The Forgotten Highlander - Alistair Urquhart [58]
With the agreement of the Japanese, the burial party built two six-foot-square bamboo cages. The ‘madmen’ could stand or lie down in these, just ten feet from my hut, and they had a bench to sit on. They received food and water but sadly were largely ignored. At night it was awful to hear them in the darkness jabbering and screaming, throwing themselves at the cage sides. The men who went in there never came out alive. Death would have been welcome for them. It was a dreadful thing to see our fellow beings caged like animals but what else could we do?
By now the lack of food at Kanyu I had become a major issue. Only those on work parties received rations. The sick were not given any food so ours had to be divided up so they could have some. The more sick men there were, the less food I got as a worker. It was a terrible situation.
The Japanese decided how many bags of rice we required but the way in which it was distributed was up to our officer. I didn’t know how he came to his decisions; we just hoped he was fair.
When the Japanese felt we had been especially disrespectful or dishonest, we would be punished collectively with further reductions to our meagre rations. This happened only on rare occasions, not through any good grace on their behalf, but because the human body simply cannot operate on anything less than the rice we received.
I was really beginning to struggle. While my muscles had become used to the rhythm of work, I had become very ill and weak. Due to the lack of vitamin B in our plain rice diets, all of us had fallen victim to beriberi. In the long term it could be worse than dysentery or malaria. In the short term it gave me a swollen tummy and a tremendous pain in my joints, like a very bad toothache. My eyes too were beginning to give me trouble, stinging from the constant glare of the sun on the dirt and clay. The lack of vitamins entering my system worsened their state and I was lucky not to go blind, as others did. We called the blindness that sometimes came with beriberi, ‘camp eyes’, and lived in terror of going blind. At first men noticed their range of vision reduce to around ten metres and that everything was blurred. Then they would go blind altogether. The medics assured us it was temporary but I did not want to discover for myself. I also had very little chance of getting a proper sleep and the nightmares of surrender at Fort Canning continued as terrifyingly real as ever.
As if all this was not bad enough I started to suffer from kidney stones, brought on by constant dehydration. I had first had an attack of those devilishly painful daggerballs during my early days in Singapore while still with the Gordons. Downtown when they struck, the pain doubled me over and caused me to actually shout out in public. I didn’t know what was happening so I paid a visit to the Alexandra Hospital. They told me to drink lime juice once a day and as much water as I could. Now with mere droplets dribbling past my cracked lips, the kidney stones struck often and with excruciating regularity. With no pethidine or morphine it was sheer hell. A worse pain I have never experienced.
Kidney stones tortured me for the next few years as a POW. The pain was so bad that I started to pray, the first time I had ever lent on God’s