The Forgotten Highlander (30 page)

Then Mum cleared her throat and told me nervously, ‘You should also know, Alistair, that your friend Eric didn’t make it.’

I felt ill. I could barely lift my head and the conversation buzzed around me. The words became jumbled and I could no longer make them out, as the kitchen walls seemed to close in. It was like a bout of cholera, the claustrophobia enhanced by the cramped kitchen and the desperate shows of love and affection my poor family poured on me.

‘He was killed on his first mission over Europe,’ Dad said. ‘He was a rear gunner, a real brave soul.’

It was all too much, yet another kick in the face. Even though I had been around so much death, lived it and breathed it, nothing prepared me for the loss of such a close friend. All I could think was, Why then am I still alive? By what miracle had I returned home? Suddenly I snapped. I slammed my fork down on Mum’s finest crockery plate and stood up, the chair screeching on the wooden floor. The room fell silent. It was so unlike me to make a scene, completely out of character. I knew they were trying to help but I just couldn’t stand it.

‘I’m going out,’ I announced. I was already half out the door when a chorus of ‘I’ll come with you’ and ‘Come back, Alistair’ rang out.

But I was off. I needed to be alone. My head felt like it was going to pop and fresh air seemed the only answer.

I walked and walked. Past the Co-op and up Auchinyell Brae, I hardly broke stride. Before long I was miles from home, walking with purpose but without forethought or direction. Aberdeen could not possibly have physically changed much during the war years but somehow I failed to recognise any of the surroundings. It all felt surreal and nothing seemed familiar. God knows where I walked but I kept on going, strolling without respite. Even when it got dark I kept on going and going, step after step, on my own enforced route march.

I did not return home until around five o’clock the next morning. My parents were still up, obviously worried sick. As I crawled up the stairs to find a bed to lie down in, utterly exhausted, they asked where I had been.

‘We’ve been out looking for you,’ Mum pleaded, begging for information.

‘And all night,’ Dad chimed in. ‘We even called the police. What have you to say for yourself, son? It’s freezing outside.’

I hated myself. I knew they were trying to be there for me but I just wanted to be on my own. I had lived a solitary and sorry life for so long that love only suffocated me. In many respects my family felt like strangers. How does one describe the feelings of a person who has been through something like we had, something no one could ever have envisaged? They could never comprehend the depths of man’s inhumanity to man or the awfulness of an existence that consisted of surviving one day at a time.

I flopped down on my old bed in the room that I had helped build with my father all those years ago and slept all day and the next night. The recurring nightmares of the railway came again, leaving me afraid to lie down.

When I went downstairs the next day I ate a quick and light breakfast before promptly disappearing again. For the next few months my daily routine consisted of long and pointless walks. After a while I started looking at people’s faces trying to spot anybody I knew from before the war but I never did. Not in the whole town. But I did purposely avoid my old haunts, especially the plumbers’ merchants, Duthie Park and the dance halls.

I created mayhem at home, where I was morose, rude and short on patience. My sister Rhoda, God bless her, was so supportive and in many ways eased the situation, although I cannot ever remember thanking her, such was the state of my mind. I was irrational and unable to control my actions. I wanted only to be on my own, outside the four walls, wandering aimlessly in and around the streets of Aberdeen.

After a few weeks pounding the strange streets of my home town my body began to fall apart. I started to suffer with pains from beriberi, which attacked my legs, back and arms, and the cold winter air did not help. When my bowels started playing up as well I decided it was time to visit my local GP, Dr Rice.

I told him that I had amoebic dysentery while incarcerated so he put me on a course of inter-muscular injections. He injected my left arm but the skin began to tighten and then swell and became incredibly painful, so he went for the other, which did the same thing. After that I couldn’t lie on my back or sides, couldn’t bear sheets or clothing to touch them. Life was pretty bad despite the relative luxury I was afforded.

I still could not eat properly. I left untouched all of my old favourites, which Mum loved preparing for me. Much to my surprise I craved rice, the lousy stuff that we had all hated so much. The aptly named Dr Rice arranged for me to attend Stracathro Hospital – a large country house near Brechin in the neighbouring county of Angus that had been converted into a military hospital.

They did all of their tests and suggested different foods but I was still unable to take anything except fluids. My health suffered accordingly and I became weaker by the day.

I stayed there for several weeks. I could go home at the weekends but I had little money and nobody in the family had a car, so it was not an option. Mum and Dossie started out one Saturday but got on the wrong bus and never arrived at the hospital.

One day a baffled doctor visited my bedside and said he couldn’t understand why I couldn’t take food. I told him, ‘If you had to survive on nothing else but rice and water for three and a half years, then maybe you could understand!’

‘Yes, perhaps you are right. We just don’t know what else to do for you,’ he said rather ashamedly.

‘Maybe my body is craving rice,’ I suggested in a less defensive tone.

‘We could try it.’

It seemed logical and perhaps not surprisingly it worked. My body responded to the rice and seemed to relax. My throat opened up and my bowels went from a stormy sea to a millpond. I ate rice pudding every day for several weeks – and relished it too! After a while I was put on to tripe, which did me the world of good, and then on to some white fish.

After three months and a final prognosis of having suffered from a duodenal ulcer, I came out of hospital armed with instructions for my mum on how to cook tripe, which she despised. She cooked fish, poached in milk, and servings of rice, as exotic as it got in those days. To this day I still have to eat rice two or three times a week, with some fish or chicken. Anything else causes havoc with my insides. One of my favourite dishes in Singapore had been a curry but never again. Even an onion is enough to set me off. The diet courtesy of the Emperor’s Imperial Army, along with years of dysentery, had destroyed the linings in my stomach and done irreparable damage.

Thanks to my new diet and more rest and recuperation at home – where I hardly had to lift a finger – my body, mind and soul began to recover. I wrote to the Royal Army Pay Corps headquarters, gave them my rank and number, and asked for payments because I was still unfit for work. They tallied up my pay for my time as a POW and after deductions for ‘subsistence’ I received the grand sum of £434.00 – for the period from 15 February 1942 to 18 November 1945.

The charge for ‘subsistence’ infuriated me – they were making us pay for those handfuls of maggoty rice. Yet it was standard practice and applied to all returning prisoners. It is a miracle that they did not charge me for the loss of my rifle, as they did some men.

Early in 1946 and still a de facto member of the British Army, I was summoned to appear in front of a medical board at Woodend Hospital, Aberdeen. The board comprised four well-fed and comfortable-looking officers sitting behind a desk. They told me that the conditions of my military discharge hinged on my producing my Army ‘records’ and that unless I could produce records of all the diseases that beset me in the POW camps, they were not able to consider my situation.

I was stunned. I sat in an awkward silence trying to compose my thoughts and control my rage, before speaking.

‘Sirs,’ I said. ‘Have you any conception of conditions in the Japanese prison camps?’

They did not reply so I went on. ‘There were no pencils, pens, paper, aye, no toilet paper, drugs, toiletries, soap or water to wash! Never mind keeping records of each POW in many, many camps, certainly not in Kanyu or the Hellfire Pass camps. Just how much recording the Japanese kept is very little, as my Japanese Record Card shows!’

The chairman broke the silence that followed, saying, ‘Then we are sorry, we are unable to help.’

This then was the sort of treatment meted out by the Army. It took another three or four meetings with various medical boards before they offered me demobilisation – but only if I agreed to pass myself as A1, which foolishly I did. I was so fed up of being downtrodden by the Army but I had let them off the hook of having to pay me any kind of disability war pension – it was a dirty trick played on many of the returning Far Eastern prisoners of war.

Two days later I went on my way down south for an official discharge and was issued with a brown-checked demobbing suit and hat, the usual Army fitting, and a pair of shoes. Hurrah, free of the Army at last.

By February 1946 I thought it was time to take a chance and try dancing again. I dusted off an old pair of dancing shoes with leather soles (my good pair had been abandoned back in Singapore) and shined them up. As I nuggeted them and buffed up a reasonable shine I was surprised at how unsteady my hands were. I was nervous. While dancing had always come very easily and naturally to me, it felt like starting afresh. It had been so long since I had allowed myself any luxurious thoughts of quicksteps or the tidal rise and fall of the waltz. But above all else, returning to social circles, dealing and talking with strangers, horrified me.

I decided to go to the Palais de Dance, the classier of the halls, on a quiet Wednesday night. I wore my uniform, which fitted only where it touched my still skeletal frame, and was pleased to see a lot of military people milling around outside. I recognised no faces, however. Inside the band started up and men at once crossed the floor, seemingly as fraught with danger as no man’s land or the mine-ridden seas of the Indian Ocean, and asked women to dance. I stood there for a long time, probably an hour, before I approached a girl. I had noticed she could dance and looked assured yet kind. I ‘tipped’ her dance partner, the polite way of ‘cutting in’, and got the chance for a quickstep double novelty dance. The first thing she said to me was, ‘So you can dance! Why did you stand for so long?’

I smiled and swung her around, delighted to be back in the saddle, so to speak. I only got halfway around the floor when I was tipped by a woman, who could also dance. Before I knew it I was back in my element. I tried to remember the female faces so I could get another dance with them later.

At the end of the night on my way out, with the smile still plastered on my face, one of the women collared me to say, ‘I hope you come back, as I enjoyed dancing with you.’

That broke the ice and I went back two days later for the big Friday night dance. My legs were still aching from all of the unexpected exercise, using different muscles, and muscles that still needed to be built up, but nothing would stop me now. Early in the evening I met a woman called Mary Milne who was wearing a Women’s Auxiliary Air Force uniform. She was a local lassie, three years younger than me, and a very good dancer. I had seen her earlier and she had caught my eye, so I made sure I tipped in later on and we got on well immediately.

‘Will you be going to the dance tomorrow?’ she asked, as we tapped out a slow fox-trot.

‘Most certainly,’ I said, hardly able to control my delight.

Dancing was the best rehabilitation I could have asked for, and it was also crucial to my reintegration to society. I slowly came out of my shell and thanks in no small part to Mary. She didn’t ask me any questions and I liked it that way. I told her I had been a prisoner of the Japanese but that was as much detail as I gave. It turned out that in previous years she had courted someone who had been a prisoner of the Germans – so she sure could pick ’em!

Before long we were ‘walking out’, and seeing each other as much as possible. One of our favourite things was a stroll along the beach. On one such occasion, memorable for its cloudless sky, I took an attack of malaria. It came on quickly, forcing me to sit on a bench, sending me into hot, sweaty shivers. Mary was terrified as she did not know what was happening, and when I went into a tense rigor she helped me to a taxi and we rushed home. Dr Rice came, with his quinine, and gave me a dose in bed, which sorted me out. But it took me a fortnight to recover because of an enlarged spleen. I considered it a minor setback and got back to the dancing straight away, though by now struggling to breathe through my nose properly – it had been broken so often during all of those beatings on the railway. I went in for an operation to have a hole bored through my nose bone, and while I was in I took another malaria attack, which laid me out again, this time for a month.

As a couple Mary and I soon made friends at the various dance places. One of Mary’s best friends and her boyfriend often joined us to make up a foursome. I enjoyed getting out but I must have been awkward and possibly miserable company. In reality I had little or no conversation. I did not wish to talk about my six and a half years in the Far East, especially as the others had not been abroad or on active service. If someone asked about my time in the war, I regurgitated my stock answer of, ‘It was so bad that I don’t want to talk about it.’ If the war came up in conversation, I would keep quiet or steer the topic elsewhere. At the outbreak of the war Mary and her pal had gone to Glasgow to enlist and got caught in the blitz on Clydeside. They had been in the thick of it and while physically unharmed, they were mentally shaken. We just wanted to move on from the war.

Still painfully thin and very unfit I was unable to keep up with my new-found friends, especially in the dance halls, which put me at a disadvantage as Mary was pursued by several rivals. One particularly keen would-be suitor, who had been in a reserved occupation in Aberdeen and had never suffered during the war, really annoyed me. I became defensive and jealous. I suppose that being very self-conscious about my frail appearance and the fact that I was not earning did not help either. However, Mary and I still went out together; perhaps she sensed there was an ember smouldering within and at some stage it would turn to flame – I really do not know. I felt happy in her company because only then did I find some peace of mind.