McCaffrey was a decent bloke and obviously a competent doctor, but Drew had wondered afterwards if the man really knew what he was talking about when it came to migraines. He didn’t have a clue himself — in his experience the only people prone to migraines were histrionic middle-aged matrons, or young women of nervous disposition who had to lie down in darkened rooms all day. But there was certainly something wrong. The headaches started innocently enough, a mere niggle at the base of his skull, and always in the same place, but then the pain worsened over a period of hours until it was immense and the nausea was chronic and he wasn’t even able to move. Even the most shallow breathing caused sickening bolts of pain to blast and pound through his head, and it went on and on and on until he thought he might not be able to stand it any more. During several episodes lately, he’d been convinced that if he’d had a revolver he would have shot himself, just to stop the agony. As it was he could only lie there on his mat, with his mates tiptoeing around him, and pray that the pain would subside soon. The only good thing about the headaches was that he felt almost healthy in comparison when they’d gone, and there weren’t many chaps in the camp who could say that.
But he too was beginning to suffer from malnutrition. The shorts he’d been given at Macassar now had to be held up with string as he’d lost a lot of weight. He was six foot one and had weighed over fourteen healthy, muscled stones at the beginning of the year; he estimated that he now weighed around ten, which was far too light for his big frame. His teeth were beginning to feel loose too, and he was covered in suppurating open sores, which were very difficult to heal in the heat and filth of the prison. There was talk that one poor chap in the block might even have to have his lower leg amputated shortly because of a huge ulcer on his shin.
He opened his eyes, closed them again quickly and rested his arm over his face — the light was just too bright to bear. At least it was marginally cooler inside the concrete cells than it was outside. The barred but open windows helped. And there was plenty of room in the cell, not that any of the chaps had much to put in it. Don and Keith, the fourth bloke in their cell who was currently on kitchen cleaning duty, had found themselves wooden boards and laid them across boxes to make beds, but Drew and Tim preferred to have their mats on the ground. The ceiling was criss-crossed with ropes on which their meagre clothes, threadbare blankets and cleaning rags hung to air, and two pails of water — boiled as per the doctor’s instructions — sat against a wall, one for drinking and one for personal ablutions. They all shaved daily, and although it was pointless, really, it gave a man a sense of dignity to face the day with a cleanly shaved face.
Keith came in, dripping with sweat from the heat of the kitchen fires, slipped his home-made rubber sandals off and collapsed on his bed.
‘What are we having?’ Don asked immediately.
‘Same old shite, rice an’ a bit o’ cabbage, one shred each,’ Keith replied scathingly. Even though the dark lines of the tattoos adorning his forearms — a crown and anchor on the left and a very buxom mermaid on the right — were contracting as the flesh beneath them shrank, he, like the others, was not yet at the point where he felt grateful for anything at all to eat. ‘Drew got one o’ his heads again?’
‘Started an hour ago.’
‘Poor bastard,’ Keith said.
Drew didn’t even bother to uncover his eyes. He would not eat his food in case he threw it up and wasted it, but it would be kept for him — out of reach of the rats and cockroaches — for when he felt better, providing it was still edible by then. If it did look like going off before he could eat, then someone else would be allowed it. But he was grateful for Keith’s commiseration. For months he’d been too scared to say anything about his headaches to the others for fear of ridicule, or of them thinking he was malingering to avoid having to do any work, but they’d all seen him vomiting until his nose bled, and then shitting uncontrollably when the migraine was beginning to subside, and they were quite sympathetic towards him, particularly Tim, who always brought him a rag soaked in cool water for his forehead. It would have been so much harder to bear if they weren’t sympathetic, or even accepting. It was humiliating enough suffering bloody headaches when so many of the chaps were so much worse off.
His cell mates were good sorts. He’d been good mates with Tim — who had also made his own way to England at the start of the war to join the Royal Navy — for quite a while now, and he knew Keith and Don of course, because they’d been serving on the same ship. Tim was from a small settlement on the Taranaki coast, where his parents owned the local grocery shop, and had apparently spent much of his spare time sailing in the South Taranaki Bight in a small boat he’d built himself. He talked about the boat wistfully and often, and swore that the first thing he’d do when he got back home would be to take her out. Drew was older than Tim by two years, but they got on very well and had shared many drunken and raucous shore leaves together.
Don Kerr was an Englishman and Keith Wallace a Scotsman, originally from Glasgow. They were hard men, born sailors, handy with their fists and very capable. So was Tim, as he’d demonstrated many times in brawls, although he had a surprisingly compassionate side as well. Drew came from a different background, but any distinctions soon ceased to matter, especially as he refused to enter the navy as an ensign and chose to enlist as an able seaman.
None of them had yet lost their spirit, which was both a blessing and a bit of a wonder. They’d been in Rangoon for less than a year, but in that time had been starved, beaten, blatantly deprived of Red Cross packages, forced to work when they were unwell, and were completely at the whim of the temperamental Japanese guards and the camp commander, a man they rarely saw but hated with a vengeance. But they were managing all right, or at least that’s what they told themselves. The doctors were doing what they could medically, and had set up rosters for regular inspection of the latrines, such as they were, and of the kitchens, in an effort to minimise the spread of disease. The doctors in fact copped a lot of flak from the Japs on behalf of the men too sick to work. They argued vehemently with the Japs at sick parade every morning to keep their patients out of the working parties, even the poor blokes too ill to stand, and were often severely punished for it.
Every man up to it had a job to do, not for the Japanese but for the benefit and morale of the prisoners. They kept their cells and environment as clean as they could, they made things to trade, and for themselves, and to keep themselves busy, they talked and congregated whenever they could, although the Japanese had forbidden meetings. This was a blow because it prevented any organised recreation, educational classes or even religious services — anything that would break the ghastly monotony of prison life. But it could have been worse; they could have been RAF, who were for some reason treated even more appallingly by the Japs. They were jammed together in the smallest cells, given filthy old sacks for bedding and only half the food apportioned to the other prisoners, and were beaten for merely talking to each other. Drew was extremely pleased he was a sailor, and hoped like hell that Liam was never shot down over Japanese-occupied territory.
He rolled over and bent his neck at a deliberate angle in an effort to relieve some of the agony in his skull. He closed his eyes and hoped for sleep. His headaches always followed him in his dreams, but the pain seemed further away then, muffled and just ever so slightly more manageable.
Mercifully, the migraine had gone yesterday afternoon, and he was back seeing McCaffrey again. The hospital had been set up in a large wooden shed, and some of the chaps with carpentry skills had removed sections of the walls and replaced them with blinds made from bamboo held together with wool from unravelled socks. The blinds could be rolled up when it was really hot, or lowered to keep the patients dry when the rains came. There were about forty men in the hospital at the moment, so it was almost full.
McCaffrey had a screened-off cubby-hole at the end of the shed. He sat at his small table, looking gravely at Drew with his thin legs crossed and hi
s hands in his lap.
‘I’m sorry, old boy, but there really isn’t much I can suggest. We do have a bit of opium now, and I hope there’ll be enough left for the next headache, but I can’t guarantee that. As you probably saw when you came in, we’re pretty busy at the moment.’
Drew had tried once again to explain the extent of his misery when he had a headache — without actually mentioning that he had considered suicide, which would be seen as cowardly — but wasn’t sure he’d succeeded. Oh, he knew the doctor was aware that the bloody things really hurt, but wasn’t sure he’d grasped quite how hellishly awful Drew felt about it all, especially about not being able to do his chores. It made him feel inadequate and ashamed, as if he were letting the side down. And he was — every time he couldn’t get off his mat, someone else, probably someone more ill than he was, had to do the work instead.
He opened his mouth to have another go at explaining himself, but McCaffrey held up his hand.
‘Look, I do know how you must feel about all this. Well, I don’t, because I’ve never had a migraine myself, thank Christ, but I know how damnably debilitating they can be so I’ve a fair idea of what it must be like at your end. But I’ll say again that I think these headaches are a result of your head injuries, so there’s no point going about thinking you’ve suddenly turned into some sort of sad sack with a “delicate condition”. You haven’t. Bad headaches aren’t uncommon after a heavy blow to the head, and severe migraines aren’t unknown either.’ He twiddled his moustache for a moment. ‘Does the heat seem to set them off?’
‘Not so much the heat, but I think being in really bright sun might.’
‘As in when you’re working outside?’
Drew nodded.
‘That’s a bit of a bugger, given that we’re in the tropics. Do you think you’ve the stomach to pick maggots out of a stinking great sore while the owner of said sore screams his head off?’
‘Pardon?’
‘Nursing duties, man, could you do it?’
‘Er, I don’t know.’
‘Well, you’re about to find out. You’re now a medic attached to the hospital. It’s never bright and sunny in here. Fortunate, really, because we’re starting to get a lot of eye lesions from lack of vitamins, and bright light can be extremely painful.’
‘But I’m not a medic. I’m only on the Japs’ list as an able seaman.’
‘Well, you’re a medic now. I’ll lie and say there’s been a mistake.’ McCaffrey uncrossed his legs and slapped his bony knees decisively. ‘It’s the best I can do, old boy. And if you do get a real stinker, you can just lie down yourself until it goes away. All right?’
Drew nodded, delighted. He could make a real contribution now, and if one of his sodding bloody migraines came on, well, where better to be than the hospital?
‘But I have to warn you,’ McCaffrey went on, ‘it’s hard work in here, a lot of it not very nice. It can be a bit stomach-turning.’
It was. His first job was to clean up a man brought in by his mates after twenty-four hours of constant vomiting and diarrhoea. The poor wretch was covered in shit and spew from head to foot, and was so weak he couldn’t do anything to help himself. He was weeping as well from the pain of the severe griping in his bowels, and every time they moved he let out a moan he couldn’t smother.
‘I’m sorry, mate,’ he said again and again, and Drew shook his head and waved his hand dismissively as he finally finished wiping him down.
‘It’s only shit, don’t worry about it. I was up to my eyebrows in my own the other day. Stinks though, eh?’
And it did, too. It was absolutely eye-watering, and Drew wondered if he would stink of it constantly himself from now on.
The patient tried to laugh, but was suddenly gripped by another spasm. His bowels opened again and a great flood of watery green matter whooshed out from between his legs and soaked the mat beneath him, and the clean shorts Drew had rather short-sightedly given him.
‘Perhaps if you just went naked, and put a bit of towel over yourself?’ Drew suggested kindly as he got to his feet and picked up the bowl containing the dirty washing water. He’d have to get another lot now.
And it went on like that, day after day, although there was a fair bit of variety in what Drew was required to do. On his fourth day he was asked to assist when a doctor — not McCaffrey this time but an army doctor called Paterson — used a bamboo ‘needle’ and distilled rainwater with added rock salt, to rehydrate a man almost comatose from the effects of dysentery. A small cut was made in a vein in the man’s arm — a vein which took four different attempts to locate because of his poor condition — and the needle inserted and the water dripped in. It was crude, but the man recovered. Drew hadn’t been involved in any of the tricky bits, and had only cleaned up the blood afterwards and kept an eye on the patient, but he’d been amazed at the ingenuity the doctors were using to help their patients. Crushed charcoal in water was also given to try to slow bowel activity, and the precious opium was administered when patients were unable to cope with the pain. Knives and forks were modified as surgical instruments, and sharpened spoons were sterilised in boiling water and used — without the benefit of anaesthetic — to scrape out the worst of the tropical ulcers that afflicted almost everyone.
Drew felt helpless, and sickened, a lot of the time, but he did everything he was asked. Sometimes the only panacea available was compassion, but he discovered he had a surprising reserve of that particular emotion and was more than willing to share it. But sometimes he suspected that his motives might be selfish, because the more he did for the patients, the better he felt himself. His headaches did not go away, far from it, but he found that being of some use to someone stopped him from thinking about himself too deeply.
He became very expert at detecting the early signs of emerging maladies in others, and was on at his cell mates constantly about washing their hands after using the latrines and before and after eating. Keith and Don tended to laugh at him, but Drew observed that they were actually very fastidious about their personal hygiene. Nobody actively courted dysentery, and even less the dreaded cholera that had now broken out in the camp.
The first victim had been brought into the hospital five days ago. The poor bloke, an RAF chap — so they had been bloody lucky to be allowed to bring him into the hospital at all — had been carried in by his mates at the instigation of his prison block’s doctor, with intense muscle cramps, glassy eyes, a barely audible voice and a milky white fluid coming out of him at both ends. Over the next five hours his body dehydrated with incredible speed, in spite of the administering of the salt water. In fact, as the doctors had looked on in growing horror, he’d dried up and become unrecognisable — and then he’d died. So after that every cholera victim in the hospital — and there were a lot of them — had a small bamboo disc attached to his wrist so that he could be identified should his condition deteriorate. What had been particularly awful was that the RAF chap was fairly new in the camp, still quite a fit and healthy bloke, and he’d succumbed appallingly quickly. Drew had washed himself almost raw after that first one, but it seemed that the cholera struck randomly, and without any warning. The word went out again that absolutely all drinking and washing water must be boiled, and any food cleaned thoroughly in boiled water before consumption, an edict that was even endorsed by the camp commander, who had so far shown little interest in the welfare of his prisoners.
The only benefit from the death of a patient was that the doctor involved had the job of redistributing any personal effects. Drew received a pair of boots in this manner, although after a week he began to leave them off for two days at a time so that they, and his feet, had an opportunity to dry out. Tinea was a revolting affliction, and Drew had no intention of getting it if he could possibly avoid it. There was a man in the hospital whose tinea had started between his toes and had now spread all the way up to his groin so that his legs and genitals were a mass of weeping, burning sores.
At
night, if he wasn’t on night duty, Drew went back to his cell and collapsed with fatigue. Aside from the migraines, his own health was deteriorating at quite an alarming rate. He’d had two serious malaria attacks now, was still covered in sores, and his hip bones and ribs were protruding markedly. He usually ate at the hospital, so tonight he was very surprised to see a small mango sitting in the middle of his sleeping mat. A whole mango!
‘Whose is this?’ he asked in amazement.
Don and Keith watched on in amusement, and Tim sat up on his mat and beamed.
‘It’s yours. We got them from an old lady at the gate. It’s a bit too ripe, but we didn’t think you’d mind.’
Drew picked up the fruit. It was a little soft, but smooth and full and promised to be very juicy, and he could smell it quite clearly. He lifted the crimson and yellow globe to his nose and inhaled the heady scent, then bit straight into it. Juice squirted out and ran down his chin.
Blue Smoke Page 24
