it was true … Oh, what a glorious feeling!
Siki made a very short speech. He merely said, ‘War is ended, Americano and English will be here in a few days. We are now all friends!’ He did not say who won the war.
Somebody made a huge tin of black coffee, and we celebrated and talked, but nobody was unduly excited, we were too stunned.
When we realised there wasn’t any more of that awful tenko and standing outside bowing to these little horrors, no more face-slapping, no more standing in the sun for punishment, we started to get really excited, and by 6 p.m. the noise in the camp was terrific.
It is marvellous to be free and to be able to wander outside the barbed wire for a walk through the rubber and to collect some wood. How many thousands of times we have talked about being free, and now it is here everything seems just the same – except that the day after the announcement in came some vegetables for us, and boxes and boxes of medical stores, bandages, quinine, vitamin tablets, serums, powdered milk, butter, etc. All this stuff was carried down from the guard house to the hospital.
Eyewitness Page 19