The Forgotten Highlander (21 page)

Dunlop set a shining example of how officers ought to conduct themselves and gave all too many a showing up. He was twice threatened with execution but intervened constantly on behalf of the sick men. He introduced order, fairness, record-keeping and above all hope to Chungkai.

Dunlop became a legendary figure both during and after the war, and was knighted for his amazing bravery and for saving countless lives. When Sir Edward ‘Weary’ Dunlop died in 1993, he was rightly given a full state funeral in Melbourne.

After a couple of weeks of feeding and rest they decided I was ready for rehabilitation. I took some amount of convincing but once they hoisted me out of bed and started carrying me from the hut, my protests were futile.

My admiration and respect for the medical staff would only increase with every day at Chungkai. Despite their mammoth task and the flood of sick men dumped at the camp every day, their dedication and patience were aweinspiring. They had built parallel bars outside with a canopy over the bamboo apparatus for shade. Men used the gymnastic-type equipment to learn to walk again, holding themselves upright with their arms and upper body and retraining their legs. On my first visit the staff sat me down on a stool beside the bars and I watched a man struggle and strain, with beads of sweat streaming down his forehead, to walk the length of the bars, helpers waiting to catch him if he fell. I thought to myself, I’ll never be able to do that.

But that was to come. First the orderlies had much simpler, allegedly more achievable tasks for me to tackle. As I sat there on the three-legged stool they attached to my right foot a small bag with some sand or dirt in it.

‘Try and lift your foot off the ground. Even an inch will do.’

I tried but nothing happened. My brain was willing but my foot refused to budge.

‘Keep trying,’ they encouraged. But no matter what I tried it wasn’t moving. Within minutes I was exhausted and they told me to rest. They left me alone, stewing in self-loathing, and came back half an hour later.

‘Try again. But this time I want you to concentrate with all your might from brain to foot. It’s all about mind over matter.’

From an early age I had relished a challenge and I hated being beaten. I focused my eyes on the hairs on my foot and willed it to move. After a while the orderlies shouted, ‘Yes, you did it!’ Although I never saw it I must have raised my foot half an inch and for the next couple of hours I sat there trying to repeat it. I was sweating like a pig, the frustration oozing out of me as I made incremental progress. The old stubborn Alistair was returning. By the end of the session I could lift both feet an inch off the ground.

The staff carried me back to my hut, where I fell asleep exhausted. The next day they took me back and sitting on that stool I managed to raise my leg two or three inches. I felt ready for the parallel bars and the orderlies agreed. They lifted me up and held my shrunken backside as I dangled my useless legs. Being on my feet felt surreal, as if I had never walked before. They pushed me to try to move a leg.

‘You moved your leg when you were sitting down so you can do it now.’

Try as I might, I couldn’t get my legs to move.

‘Don’t worry about it if you can’t. We’ll try again tomorrow.’

I went back to the stool and tried again. Once I had mastered lifting one bag of weights I went on to the next heaviest. I gave up only when completely knackered, and they carried me back to the hut.

On the way back a young chap was walking towards me when he stopped suddenly and said excitedly, ‘It’s not you, is it? Is it you? Is it?’

I recognised him straight away. ‘Yes, it’s me, Freddie.’

‘Awright mucker! It’s been a while.’

Indeed it had. It was the first time I had smiled in months. Freddie Brind looked remarkably fit and well, considering. I was not surprised he struggled to recognise me, however. I had lost three or four stone and most of my dignity and self-respect.

One of the medical officers carrying me told Freddie, ‘Alistair here has been learning to walk again. He’s doing very well.’

As they carried me Freddie trailed alongside, talking at a million miles a minute. It was as if we had never been parted. At the hut the orderlies left and we were alone. We were so pleased to see each other. For me he was a breath of fresh air. I had constantly worried about him, his brother Jim and the other lad, John Scott. I still felt like I had let them down, abandoning them at Changi all those months ago. It seemed like a lifetime ago. I wanted to know everything but I struggled to get a word in. He told me he had been at Chungkai for almost twelve months, having arrived with his brother. He did not know what had happened to John, who became separated from them at Changi. But Freddie was more interested in telling me what I should be doing. He might only have been aged fifteen then but he was a truly inspirational figure.

Lying in my bed I must have looked a pathetic, sorry soul. He told me in no uncertain terms, ‘This isn’t you, Alistair. You need to pull yourself together. You can do it.’

He must have noticed the deep-rooted scepticism that lay behind my watery eyes.

‘You can do it all right, mucker. I’ll see to it. In fact I’ll have you swimming across that river before you know it. I swim across it every day to collect dead bamboo for the cooks’ fires and you can come with me, it’s a breeze.’

‘No way,’ I said. I couldn’t even walk – I couldn’t see how I could ever possibly swim again.

‘You wait and see,’ he beamed. ‘Wait there.’

He dashed off. Good old Freddie, I smiled. He had made it. The senior Gordon Highlanders officers must have pleaded with the Japanese not to send the boys to the railway and instead to the relative safety of Chungkai. I was surprised, though, that they had not been kept at Changi, which may have been safer. Still Freddie looked healthy and the glint in his eyes registered that he remained as cheeky as ever.

Freddie soon returned with some cake – and his brother Jim. It was great to see him too. He had lost some weight but still looked quite healthy. He was the same old Jim; it was impossible to get a word out of him. Instead I devoured the cake, which he called ‘Gula Malacca’ and told me was made from the sap of a palm tree. It was extremely sweet and tasty – the first amount of sugar to pass my lips in two years. It was possibly not the best thing for me, as I had some bowel problems after that but it was so delicious that it was worth it. I stopped short of asking Freddie where he got it from; I didn’t want to know. And if Freddie had been in Chungkai for a year without my supervision to rein in his unbridled curiosity and enthusiasm, he no doubt knew every nook and cranny of the place.

From then on I saw Freddie daily. He swam across the river every day to collect firewood for the cooks. All of the wood around the camp had already been pilfered so the best pickings were across the 150-yard-wide stretch of fast-flowing brown water. He would dash across, bundle together a load and haul it back behind him. For his efforts the cooks gave him extra food. The Japanese knew of his exploits but never stopped him. He was doing no harm and he always returned. Even they found it difficult to be mad with Freddie.

He was also embroiled with the Australians and their clandestine cigarette production and distribution racket. All of these activities were done at night and were so well concealed that the Japanese never shut them down as long as I was there. Freddie told me how they made the cigarettes. They used a flat wooden board, which had a thick parchment attached to it that rolled around a thin piece of bamboo glued through it. The tobacco, which must have been smuggled inside the camp through the wire, was placed on the parchment. Paper came from books – usually the Bible, which was the preferred choice as it best kept alight – and it was rolled around the bamboo stick, wrapping itself around the tobacco. Once licked and sealed it formed a perfect smoke. I was amazed at how professional the cigarettes looked. The Dutch, who mainly kept to themselves, had their own operation.

Freddie was the Australians’ top salesman. A natural barrow boy he could sell fish to the sea. He sneaked from hut to hut, group to group – he was never caught – and flogged his illicit wares. After some time, he told me, he had established a large clientele and everyone knew him as the boy in the know. He was paid a cut from the earnings and always had dollars in his pocket. While I never approved of his occupation, I was always grateful for the food he purchased for me from the sanctioned canteen. The supplements to my diet, which included two-egg omelettes, molasses, coconut and papaya, assisted in my recovery and probably later helped save my life.

Meanwhile the medical orderlies told Freddie in no uncertain terms – which were often the only terms he fully responded to – not to interfere with my rehab. But after Freddie’s arrival on the scene I approached my physical exercises with a renewed vigour. Through sheer hard toil I slowly started to make headway. Day by day my movement returned. I lifted all of the weights attached to my foot and progressed to the parallel bars. Once I could struggle from one end to the other with help from my arms, they gave me a pair of crutches. After a few weeks on them I graduated to just one crutch and eventually was walking unaided, albeit with a pronounced rolling, John Wayne-like gait.

Despite my weeping tropical ulcers and still faltering walk, I was recovering well. In the evenings Freddie and I would talk for hours, much like we did on top of the hill at Changi. I even took in several theatrical shows, which the men had organised themselves. They were always outrageous burlesque affairs, held on a rickety stage and with an improvised orchestra. There was a piano, trumpet, saxophone and drums, and always plenty of laughs. It was a real boost to the spirits.

Compared with the other camps this truly was a holiday camp. I hardly ever saw a guard, let alone a coordinated or even random beating or punishment. Men walked about freely, traded, smoked cigarettes, sang songs and even played sports.

Reading between the lines and picking up on snippets of overheard conversations, I soon realised just how unlucky I had been. The Kanyu camps, under the sadistic rule of the Black Prince, were by far the worst camps I heard about. Other men talked of earning weekly pay for their work on the railway, which they saved and spent in canteens in their camps or when they got to Chungkai. Others enjoyed days off and long weekends. Some Japanese allowed men to sing rousing songs as they worked. Other prisoners had chatted with native lassies as they strolled past and traded with locals.

As I ventured further from my hut, exploring the vast camp, I saw dozens of blokes hopping around with legs lopped off. They were mainly victims of gangrene brought on by tropical ulcers. A couple of the senior doctors at Chungkai had been doing an incredible number of amputations and with rudimentary equipment and no anaesthetics, had attained amazingly high success rates. One of these doctors, a Canadian called Captain Marko, had performed 120 amputations.

As my condition improved I was able to take in the amazing hospital camp operation. Artisans and tradesmen among the prisoners had made an astonishing array of medical equipment, adapting old Ovaltine cans, Japanese beer bottles and mess tins to become retractors, saline drips and anaesthetic masks. They employed bamboo to make shunts, false legs, a dentist’s chair and even an orthopaedic bed. They set up stills to produce surgical alcohol and distilled water. Drugs were bought on the black market and smuggled in to the camp, I would later learn, by the heroes of the secret ‘V’ organisation – interned British businessmen in Bangkok, who also alerted the neutral authorities to our plight.

Chungkai was about rebuilding minds as well as bodies. Many of us had to relearn how to socialise and to overcome the trauma of the railway. Accordingly there were plenty of organised activities to keep my mind occupied in the evenings. We had so many talented and professional people in our ranks to give classes and talks. There were professors and lecturers in all manner of disciplines but one of the most popular speakers was a cockney burglar, who regularly entertained audiences with tales of how he had robbed his way across London. Chungkai had a great theatre too, a massive and fantastically well-organised place with concerts every Friday and Saturday night. These were of classical, jazz and popular music, along with cabaret shows of a professional level. The one I enjoyed most was called ‘Wonderbar’. It included a can-can routine and the prisoners’ favourite drag queen – Bobby Spong.

One afternoon when I was at the Thai-run canteen buying a coconut with some dollars Freddie had generously insisted that I take, I saw a notice on the message board that caught my eye. I recognised the name immediately.

The handwritten notice proclaimed, ‘E. W. Swanton – renowned cricket commentator and observer to give talk on Test match cricket this evening after dinner at the hut beside the officers’ mess.’

I went on my own, as cricket and especially talk of cricket was too boring an activity for restless Freddie. I had always admired the sport and enjoyed tussling with my brother Douglas on the green down from our house. Ernest William Swanton had been one of Britain’s leading cricket writers and commentators before the war and even claimed to have been taken in his pram to watch the great W. G. Grace batting for London County. The hut was already crammed full when I entered, and pitched in darkness. Once the murmurs subsided a voice at the front began. I knew it was Swanton – he had a very distinguished voice and I recognised his impeccable accent from listening to Test matches on the wireless back in Aberdeen. Swanton, who had joined the Bedfordshires, was wounded during the battle for Singapore and was in hospital when the Japanese overran us. At Chungkai he could often be seen cradling his beloved 1939 copy of cricket bible
Wisden
, which he had convinced a Japanese censor to mark as ‘Not subversive’.

He introduced himself with his own blend of pomposity and gregariousness and began talking on Test cricket. We stood in reverential silence. Such were his descriptive powers that you could almost hear the compelling crack of leather on willow. Listening to him I was surprised to hear that he was full of praise and admiration for the Australians. He was envious of their hardened attitude and the way they played without fear of reputations. To the harrumphing of some English chaps who stood near me, he proclaimed the Australian great, Don Bradman, as the best player he had ever seen. Bradman’s powers of concentration, he said, distinguished him from his English counterparts, including Denis Compton. ‘It’s the blazing fire in their bellies,’ Swanton recalled. He went on to describe a century that he had witnessed Bradman score, ‘all along the ground, hardly a shot in anger, or an ounce of effort’.