The Early Days

In those first weeks one of our good friends, Laurie Scarborough, fell ill. The Japanese diagnosed tuberculosis, which frightened them enough to move him and four of us into an adjoining cell in isolation. After a week or so Laurie died.

We had to carry him out of the jail to a field where a trench had been dug, filled with bamboo, and topped with a metal grille. We laid his body on it, doused the lot in petrol and set it alight. When it would not burn fast enough we were made to fetch bamboo poles and turn the body to hasten it. That has given me nightmares down the years, and no doubt did the same to the others who were there.

Not everything was so grim. One day the Japanese arrived with squares of white cloth, Japanese script around the edge and a large number in the centre, to be sewn onto our shorts for identification. The puzzle was which way up they should go. My own number, eleven, gave me a good laugh, for it was unmistakable however you held it: 11. The laugh cost me, for a guard came up and belted me, calling me bugaro — stupid — the Japanese eleven being written quite differently.

We had no doctor among us, but we felt we ought to have something like a medical room. The only man with any medical experience was a sergeant named Smeraldo, of Italian descent, who had changed his name to Esmerald for fear of how the Japanese might treat a man whose people were on the side of their allies. He would have nothing to do with a sick bay or anything resembling one.

A tank crew was brought in about this time, one of them with a broken ankle. We set it — entirely wrongly — so that his foot sat at about ninety degrees from where it should have been, and he was lame for the three years of his captivity, though the leg could surely be re-set once he got home. He had broken it leaping from his tank after a Molotov cocktail was thrown into it, and the wound was full of maggots; we picked them out, leaving a few behind to keep it clean.