Out on Working Parties

We were moved from No. 3 block to No. 6, which was to be our home for the next three years — though we never gave up the hope that we would be out by Christmas. Word came that we would soon be going out on working parties, and we welcomed it, for any change was better than the boredom of the cell.

One of the first jobs was to take down all the sandbags that had been built up around the doors and windows at the front of the jail. Much later, a party was marching out towards the gate when aircraft appeared overhead, just as the guard was being changed in the archway. A plane was hit, and we flung ourselves to the ground, at which the guards began to laugh — not for long, for the bombs we had heard coming exploded at the entrance and decimated them, leaving us untouched on the ground.

We were paid for this work — a penny or so a day at first. About thirty of us were sent one day to a local school and split into two groups, one of which I took charge of at the school while the other went into town with a Sergeant Major, each under a civilian Japanese overseer. When the town party rejoined us, the Sergeant Major told me their overseer had taken them to a café for a sit-down meal — while ours had left us all day with nothing to eat or drink. I said exactly what I thought of that, not noticing the civilian Jap standing near, an English-speaker who took in every word; he asked for the same party again the next day. This time a second Sergeant Major attached himself to us — his first and only venture outside the jail — and the whole party stayed at the school and was given a fabulous meal of curried beef and rice. My tirade, it seemed, had done some good.

Some of the parties I would have done without. Once we were sent to clear a bombed village, drawing the bodies from the rubble; it was a dreadful business, and when I pulled one body by the arm the skin slid away to the wrist in my hand. That, too, has stayed with me down the years. We marched out, as often as not, in the worst of the midday sun, kept to the main roads in our bare feet with the melting tar oozing up between our toes, until the soles of our feet were like leather. We went one day to the docks, a mile from the jail, to unload a ship carrying comforts for the Japanese troops: small bags of trifles fit for children, yo-yos and whistles and the like. One man found a tin of tomatoes in his bag, and after that everyone fell to opening bags in hope, with little luck, dumping the opened ones in the dock where, astonishingly, the floating heap went unnoticed. I was prising a packet of cigarettes from a part-nailed crate when a Japanese officer bellowed behind me; without turning I flicked the packet into a pile of rubbish, and talked my way out of it by saying I thought the loose lid ought to be nailed up. He had the whole crate carted off, and put me and a couple of others on the lorry to go with it.

A short while later the drone of an aircraft sounded in the distance. We told the guards it was English, and while they craned to look, the three of us helped ourselves to several packets of cigarettes. I hid four of them, one at each side of each ankle, held with a puttee. At the search I pulled some paper from my pocket and asked if I might keep it to make cigarettes; it was refused, and I was bashed, but he passed on without searching my legs.

The next day, clearing the same area, I pocketed a tablet of soap, gritty but better than nothing. A Japanese sergeant who spoke good English caught me, gave me a couple of hefty slaps, and told me I had no need of it, as we got plenty of soap and cigarettes in the jail. I denied it hotly, not knowing what punishment I was inviting — and to my surprise he believed me, went off, and came back with a packet of cigarettes to hand round the lads.

There were spells of heavier work. One lasted three days and nights, loading lead ingots: two men would lift one onto a shoulder, carry it up a plank to the open hold, and drop it in, twelve hours a shift. The job was well done — though not so well as the air force managed the day after, when the ship had moved out into the middle of the river and they bombed it, and down it went with all that weight. Another three days and nights we spent on a coal barge, shovelling coal into a ten-foot bucket to be hoisted out, standing barefoot on the coal itself. We came off each hour black from head to foot, but not for long, for the sweat soon carried the dust away. At midnight there was a rice-ball for our trouble.

Later still we were sent into the centre of Rangoon to deal with unexploded bombs, a task for which none of us had the least training. The first sat four feet down in two feet of water in the middle of the main road. I was sent to a nearby house to scrounge a bucket to bail it out, and found three Burmese ladies taking tea in the garden. As I bent to pick up the bucket my shorts — patched, and the patches patched again — gave up the ghost and split from top to bottom. After so long without the sight of a woman I fled, mortified, bucket in hand. In time we got the bomb out, loaded it on a lorry, and drove off like the clappers to drop it in the river. On the far side of the city another party was waiting by an unexploded bomb, one of the lads sitting on a metal object sticking out of the ground; he got up smartly when told it was the bomb, fins and all gone.

We tidied the railway marshalling yard too, which was bombed most Sundays, our day off; we would clear up after a raid and the bombers would come again and undo it all. We did not mind that job, for there was usually some loot to be had — once cigarettes, damp from the fire hoses, once sugar, also damp, which we hid in our water bottles. We were gaining a fine education for a life of crime, had any of us chosen to take it up.

Among the worst of the labour was the wood yard, shifting great lengths of teak onto lorries — heavy, dangerous work that took all our strength to lift and balance, and good coordination to drop and jump clear, the harder because by then our average weight was about six stone. And around the huts we were set to build blast walls some ten feet high. Jumping down from one at lunchtime, I fell forward onto a rusty six-inch nail standing up from a plank, and it went clean through my hand. A guard saw it, drew the nail out, fetched a little cooking oil from a village hut, dipped a length of hollow dried grass in it, set it alight, and poured the burning oil into the hole. I swore at him — the only time I ever did so without paying for it.