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and then I got knocked about a bit, though I never had a formal beating-up. Only one girl was…given a real Gestapo beating, and that was because she was alleged to have been overheard saying that the Japanese were stupid to have blackouts in the camp when the street lights were blazing.” In Marjorie Lyon’s group of 114 internees, 15 men and 4 women—the latter aged between fifty and seventy-two—died. One of the British women who died in a camp on a derelict rubber estate at Loebeck Linggan was a 1942 fugitive from Singapore named Margaret Dryburgh. Miss Dryburgh was a devout Christian, who cherished the captives’ hymn:

Give us patience to endure

Keep our hearts serene and pure,

Grant us courage, charity,

Greater faith, humility,

Readiness to own Thy will,

Be we free or captive still.

On 21 April 1945, less than four months before the war ended, Margaret Dryburgh lay on a sickbed trying to say her favourite Twenty-third Psalm. A friend understood what she wanted, and stumbled through the words on her behalf. When it was over and a silence fell, the old woman smiled, said simply, “That’s what I wanted703,” and died. At the same period in the hospital where Nini Rambonnet nursed, patients were expiring from malnutrition at the rate of ten a day. Corpses were laid in crude coffins of coconut leaves, on each of which the Japanese laid a bunch of bananas. The living attempted any expedient to assuage hunger. Nini ate toadstools, which made her very sick indeed. One of the girls, in that time of despair, asked a guard who spoke Malay when they would be released. He answered: “Not until your hair is grey704 and your teeth have fallen out.”

2. Hell Ships

ALTHOUGH LABOUR on the Burma railway represented the worst fate that could befall an Allied POW, shipment to Japan as a slave labourer was an ordeal which also proved fatal to many. On 17 June 1944, prisoners were paraded in Hall Romney’s camp on the railway. The commandant announced that they were being transferred to Japan. “Looking back on the past year and ten months since camps were first established in Siam,” said the Japanese officer benignly,

you have worked both earnestly and diligently and produced a great achievement in the construction of the Siam–Burma railway…For this we wish to express sincere appreciation. Your work in Siam having finished, you are being transported to the Land of the Rising Sun, an island country joyously situated and rich in beautiful scenery. From time immemorial our Imperial Nippon has had the honour of respecting justice and morality…They are men and women of determination, generous by nature, despising injustice in accordance with the old Nippon proverb “The huntsman does not shoot the wounded bear.” In spring the cherry blossoms are in full bloom. In summer fresh breezes rustle over the shadow of green trees. In autumn the glorious moon throws its entrancing light on sea and river…

After many more minutes of such lyrical rhetoric before his audience of half-dead men, the Japanese commandant concluded: “I wish you ‘bon voyage.’” The prisoners were sent on their way.

Conditions in the holds of transport ships were always appalling, sometimes fatal. Overlaid on hunger and thirst was the threat of U.S. submarines. The Japanese made no attempt to identify ships carrying POWs, of whom at least 10,000 perished following Allied attacks. RAOC wireless mechanic Alf Evans was among 1,500 men in the holds of the Kachidoki Maru on the night of 11 September 1944, when the ship was hit by four torpedoes. Evans was lucky. Suffering malaria, he was sleeping with other sick men on a hatch cover on the forward deck, instead of being battened below. As the ship began to settle, he asked a gunner officer: “What do I do? I can’t swim.” The gunner said: “Now’s the time to learn.” Evans jumped, and dog-paddled to a small raft to which three other men were already clinging. One had two broken legs, another a dislocated thigh. They were all naked, and coated in oil. A Japanese soldier hung on for a while, reciting repeatedly