Blue Smoke (24 page)

‘Girls, I’m afraid I have some bad news. I didn’t want to tell you before, but Drew has been taken prisoner by the Japanese. We think he might be in Burma now.’

Burma, December 1943

D
rew shook his head, but carefully, because he had another bad headache.

‘No, I think the potatoes should be mashed, with grated cheese on top and then lightly grilled.’

‘With roast beef?’ Tim protested. ‘No, you have to have roast potatoes with roast beef, lovely, crispy golden ones.’

‘Well, all right then,’ Drew said, ‘I don’t want roast beef, I want sausages. Pure pork ones.’

Don disagreed. ‘Well, you’re both wrong, as far as I’m concerned. The only way to eat potatoes, full
stop
, is to boil them, then add just a sprinkle of salt and serve them with lots of butter.’

Tim considered this. ‘New potatoes?’

‘Of course,’ Don replied.

‘Yes, but new potatoes are more of a summer thing really, aren’t they, and we’re having a roast.’

‘You can have a roast in the summer,’ Don insisted. ‘We always had a roast every Sunday no matter what, summer or winter.’

Tim folded his arms. ‘But Drew’s having sausages now.’

But Drew had forgotten about his sausages and was wishing that Don and Tim would both shut up. His headache was getting
worse by the second, and he knew, with a sinking sense of dread, that it was going to turn into another migraine.

There would be no roast beef for dinner tonight, or sausages, or potatoes in any shape or form. What they might get was a small cup each of partially boiled rice and, if they were lucky, a shred of dried fish or perhaps a wedge of raw onion. Occasionally it was soya beans instead of rice, and from time to time there was a sort of pale watery soup with paper-thin slices of vegetable from the prison garden floating in it. Until recently this might have been supplemented with an egg or a tomato or a tiny piece of fresh fish bought or traded from the locals outside the prison gates, but this did not occur regularly enough to have any lasting nutritional benefit, and as the months had passed the Burmese people seemed to have had less and less to spare.

The food rations had been pretty diabolical ever since Drew had been captured nearly ten months ago when his ship, the Royal Navy cruiser
Exeter
, had gone down at the hands of the Japanese fleet in the Java Sea. At first they’d all thought they were going to be shot as they were pulled from the water by the Japanese sailors, but instead they’d been taken to the old Dutch barracks at Macassar, in Celebes. Well, some of them had. Where the other survivors from the
Exeter
were now, no one knew. The prison at Macassar had at least been clean and in fairly good repair, but even then the food was woefully inadequate. They were given the bare minimum of clothing — half of them were almost naked after their dunk in the sea — but no shoes. Drew, who’d arrived at the prison clad only in a pair of trousers with one leg torn off at the crutch, was issued two pairs of shorts and a singlet, and, in retrospect, considered himself to have been lucky. They’d thought conditions at Macassar were appalling, but now he and the other chaps would give just about anything to be back there.

After a month at Macassar they were moved up to Burma and
incarcerated in their current POW camp — Rangoon Jail, a huge, grim, imposing prison that had once, ironically, been operated by the British. The compound was configured like a wheel within a square: inside the high perimeter wall were half a dozen or so wedge-shaped sections divided off by barriers, and within each section were the ‘spokes’, long, double-storeyed blocks of prison cells surrounded by a large yard, along with various sheds and other smaller buildings, all in varying states of disrepair. At the centre of the wheel stood a tall, incongruously grand house where the Japanese commander lived. There were very few trees in the compound, but even they made a marked contrast to the miles and miles of grey concrete and tin. It was a thoroughly depressing and dismal place.

Drew went back to his rattan mat and lay down. Most of the time he counted himself very fortunate to be sharing a cell with three chaps from the
Exeter
, one of whom — Tim Scanlon — was also a New Zealander. Some of the other inmates, and there were hundreds and hundreds of them, lived in single cells, which he wouldn’t have been able to tolerate — he liked company, and always had. But these days, when he was feeling so unwell much of the time, he could have done with a bit of peace and quiet. They played this game often, planning favourite menus, and Drew usually enjoyed it, especially when they got to the pudding bit, but today he just felt too sick.

Before banging his head leaping off the
Exeter
as she went down, and then hitting it again so hard when he was in the water that he’d been unconscious for nearly twelve hours, he’d never had a headache in his life. But now he seemed to be having them all the time. They’d started gradually, perhaps one a fortnight after he’d been taken prisoner, but now he was getting them every week, and sometimes they could drag on for three or four days. He could always tell when they were starting — first the
extreme sensitivity to light, then sound and smell, and finally the excruciating pain — but the knowledge did him very little good because the medical care in the camp was dismal. The Japs issued about fifteen fresh bandages a month, to service the entire complement of prisoners, plus a small bottle of iodine and maybe a dozen assorted tablets, but there was certainly nothing suitable for severe headaches, or any other sort of pain, if it came to that. It was well known that the bastards had stockpiles of quinine for malaria and emetine to combat dysentery, but they kept those for them selves. There was no point to letting on you were sick anyway, as the Japs regarded illness as a sign of weakness and punished anyone forced to admit they were too weak to attend parade or work at prison chores.

Almost everyone had already contracted malaria or dysentery, or both — a month ago Drew had spent a whole week lying in a pool of his own reeking shit, despite the best efforts of his mates to keep him clean and comfortable — and squashy, swollen bellies and puffy ankles were clear signs that chaps were beginning to suffer from the malnutrition-related diseases beriberi and pellagra. The sanitary arrangements were extremely basic — a water tap per prison block, and the latrines were wooden seats mounted over basins on the ground which had to be emptied regularly into open drains at the back of the camp. It was probably only a matter of time before someone contracted cholera.

But there were doctors and medics among the prisoners, and they’d worked hard to set up a hospital in the camp for the sick and wounded, although they had almost no medical supplies, and only crude medical tools they’d fashioned themselves. The doctor in Drew’s block, McCaffrey, was a major in the Royal Navy. When Drew had first gone to see him, he’d suggested that Drew’s migraines were possibly brought on by either the stress of being a prisoner or the constant, debilitating heat, but were
more likely a result of whacking his head. He couldn’t offer any treatment, except to mention that he was doing his best to get hold of some of the Thai opium he knew was available on the black market. It was a matter of coming up with something the guards were willing to accept as payment. He was talking to some of the RAF chaps at the moment: they were in a better position to offer some sort of currency simply because they’d been wearing more clothes — with more pockets containing items such as cigarette lighters — when they were captured. Along with watches and jewellery, those items had been very carefully hidden away for the day when they could be used for barter. And the chaps were also making decorative boxes, palm oil soap, wooden dolls, shaving brushes and other gadgets that appealed to the guards. If and when they were able to get their hands on some opium, McCaffrey had said, and if there was enough to go around, then there might be some for Drew. But he’d also told him, as kindly as possible, not to hold his breath; there were men in the camp, amputees and such, in severe need of pain relief, and any opium would have to go to them first.

McCaffrey was a decent bloke and obviously a competent doctor, but Drew had wondered afterwards if the man really knew what he was talking about when it came to migraines. He didn’t have a clue himself — in his experience the only people prone to migraines were histrionic middle-aged matrons, or young women of nervous disposition who had to lie down in darkened rooms all day. But there was certainly something wrong. The headaches started innocently enough, a mere niggle at the base of his skull, and always in the same place, but then the pain worsened over a period of hours until it was immense and the nausea was chronic and he wasn’t even able to move. Even the most shallow breathing caused sickening bolts of pain to blast and pound through his head, and it went on and on and on until he thought he might
not be able to stand it any more. During several episodes lately, he’d been convinced that if he’d had a revolver he would have shot himself, just to stop the agony. As it was he could only lie there on his mat, with his mates tiptoeing around him, and pray that the pain would subside soon. The only good thing about the headaches was that he felt almost healthy in comparison when they’d gone, and there weren’t many chaps in the camp who could say that.

But he too was beginning to suffer from malnutrition. The shorts he’d been given at Macassar now had to be held up with string as he’d lost a lot of weight. He was six foot one and had weighed over fourteen healthy, muscled stones at the beginning of the year; he estimated that he now weighed around ten, which was far too light for his big frame. His teeth were beginning to feel loose too, and he was covered in suppurating open sores, which were very difficult to heal in the heat and filth of the prison. There was talk that one poor chap in the block might even have to have his lower leg amputated shortly because of a huge ulcer on his shin.

He opened his eyes, closed them again quickly and rested his arm over his face — the light was just too bright to bear. At least it was marginally cooler inside the concrete cells than it was outside. The barred but open windows helped. And there was plenty of room in the cell, not that any of the chaps had much to put in it. Don and Keith, the fourth bloke in their cell who was currently on kitchen cleaning duty, had found themselves wooden boards and laid them across boxes to make beds, but Drew and Tim preferred to have their mats on the ground. The ceiling was criss-crossed with ropes on which their meagre clothes, threadbare blankets and cleaning rags hung to air, and two pails of water — boiled as per the doctor’s instructions — sat against a wall, one for drinking and one for personal ablutions. They all shaved daily, and although it was pointless, really, it gave a man a sense of
dignity to face the day with a cleanly shaved face.

Keith came in, dripping with sweat from the heat of the kitchen fires, slipped his home-made rubber sandals off and collapsed on his bed.

‘What are we having?’ Don asked immediately.

‘Same old shite, rice an’ a bit o’ cabbage, one shred each,’ Keith replied scathingly. Even though the dark lines of the tattoos adorning his forearms — a crown and anchor on the left and a very buxom mermaid on the right — were contracting as the flesh beneath them shrank, he, like the others, was not yet at the point where he felt grateful for anything at all to eat. ‘Drew got one o’ his heads again?’

‘Started an hour ago.’

‘Poor bastard,’ Keith said.

Drew didn’t even bother to uncover his eyes. He would not eat his food in case he threw it up and wasted it, but it would be kept for him — out of reach of the rats and cockroaches — for when he felt better, providing it was still edible by then. If it did look like going off before he could eat, then someone else would be allowed it. But he was grateful for Keith’s commiseration. For months he’d been too scared to say anything about his headaches to the others for fear of ridicule, or of them thinking he was malingering to avoid having to do any work, but they’d all seen him vomiting until his nose bled, and then shitting uncontrollably when the migraine was beginning to subside, and they were quite sympathetic towards him, particularly Tim, who always brought him a rag soaked in cool water for his forehead. It would have been so much harder to bear if they weren’t sympathetic, or even accepting. It was humiliating enough suffering bloody headaches when so many of the chaps were so much worse off.

His cell mates were good sorts. He’d been good mates with Tim — who had also made his own way to England at the start
of the war to join the Royal Navy — for quite a while now, and he knew Keith and Don of course, because they’d been serving on the same ship. Tim was from a small settlement on the Taranaki coast, where his parents owned the local grocery shop, and had apparently spent much of his spare time sailing in the South Taranaki Bight in a small boat he’d built himself. He talked about the boat wistfully and often, and swore that the first thing he’d do when he got back home would be to take her out. Drew was older than Tim by two years, but they got on very well and had shared many drunken and raucous shore leaves together.

Don Kerr was an Englishman and Keith Wallace a Scotsman, originally from Glasgow. They were hard men, born sailors, handy with their fists and very capable. So was Tim, as he’d demonstrated many times in brawls, although he had a surprisingly compassionate side as well. Drew came from a different background, but any distinctions soon ceased to matter, especially as he refused to enter the navy as an ensign and chose to enlist as an able seaman.

None of them had yet lost their spirit, which was both a blessing and a bit of a wonder. They’d been in Rangoon for less than a year, but in that time had been starved, beaten, blatantly deprived of Red Cross packages, forced to work when they were unwell, and were completely at the whim of the temperamental Japanese guards and the camp commander, a man they rarely saw but hated with a vengeance. But they were managing all right, or at least that’s what they told themselves. The doctors were doing what they could medically, and had set up rosters for regular inspection of the latrines, such as they were, and of the kitchens, in an effort to minimise the spread of disease. The doctors in fact copped a lot of flak from the Japs on behalf of the men too sick to work. They argued vehemently with the Japs at sick parade every morning to keep their patients out of the working parties, even the poor blokes too ill to stand, and were often severely punished for it.