Chapter Five

In the jail, life went on as usual but, thanks to one of the officers, we started to get spinach with our rice at tea-time. He had spotted this growing wild and started cultivating it, saving the seed and not eating any during the first season. Eventually the amount grown virtually covered a large field outside the jail. We also grew sweet potatoes, nothing like anything I had ever grown before. A cutting inserted in the ground took root and then traveled along, now and again sending out shoots which rooted and then grew a sweet potato just under the soil. We used to scratch away the soil, find a sweet potato, carefully break it off and return the shoot to its place in the soil leaving it looking undisturbed. The young potato was eaten raw and was a treat, nothing like the mature ones.

The Jap in charge of the Garden Party was named Noguichi-San which we converted to No Good San. He would march us to the garden, halt us, and then dismiss us with a salute which we had to return. One day I fell out of the ranks and was lighting a cigarette with the sun's rays and a magnifying glass. His shout of NAN DA CURRAII should have put me on my guard but he picked up a garden rake and bashed me on the head — I felt it!!

The officers were being paid but most of it being deducted for board and food. However they still had some money left which they used to buy cigars or rather Burmese cheroots and some food. Usually they would ask one of the men to do the transaction for them through Noguichi, and one day I was to do this for one of them. We used the Burma cheroots to break up and make cigarettes but the other Burmese smoke consisted of very little tobacco mixed up with chopped-up bamboo. These were no good to us as they were no use to make cigarettes. Noguichi came and brought the wrong type of smokes. I tried to tell him they were the wrong ones and he reacted by trying to kick me in the genitals. I turned aside a little, put my hand under his foot and he landed on his behind on the ground. I disappeared and for some reason he did not find me.

Because of his pretentious way of saluting on dismissal he was also known as the "Admiral" but his mannerisms were most amusing though many aspects of the man were not. Occasionally he would decide that the actions or deeds of a man or men warranted punishment and he would make them stand facing each other and commence to slap each other. Usually one would appear to slap while the other clapped his hands together and very often got away with it.

Back in camp life went on; one of the cells had an Irish Sergeant Major in charge, the men being from different areas and regiments. The Sergeant Major was given permission to exercise the men by a drill parade providing he gave the commands in Japanese. I decided this was going to be no ordinary drill parade and stayed to look on. His brogue was such that I could not understand his English at all and I don't think I was alone in this. However for the first few minutes things were going quite well with the squad at the time marching away from him. Surely it could not last. His command came in Japanese to 'about turn'. The result was catastrophic; it looked as if a bomb had dropped right in the centre of the squad with a large hole in the centre and the squad marching in four different directions.

Nogger was the chap in charge of the boiling of water, absolutely necessary in this environment. He was of limited intelligence but certainly efficient for his task. He was in the hut where his large drum was kept when one of the men came in, dipped his can in the tank and left. The Medical Officer (M.O.) was passing at the time and went up to Nogger to admonish him for allowing the man to dip his can into the water. "You should not allow this to happen, it is not hygienic and we must think about hygiene all the time." When the next man came and attempted to dip his can in the water Nogger moved in on him, stopped him and said "You are not allowed to do that. The Doctor has told me there has been an outbreak of hygiene, and we have to do everything to stop it."

We were given a task in the jail to do a bit of patching up using the Japs' idea of mortar, mixing soil with quicklime and water. We had no tools but were told to use our feet to do the mixing. Of course, as expected, this mix burnt our feet and left us with sores. A repetition of this occurred later when one of our bombers breached the prison wall, a structure about ten feet or so wide at its base. Two walls, one skin depth were built using bricks and the soil and quicklime mix. We then had to fill between the walls (about nine feet) with the mortar, the whole job taking a lot of hours. The whole lot was then left to set. What a hope, the whole lot collapsed with heavy rains that came while the mortar was still wet.

The toilets for the compound were in a large building open front and back with a corrugated roof. There were four rows of pairs of stone blocks with an empty munitions tin between each pair. The tins were emptied every day into 50-gallon drums with a couple of wire loops at the top. A couple of men unfit to go out on working parties were detailed to do this job and to then carry the drum by putting a bamboo pole through the loops and onto the shoulders of one man in front and a second behind. Not a very pleasant job for the man behind, the balance of the drum being difficult to control, the liquids swirling about, often soaking the rear man.

Solid stools were non-existent until one day when a chap came chasing out of the toilets shouting that someone had deposited a stool which was standing up for itself. He was not believed till a couple more went in and confirmed his statement. Most of the persons in the compound attended such a rare occurrence, marched past and saluted it. An RAF officer finally admitted he was the cause of it but could not give any reason why.

The drums were carried as described above to be emptied into a large cement-lined pool which, after a short time, was heaving with maggots which inevitably became flies which descended in hoards on the compound. They attacked any food, rice and so forth, so we had to keep moving one hand over our dishes to keep them off. Eventually the Japs arrived, particularly on a Sunday when we were sometimes on a rest day, bringing little bottles and fly swats making us fill the bottles with the dead flies we had captured.

Every Sunday a small group of us met in the back compound under a large tree where an officer was teaching us Urdu. The others dropped out one by one until only the officer and I were left. On the next Sunday the officer sent a message to let me know that he was ill and he would not be attending so there was no point in my attending. I suppose one has to have a bit of luck some time. I certainly had that day. There was an air-raid and our aircraft came over and dropped a mixed bag of bombs. The first of the stick was an H.E. bomb which blew up a small cookhouse but left a group of three men untouched though only about eight yards or so away. I was inside the building in the passage and went to the ground. When I got up I could not see a yard in front of me because of disturbed whitewash etc. The next bomb demolished our tree where we would normally have been sitting. If the officer had not been ill that day we would both have been killed.

On another occasion I had been to the latrine, suffering with dysentery, when the bombers came over. I was half-way back to the trench when I heard the bombs whistling down. I got to the trench and dived in, followed by a brick which hit the side of the trench just above my head. The same bomb fell on a slit trench burying and killing some prisoners sheltering there.