Prisoner from Penang: The moving sequel to The Pearl of Penang

by Clare Flynn

  As soon as we moved out into the strait, the ship was caught up in a tropical storm that sent the ancient boat bucking and groaning, filling us with terror and causing many to be violently sick. I lay on the deck, pelted by driving rain and washed by waves, clutching Mum’s hand, convinced that she was going to die while we were still at sea. All around us sick women and children were vomiting and crying out, distressed and terrified as thunder and lightning split the sky. The boat rose rapidly on the swell, then plummeted vertically downwards from the crest of the waves and we all feared for our lives.

  Not long after the storm subsided, someone pointed through the thick mist to the long finger of a seemingly endless and all-too familiar pier, appearing in front of the ship. There was a collective intake of breath. We were going back to Banka Island, and that must mean to the miserable Muntok camp where our nightmare had begun. I felt my throat close. Next to me one of the Australian nurses let out a groan that spoke for us all.

  Mum was now unconscious. Marjorie was in a worse state, lying next to her, under a filthy sheet, the elephantine swelling of her lower limbs evident through the thin cotton cover. Yet both those brave women survived the rest of our journey – the last part of it mercifully short.

  Instead of that long terrible march through the jungle with heavy luggage, we were herded onto a truck and driven to our destination. When we arrived, to everyone’s initial relief, the Muntok Camp we were taken to was not the one where we had started out. The wooden huts were new and looked more like those of a native village. And the whole place looked clean. There were half a dozen large concrete-floored sleeping huts furnished with newly woven mats to sleep on in significantly more space than we had been used to. To cap it all, there were three designated kitchen areas and a large supply of chopped firewood.

  I turned to Veronica, who had been there for two days already. ‘This seems a big improvement.’ I felt a surge of hope that Nurse Becky’s statement about our needing a reversal of circumstances might prove prophetic.

  ‘Don’t speak too soon, Mary. You haven’t seen the toilets yet.’

  Veronica led me around to the latrines and to my dismay I saw they consisted only of an open pit with bamboo slats over the top.

  She pulled a face. ‘One is expected to squat with one foot on each slat. Better hope your balance is up to it, as there’s nothing between you and the pit.’

  The first time I used the facilities I was filled with bowel-paralysing horror. Between the wooden slats I could see a seething mass of maggots. To add insult to injury, the latrines were sited immediately adjacent to the kitchens, making the task of preparing our miserable rations even more onerous and noxious.

  However, that first night there was more food than we had been accustomed to – including some fish. A number of inmates overindulged and were sick as a consequence. I was not one of them, my hunger tempered by guilt and anxiety over Mum.

  While the plentiful food that first night was good news, the bad news was we had no water to wash and were forced to retire to bed filthy after our exhausting journey.

  The quantity and variety of food did not continue either. Within a week, all nine water wells in the camp, overwhelmed by the inflow of people, were dry. We were back to another daily trudge up and down a treacherously muddy hill to reach a stream, half a mile away.

  One of the bitter ironies of our lengthy imprisonment was that the more beautiful our surroundings, the greater our torment. Here at Muntok, women increasingly fell victim to disease. Marjorie was not the only one with beriberi, and both the wet and dry variants were now frequent throughout the camp. Mrs Hopkins and Beryl both had the dry version and while still able to stand they now moved around the camp like a pair of staggering drunks, unsteady on their shrivelled feet and legs.

  Veronica came upon me that night as I was getting ready for bed. She told me she was going to try and get some quinine for Mum.

  ‘How?’ I had noticed that Veronica’s services to Sergeant Shoei appeared to have ceased since we’d arrived in Muntok. ‘I thought Shoei–’

  ‘Had stopped screwing me?’

  I was shocked by the crudeness of her language but didn’t want to give her the satisfaction of seeing that. ‘Yes.’

  ‘There comes a point when even the Japs would rather do without, than do the dirty with us. Can’t say I blame them.’ She gave her little tinkling laugh. ‘It must be like having intercourse with a bag of spanners. Except spanners don’t smell and have sores all over them.’ She spoke without bitterness, amused rather than angry at the state we were all now in. ‘No. I have an idea how I can get to the supplies though.’

  ‘How?’

  ‘Better you don’t know.’ She gave me a tight little smile. ‘No promises, but I’ll do my best.’

  Veronica was as good as her word and the aspirin she managed to obtain meant Mum’s inevitable passage to death was at least without the levels of pain she would otherwise have had to endure.

  Mum died in the middle of the afternoon of what our collective tallying of the dates indicated was December 18th 1944. I was with her, holding her hand as she slipped away. She’d been unconscious for most of that last day, but I am certain she knew I was there. Just before she died, she opened her eyes, looked at me and said, ‘Sorry, Mary. I must go now. Your father’s waiting for me.’ Her eyes closed and she breathed her last breath.

  It was only after the war was over and I finally received word that Dad too was gone, that I discovered he had died just a few days before her, on December 15th.

  Mum’s was not the only mortality that day. As well as beriberi, the camp’s death toll was added to by the spread of something we called Banka Fever. This was a form of cerebral malaria and every bed in the hospital hut was filled with cases. The nurses were seriously handicapped in their heroic efforts to help the sick by the absence of medication and medical equipment. The Japanese had the supplies, but continued to withhold them, offering a completely inadequate token amount of quinine each month, implying it was more than we deserved. By the time the year drew to its miserable close, around fifteen women were laid to rest in the jungle clearing where Mum was buried.

  I had to dig my own mother’s grave. This is not something I ever expected to have to do. Before we laid her to rest, I slipped Dad’s letter under her hands. She had treasured it all through our captivity, reading it every night before she went to sleep. Now it was falling apart, water-stained, torn and so fragile I doubted I’d have been able to read it even if I’d wanted to.

  Veronica made a simple cross and, using a nail heated in the cooking fire, burnt Mum’s name and the date onto it. I knew it wouldn’t stand long over the little patch of jungle where we buried her. The jungle would take over and eradicate any signs of the growing number of graves there. Marjorie, now in the final stages of beriberi, that would result in her joining Mum in that little corner of the island in just a matter of weeks, was unable to attend Mum’s funeral.

  One of the camp’s small number of missionaries presided over the prayers. Penny had by now joined the choir and she and the other members gathered in the clearing and sang a hymn Mum had liked in church back in George Town, Lord of All Hopefulness. Yet on the day we buried her I had never felt so without hope.

  I stared at that pathetic little wooden cross with only her name burnt onto it: Janet Mary Helston. A tear trickled down my cheek. I brushed it away. No time for crying. I had latrines to empty before the evening meal.

  Christmas that year was just another day. Previously, we had tried to make an effort to sing, to put on little shows or watch the children entertaining us with a nativity play. But the Christmas of 1944, as the war was going the way of the Allies, an end to our torment seemed further from our reach than at any other time since we’d entered captivity. No news of the world outside reached us and we were nearing the point where we could no longer imagine any way out of our suffering than death.

  10

  The Last Camp

  We
were to remain at Muntok for less than six months. Yet again, we were moved at the whim of the Japanese. This was the worst wrench of all. I would be making a move for the first time without Mum, forced to abandon that little patch of Banka where her body lay. The dense jungle would reclaim the ground in which she was buried and there would be no remaining sign of the passing of my poor brave mother. Not for her a quiet, well-tended plot in the graveyard in George Town, with my father laid beside her and a stone headstone with an inscription.

  If I had ever thought of my parents’ last resting place, it was that it would be far ahead in the future. Maybe twenty or thirty years away. Mum’s grave being lost forever in the dense jungle of Banka Island would never have entered my wildest dreams. I had to take consolation from the fact that she was not alone there but surrounded by the graves of many of our friends – almost eighty of them by the time we left the island. There was a large complement from our dormitory in the Van den Boschs’ house – Mum’s friends Beryl and Marjorie, the young bride Sharon Henderson, Mrs Hopkins, Mrs Van den Bosch and her small daughter.

  I was far from hale and hearty myself. Like all of us, I had not been exempt from attacks of dysentery and malaria, but I was younger and fitter than many of the women. As we moved into the first months of 1945, dying was more likely than staying alive for anyone who became ill.

  Everyone in our sisterhood looked up to the Australian nurses. To us mere mortals, they were indestructible and optimistic forces of nature. Yet, as 1945 advanced, they too began to succumb to the tentacles of death. Dying should have become banal, yet each one was a personal tragedy and a source of grief and loss to us. They were all individuals. Each death carried with it a remembered kindness, a regretted angry word, a joint punishment or a shared joke. The women who had irritated or annoyed us at the beginning of our terrible journey, such as Marjorie or Mrs Van den Bosch, had become essential members of our close-knit sorority and we mourned their passing.

  I marvel that any of us did survive, when we had so many examples around us of others falling by the wayside. What right did we have to live, when our companions had so easily slipped away into death? It is a question I am still asking and probably always will.

  It was Veronica who was most responsible for keeping me going in those last days on Banka Island. She made it her mission to keep me alive. When I reached the depths of despair, hopelessness and complete physical exhaustion, I had an overwhelming desire to just lie down and give up. Death was an inevitability. Staying alive was a deliberate choice and certainly not the easiest one. Every time I was at the point of collapse as we slithered our way up the mud path from the stream, Veronica was there behind me, telling me to keep moving.

  ‘Think of the kid,’ she would say. ‘The Cameron girl depends on you. If you give up, she’ll be dead in a week.’

  She was right. Penny needed me. Maybe not for her physical survival, but for the love and affection which made that survival possible. I was all she had. If I were to die, as her parents had, who would remain for her with any connection to her old life? And, in turn, Penny was all I had. I couldn’t have loved her more if she were my own daughter. She was my motivation to go on, but it was Veronica who consistently reminded me of that fact.

  Our last journey proved to be the worst so far. All we were informed was that, like yo-yos, we were heading back to the main island of Sumatra.

  Veronica and Penny were among those who left in the first detachment. Everyone in that group survived the horrors of a journey that took over thirty-six hours.

  I was included among the second group, ordered to leave at dawn the following morning. This party included the sick and dying women and their nurses. Those of us on our feet were required to act as stretcher bearers.

  ‘Some of these patients can’t be moved.’ One of the nursing sisters spoke out, addressing her objections to the camp commandant himself. ‘These women are close to death. It’s a matter of hours. It would be an act of supreme cruelty to move them. Can’t we wait with the worst cases and just move those we believe can withstand the journey?’

  She was rewarded with a fierce slap across the face. The blow was so hard that it sent her reeling backwards.

  So, we left the camp, and were taken on open trucks back to that long endless jetty we had trudged along so many times before. The skies opened up in a torrential rainstorm. One of the patients was already dead.

  Sergeant Shoei oversaw our next task. All of us capable of standing were ordered to unload the household goods of the Japanese from waiting trucks, pile them onto handcarts and drag those carts the length of that interminable pier to the waiting boat.

  Laura Hopkins was beside me. She and I had become close since we had each suffered the loss of our mothers. Like me, she was an only child and knew nothing of the whereabouts of her father.

  ‘There’s not going to be room for us on that boat once all this is stowed,’ she said, her mouth set in a grim line.

  ‘I know,’ I replied. ‘Do you think they’ll make us wait here on the jetty for another boat?’

  She closed her eyes. Neither of us needed to voice what we were each feeling, that our numbers were going to be seriously depleted by the time we got to Sumatra.

  It turned out to be worse than the long wait we’d dreaded. Once the boat was loaded, we were ordered back onto the trucks, now with several of the patients dead, and driven back to the camp we had left that morning. There we buried the dead and the following day set off again for that long pier that symbolised the endless, hopeless nature of our captivity and the growing likelihood that we would not survive the rest of the war.

  Our final walk along that wooden pier was like the journey to Calvary. The heavy cross we had to bear was the carrying of stretchers, until at last we had loaded all the sick and dying patients onto the deck. Anyone capable of walking, no matter how weak, was expected to do so and I will never forget the pathetic sight of women with dry beriberi, Mum’s third Penang friend, Daphne, among them, shuffling along, emaciated legs splaying outwards under them, so that they had the gait of the heavily intoxicated. Those with the other form dragged their inflated bodies on swollen feet, a slow-moving procession of women who resembled the Michelin Man in the French rubber tyre advertisements.

  On board, the stretcher cases were laid side-by-side on deck, with no protection from the fiery heat of the midday sun. The only conclusion we could draw was that the Japs wanted our numbers to be significantly diminished by the time we reached our destination.

  The rest of us were loaded into the hold with the rats and the filthy rice sacks, and the hatches closed on us. Inside, it was pitch dark, hot as an oven and with no ventilation. We sat crammed together, praying that the passage would be fast and calm and that our ordeal would soon be over.

  But day turned to night and while it became mercifully cooler for us in our sealed furnace, those on deck endured the cold with no cover to ease the shock of the changed temperature on their sun-blackened, blistered bodies.

  Inevitably, after landing, we gathered on the dockside to go through tenko. This was repeated several times – in the full glare of the sun – until some bright spark worked out that the reason the numbers didn’t add up was that the Japs had failed to include the dead in their count.

  The worst part of the journey was still to come. We waited in the heat all day beside the railway track, until eventually a train appeared. The impatience of the Japanese boiled over into anger. I suppose that their role as the guardians of a company of half-dead women was not a glorious one. They must also have been on short rations themselves – there were severe food shortages everywhere as the Allies tightened the net, blocking shipping and supplies. But this was neither clear nor significant to us then. We had become zombie-like, victims of our oppressors’ voodoo, so that we no longer searched for optimistic signs, or indeed felt any emotions – just a passive numbness and a longing for it all to be over – even if that meant death.

  As the guards scre
amed, exhorting us to move faster, we carried the stretcher cases into the goods vans and laid them on a floor that was black with a heavy layer of coal dust.

  Our own accommodation was no more salubrious. All of us, including those among the seriously ill who were able to move, were herded into filthy carriages which had also been used to haul coal and were thick with the evidence. We were given just one small can of water – not enough to drink, but just sufficient to dampen a cloth with which to ease the fever that so many of us were experiencing.

  By the morning, half a dozen more women had died. The heat in the carriages was stifling, the air barely breathable. Several dysentery cases made the confinement more hellish. There were no toilet facilities, no openable windows, so that their soil had to be collected in a can and poured out of a small hatch near the ceiling.

  As night fell, the train came to a halt with a screech of brakes and we gave a collective sigh of relief that it was over.

  It wasn’t.

  We were held all night on that crowded stationary train, tightly packed like candles in a box, rigid, unable to move our limbs to stretch. Our only sustenance was a bit of brown bread, gritty, hard as a rock, and no water.

  At daybreak, as the light filtered through the grimy windows, I watched Sergeant Shoei strut along the platform past our carriage.

  One of the guards flung open the door. ‘Tenko!’ he screamed.

  After a long drive into the dense core of the Sumatran interior, we arrived at an abandoned rubber estate. If my suspicion that the Japanese wanted to hide us away until we died was right, they could not have chosen a better place. As we clambered down from the trucks, our numbers significantly diminished, I turned to Laura. ‘No one will ever find us here.’

  She looked at me, her face expressionless. ‘Do you think we’ll be executed?’