The Other Side of Paradise (22 page)

‘English lessons. He wants to improve his English conversation. It was rather a hoot.’

It hadn’t been a hoot, though. To be a captive, to be completely in someone else’s power and to fear what they might do if they so chose was the most terrifying thing on earth. She was still trembling, her heart still pounding away as she lay on the floor in the dark. The mosquitoes had started their nightly raid. Some animal – probably a monkey – called out suddenly from the jungle. It sounded like mocking laughter.

Lady Battersby was released a few days later. She tottered out into the compound, blinking in the glare of the sun. Incredibly, her navy leghorn straw hat was still on her head, her gloves on her hands, her stockings on her legs, her white court shoes on her feet, her white leather handbag over her arm, and the snailshell hair in position. Only the pearl choker was missing, confiscated by the Japanese. She waved away all offers of support in the same old peremptory manner, but she looked frail and much older. At
tenko
the next morning all eyes were on her, all breaths held as she stood in the front row. If she refused there would be more long hours standing in the sun for them all. After a long and tense moment, she bowed.

Another prisoner arrived alone – a tall girl in ragged clothes, with wild hair and skin burned deep brown. Susan watched her stride in through the gateway, ignoring the guards and their bayonets. It wasn’t until she heard her Australian voice that she realized it was Stella.

Like all new arrivals, she was instantly mobbed by the others and bombarded with questions. Where had she come from? What had happened to her? What news did she have of the war? Stella told her story. When the ship had been sunk she had got on to a raft with other nurses, and they had drifted for several days. Three of the nurses had died before the raft was washed up on a deserted beach, and the rest of them were in very bad shape. After a day or two they had decided to try to find a way through the jungle to reach help. They had set off but she had somehow got separated from the others. She had come across a river and followed it until some Jap soldiers had seen her and brought her to the camp. She had no idea what had happened to the other nurses.

‘I didn’t realize it was you at first,’ Susan told her later.

‘Same here. You look like you’ve been through the wars a bit.’

‘How did you manage to hang on to your shoes?’

‘I never took them off. And thank God I didn’t. I’ve needed them, I can tell you. What about those two little kids you were looking after?’

‘They’re here. We were lucky. We all survived.’

‘Tell me about it.’

She told her. Stella whistled.

‘Crikey, you
were
lucky. I was too. This place might not be five star, but at least we’re alive.’

‘What about the other nurses that were with you?’

‘They’re dead.’

Susan stared at her. ‘All of them? Are you sure?’

‘Certain. Swear you won’t ever breathe a word and I’ll tell you about it.’

They walked away to a corner of the compound and Stella talked in a low voice. When the raft had been washed up on the beach, they had found other survivors there – British sailors from another ship, one of them seriously wounded. They had done what they could for the wounded man but he had died during the night. The next day a group of Japanese soldiers had arrived. The British sailors had been marched off round a corner out of sight and the nurses had heard shots before the Japs had returned wiping blood from their bayonets.

Stella said, ‘We knew what they’d done, of course, the murdering bastards. Next thing, their officer told us nurses to get in a row and made us walk away from them into the sea. Then they machine-gunned us in the back. They missed me but I pretended I’d been hit. I fell face down in the water and floated there, as though I was dead. When they’d gone away, I came out and hid in the jungle. You should have seen the sea – it was all red with blood. I was the only one to survive.’

‘Oh God, how horrible.’

‘Yeah, pretty gruesome, isn’t it? I didn’t tell the others that part of the story because if the Nips find out that I was a witness they’ll kill me. So, swear you won’t tell a soul.’

‘I swear.’

‘You see, I’ve made up my mind that, whatever happens, I’m going to stay alive so that when we’ve finally won this bloody war I can see to it that those pigs get punished for what they did. They’re going to pay for it one day.’

Soon after Stella’s arrival, they were moved across the Bangka Strait to another camp in Palembang in Sumatra. The long journey began in the dark at three in the morning when the women and children walked in a weary line to the quayside, carrying their few possessions and a handful of cooked rice wrapped in a banana leaf to last them for the day. They walked slowly, some of them limping from sores and unhealed wounds, others weak from sickness. After several hours waiting on the quayside they were ferried out in small boats to a dirty old tramp steamer with open decks. There was no protection from either the blazing sun or the drenching rain which came and went alternately on the twenty-mile crossing over the strait into the mouth of the Musi River. There were sixty more miles in steaming heat until they finally reached Palembang in the late afternoon. After waiting for several more hours on the quayside they were transported to the new camp, standing up in open trucks and booed by the natives gathered on the roadside.

It was larger than the previous camp – a rectangular space, surrounded by a wire fence, about a hundred yards long and fifty yards wide and with one well. The prisoners were kept in vermin-infested bamboo huts with rusty corrugated-iron roofs, and they slept on bare concrete floors – thirty or more to each small, airless hut. Rain dripped in through leaky roofs, lizards crawled about the walls, snakes slithered in between cracks and curled up in corners, enormous spiders and rats ran over them at night and lice and leeches and mosquitoes had a human feast.

The daily rations were delivered by truck and thrown out on to the ground for them to retrieve like starving dogs – rotten cabbages, decaying beans, mouldy carrots, sacks of dirty rice full of weevils, fat maggots and bits of broken glass and stones. Sometimes they were tossed a hunk of decomposing wild pig that had to be hacked into fair shares for each hut with a penknife and ended up as a tiny sliver for each person. Cooking was done in empty kerosene cans and tins over wood fires fuelled by chopped-up doors, all water carried in one bucket from the well. There were no baths or showers and the lavatory was an open concrete drain, used also by the guards – stinking and fly-ridden.

More prisoners arrived in lorries. English civilians, Dutch nuns in their flowing white habits and Dutch families weighed down with suitcases and boxes crammed with their possessions. The men were immediately marched away, the women and children left behind to swell the camp numbers. There were now nearly four hundred crowded into the twelve huts. Natives from the surrounding
kampongs
came to the wire to stare and point at them, the children giggling behind their hands.

The camp commandant, Captain Hatsuho, was a short man with stiff black hair and a voice like a dog’s bark. He spoke no English and his screaming harangues at
tenko
, standing on an old packing box, were translated unintelligibly by one of the guards. Punishments were meted out at random – blows to the head, slaps to the face, withdrawal of rations, solitary confinement. If the bowing was thought not low enough at
tenko
all prisoners, children included, were made to stand for hours in the burning sun. The guards were sadistic, stupid, lazy. Their captives gave them names to suit them: Bandy Legs, Squint Eyes, Pig Face, Buck Teeth.

Among the English arrivals there had been a woman doctor and several nurses, and two of the huts were given over to make a camp hospital. There were no beds, no sheets, no equipment, no quinine or other medicines, but plenty of patients to fill it to overflowing. They made
bali bali
for them to lie on – low pallets of rubber-tree branches bound together. Malaria, fevers and dysentery spread throughout the camp and the row of graves outside it lengthened steadily.

Stella had gone to work in the hospital and her hatred of the Japs increased with every death.

‘One of the kids went today,’ she said. ‘That sweet little girl Ruth. We tried everything but we couldn’t save her – there was nothing to save her with. I’d like to kill every Jap on this earth.’

The violent Sumatra storms had damaged most of the roofs. In the hut where Susan slept with thirty other prisoners, there was a big hole above her. At night, lying on the hard, cold concrete floor, Hua on one side, Peter on the other, she could look up and see the stars shining above. She thought, the Japs can take away our freedom, our dignity, our comfort and almost everything else that matters, but they can’t take away the stars.

Twelve

1942 DRAGGED BY.
The monotonous days became weeks and the weeks became months. Since the Japs did nothing to improve conditions in the camp, the prisoners did what they could for themselves. Two representatives were elected to deal with Captain Hatsuho – a nun, Sister Beatrix, for the Dutch and Miss Tarrant, a missionary schoolteacher, for the British. Lady Battersby had been much put out not to have been chosen, but Miss Tarrant spoke some Japanese and was a much more tactful negotiator. Lessons were started for the children in a corner of the compound and Miss Tarrant managed to persuade Captain Hatsuho to provide paper and pencils. Committees were formed, rations shared out meticulously. Cooking, cleaning and water-carrying rotas were drawn up in each hut, turns taken with the only axe to chop firewood, cooking pans improvised from empty cans with sticks for handles, utensils from tin and wood, washing lines from bamboo. Life in the camp brought out the best and the worst in people: some were always more willing to help than others, some always had excuses. Some were strong and some were weak.

Volunteers gave language lessons, bridge lessons, dancing lessons, singing lessons. Miss Mumford, a music teacher, formed a camp choir and put on concerts. Lady Battersby bullied people into giving talks on every imaginable subject: Cultivating Orchids, Collecting Teapots, Walking the Pennine Way, Breeding Siamese Cats, Life on a Rubber Plantation. Empty rice sacks were stuffed with grass to make mattresses and pillows, dolls and toys fashioned out of odds and ends for the children, and games made by hand – snakes and ladders, ludo, playing cards.

Bartering was done with the native pedlars who came to the camp wire. Susan took one of the gold charms off her bracelet – an elephant – and exchanged it for four bananas which she gave to Peter and Hua. They were tiny and thick-skinned, the fruit inside no bigger than a finger, but they were food. Hua didn’t seem to mind the eternal rice but Peter hated it and he had grown thinner and thinner, his bones sticking out like a starving animal’s. That’s what we’re all doing, Susan thought. Starving to death slowly – if we don’t die quickly.

Dysentery and malaria were rife in the camp. Nothing healed properly. Bites and blisters turned to running sores and ulcers, cuts and scrapes festered, rashes itched and spread, and the flies and the red ants and mosquitoes and insects of all kinds tormented them with their biting and buzzing. The rats ate their clothes as well as what little food they managed to save, and made nests for their young in the huts. They all stank to high heaven because there wasn’t enough water for washing either clothes or bodies, and no soap to wash with. Susan’s hair was like dirty straw, her skin the colour of old mahogany. Everyone had lice and fleas. They were all in the same boat, which was a small comfort, like the stars.

Mrs Cotton lived in Susan’s hut and helped her with the children.

‘My son Harry’s not all that much older than Peter, but he’s safe in school in England, thank God. I cried for days when he went but now I’m glad. The school’s been evacuated to Wales and when we got Harry’s last letter he said he was having a super time. Heaven knows if we’ll ever get any letters in this place. I don’t suppose people outside even know if we’re alive or dead.’

‘The Japs made a list of our names and addresses, so there’s always the hope they might pass it on to the Red Cross.’

‘I doubt it. They don’t care about the Red Cross, do they? Look at what happened to those parcels the other day.’

A lorryload of boxes had arrived outside the camp gates, close by their hut – boxes with American Red Cross in big letters on the side. They had watched excitedly through cracks in the hut walls as they were being unloaded. The guards had wrenched open boxes and pulled out jars of tablets, bottles of medicines, cartons of dressings, cotton wool and bandages. Then they had opened more boxes and fallen on the tinned meat and cheese and milk and butter, the Camels and Chesterfield cigarettes which they stood around chain-smoking.

None of it had found its way into the camp. Not one jar or bottle or carton or tin. The hospital went without the medical supplies and the prisoners went without the food. Supper that evening had been the same old weevilly grey rice with a few bitter
kang kong
leaves, each tiny spoonful eaten very slowly to make it last as long as possible. There was always desperate, terrible craving for something sweet.

The hunger never left them, especially at night when an empty stomach gnawed away like the rats that lived in the huts, and they rolled around in misery. In the dark they talked about their favourite foods, and what they would eat as soon as they were free. Susan lay awake torturing herself by conjuring up lovely dishes that Cookie had served at Cavenagh Road – noodles and shrimps, kung po chicken, shredded pork, crispy won ton. She thought, her mouth watering, of the Sunday curry tiffins at the Tanglin Club, of the dinner parties, of dining at Raffles, of beach picnics with the hampers of food and wine, breakfast on the east verandah with Soojal bringing fragrant coffee and fresh orange juice and a plate of her favourite mangoes and papayas. She even thought of the Indian meal served on banana leaves at the hut Ray had taken her to – which reminded her again, most bitterly, that it was all his fault that she was where she was.