Not that he wouldn’t say a few choice words sometimes – mainly swear words for the benefit of the younger children who crowded into my auntie Rose’s kitchen on our regular Sunday visits. All the kids loved Uncle Billy. What kid wouldn’t? As my mum and her two sisters fussed and cleaned and brewed and gossiped, he’d sit at the kitchen table with us, rolling cigarettes from an old tin of tobacco, pulling funny faces and releasing profanities like stray bullets. We all howled with mischievous laughter as the women tutted. On other days it would be funny rhymes or nonsense fairytales – ‘Little Hood Riding Red’ and ‘Who’s Been Sleeping In My Porridge?’
The best thing was when he’d do his party trick. He’d take a daffodil or a tulip from the vase on the table as the women talked, and he’d slowly begin to eat it. The whole thing! We’d squeal with revolted fascination. First the petals, poker-faced as we giggled. Then the head – crunching on the bloom with bulging eyes. Our laughter would elicit patient shushes from Mum. Finally the stem. The women would roll their eyes, and Billy would grin triumphantly. Once it was a whole banana peel and one of the lads said he’d even eaten a fly, though I’d never seen it. To us he was a superhero with a special power. Was it just a magic trick? A sleight of hand and stomach he’d perfected for our amusement?
Apparently not.
‘Billy can eat anything,’ my mother said.
‘But how, Mum?’
The answer was simple and brooked no further enquiry.
‘The war,’ she said.
The war. That great veil thrown across the generation that bore us. The verbal dustsheet that concealed and protected the furniture of their younger lives. Silences like holes in the fabric, through which we spied too little to determine the nature of the things their earlier lives had rested on.
My auntie Mary had met Billy in March 1946, in those heady days of peace that finally fell on an exhausted Britain following victory in Europe and the Far East. She was just a shy eighteen-year-old, enjoying the dances and parties that had resumed with the returning servicemen. These men were noticeably different from the callow boys who’d been her dance partners in the war years. A different breed. She’d first noticed Billy talking to her father about football in the bar. He’d seemed brash and loud – but Mary detected shyness behind the bravado. They started courting, and within a year they were married.
Billy had been repatriated to Britain at the end of 1945. He’d been a sergeant in the Royal Signals Regiment stationed in Singapore, and Mary discovered that he’d spent three and a half years in a Japanese prisoner-of-war camp. Stories were already circulating about the horrors suffered by the troops imprisoned there, but Billy would say very little. There were nightmares that woke him – sweating and shaking – but no flesh on the skeleton that haunted him. In the party thrown to welcome Billy home, his family told Mary that Billy had spent the entire evening sitting in the kitchen with his mother, drinking in silence.
It’s now the early seventies. I can’t be more than nine years old. My brother Mark is less than two years older than me. We’re both sitting with Uncle Billy in the café area of a leisure centre in North Wales. It’s summer, and we’re on a day out from Liverpool. The sun is blazing through the sheet glass and glaring off the white melamine surface of the cafeteria table. There are crisps and fizzy drinks, and Billy has his tobacco tin open – eyes down, his yellow fingers rolling the paper patiently and nodding as the women talk. My mum and Auntie Mary are standing over us, handbags over forearms. They won’t be long, they say. Just a stroll around the shops. They leave, and it’s just the boys. Nearby, children splash in the pool and the sun continues to shine.
Billy is relaxed in our company. More talkative than usual. We’re loving it. We relish the chance to have our superhero to ourselves. Like all boys of this age, our minds are full of cartoon adventure stories of military derring-do played out in the wartime comic books we read, and in the black-and-white British war films that fill our television screen on rainy afternoons. Emboldened by Billy’s calm contentment, and in the absence of our mother’s restraint, I venture a bold question:
‘How can you eat everything, Uncle Billy?’
His fingers stop rolling. He looks up at me for a moment, without tension or haste.
He considers before replying.
‘ ’Cause if you didn’t, you died,’ he says.
‘In the prison camp?’
He nods.
‘What was it like, Uncle Billy?’ Mark asks.
A child’s question. So wide and simplistic as to demand specifics, or else be dismissed with an ironic quip. Yet this time Billy doesn’t. Maybe it’s the peace, or the steady sunlight. Maybe it’s because he’s in the company of children, which he loved. Whatever it is, he decides to answer. Slow, steady voice, eyes down as he rolls cigarettes, or else staring off into the distance as he holds each chain-smoked fag in his rugged builder’s fingers. Before the women return, he’d tell us what it was like in his awful war. Just once. From the beginning to the end.
*
The island of Singapore was a grievous loss to the British in 1942 – perhaps the worst military defeat the nation has suffered. Situated at the bottom end of the jungle-covered and supposedly impassable Malay Peninsula, Singapore was an essential strategic maritime gateway to the Far East for an empire facing the new threat of Japanese expansion. Britain had fortified Singapore heavily before war broke out: massive guns faced out to sea to repel all maritime incursions, and a garrison of 90,000 Commonwealth troops was stationed there. Yet no guns faced inland across the causeway to the peninsula, as it was thought impossible to mount an invasion through such inhospitable terrain. This was to prove a disastrous miscalculation. When the Japanese swept down through the peninsula at lightning speed, the British were undone by the ferocity of the attack, and were soon besieged on the tiny island. The fearful command of ‘every man for himself’ went out. The young Sergeant William Routledge joined a group of fourteen men who fled across the causeway to make their escape.
His unit met up with a band of Gurkhas and embarked on a remarkable four-week journey behind enemy lines to the peninsula coast and, after stealing a local fishing boat, to the island of Java and freedom. The injured and exhausted troops were briefly hailed as heroes, until the Japanese overran Java and rendered their escape futile. Billy was taken prisoner and sent to Batu Lintang POW camp in Sarawak, Borneo. He was to survive there until the end of the war, three and a half years later.
Batu Lintang was a former British barracks that housed both military prisoners and civilian internees in separate compounds. The treatment meted out to prisoners by their Japanese captors was appalling. There was torture, forced labour, cramped living conditions, insufficient clothing and inadequate medicine. However, most devastating to life and health was hunger – the withholding of adequate food. The basic diet of prisoners contained only 44g of protein and 1,600 calories, and was devoid of essential vitamins. The rice ration was further reduced as the war progressed, so that by the end each man received little more than 100g per day, on which he was expected to labour for long hours. Starvation and disease soon took those previously at the peak of health.
Hilda Bates, an internee at the camp and a former nurse, observed the deterioration of Billy and his comrades from a distance:
In the soldiers’ camp … many of the men were just skeletons, crawling about, as few were able to stand upright. Even our toddlers received the same rations as these poor souls, and the children are still hungry, so what must have been the suffering of those men, many of whom are hardly more than boys?
Billy was just twenty-five years old. A skeleton from a child’s nightmare. He was incarcerated with a couple of other Liverpudlians, and he told us that they stayed close – brothers from a distant town, looking out for each other and pooling their rations. There was another friend, Selby Sutcliffe, who lived just a few weeks until hunger and fever took him. Billy watched him die.
But Billy didn’t die.
He refused to. He focused his hunger into something else. A dark passion grew in his empty stomach.
The prisoners would eat anything they could find or catch. Snakes, snails, cats, dogs, rats. Insects. Flowers. Superheroes with a special power. Yet they still fell. To dysentery. To beriberi. The camp hospital was its own death sentence – a waiting room for the makeshift cemetery they nicknamed ‘boot hill’, visible just outside the fence. The camp doctor refused all but the most basic medicine to inmates, and even denied the sick their rice ration.
The death rate in Billy’s part of the camp rose to ten a day. Anyone who could still walk was required to report for work – long hours of pitiless labour – and then, on their return, they had to dig graves to bury their dead. When this was done, there was one final humiliation: scavenging through the belongings of the deceased for any food scraps they might have left behind. Yet Billy worked, and he dug, and he scavenged, and he went on.
© IWM
His clothes soon rotted away in the tropical humidity, and weren’t replaced. The men were forced to wear makeshift loincloths while they toiled, skeletal and naked, in the baking sun. But Billy went on – feeding on his dark passion like a fungus.
There was a lifeline. A thin and dangerous one. Outside the hidden gaps in the large barbed wire perimeter, local Malay and ethnic Chinese civilians lived under an oppression of their own, and were sympathetic to these Allied captives. It was possible to slip out unseen, and to barter for scraps of food in exchange for old wedding rings, tobacco, or stolen camp equipment. Failing that, a desperate inmate reared on the tough streets of Liverpool might try to steal what food they could, before returning with their prize. Billy became an expert thief and scrounger. He and his fellow Scouser, Jack Osborne, would take it in turns to venture beyond the wire and bring back what they needed to survive.
Yet the price of capture was appalling. Guards were unspeakably brutal to even the mildest perceived wrongdoings. Punishments were vicious and ingenious in their cruelty. A favourite was to make offenders stand in the midday sun holding a heavy log of wood above their heads. If they weakened and lowered their arms, they would be kicked and punched senseless. More serious offenders would be handed over to the military police for torture or execution.
Suddenly, at the cafeteria table, Billy remembers something, and he starts to laugh. A deep, warm chuckle, squeezing the lines around his eyes and shaking his shoulders. The laugh is almost tender in its sincerity – and in jarring contrast to the awful account he is giving us. My young brother and I look at him, quizzical and unsettled.
‘One of the funniest things I ever saw,’ he says.
One day, the Japanese guards had devised a special punishment for their own amusement. They lined up British soldiers in pairs facing each other, and ordered them to fight their partner. If they didn’t throw genuine punches at their comrades, the guards would do it for them with rifle butts, boots and fists. The starving, sick men would have to inflict real pain on their fellow sufferers, or else leave them to the cruelty of their jailors. So they did – punches pulled as much as it was possible. Yet there was a further twist. The guards removed a single soldier at one end of the line, so that the soldier remaining had no partner to fight. They then ordered this soldier to fight himself – to punch his own gaunt face and rib-poked body. If he didn’t do this convincingly, he would be beaten to paralysis by his captors. So this man did so.
Billy watched this poor man between punches of his own and dissolved into hysterical laughter. The guards were furious, but Billy didn’t care, he laughed and laughed. Even as he recalled the macabre sight, his old face was transfigured by a wicked smile. ‘If you’ve never seen a man trying to beat himself up before, you’ve never lived!’ he said.
Mark and I were caught between his laughter and the horror of the scene he’d recounted. We were still young. We didn’t yet understand the purposes to which our native city could bend humour, and the dark passion that could fuel it. Liverpool is a city of comedians: of sharp wit and a resilient sense of the ridiculous. Its reputation is well deserved. In all my subsequent travels, it remains one of the funniest places I know. Yet its humour has claws. A native learns that there can be a difference between something that makes you laugh and something that’s meant to be funny. Once, in junior school, I was beaten up by the class bully while a circle of kids watched me. This boy quipped constantly with the crowd as he kicked me. And he was hilarious! Genuinely laugh-out-loud funny. And not funny at all.
Sometimes laughter is decoupled from warmth, like the sound of crows chortling over discovered carrion. Sometimes it’s the song our dark passion sings. A focused hunger. A grinning skeleton.
One day Billy was scrounging outside the wire, and he’d returned to camp with a few precious potatoes concealed inside the loincloth he wore. He tried to avoid any guards, in case they might require him to stop. In Batu Lintang, every prisoner had to bow low when in the presence of a guard. The punishment for failing to do so was severe. One internee had been paralysed for a week because his bow had not been considered deferential enough. Just then, Billy was spotted by a guard who called for him to stop. Billy knew that if he took his hands away from the potatoes he cradled in his loincloth he’d be discovered. He continued walking. The guard now screamed at him. Billy stopped. He bowed to the guard – and the potatoes fell out onto the yellow earth. The guard took his rifle butt and rammed it into Billy’s face, breaking all of his front teeth. Scarlet blood on shards. A lurid skeleton from a child’s nightmare. He beat Billy continuously about the head, neck and spine. These were injuries that kept him in an agony of back pain and neuralgia until his death. The potatoes were duly confiscated.
Yet Billy didn’t die. He refused to. He focused his hunger into something else.
‘How did you keep going, Uncle Billy?’ we asked him.
Billy considered for a moment, before he settled, at last, on the simple truth. The grin was gone.
‘Hate,’ he replied.
That was it. That was the dark passion that sustained him. Hatred.
Billy Routledge hated all things Japanese until the day he died. He hated their cars, their television sets, their smiling faces on advertising hoardings – the very idea of Japan. It burned from him like toxic fumes. We all knew this and accepted it like the seepage of an old wound, without understanding its true pathology. In the crucible of his starvation he’d fed on the only thing that would guarantee his survival beyond despair. Hatred. He’d turned his skeletal body into an organism that fed off hate, that thrived like a fungus on the privations he saw and suffered. A superhero with a special power. Hunger as hatred. Hatred as defiance. Raw and soil-stained. A dark passion. A motivating force. A focused desire.
Was that it? Was that the croaking carrion song that Owen and Susan were singing in the dank darkness of a Clay Street slum, their hungry bodies and tongues fumbling and moaning? Was it hatred that fuelled my family’s survival? Endless hunger and persistent loss turned into a dark, rutting passion? Laughter without humour? Sex without love? A grinning skeleton?
No. There was something deeper still. Something beneath the hunger and the hate.
News about Hiroshima seeped into Batu Lintang like rain through the hut roof. Allied planes began to fly sorties over the camp and the guards started to dispense food and medicine with a newfound largesse. Eventually the Australian Army arrived at the gate to liberate them. They discovered men lying in their own filth; naked, covered in ulcers, and in the advanced stages of starvation. Weakness from hunger had led to a lack of movement and circulation, which resulted in gangrene of the limbs and digits.
Billy was attending to his Liverpool friend Jack Osborne, his fellow scavenger and survivor. Jack had succumbed to spinal malaria. Three days after the liberation, Jack died. Billy was so traumatised by Jack’s death that he couldn’t go home – not yet. Billy volunteered to stay on at the camp, attending to the men still too sick to travel. He returned to Liverpool a few months
later. Of the two thousand Allied troops held at Batu Lintang POW camp, only one in three would walk out of those gates again. My uncle Billy was one of them.
At the leisure centre, Mark and I sit motionless. Nearby, children splash in the pool. The seconds pass. Billy is looking for the words. A reason. An explanation.
‘I’m a bastard,’ he said, finally. ‘I was born a bastard. I grew up on those streets with just my fists, and with nothing but shit to eat. I could take anything. Or nothing. But there were men in that camp who weren’t bastards like me. They were good men. Brave, kind, clever men.’ He searched for the words. ‘Poets, musicians, artists.’ He breathed the memory down in his lungs with the cigarette smoke. Exhaled. ‘I watched them die. Watched them fade away because they couldn’t hate like I did. They couldn’t live on nothing.’
Billy looks directly at us, his crow’s-feet eyes devoid of their laughter. ‘You know who walked out of that place? Not the poets or the musicians. Not the good ones or the gentle ones. The Scousers. The Glaswegian slum kids. The cockney thieves. The kids who’d known nothing but shit,’ he said. ‘Bastards like me.’ He stubbed his fag out in the plastic ashtray.
‘I hate them for that. I’ll hate them for that till the day I die.’
And there it was. Beneath the hunger and the hate. The truth of it, stated as fact and not as bitterness. Not hatred as defiance, but hatred as a toxin that Billy couldn’t flush from his system, starving him of life’s nutrients. A curse, crippling him as surely as the back pain and the agonising neuralgia. The goodness he’d seen, but couldn’t save. The lost poetry. The music that he couldn’t play himself.
At that moment, Mum and Auntie Mary returned to our table from their excursion.
‘Hello boys! Have you had a nice time?’
*
Mary and my mum were amazed that Billy had opened up to us the way he did that day. He never did again.
Flesh and Blood Page 4
