The Mechanics' Camp

I had become friendly with a six-foot Sub-Conductor of the Ordnance Corps, and one day he told me he had put me down for a party of thirty to go and live in a Japanese camp some miles off, to maintain and repair army vehicles. When I protested that I was wholly unsuitable — I could not even drive, and knew nothing of machinery — he said that made me perfect for it: all the more likely to do the vehicles harm.

As it turned out, I was put in charge of six men re-treading tyres, and here a little knowledge served me well, for my work at home had been in a rubber factory. It was hard labour, cruel on the arms. We cut the old tread off with a great knife, rasped the tyre down to the canvas with a tool of wood, sheet metal and gramophone needles, coated it and a length of uncured rubber with solution, hammered the new rubber on with a heavy wooden stake, and baked the tyre in a section of mould over a wood fire — a primitive business that left us covered head to foot in rubber raspings.

It was a business that could be quietly spoiled, too. I suggested to the lads that a little water dabbed on the tyre before the rubber went on would turn to steam and stop the two from bonding. We managed it many times, but never better than the day an Indian driver and his mate brought in four tyres needed for the morning. We treated all four, and all four came from the mould blistered with trapped steam; a little Japanese — not a bad fellow, for a Jap — pricked the blisters to let the air out, and the tyres went off north at first light. Later that same day the two Indians came trudging back, carrying four tyres and four treads between them: they had braked once, and the treads had parted company with the tyres. A very satisfactory result.

Other men fared worse at their work. In the next hut a few prisoners made lead battery plates, pouring molten lead into moulds; the metal dripped through onto the bare feet of the men below, and burned them terribly. And the camp had its absurdities. One of our first jobs there was to put up a bamboo fence around our hut; a few weeks later our sergeant and I — the only two with any scrap of the language — were told to take it down again, and had it almost down when an officer appeared, gave the guard a dressing-down, and the guard at once blamed the pair of us. The men, who had to build and unbuild it, were not best pleased with our interpreting.

There were small mercies. After a stint at the tyres we would go to a well in the jungle to wash off the rubber, and once I hauled up a bucket and tipped it over my head to find myself covered in leeches; the lads got them off by touching them with the tobacco of a Burmese cheroot — there is no need, whatever the books say, to light the cigarette first. We got a weekly treat of sweet Indian tea and a Japanese sweetmeat, a rice cake with a paste inside, the nearest thing to an Eccles cake I can describe; nothing I would relish at home, but a delicacy there. And near the tyre hut was a small Pakistani village, one of whose people would now and then risk a great deal to bring us a little food. Had it been in my power, when the Japanese were beaten, I would have liked to reward that man for what he did for us.

It was while I was here that I tried again to get a doctor for the swelling on my neck, with no luck — until a number of white-coated Japanese came into the compound. One of them had me wait, lined up beside three or four others, while a table of instruments and medicines was set out, and we were vaccinated and inoculated several times over and sent away. They came back a fortnight later to see whether we were still alive. We had been their guinea-pigs, used to test medical stores the British had left behind in Rangoon.

That was of a piece with much we now noticed. The Japanese had begun to behave like men expecting an early end to the war. The plainest sign of it was the day a great many of us were taken to a local high school, Myoma, and set first to digging a square pit in the middle of the football field, then to laying teak beams across it in crossed layers, and then to carrying basket after basket of soil, coolie-fashion on the head, until the whole playing field was built up to the height of a three- or four-storey house. We laboured at it for weeks, on into the monsoon, the ground turning to mud; when an officer arrived unseen and the guard failed to call us to attention, the guard was made to crawl to him through the length of that mud. I was taken off the soil to help a so-called joiner nail three planks into a right-angled triangle, to set the uprights of the blast walls true — but the fool would not see, though I told him often, that we were working on sloping ground, so the uprights stood at ninety degrees to the slope. Half a dozen went up, more and more obviously wrong, until an officer came, took one look, screamed bugaro at the guard and belted him. The officer left; I was stood to attention and belted in my turn. I was lucky often enough — but not that day.