The railway man : a pow's searing account of war, brutality and forgiveness (20 page)

I disciplined myself to count the little beats of blood in my wrist for fifteen minutes at a stretch. It was not that hard, really; what else did I have to do? Forcing myself to concentrate on nothing but my pulse - the effort alone probably put me into a kind of agitated trance, and I was already near hallucinating from starvation and weakness. They had taken all sense of normal, filled time away from me and I focused my panic in on myself in a fever of self-control.

I would count carefully all the time I was doing this and divide the resulting figure by fifteen, giving the pulse rate per minute. The normal rate is about 76; I got mine up to a figure which was so high that I could not count properly and I was confident that I could repeat this whenever I wanted to do so.

One day, when I was lying down and there was a warder within earshot, I worked my pulse up, cried out and twisted and clutched myself. My performance had an effect: the warder took a look at me and had me carried down to one of the 'sick' cells. And so I lost sight of Fred Smith, who seemed resigned to survival in Outram Road and whose extraordinary resilience could not be disguised long enough even to pretend weakness. He had supported me to the hilt and told me I was doing the right thing, but I hated leaving him alone in that horrible bare cell.

In the sick cells the doors were left open during the day, which was a slight improvement, and you did not have to take part in work squads. I was joined in the cell by an Australian called Stan Davis, who was not officially sick - he was supposed to look after me, and save the therapeutic energies of the medical orderly. Stan probably knew as much about medicine as that individual, in any case, and when we were able to talk we plotted the best way for both of us to get beyond the sick cell to the hospital at Changi - if indeed it was not a dangerous mirage. Stan was another radio man, even luckier than we had been. A private soldier in a motor-transport company, he had been part of a group operating a radio in the POW camp in Sandakan, in British North Borneo, and planning an escape. This group really had been in subversive communication with local civilians. The Japanese shot his officer. Captain L.C. Matthews of the Austrahan Army Signals.

Stan and I agreed that I would eat all the food which came into the cell other than rice and that Stan would eat all the rice, and nothing but rice, and we swore that we would stick to our diet until the end, whatever it might be. My resolution was not as suicidal as it may sound because by May 1944 the food had improved slightly, and the rice now came with a few soya beans or fragments offish, but I very quickly became even thinner while Stan got more and more bloated, and looked as though he had real wet beri-beri.

We each made exaggerated shows of trying to move about, taking care to fall over or otherwise to collapse whenever we left the cell, and so after a while we were spending twenty-four hours in the cell with nothing but determination to drive us on. We had nothing to distract us from our self-destructive will to live, and only the faint chiming of that mysterious clock to mark the passing of time.

Stan and I exchanged anecdotes of the campaigns in Malaya and life in Borneo, the fall of Singapore and the early days of captivity. He had been brought up a Catholic in Western Australia and entertained me with stories of the fierce angry discipline handed out by the Christian Brothers, a religious order that specializes in teaching poor children; and he spoke about distances I could barely imagine, deserts taking weeks to cross and farms measured in square miles. I tried to find a way of explaining lowland Scotland to this hard man of the outdoors, for whom life in these cells must have been terribly constricting; we compromised by reciting poems like James Henry Leigh Hunt's Abou Ben Adhem, which seemed to declaim something beautifiil and defiant to us:

'What writest thou?' - The vision raised its head. And with a look made of all sweet accord, Answered, 'The names of those who love the Lord.' 'And is mine one?' said Abou. 'Nay, not so,' Replied the angel. Abou spoke more low. But cheerly still; and said, 'I pray thee then, Write me as one that loves his fellow-men.'

I tried to sleep as much as possible, but it was difficult to find a comfortable position. When the body is so thin that your prominent bones stick out like handles there is no ease to be had on three wooden planks, and my hips were still in poor shape. I would drift into a kind of coma, fiill of dreams and hallucinations and waking impressions that were clear and completely unreal. As at Kanburi after the beatings, my mind was churning and spewing disconnected fragments of learning and memory; bits of rage at our treatment at Kanburi came up, the cages, the beatings, the repetitious stupid refrain of'Lomax you will tell us' and the little interrogator with his thuggish fiiend. I felt I had been dead, I had been sentenced to death, 'Lomax, you will be killed shortly', I was suspended between life and death in my delirium. Often it was a brain fever spinning out automatic rhymes and strange biblical nursery verses. One of these at least I wrote down later:

At the beginning of time the clock struck one Then dropped the dew and the clock struck two From the dew grew a tree and the clock struck three The tree made a door and the clock struck four Man came alive and the clock struck five Count not, waste not the years on the clock Behold I stand at the door and knock.

There were non-stop, intensely tactile visions, so real that I could smell and see the places they presented to me: a procession of ocean-going ships slipping down the Clyde past Greenock; the unbelievably delicate evening light of the West Highlands; a summer lake in Kashmir, with vast snow mountains above it. My mind wandered back along the roads I had cycled in my search for steam engines, but it was a jagged, confused and chaotic reprise of those long journeys. I walked with S.'s hand in mine on an Edinburgh street past dark high buildings with glimpses of steps plunging down into old courtyards.

I had one vivid and frequent dream with a scene that seemed utterly perfect and unattainable, a vision of impossible beauty. It was the image of an old English garden in summer, near a cathedral, with banks of honeysuckle and roses under oak and willow trees, the cathedral spire rising above them. It seemed so entirely real, and at the same time a romantic painting of such a scene, as though I was looking at it from the side so that the smooth lawn swept away from me in a great green triangle. There was an old brown-red brick cottage hidden in the trees; it felt like order and wealth and safety.

The visions became more frightening and grotesque. One evening, the long wall of the cell began to dissolve. The cracked cement and the brickwork melted away. Far away was an immense figure, standing erect with many waving arms, emerging from a heaving sea of flame and smoke, and growing larger, until it seemed to fill the entire view. It seemed to be standing above a lake, and the surface changed into distinct waves, and then into human figures tiny against the mass of the giant. They seemed to be worshipping, chanting, praising, calling out 'Kali, Kali, Kali'. I felt sheer terror as the figure's eyes looked down directly at me, the terror mounting like choking until I woke up to find myself looking at the bare light bulb and the cell walls.

After two months of dogged persistence in our dreadfiil routine, and by then we were both in a bad way, I made another attempt to fiighten the warders by working myself into a crisis, my pulse racing and my body shaking-and this time the symptoms hardly needed to be simulated. It's not too difficult to feign imminent death when you already look like a corpse. Stan called a warder, who looked at me, and then called someone else. He may not have wanted a death on his watch without checking with a superior.

Usually, they shut the cell door at night, but that night they left it open and a warder looked in several times to check on me. I acted up enthusiastically whenever I heard him coming. The following morning there were sounds of an unusually large group walking towards our cell. It turned out to be a stretcher party. I was bundled on to the stretcher, calling out for Stan to be taken too, but they stumbled out of the cell without him. Once again I was leaving a friend.

I kept my eyes shut, but could tell that we made our way down the central hall, across the sunlit yard and into the administration offices, where I was dumped on the floor. My kit was loaded on top of me and the stretcher was lifted again, out into the open air. I could hardly believe it when I realized that I was being put into the back of a vehicle, an open truck of some kind. I was about to learn what happened to the men who had gone out of here before me, and take the consequences of my leap in the dark. The truck drove off.

I could look up through half-closed eyelids and see the sky, and smell the air of a city again. The sun was warming and the vault of blue looked imponderably beautiftil and limitless. I heard Chinese voices, Malay voices when the truck slowed, even women and children's voices - the first I had heard for a long time.

The truck seemed to leave the traffic and traffic noises and drove through what smelled like countryside. I was beyond fear, but I hoped dully that I was not being driven to some lonely execution ground. After about half an hour there was a silent length of road, then a right-hand turn, another short road, a near stop, another right-hand turn which interrupted the sunlight -and then, an English voice. Almost immediately, the stretcher was lifted off the truck, I was transferred to another stretcher and carried away.

I opened my eyes fiiUy for the first time. I was still a prisoner, and around me I saw the functional and naked walls of a modem gaol. But this was what I had been trying to achieve for months: I was inside Changi at last.