The Sick

We went without proper medical help for a long time. One day a number of British prisoners, weeks of beard and hair on them and many plainly ill, were brought into our old No. 3 block; about then a Medical Officer of high rank reached our block and another doctor came to No. 3, so that things seemed to look up — though still we had almost no medical supplies, and the doctors had to work with whatever a working party could find.

The diseases were many, and some of them strange. Beriberi was everywhere, bred of a diet of nothing but boiled rice and the vitamins it lacked. Malaria came from the mosquitoes, and the worst cases died, often after terrible nightmares; and where malaria and dysentery took a man together, there was little hope for him. Dysentery I knew at first hand, as did my good friend Harry. The only treatment was starvation — ten days or so of it, then rice water, then after a week a little rice. At night Harry and I had to make our way in pitch darkness to the toilets at the far end of the block, and to keep from colliding we would call out as we passed, "Coming out, right" and "Coming in, right." Between us we lost about six stone in weight in that time, and never got it back while we were in the jail.

Ringworm covered poor Nogger, the water-boiler, from head to foot. Jungle sores could start from a scratch and then eat into the flesh — in one man I remember, into the stomach, so that you could see right inside him. The only thing the doctor had for them was copper sulphate, the bluestone used on horses' sores; when a man on a working party found some crystals of it, the doctor was overjoyed and begged for all that could be brought. Many men suffered, too, from blistered, weeping testicles, the itching past bearing, and one was so tormented that he dabbed the copper sulphate on himself — it bit like acid, and he ran for the water tap in the compound and turned it full on, trying to wash the agony away.

Worst of all, for me, was strongyloides — a worm that entered through the bare soles of our feet, lodged behind the stomach wall, and travelled the body causing an itch worse than anything I have known. I carried it for thirty years. My own doctor at home took it for urticaria, brought on by food or nerves, and since my diet did not change it was put down to nerves, so that for years I believed myself a nervous case. Only when I applied for a pension did a copy of a 1945 report from the York Military Hospital come to light, showing that strongyloides had been diagnosed even then and never passed on; at the Tropical Diseases Hospital in Liverpool it was cured at last in under a week. The Medical Officer recommended a gratuity, which was refused. Now and again the "family" behind my stomach wall would set off on a tour of my body, and the itching would return; once, wearing the string vests that were all the fashion, I found myself covered in little bumps, one at every hole of the vest, and gave the vests to my brother-in-law.

There were stranger afflictions still. We called one "Happy Feet" — and I have since read the same name used in other camps, which I always thought odd — where the nerve-endings in the soles jumped so that a man could not keep his feet on the ground; a friend of mine had it so badly that on the march to freedom he had to hang on to me, unable to bear his feet down at all. A party of Javanese troops in green uniforms was brought in and began dying from the first, loaded onto lorries and taken away to be buried, until none were left; we never learned what was wrong with them, or where the rest were taken. Prickly heat came in two kinds, the dry a fierce itch from the sun, the wet a crop of blisters. And there were crab lice, small crab-like things that buried their claws in the skin, leaving only a black speck showing, and that nothing but methylated spirits would shift — and we had none.

The doctors did extraordinary things with nothing. In the next compound were Chinese prisoners, and when two of them fought and a Chinese general stepped in to part them, one stabbed him in the stomach. They chose our doctor to operate, which he did in the rough, with a scalpel found on a working party and sharpened on a cement step, and no anaesthetic at all; the general bore it bravely, but died later. Another time our doctor amputated a British prisoner's leg, with ice for the only anaesthetic — and that man lived.

Then there was cholera, which terrified everyone, the Japanese most of all. The sick were moved to an isolation block, tended by a few very brave volunteers, and the rest of us inoculated. I came in from a working party of thirty to be lined up at once for the needle — the same needle that had already done a hundred and fifty men or more, and I was the very last of them. I felt it. Some died even so, but the outbreak was halted.

My own long trouble was a swelling on the neck that, for five or six weeks, all but closed my throat, so that I could neither turn my head nor swallow. In the end, in desperation, I drove the sharp end of a pair of tweezers into it and got some relief when a great deal of pus came away; for days after I drew more off with poultices of hot rice. I think of it still when I eat a poppadom, for in those weeks my food was a chapatti of flour-and-water paste, rolled paper-thin and cooked on the hot-plate, and it took me a whole morning to get one down; I could not drink properly either, but had to take water into my mouth and let it trickle slowly back. I never did learn what it was, or what had caused it.