The Forgotten Highlander - Alistair Urquhart [79]
At River Valley Road I suffered from a recurring nightmare, always of the Death Railway. A Japanese guard with horrific bulging eyes filled with fury and evil would be beating me. All I could see was his enraged face, him just laying into me. I would wake up sweating, scared to death. And no matter what I did I could never get back to sleep.
Again I often slept on the ground just outside my hut. It was mighty cold but free of the bugs and the irritations of the other men and the old trick I had learned on the railway still worked – I got a better sleep. I didn’t allow myself to think of home. All I could do was to think about the next day and how I would face it. I was psyching myself to make it through another day of hell and torture. To think of home was too much. It brought me down. Later when I thought my number was up I allowed myself to think of home – as a final, pleasurable treat because I thought I was going to die.
The officers and warrant officers at River Valley Road had their own huts and kept themselves apart. But they really had no authority over us. They were now just the same as everyone else – slave labour for an enemy that regarded us all, officers and ordinary soldiers alike, as subhumans to be worked to death. The only difference was that the officers never wore Jap-happies, their khaki shorts easily distinguishing them. Just like us though, they had to slave at Singapore’s docks. Only one officer was permitted to stay behind in the camp. The Japanese used to pick which would stay behind and if they thought an officer bolshie he would always be on the work party. Morale and discipline stayed rock-bottom in the camp and our commanding officer, Captain R. D. Wilkie, even suffered the indignity of being robbed of his own personal and company funds. There was very little respect for officers.
Riddled with dysentery, malaria, beriberi, tropical ulcers and disease, with bare, blistered feet and wearing just our Jap-happies, we paraded every morning shortly after sunrise. The sun would come up about 6 a.m. and by 7 a.m. you had to be up, have had your food and be ready to go out on the work party. The cook signalled breakfast by rattling a tin and everyone rushed to join the queue. One of the POWs served us – a cup of rice and a cup of boiling water, the same unappetising affair as on the railway, the rice again littered with all sorts of maggots, flies, lice, bed bugs and greyish weevils. Not that I was bothered. I was so hungry and so focused on staying alive that I devoured any food no matter what was in it or how it was contaminated. The cooks again had the advantage. They survived best, never doing hard labour and always better fed. With a bamboo ladle they would scoop up the rice and then skim the top of it using a paddle. Of course how much you got depended on how hard they pulled the ladle through the rice. As the men queued every eye fixed on that ladle, counting virtually every grain. I can see it still. We were in a desperate, horrible state.
Men would often try to call off sick. But it was the Japanese who decided whether or not you were sick enough to be off. You had to be very ill not to work. You were usually safe if you had tropical ulcers, coupled with dysentery or malaria. Yet having just one or the other would not be enough to save you from work. The tropical ulcers I had picked up on the railway were pretty much healed up. So despite continuing to suffer from dysentery and dehydration, during the three months I was at River Valley Road I was never allowed off work. Men died like flies but I never found out the fatality rate in my time there. You never knew how many were dying because you were away at work every day; they died in the so-called hospital wards and had been buried before you returned. There was a part of you too, to be honest, that didn’t want to know.
After all I had been through I had decided