Eyewitness (19 page)

*

Our Navy band is split up a bit just now. Blackie and Roy are in hospital with dysentery. Jim, George, Izzy and Otto have wangled a job in the Nip kitchen. Good for them as they can pick up some extra food; and the young ones, especially, need this. Last night Otto brought some Jap stew over to me. It was very rich by our standards – meat, fish, beans, pumpkin and pickles. I ate it, but the richness demanded payment of me. Ken, Fatty, Bob, Blackie and myself usually manage to get on the same jobs, out on the railway.

*

Last night, after the storm had quietened a bit, we passed the time ‘just supposing’ – just supposing we were at home doing some of the things which are quite normal here. Like sitting down at the side of the road and removing our only garment – a G-string, or a ragged pair of shorts – and hunting out some of the more troublesome lice. It made a bit of fun to cook up these situations – especially to listen to Otto’s loud laughs.

*

For the time our lives are centred upon the embankment. It is a long curving affair secured by a high knoll at one end and reaching out towards a bridge at the other. It will be about 23 feet high and is known as the seven-metre bank. Basket by basket,
tanka
by
tanka
(bag stretcher), we carry the earth which has to be scratched from between the rocks in the jungle, tramping it out to the slowly forming bank. It is real coolie work, and the monotony can only be offset by private thoughts and observation.

Lately big pressure has been put on the work. They want the bank by the wet season. It is at the 150-kilometre post. All day, each pair of men carry load after load with a bag stretcher. Pick up. Carry 25 yards or more. Up the bank. Dump. Walk back … on and on. The way is along tortuous paths which constantly change as the soil-hungry diggers search further and further afield. Some of the unscrupulous take some of the narrow bridges of earth we have left between the boulders. The diggings are a succession of ponds full of tadpoles and covered with frog spawn. In the next hole to us they dug out a twelve-inch centipede whose head was almost the size of my thumbnail. The slimy earth bridges twist and turn on themselves and are treacherous to barefooters carrying soggy loads. All the time there are hostile shouts from the Japs. And, in the monotony, there is nothing more grating than unintelligible noise.

Each man has to move one cubic metre a day. This may not sound much, but under these conditions we find it plenty. I manage to scribble a bit of this in the dinner breaks, and find that it helps.

*

The Japanese are addressed as George, Charlie, Claude, Eustace, etc. The sergeant, Billy the Pig, is a slightly reformed character; but his underlings have taken upon themselves his shed bastardry. They have no idea of pace and try to get us to work at one that would exhaust us in an hour. We cruise at our own speed as best we can. There are many phonetic sounds the Japanese do not have, and they seem to rely on grunts and roars belched from the belly and chest. The men’s tempers are at their lowest ebb at the end of the day after an hour’s grinding walk to the camp and it is then, when they are formed up in five rows for the count parade, that they use the grossest insults on our masters.

Our lot is made a little easier now with a cup of rice coffee as we come in – for we have had only a quart of water all day. After a shower we are torn between the cry of our bodies for rest and the nag of maintenance jobs on them.

*

Today it has been particularly bad. We got mixed up with a lazy crowd of low morale, who cloak their laziness with an affected patriotism that they will do as little as possible for the enemy. It doesn’t trouble them that what
they
don’t do will fall on their mates.

When we should have been finished and away, we were caught in the rain with more to do. The viscous, red mud clung to our feet like lead, and we slipped dangerously with our loads. The poles of our
tankas
got slimy and our fingers ached from gripping them. Afterwards the guards found more for us to do, felling trees for ramps. When we went home in the rain – a strange set of soggy, ragged clothes props – I had parted company, at last, with the seat of my rotten calico trousers. At the count, men dawdled and sulked like children just to get their own back on
somebody
. They blamed the Japanese, and punished themselves.

We got back to the lines only to find that eight tents had been taken – ours among them. Just the platform was left in the pouring rain with all our gear on it sodden with rain. One hundred and sixty men looked like having to spend the night in the rain and were not happy about it. But I was lucky, for Buck Pederson, who takes a special interest in my drawings and diary, was in camp when they took our tent, and he had taken them out and put them in another tent. I was very relieved – for I place a great store by these things. I feel if I can get them back the experience will not be entirely wasted. Memory is not enough.

*

There are odd hazards all about us. One man stood on a five-foot-sixinch banded krait – a very deadly snake. It struck at him and missed, and was eaten for its trouble. One lunch time a man was bitten by a scorpion, or centipede, or snake: I heard three versions. Whatever it was made him vomit but he is still alive. There is also the danger of blasted rock. In the open you sidestep the stone as it comes down. But if you are in the trees you only hear it ripping through leaves and branches. I saw two bamboos cut as if by a scythe, and dived behind a tree like a man who values even this miserable existence. The elephants were halted nearby while some shots were fired. They stampeded – luckily not through us – and were only brought up after three miles.

*

As we came down the Hill, the valley of the Kwai Noi and its barbaric railway were wrapped in a comforting, cotton-wool mass of fog. We were well over a hundred paces from the bank by now. The nearer boulders had given up their last earth, and we had to endure a long carry along difficult tracks. It was a regular, funeral tramp, of corpselike monotony. It was a heavy overcast day – too heavy to sweat much in. The simple fact of picking up the stretcher, and the strain of weight on one’s arms, clogged the mind to a sodden mass like the earth itself. No thought in the mind save … Drudgery … Oppression … At such times we are silent as ants. Often, for the life of me I could not tell you what my thoughts are and I am conscious of nothing, save of my feet jolting up from the ground.

*

A dull day with grey half-light – indigo, green and sepia. Whitish rags of low cloud skirting across the mountains, tearing themselves on the ridges. It is humid and we are hurling rocks down the hillside. Scraping them out with our hands, crowbars, picks and shovels. We strain on great ropes, for all the world like the slave pyramid-builders of Egypt. Our overseers are small, swarthy people. I think of Sabatini’s Sea Hawk and how, on impossible food in the Spanish galleys he grew thews of steel. I think that all
my
thews grow is tired. But it is quite remarkable how the general health has stood up so far. We are not supermen. We are short on temper. Sides are taken by the have’s and have-not’s, the will’s and the will-not’s. But we are not dead yet. We are diligent ants, heaving and pushing great lumps of rock which, if they had broken loose, would have squashed a dozen of us. Selfpreservation has brought a bit more interest to the job. Also, despite our slave state, we do gain some satisfaction pitting our will against the inorganic – some vanity is served.

*

Contributions to the Regimental Fund, except for the sick who are not paid, have been increased to one-third of our pay, due, I suppose, to the rising cost of dying. So now I have to work two days to get enough to buy a pencil to write this with.

*

On the way out to work we saw four bullock carts and four frowsy Thais sitting on their haunches eating rice from small bowls, with thin long dark fingers. One, an old thin crone with craggy brows and high cheekbones like smooth walnuts, stood with his tattooed back towards us. It was a pattern of straight, horizontal and vertical designs, in a dull blue, which also covered his chest and arms. One of his companions was a boy. All had slept in their narrow carts during the wet night and looked mouldy and mildewed.

*

Our rations have been patchy. Although some meat and dried Chinese cabbage has come into the camp it is not for us. We are told that thousands more prisoners will be coming up through this camp and the provisions are for them. One night, a basket of onions, three baskets of pumpkin, and two of dried cabbage came in. The Japanese took the onions, two of the cabbage and one of the pumpkin; this left us with two of the pumpkin for 800.

It continues to amaze us how we stay alive and go on working. It is the eggs. We cannot thank the Japanese for these, but I suppose we should appreciate their unusual humanity in allowing us to spend our pay on them.

Some say that, because of this underfeeding and lack of clothes, we may be paid our normal subsistence pay by our Service, after the war is over. [This was never paid by the Australian Government.] As our clothes fall apart, we try to salvage enough for a simple G-string. As far as the Japanese are concerned, we are expected to exist only on small quantities of inferior rice. Hijacking from the Japs gets us a bit of meat and cabbage. The actual total issue per man over the past ten days has been 12 ounces of vegetables. Coming home tonight I was, as ever, ravenously hungry. I was thinking, gratefully, of my plain rice ration. When we got back to the engineers’ for the count, all we could smell was the aroma of Nip cooking. It was torture.

*

Our food when the weather is wet is not improved by conditions in the cookhouse – a shallow pit some 15 feet by 30, without a roof or wall, and with only a skeleton-frame. On either side are the shallow, hemispherical
kwalis
, iron cooking pans, each about four feet in diameter, set over dug-out fireplaces. Their rims are almost flush with the gritty red earth. The rain beats down through the smoke-blackened rafters, splashing sooty flakes into the
kwalis
. The beating rain also bounces up from the red, soot-blackened mud, spraying it into the tepid rice. Soon the floor of the kitchen is under water for the cooks to slosh around in. If there is too much rain, the water rises and puts the fires out. That we get anything under these conditions, is something of a wonder.

So far we have had only a few hours of rain at a time. As our tents go, one by one, we pack more and more closely into the rest. What will happen in the Wet?

*

Today we received the sickening news that there is six
tons
of mail at Tarsau. Of course it
must
be all rot … but, it
might
be true.

Betty Jeffrey

Betty Jeffrey was an army nurse with the 2/10th Australian General Hospital, which arrived in Singapore in early 1941. A year later she was one of the 30 nurses who survived the sinking of the
Vyner
Brook
. She survived three days in the water, and then the Banka Island massacre where 21 nurses were murdered in one of the most disgusting atrocities of the war, before being imprisoned on Sumatra in various camps.

After her prison camp was liberated in 1945, Jeffrey was still very ill (not that you would know it from reading her diary) and was in hospital for two years. With fellow survivor Vivian Bullwinkel, Betty Jeffrey established a memorial to the Australian nurses who died during the war, the Nurses Memorial Centre in St Kilda, Melbourne, which opened in 1949.

Her diary, kept at great risk, was published as
White Coolies
in 1954, and made into the film
Paradise Road
, directed by Bruce Beresford, in 1996.

Betty Jeffrey died in 2000, aged a heroic 92.

*

August 24th, 1945!
The war is over. Who will be first here to take us home? We are free women! [The war ended on August 15th, 1945, but prison camps were not informed of this.]

August 26th, 1945.
I was having a grand attack of malaria the day we heard, and couldn’t write the wonderful news in my diary, but what happened was this:

A message was sent round the camp saying that Siki would be making one of his speeches up on the hill at 3 p.m. The rumours were getting stronger every hour and the excitement in the Indonesian block was terrific. They were certain the war was over. We all hoped Siki would tell us our rumours were true, but deep down inside we thought it would be his usual rubbish. After all, the end of the war would be a tremendous event, and why should it happen this day?

Some people said the war must be over, because the Chinese who brought in the rations said
tabi mem
, which is ‘good morning’, for the first time in years. We were usually termed ‘orangs’, which are pretty low types in any language.

Nobody could be bothered going up the hill to hear Siki, but after a while Blanchie and Flo Trotter wandered up just to put in an appearance. The rest of us went on with our chores or our malaria.

After a while Katrine, a Chinese girl who lives with the nuns next door, ran past and said to Sister James and myself, ‘War is finished at six o’clock tonight and big gate opened!’ and ran on. We still thought it a rumour and didn’t bother to tell the other girls, but we both had an odd, excited feeling inside us which refused to settle down. In a little while somebody else ran past and said the same thing, then Blanchie and Flo arrived back positively beaming and breathless, and said it was true … Oh, what a glorious feeling!

Siki made a very short speech. He merely said, ‘War is ended, Americano and English will be here in a few days. We are now all friends!’ He did not say who won the war.

Somebody made a huge tin of black coffee, and we celebrated and talked, but nobody was unduly excited, we were too stunned.

When we realised there wasn’t any more of that awful tenko and standing outside bowing to these little horrors, no more face-slapping, no more standing in the sun for punishment, we started to get really excited, and by 6 p.m. the noise in the camp was terrific.

It is marvellous to be
free
and to be able to wander outside the barbed wire for a walk through the rubber and to collect some wood. How many thousands of times we have talked about being free, and now it is here everything seems just the same –
except
that the day after the announcement in came some vegetables for us, and boxes and boxes of medical stores, bandages, quinine, vitamin tablets, serums, powdered milk, butter, etc. All this stuff was carried down from the guard house to the hospital.

There were dozens of enamel wash-basins, towels by the score, and huge mosquito nets, almost young houses, made from cotton material that we at once tore into strips to make sheets and night attire. We shall be quite well stocked and living in comfort in a few days’ time when the Allies come. All this must be the contents of the Red Cross parcels promised us early this year.

Shortie and I were allowed one day of freedom, then we were both put very smartly into hospital, fuming at the thought of missing the fun and games now going on. As we were admitted Jess and Iole were discharged so we could have their bed-space. We were told by the doctors it was to give us a rest before we started on our journey home. That sounded good enough for us, so in we went.

The thought that home is really in sight at last is almost too much to grasp. Home, the place we have had on our minds for the last few years till we have gone nearly crazy, is now a certainty this year. All of us can say now that we shall be home by next Christmas and know we are right this time. Last May I was chatting with one of the Indonesian women as we were doing our washing in the creek, and she told me then that we would be in Australia in September this year. Oh, I do hope it is true and we are all taken out of this deathtrap quickly!

How lucky is a Dutch woman in hospital here! She was brought in early today suffering an agonising pain. Her trouble was diagnosed as a ruptured gall bladder; the four women doctors immediately got in touch with a Japanese doctor and demanded instruments, anaesthetic and other medical supplies and a place to operate.

A Dutch doctor was brought to a house up on the hill in the German settlement there. A room was prepared and an operation performed successfully. If this had happened a few days ago nothing could have been done – Japs never would co-operate. Two of our girls set up the operating theatre and assisted with the operation.

Amana, the guard, had the nerve to come round and call us to tenko yesterday morning. He got a very poor reception; we did not expect it and were not standing in two lines for him. He was furious and screamed at us, but we took no notice of him. Later Mrs Hinch reported him and he was punished in front of us by his superior officer. This freedom is going to be good!

Chris Oxley’s luck is outstanding. For months now she has threatened to sell her four back teeth on their little gold bridge so she could buy food. As she was quite penniless she gave them to an Indonesian guard a few nights ago to sell for her on the black market. Next day we were told we were free. Poor Chris! We couldn’t help laughing at her luck, and she laughed, too, but today the guard returned them to her. We were all quite surprised, because she said she didn’t know which guard she gave them to and had really said goodbye to them.

August 27th, 1945
. Most of us have been numb for the first few days of this freedom, but what really brought it home to us was when the civilian men from their camp a mile or two away on the same rubber estate walked into our camp to see their wives and families and took absolutely no notice of Siki. How we enjoyed seeing that! They walked straight past the Jap guards and did not even look their way.

There were very few British men left alive, but we were just as excited as anybody else to see real men at last and dressed in white shirts and shorts, after seeing nothing but bandy-legged monkeys dressed in khaki running around for three and a half years (and two weeks). These huge six-footers from Holland and a few of our own men have come here for the last three days and taken complete control of the camp. They have formed into working squads, chopping down trees near the kitchen to save carrying wood longer distances, into kitchen squads, food scouts, and so on. Last week our vegetable ration sat in the sun and rain for days, the best of it was picked out and fed to the pigs, the remainder to us. This week we have so much rice we can’t cope with it all! The scouts have found a good supply of carrots. The kitchen today is full of rice and carrots.

We have had meat each day for three days now. Some of the men go out in the jungle and shoot wild pigs or deer, and they promise to keep up the supply. Instead of our usual little ration of gristle and skin we now have thick pork stew and plenty of it. As Shortie and I were in hospital we were given liver soup made specially for the patients. It was superb.

The men have also found lots of papayas, which are given to everybody in camp. This fresh fruit is going to work wonders for us all. They tell us the fruit is rotting on the trees outside the camp, and to think these nasty little Nips wouldn’t let us have any! We should all be well again in no time.

One thing I forgot to mention – the very first thing the Japs gave us all, the day after Siki’s speech, was a lipstick! One between two people. About an hour after that we were given a bottle of scent and a bottle of Chinese hair oil, also to be shared. It was most amusing to see women dashing about with crimson lips. It seemed to make their eyes shine, and we all looked so well! The scent is a bit overpowering, so we are not very interested in it.

Today ‘Dutchy’ arrived on the door step of Hut 13. We have not seen Dutchy since February 1942. He was taken prisoner when we were at Muntok, and he helped us there quite a lot by ‘acquiring’ food for us when we were so terribly hungry during those first two awful weeks. The girls said he arrived laden with food and announced that he had come to cook all day for the whole group of Australian nurses. At the moment I have only half finished a huge lunch he sent over here. The rest will have to wait until later on in the afternoon. It is fried rice and chicken, wonderful.

Yesterday the men brought more goods which they had found somewhere, and we were given half a bar of Jap soap, awful stuff, and one small cake of our own decent civilised soap, three packets of Japanese cigarettes, also a four-ounce tin of Australian butter. Shortie and I are to share the butter, but as we have had so much good, rich pork in the last few days, we thought if we opened the butter that would probably finish us off. After all we have not had any butter for three and a half years.

Today we were able to buy a ‘koekje’, a small sweet biscuit, so we opened the tin of butter and put some on our cake. It was good! We also had a teaspoonful of bacon given to us, which we ate as soon as we got it.

All I want now is home and mother, a bottle of icy-cold lemonade, and some bread and jam. It is almost too much to believe that this may all happen any day.

Still August 27th, 1945
. I have written this diary spasmodically for three and a half years, but now it is written almost hourly because good things are happening so quickly. Hell has turned into heaven almost overnight. Thank goodness this diary does not have to be hidden any more, it looks a wreck.

The men are here in hordes to mend our leaking roofs, cutting firewood a decent size, making bridges at the hospital doorways to save us walking and falling in thick mud and water, and doing the cooking. They even send round a menu! This is in Dutch, of course, but that is easy to read when you are longing for a change in the diet. Now at 4 p.m. comes the message: ‘No more money troubles, the Dutch Government will send in food and will pay for it.’ What a relief that is, after living on our wits, more or less, all this time, trying to earn money to buy miserable bits of food to keep body and soul together!

August 28th, 1945
. The men have organised us properly and their kitchen staff are doing a wonderful job. They cook and serve food properly and it is still hot when we get it. Our kitchen staff had been too tired to be able to do it properly, and there were few people well enough to help them. They must have shouted for joy when the men arrived to take over. Today our lunch rice was fried in pork fat and had little pieces of pork through it; yesterday we had curried pork with our rice. Apparently the shooting efforts of the men in the jungle are most successful. Thank you, men. Fowls and eggs are now beginning to appear on the scene.

I have never thought much about the hair on men’s legs before, but at the moment a large Dutchman is working just outside the hospital doorway, making a decent path, and his hairy legs are a delight to gaze upon after seeing shiny, hairless, bandy yellow legs for so long.

Stop Press
. Sister Palm is said to be at Benkoelen, about one hundred miles away, not in Sweden.

August 29th, 1945
. Did some bartering with a native today, so the Malay we have been learning really works. He gave me 15 bananas for a few Jap cigarettes. Tomorrow he said he will bring me ten eggs for ten cigarettes. We shall all be able to have an egg.

The natives wander through the camp now with fowls and bananas. They want clothes. They must be hard up if they want our clothes, which were old when we got them. They also want cigarettes.

Today we all had half a cup of milk, the first for years. We are getting bacon and papaya each day. It is a wonderful feeling not to be ravenously hungry all day long. This is fun being a patient, quite a change from nursing.

August 31st, 1945
. It is Queen Wilhelmina’s and Pat Gunther’s birthday today and we have had an absolute feast day. The natives gave us a huge bullock and the men skinned and cooked it. We had our first taste of real beef for three years and plenty of it, too. It was as good as any I have had. It is such a novelty to be able to bite on something and chew it after rice, rice, rice. This meat each day is working wonders on us all. We have also had more butter given to us, and we are definitely beginning to feel more human and less like drooping lilies.

September 3rd, 1945
. Out of hospital again, thank goodness. When I was discharged I walked over to Hut 13 and found all the girls sitting there chatting to Australian and Dutch men, the girls looking quite dashing with their lipstick. As I walked in all the men stood up. It quite startled me, it was so unlike life in the camp to see civilised manners again.

Things are coming in each day now. They have apparently been here for ages – things we have asked for over and over again, medicines we begged for and were refused, so our women died. To think they had so much stuff so close to our camp – blankets, mattresses, more boxes of medicines, materials for dresses, undies, silk stockings – and more hair oil! Butter is coming in each day; we were given a pound tin each today, so we are all letting our heads go and having it with every meal. We were also given a good ration of Jap tinned meat, it is quite good.