The Forgotten Highlander - Alistair Urquhart [78]
Our destination was the River Valley Road camp, in Singapore City, where a new chapter of slavery and misery awaited us. Still we felt relieved to have survived the nightmare train journey from Thailand and pleased to be out of the jungle and back amid familiar surroundings, which served as a reminder that civilisation really did still exist even if our brutal captors remained strangers to it. And surely nothing could be worse than the diseaseridden camps of the Death Railway. Hellfire Pass and the bridge over the river Kwai with all of their horrors were behind us now. Or so we thought . . .
There were about a thousand men in the camp at that time. The Japanese were using it as a holding centre for prisoners destined to slave in their vast South-East Asian gulag, a network of prison camps linked to construction sites and industrial complexes vital for their war effort. With complete disregard for international law, starving prisoners sweated in the steaming jungles of Burma, Thailand, Borneo, the Philippines and Sumatra, and shivered in horrific and freezing conditions in coal and copper mines in Taiwan, Korea and Manchuria. By late 1943 acute manpower shortages in Japan itself led to the construction on the Japanese mainland of a system of prison camps adjacent to factories and mines operated by some of Japan’s best-known companies.
The camp at River Valley Road was a little better than the camps on the railway. The accommodation remained very basic, made from timber, but its four walls provided more shelter from the elements than the open-sided huts on the railway. The trouble was this served only to make the huts a safer haven for the swarms of bugs that we had to contend with, now even more numerous than on the railway. They got everywhere: in your bed, in the rafters and buzzing around your head constantly. Of course we had no mosquito nets. Bed bugs were also rife, sucking precious blood from you as you slept. And then there were the rats that fought for space in the hut with thirty or forty prisoners. Regularly in the night men would angrily cry out to scare away rats that showed increasingly little fear of humans. Each man had only about two and a half feet of space to call his own. If one rolled over, we all had to roll over. You would lie on your back on the bare boards without blankets. With just your Jap-happy on it got very cold at night.
Thankfully it was not the monsoon season so at least we didn’t have the rain and mud to put up with. The toilet facilities were basic, open wooden structures with a roof overhead, which was much the same as the shower block. The smell of the latrines was overpowering, as were the hordes of bugs and great clouds of disease-carrying blue-bottles. People dreaded having to pay a visit.
A wooden fence surrounded the camp and had watchtowers stationed at intervals, manned by Japanese guards with machine guns. The security was not as tight as one might have expected. The Japanese knew that even if we did manage to escape the camp we had nowhere to go. And as Westerners we would have stuck out like sore thumbs.
Guards patrolled the compound ceaselessly, usually on solo patrols but always within shouting distance of another sentry. They were pretty sure of themselves. I used to struggle to sleep at night, often from the constant pain of beriberi, which mostly hit my legs but arms as well – any joints really. In the absence of painkillers I would often go for a walk around the camp. The guards never minded as long as you walked within your own space. I just wandered aimlessly to ease up my joints and in the hope that I would get so exhausted that sleep would overtake the pain. Quite a few men used to walk at night. I would recognise the same faces but always walked on my own – you were