The Heat of the Sun

bills he’d received as his reward.
    ‘The bastard had taken us back to Hong Kong.
    ‘They say the Japs think you’re a dead man once you’re a POW. Well, Wainwright and I were dead. Whatever we’d been before didn’t matter now. They sent us to Sham
Shui Po Camp. We were starved, beaten, humiliated at every turn.
    ‘Some of the torments would be funny if they weren’t so ghastly. Wainwright and I hadn’t been there long when three British officers managed to escape. After they’d gone,
details of their scheme were all over camp: swim across Laichikoh Bay, scud through the occupied territories, hook up with Chiang Kai-shek’s crowd before making it to India and freedom.
Christ knows if the poor devils got that far, or any farther than the other side of the bay, but from the way the Japs carried on you’d think it was an escape worthy of Houdini.
    ‘They decided we all had to sign a statement: I, the undersigned, hereby swear solemnly on my honour that I shall not under any circumstances attempt to escape. Would you believe
it? Me, I’d have been all for signing if only they’d keep our pathetic rations coming, but some of the Brit officers got it into their heads that this just wasn’t cricket –
Geneva Conventions and all that – and Wainwright was with them all the way. The guards lined us all up on the parade ground for days, wilting in summer heat, while the CO virtually begged us
to sign, sign, sign. We did in the end. Next thing we knew, a couple of Australians tried to break out. They were dragged back in chains and we all had to watch as they stood before the firing
squad. Bam! Bam!
    ‘Those months in Sham Shui Po seem like halcyon days now, given what happened later. I’d worried about Wainwright, but he thrived; something about the man seemed immune to adversity,
or that’s what I thought then. Perhaps it was his sense of humour. Absurdity piled on absurdity: here were Wainwright and I, not even soldiers, lumped in with men who were; here was
Wainwright up to his old tricks, inventing one amazing story after another to explain how he, with that royal family voice, happened to be wearing an American colonel’s uniform – and
meanwhile doing his best to gamble his way to happiness, POW-camp style. In all this, I was his eager assistant.
    ‘It must have been 1943, around Easter-time I suppose, when Wainwright and I and hundreds of others were informed that we were being moved. For what? We couldn’t fathom it. But
before we knew it we’d been marched down to the harbour and herded on to the decks of a Jap freighter.
    ‘The voyage was a long one. The sun beat down, tropical rains fell, but we had no protection from either. Rations were piffling , as Wainwright used to say, and often rotten; there
was never enough water to go around and what there was stank like piss. Soon half the fellows were sick and more than a few had died. I’ll spare you details of the diarrhoea and dysentery, of
the brimming latrine buckets, of the rats that scampered over our faces as we lay in sunburned stupor on the decks.
    ‘Days and weeks went by. We stopped twice – at Manila, I think, and somewhere else, Saigon perhaps, where they took on more prisoners, crowding the ship even more intolerably.
Finally, we docked in Singapore. We still didn’t know why they had brought us so far. Had they taken us from Sham Shui Po all the way to Changi – one prison camp to another – only
to torment us? Why didn’t the devils shoot us and be done with it? But Wainwright said the Japs did nothing without reason. He was right.
    ‘We’d been in the Changi camp no more than a night and a day before the guards formed us into battalions, several hundred men in each. Singapore was just a staging post. They shipped
us off by railroad, in cattle trucks, packed so tight we could neither lie nor sit, while equatorial sun beat down on us. How many men died in those trucks, I wouldn’t like to guess.
    ‘For the first time in my long travails, I’d been separated from Wainwright; I was desperate to know what had become of him, but there was no way I could find out. The trains headed
north, scything up through the Malay peninsula.
    ‘The journey took a week; then there was no railroad any more and those of us who could still stand were forced to march, mile after mile every day over slithery jungle tracks as warm rain
beat down. If you fell behind, the guards thrashed you; if you died, they left your