Four Fires

by Bryce Courtenay

  ‘Our pace gets slower as the sun climbs and exhaustion begins to set in. The Jap guards get impatient hurrying us along, beating at us with sticks, kicking us and prodding us in the ribs and the back with the butts of their rifles. ‘One poor sod near me must have had the trots bad, because he suddenly breaks out of line and, tugging at his shorts, he heads for the bushes. He never makes it before a Jap guard, thinking he’s trying to escape, takes a pot shot at him. Thank Christ, he misses and the bloke hits the ground. Poor bastard is lying there quivering and then I see he’s shat his pants. We’re beginning to realise that we’re in a whole heap of trouble in the workers’ paradise. It’s midafternoon and the rain is falling in torrents but the heat ain’t let up.

  ‘At least the heavy rain cleaned us up a bit and eventually we come to these two large timber-framed gates crisscrossed with barbed wire, with more of the wire stretched at an angle above the top frame of the gate to about eight feet. The two gates are fastened with a length of chain and a large padlock. A high crisscrossed barbedwire fence stretches away on either side of the gates and there’s another inner fence made of plain barbed wire running parallel a few yards further back. A hand-painted timber sign on one of the gates says “No. 1 Prisoner-of-War Camp North Borneo”. Also in English, underneath, in smaller letters: “POW Administration HQ Kuching”. We’ve reached the workers’ paradise at last.

  ‘There’s a young bloke about the same age as me standing two from me, we’d shared a cigarette at the three-mile peg and we’ve introduced ourselves. Me four mates were off having a Jap-supervised shit and there’s just me not needing one for a change.

  ‘“Cleary,” he grins at me, offering me a fag, “Albert Cleary.”

  ‘“Tommy Maloney,” I say back. “Thanks, mate.”

  ‘“Gidday, Tommo,” and we shake hands. Cleary’s got a cheeky grin and you can’t help liking him right off. Now as we’re standing outside the gate, he says, “Reckon I could open that lock with a rusty nail, shouldn’t be too hard to get out of here.”

  ‘“Know a bit about locks then?” I says to him.

  ‘“Enough to know that’s a crook one,” he grins.

  ‘“Won’t be locks keep us from escaping, mate, where’d we escape to?”

  ‘“Hmm, you could have a point, where are we?”

  ‘“Sandakan.”

  ‘“Yeah, I know, but where the hell is that?”

  ‘“Buggered if I know, Borneo somewhere,” I say, “Just another place where they’ve got heat, jungle, rubber trees and Japs.” I don’t know it at the time, but him and me are gunna become good mates.’ ‘What did the camp look like?’ I ask.

  ‘I was hoping you wouldn’t ask, there’s a lot to tell and it’s getting late.’

  ‘Sort of the general idea then,’ I suggest to him. I’ve got to know what his surroundings were like so when he tells me things I can visualise the scene. It’s Tommy’s fault, he’s taught me to always note the details within my surroundings.

  ‘Righto then,’he sighs. ‘One thing I will tell you. There’s a tree just inside the gates, a huge Mengarris tree.’ He looks up at the dark shape of the Alpine Ash, ‘It’s nearly as big as this old fella. I loved that tree, I reckon it kept me from going bonkers. The honey bees used to use it for their hives. They’re dead smart, see. Apart from the massive buttress, the trunk is straight up to the canopy, there’s no branches so the wild bears can’t climb it and raid their honey. Though the big tree stands alone within the compound, we are surrounded by dense jungle and swamps. I can’t see any trees as big as the one in the compound, but this is the tropics one hundred per cent, and the big hard woods are everywhere, much more so than where we were fighting in Malaya and Singapore. But the one big tree is an exception, it’s the big daddy of them all, and must have been why them that built the compound saved it. You’d have to be a moron to cut down a tree like that.’

  Tommy, ever the naturalist, looks at me. ‘Can you imagine what the ancient jungle with trees like that must have been like, Mole? I saw it the first time, the tree that is, miles from the camp, standing high above the jungle like a great arm, its canopy the spindly fingers stretched up to God. When we got closer, I seen that its canopy’s been ravaged by lightning strikes, some branches blackened, others split. It’s a natural target, tallest thing around as far as the eye can carry.’

  I nod, for once impatient. I’m more interested in the layout of the camp than the Mengarris tree. ‘You said “Whoever built the camp”, you mean it wasn’t the Japs?’

  ‘Nah, the Brits or the locals working under them and they done a damn good job. It seems it was built as a pukka barracks for Indian troops and their British officers and when war broke out in Europe, they used it for Italian and German internees working in Borneo at the time. Then the local Japs caught short when war was declared were interned there. They didn’t stay that long because the Jap army invaded Sandakan in January ’42 and, of course, it was them that now had a ready-made POW camp with all mod cons. It had a water and power plant, a small weather station, officers’ houses and quarters, and barracks for the men. The whole site was nearly five acres and, looking in from the gate, it appeared very neat and in good shape.

  ‘The huts near the gate were solid enough, six on either side of the gate and each made of timber, with palmthatched roofs. They look like pretty comfortable quarters and we begin to think things might not be too bad. I should’ve known better, shouldn’t I?

  ‘There’s a sort of a pond, more a muddy pool, in the farleft corner, at the bottom of a slope. It was once an elephant watering hole, then used by water buffalo, now it’s just a muddy sink.

  ‘There’s a couple of dozen closely spaced palm-leaf huts that straddle the slope to the right of the pond, five huts to a line, in four lines, the one behind the other, and a last line of only four huts. They are also on stilts and because of the slope, some of the ones at the bottom are perched way up in the air. You could see that these twentyfour huts don’t belong to the original barracks. They are native style with walls of nipah palm called atap. When atap’s dried and shrunk, it makes a damn good building material that’s waterproof and can take a hammering from the fiercest storm. This atap is tied to a rough timber frame in overlapping horizontal layers and the whole lot is secured to a timber floor built on top of the stilts.’

  I have to laugh. At first Tommy doesn’t want to be bothered explaining the camp layout, but when he gets started, he can’t help himself, he has to explain everything in detail. Most blokes wouldn’t bother to know about a thing like that.

  ‘Each hut was about fifty feet long by about twenty feet wide and contained three or four separate rooms. More like compartments really, because the walls dividing them were only waist-high, though each had a separate doorway to the verandah that stretched the length of the hut, with a set of steps leading to the ground from each of the compartments. No glass in the windows, but some were fitted with hopper-style wooden slats. There’s sixteen men to a compartment and up to sixty-four men to a hut.

  ‘It only took the first night to realise they’re not fit for human habitation. Nothing to do with keeping them clean, we done that, but there’s this single electric bulb hanging from the ceiling and a few minutes after lights out, we hear this rustling in the atap roof. Someone switches the light on and everywhere we look is rats, dozens of the buggers!

  ‘Then some bloke yells out, “Fuck, a snake!” He’s pointing to the rafters above our heads and we see this dirty big python moving along one of the rafters hunting for his supper!

  ‘“It’s a python, it won’t hurt ya!” I yell out. But I don’t think too many of the city blokes are convinced and they’re crowded on the side of the room furthermost from the big snake. I’m all for keeping the python to keep down the rats, but the others ain’t none too happy. They may have been right, there’s so many rats, we’d have needed half a dozen pythons to patro
l the hut at night, which is not a great thought. Then we soon discover there were other kinds of snakes coming in for a feed, ones that maybe weren’t quite as friendly to humans as the python.

  ‘There’s some among us that know a bit about rats, young fellows that have been branded “Dead End Kids”, mostly from the city. They are among the larrikin element in B Force, good enough young blokes, but a bit wild and always getting into trouble. They’re the experts at “scrounging”, which is the camp word for stealing stuff from the Japs. They organise a rat-killing competition among the huts and each hut has their own method of doing the deed. In our hut we switch out the lights, having first accumulated sticks, water bottles and boots, then our rat catchers would wait until they heard the telltale rustling and on would go the light and the air was suddenly filled with flying missiles. I don’t know that we killed that many, but rats are by nature domestic creatures who, like us humans, prefer a bit of peace and quiet around their nests. They weren’t getting none of that, so they packed their suitcases and migrated out of the unfriendly neighbourhood. As soon as the rats departed, there was no tucker for the snakes and they scrammed as well.

  ‘Truth is, I’d have gladly kept the rats and snakes if it meant getting rid of the lice and bedbugs. I’ve experienced the odd bedbug before in me life, but the tropical version are a new and ferocious breed. You’d wake up in the morning and it would look like you had the measles, you’d be covered head to foot with these itchy red bites that added to your misery. As for the lice, if you were able to borrow someone’s razor and shave your head and the hair on your body, it helped. Though we soon enough stopped that because a favourite Jap punishment was to stand you out in the sun for hours in the one spot without a hat, and if you were shaved up top, you’d end up frying your brain. So, in the end you just copped the fact that everyone was lousy the same as you.

  ‘Well, me new mate, Gunner Cleary, may have been able to pick the lock on the gate, but first he had to get to it,’ Tommy explains. ‘The fences around the whole compound are tight strung and crisscrossed same as the gate and then there’s the angled bit at the top, same as you see in prisons. There’s no getting through them and the gate is guarded twenty-four hours a day. Any approach you care to take is in the direct firing line of a machine gun. Whoever done the security done a bloody good job.

  ‘They let us through the gates and what looked pretty neat and tidy from a distance, we now recognise is a compound that hasn’t been lived in a while and is in pretty shithouse shape. It’s still pouring down with rain and hot as buggery and we’re dead tired and, as usual, half-starved.

  ‘The accommodation is allocated by Colonel Walsh and his officers, who naturally get the bonzer buildings the Poms built, with the wooden floors and ceilings and a sleeping platform with a woven mat for each man. When they’ve made themselves comfy, the NCOs get what’s left of the good billets and what’s still over, they turn into the hospital and the quartermaster’s store. The camp kitchen is already there on the far left and is a pretty good set-up with its own water-storage tank and two large cast-iron cooking woks in brick hearths. They look a bit like yer mum’s copper in the laundry back home, only bigger.’

  I don’t mention to Tommy that Nancy never done the laundry. It was Sarah at first, then after she’d gone to Melbourne, it’s us three boys taking turns. I must have stirred her yellow-daisy dresses a thousand times with the wooden copper stick. There’d be our stuff, three shirts and shorts, underpants, little Colleen’s gear and then the rest would be yellow daisies filling the copper. Sometimes there’d be Tommy’s filthy gear, after he got back from being down at the lake for a few days, drinking sweet sherry with the other drunks. That was when John Crowe couldn’t get to him and wash him down at the abattoir first and buy him new gear, putting the shitand vomit-crusted old stuff in the bin.

  ‘There’s 143 officers and about 300 NCOs who got the barrack buildings to themselves and around 1100 men who get to make the huts their home sweet home.’ ‘But you’re a corporal, that’s an NCO?’

  ‘Corporals don’t count, they’ve got more o’ them than arseholes, there’s not enough room or so they say. Anyway, I wouldn’t pull rank on me mates. It’s dark by the time we get into our huts and it’s still raining and still steaming hot. The rain don’t cool you down in the tropics, it’s like ready-made sweat on yer skin. We go to bed hungry and tired and the next morning we set to work getting the camp back in order.

  ‘The latrines are stinking and in a bad state of repair. They’re like our dunnies in the yard with the same removable shit cans, only they’re four-seaters. After the Yubi Maru, I’ve seen enough shit to last me the duration of the war, but the five of us cop latrine-repair duty and we spend the next four days repairing and cleaning up, gagging and feeling bloody sorry for ourselves.’

  Tommy looks up and laughs, ‘I once put in for a contract with the shire council to do the nightsoil, must have had a memory lapse or something. When it come to the part in the application where it asks if I’ve had any previous experience I wrote “Prisoner of War Camp, Borneo”. The bastards didn’t give me the contract. I know for a fact two of the blokes on the council at the time hid and picked fruit and said they had flat feet staying home while we were fighting for our lives. Maybe I touched a nerve, eh?’

  I think for a moment about the story Nancy told us about how poor old Fred Bellows, the Yankalillee nightsoil collector, died when the rusted-through bottom of a latrine can he was carrying on his head caved in and the full can o’ shit jammed onto his shoulders and smothered him. What a crook way to die, eh?

  ‘It takes us about four days to get the camp into some sort of order and during this period the Japs leave us more or less alone. There’s been plenty of rumours why we’re here but nobody knows for sure. One thing is certain though, it ain’t gunna be a workers’ paradise.

  ‘Then, the fifth day I think it was, we assemble under the big tree for a tenko, which is Japanese for rollcall. It’s the first time since docking at Sandakan off the Yubi Maru that we’ve seen Lieutenant Hoshijima, who is going to address us. He’s dressed up to the nines in his officer’s dress uniform and is wearing his sword and, as well, an Italian-made pistol with a wooden holster that doubled as the stock to make the pistol into a short rifle. He was pretty proud of the pistol because whenever we saw him, he was wearing it. He’s standing on a platform that’s been rigged a couple of feet higher than us and next to him is Mr Ozawa, a Formosan civilian, who acted as his translator.

  ‘Of the two of them, Hoshijima spoke the better English. Ozawa would babble on and Hoshijima would constantly stop to correct him in much better English. It was bloody funny, Mr Ozawa stopping, then Hoshijima telling us in English what he’d just said to Ozawa in Japanese and then Ozawa telling us again in English what Hoshijima had just told us in English. But the two of them never saw the humour of it and took the whole thing deadly serious.

  ‘So Hoshijima starts this harangue at the first tenko which, because of what I’ve just said was so funny, I don’t remember all of, but I remember the one bit.’ Tommy’s voice changes so that none of the words are pronounced quite right, like he’s having trouble getting his tongue around them. ‘“Japan will be victorious even if it takes a hundred years!” Albert Cleary’s standing next to me and he says out the corner of his mouth, “And that’s just about how bloody long it’s gunna take you, mate!”

  ‘The camp working routine really starts from after that tenko, and at first it ain’t too bad. The guards can’t help themselves, they’ll give you a whack with a pick handle soon as look at you, but the work is no worse than we done back in Singapore. We construct a bridge across the creek that runs past the compound, build these deep monsoon drains because the monsoon season is on its way. We go as working parties into town to load bags of rice and other heavy goods. We work on the guards’ and Japanese officers’ quarters in town, which must have once been private homes. An
d the one thing that never stops is the wood detail. The old boiler at the camp is responsible for sterilising the drinking water and driving the generator and it never stops, and needs constant feeding. The cooks go through a fair amount as well. With the monsoon coming, we need to build up supplies of wood, so we’re always out in the jungle chopping and carting.

  ‘That’s also the time that Hoshijima makes his smoking rule. He would decide every week when smoking could begin. He’d start and stop it on a whim so you’d never know when it was going to happen. I think he thought it was a constant demonstration of his power and influence and I reckon he was right. Not being able to have a gasper when you had tabacca in your pocket was a real bastard! Not only that, but smoking could only take place in specially designated “smoking places”, which were small pits about the size of your mother’s double bed and dug about a foot deep in various places around the compound. They were all clearly marked and after the weekly smoking permission was issued, you’d grab your ashtray and run for one of these pits. If a prisoner was seen smoking outside a pit or if he forgot to bring his ashtray, which was a cut-down tin filled with a little water to catch his cigarette ash, he was severely beaten.

  ‘The smoking pit would be jammed tight with blokes, each holding his ash tin close to his chest, with the other hand holding the cigarette, thumb and forefinger up to his mouth, his elbow tucked firmly into his side so as to allow space for the bloke next to him to do the same. To get a smoke in was bloody hard work and there’d always be blokes waiting, lining up outside the pit, to take your place the moment you’d finished. The men would keep a pin or a bit of wire, which they’d stick through the end of their fag so they could grab a hold of the pinhead and they could smoke the butt down to the very last puff possible. The only good thing about the smoking pit was that the little tabacca you had lasted a while and smoking was a true luxury.