The Forgotten Highlander - Alistair Urquhart [42]
We all lined up to sign and it seemed to take ages. Some men signed as ‘Mickey Mouse’ or ‘Robin Hood’, while ‘Ned Kelly’ was a popular choice with the Australians. After standing in line for hours it finally came to my turn. I signed as ‘AK Urquhart’ but deliberately made it an illegible scrawl so I could deny it if need be.
Once you signed you were moved to your new barracks, or camps as they now were. As Gordon Highlanders we stayed put at our barracks in Selarang, along with some members of the Malay Volunteer Force. The Japanese used Selarang as a propaganda victory. They could tell their population how cowardly we were, how easily they took Singapore and that we were a feeble enemy.
The Selarang Incident was mentally and physically draining. We had been on an emotional roller-coaster, playing for the highest stakes. It also marked a dark new phase in our relationship with our captors.
We were surviving each day at a time. Every day seemed longer and tougher than the previous day. Freddie was the only one who did not seem to be suffering. One steamy October day in 1942 a British officer’s runner found me at my hut and snapped, ‘You’re to report to Lieutenant Emslie’s office straight away!’
‘What for?’ I asked, annoyed at his abrupt manner, which seemed uncalled for.
The runner looked at me and said with a wry smile, ‘You’re down to go to a holiday camp.’
I reported to Lieutenant Emslie’s office. He said, ‘You’ve been selected to go on a draft up-country. Get organised and be ready for parade at 8 a.m. tomorrow.’
He refused to tell me any more but I suspected that even he did not have more information. I trudged back to my hut, trying to compute the information, wondering what he meant by ‘up-country’ and working out how to tell the boys. They would be devastated.
Back at the hut I sat the boys down and relayed the news, emphasising the part about its being a ‘holiday camp’. They were understandably upset.
Jim said, ‘But who will look after us?’
‘An officer will make sure you are looked after,’ I said, reigning in rampant emotions.
While I was only a few years older than the boys, I had become a father figure to them over the last few months. We had formed a strong bond and it was being ripped apart. They felt abandoned and I felt as if I had failed them.
Four
Death March
I did not sleep a wink that night. I scrunched my eyes tight to block out the horrible visions but all I could see were images of us being taken away to be executed. I imagined us being led into a field and shot in the back, machine-gunned on a beach, bayoneted or beheaded on the deck of some Japanese warship.
The next morning I said my goodbyes to the boys. It felt like leaving my family all over again. None of them tried to stop me going, they knew that would have been fruitless, yet their eyes betrayed their fear and concern. As I went to leave, Freddie grasped my arm and with tears welling up in his eyes said, ‘See you later, mucker.’
I reported to the parade ground, trying as best I could to compose myself. Despite my anxiety I had to focus on what lay ahead. I was joined by twenty or thirty other Gordon Highlanders out of the five or six hundred stationed at Changi at that time. Cleverly the Japanese did not send a whole bunch of men from one battalion together. They always took care to split us up. None of the Malay Volunteers billeted at Selarang had been selected for this mysterious task, whatever it was.
The Japanese officer in charge began shouting in staccato and through his interpreter broke the ‘good’ news. He told us, ‘You have been selected as the best men for this duty.