The Forgotten Highlander - Alistair Urquhart [56]
The Japanese never allowed us to speak while working. You had to speak with your head down, in hushed tones, to someone, ‘Hey, slow down mate. You’re making it worse for all of us.’
While I could successfully fake the amount of effort I was putting in on pick and shovel duty, I couldn’t escape the toil of carrying rocks in the baskets. It was the most difficult task. You had to be on the move all day, knees buckling under the weight, often down steep inclines. It was especially difficult during the monsoon season and caused more injuries than anything else.
Each day the Japanese increased our task. We had managed twenty feet the day before so today they wanted twenty-five feet. I whispered to the guys in my work party, ‘Let’s not do it. Let’s go slow.’
They all agreed. We went on a go-slow all day, chuckling to ourselves as the shadows lengthened. By the time it got dark we were a little over halfway through what they wanted us to do. But the plan backfired. Instead of returning to camp at 6 p.m., the soldiers set up arc and carbide lamps, bamboo fires, containers filled with diesel fuel, oil and hessian wicks, anything they could lay their hands on, to keep us there well after nine in the evening, until we had finished the task.
No matter what time of the year, summer or winter, it was always dark by the time we got back to camp. Most evenings men would gather outside the huts and chat before they hit the hay. I would occasionally join them but I would stand on the fringes and not say anything. There was not much to chat about, although a lot of men were married and would talk about their families back home. These slightly older men in their thirties and forties seemed to survive in much greater numbers. Surprisingly it was the young men who died first on the railway. Perhaps the older ones were stronger emotionally. Perhaps with families they had more to live for. I sometimes wondered if I would die without having a family and without having had the chance to live a life, and then quickly try to banish these thoughts before getting my head down.
The huts teemed with bloodsucking bed bugs that would emerge just before dawn to torment us. We could never eliminate them; we had no chemicals or anything like that. When you caught them and crushed them they smelled absolutely disgusting. After a few weeks of being eaten alive by bugs while sleeping on the floor of the hut, I decided to try a night sleeping outside. I did not know what would happen to me if I did but I judged it was worth the chance of being bashed by the guards. I always slept near the front of the hut, third man in on the right, and sneaked out during the night, careful not to make a noise, around the side of the hut. I lay down in the dirt. It was undulating but soft and cool. The stars were out and the high sky seemed to muffle the constant malariainduced moaning of men and the tormented cries brought on by nightmares. The jungle noises by now had lost their edge for me and I fell asleep quickly. When I awoke I joined the breakfast queue, feeling much more sprightly and relaxed than I had after sleeping in the packed and restless hut. The unbroken rest would pay dividends during a day on the railway. I slept outside most nights from then on. Strangely nobody commented on it and no one copied me.
There were some, however, who got up in the night to stretch their restless feet. It was quite normal for men to walk outside and find a cool spot, some wet leaves or damp soil, to cool their ‘happy feet’ – the name we gave to the very painful burning sensation caused by beriberi, which was brought on by acute vitamin deficiency.
A full-time burial party of six men now worked in the camp. It was comprised of the same six souls, who never went out to work on the railway. While digging graves in the jungle was by no means easy work, it was easier, physically at least, than being on the railway. But seeing those poor dead men must