The Forgotten Highlander - Alistair Urquhart [106]
I told him that I had amoebic dysentery while incarcerated so he put me on a course of inter-muscular injections. He injected my left arm but the skin began to tighten and then swell and became incredibly painful, so he went for the other, which did the same thing. After that I couldn’t lie on my back or sides, couldn’t bear sheets or clothing to touch them. Life was pretty bad despite the relative luxury I was afforded.
I still could not eat properly. I left untouched all of my old favourites, which Mum loved preparing for me. Much to my surprise I craved rice, the lousy stuff that we had all hated so much. The aptly named Dr Rice arranged for me to attend Stracathro Hospital – a large country house near Brechin in the neighbouring county of Angus that had been converted into a military hospital.
They did all of their tests and suggested different foods but I was still unable to take anything except fluids. My health suffered accordingly and I became weaker by the day.
I stayed there for several weeks. I could go home at the weekends but I had little money and nobody in the family had a car, so it was not an option. Mum and Dossie started out one Saturday but got on the wrong bus and never arrived at the hospital.
One day a baffled doctor visited my bedside and said he couldn’t understand why I couldn’t take food. I told him, ‘If you had to survive on nothing else but rice and water for three and a half years, then maybe you could understand!’
‘Yes, perhaps you are right. We just don’t know what else to do for you,’ he said rather ashamedly.
‘Maybe my body is craving rice,’ I suggested in a less defensive tone.
‘We could try it.’
It seemed logical and perhaps not surprisingly it worked. My body responded to the rice and seemed to relax. My throat opened up and my bowels went from a stormy sea to a millpond. I ate rice pudding every day for several weeks – and relished it too! After a while I was put on to tripe, which did me the world of good, and then on to some white fish.
After three months and a final prognosis of having suffered from a duodenal ulcer, I came out of hospital armed with instructions for my mum on how to cook tripe, which she despised. She cooked fish, poached in milk, and servings of rice, as exotic as it got in those days. To this day I still have to eat rice two or three times a week, with some fish or chicken. Anything else causes havoc with my insides. One of my favourite dishes in Singapore had been a curry but never again. Even an onion is enough to set me off. The diet courtesy of the Emperor’s Imperial Army, along with years of dysentery, had destroyed the linings in my stomach and done irreparable damage.
Thanks to my new diet and more rest and recuperation at home – where I hardly had to lift a finger – my body, mind and soul began to recover. I wrote to the Royal Army Pay Corps headquarters, gave them my rank and number, and asked for payments because I was still unfit for work. They tallied up my pay for my time as a POW and after deductions for ‘subsistence’ I received the grand sum of £434.00 – for the period from 15 February 1942 to 18 November 1945.
The charge for ‘subsistence’ infuriated me – they were making us pay for those handfuls of maggoty rice. Yet it was standard practice and applied to all returning prisoners. It is a miracle that they did not charge me for the loss of my rifle, as they did some men.
Early in 1946 and still a de facto member of the British Army, I was summoned to appear in front of a medical board at Woodend Hospital, Aberdeen. The board comprised four well-fed and comfortable-looking officers sitting behind a desk. They told me that the conditions of my military discharge hinged on my producing my Army ‘records’ and that unless I could produce records of all the diseases that beset me in the POW camps, they were not able to consider my situation.
I was stunned. I sat in an awkward silence trying to compose my thoughts and control my rage, before speaking.
‘Sirs,’ I said.