by JH Fletcher
By Christmas she was waddling. The heat was a trial yet the monthly petrol ration meant that, more often than not, driving was out of the question.
The war news was grim. The Japanese were advancing everywhere; even the carefully-worded announcements on the wireless made that plain. The airwaves were filled with names that no-one had ever heard before: Kota Bahru, Bandoeng, Timor. Even better-known places like Hong Kong, Singapore and Manila were under attack. The waves of war flowed ever southwards.
Amid all the entertainment for soldiers, the farewells and welcomes, the euphoria of ‘God Save The King’ and patriotic concert parties, evacuees were beginning to arrive from the Top End — they really telling us this Jap mob’s going to get as far as Darwin? — and always, like a sombre drum roll beneath the gaiety and good works, came the news of the missing and the dead.
Bennett, Hansberry, Kotz, Milne, Betterman … Some of them Kath had known, although none well. How long, she thought, before Hedley Warren’s name was on the list?
She would have felt better if she had known where he was. She stared at the war maps in the papers, read about Tobruk and Benghazi, Mersing and Batu Pahat — where do they get names like that? — and wondered.
There? Or perhaps there?
She could see no reason why not knowing should make a difference, but it did.
In the midst of it all, the harvest came, and went. The wheat went ten bags, the barley a little less. A fair crop. Even lugging food out to the header was getting to be an effort. In mid-January the temperature went up to 112°, and Kath thought she was going to burst. At the end of the month a QANTAS flying boat was shot down, with thirteen dead.
Dear God, she thought, what a time to bring a baby into the world.
Mid-February, never mind what state the world was in, she knew this was it. For days now, people had been talking about the new blackout regulations — what they going to bomb around here? — but Kath’s mind was on things other than the blackout.
She sought out her mother, who took one look at the sweating, scared face and knew. For twelve hours, while the bombs fell on Singapore, Kath Warren fought her own private war in heat and pain and, eventually, glory.
‘What you going to call him?’
‘The way he ripped me up, I don’t care what you call him. I feel like I’ve been worked over by the header.’
Yet nursed the slippery body of her son to her breast and knew fulfilment. And something else.
Mrs Morgan, the midwife, took the baby from her. Kath was bloody, sweaty, sore, but something made her look at the clock on the bedside locker. Startled, she looked again. ‘Ten o’clock? At night?’
Certainly, it was dark outside. The last time she’d looked, it hadn’t even been dinner time.
‘Certainly makes the day go fast …’
Something was on her mind. She lay back, while Mrs Morgan did what she could to tart her up.
‘What you got that face for?’ the midwife scolded. ‘A fine son … You should be laughing, not scowling.’
For the moment Kath had forgotten all about her battered body, even the child itself.
‘What’s the date?’
Not a question Mrs Morgan was normally asked at such a time. She had to think. ‘Fifteenth of Feb. Why?’
‘Just wondered.’ Kath did not know why. ‘Please, Mrs Morgan, won’t you pull back the curtains?’
The midwife was used to mothers with whims, although curtains was a new one. Until now they had been tightly drawn, to protect them from the prying eyes of sheep, perhaps, but, with her patient once more decently covered, Mrs Morgan had no objection. She drew them back, as requested. ‘There you go …’
Beyond the window the paddocks, invisible in the darkness, spread away. Kath was enfolded, securely, in the land. Yet there was an echo out there, a sense of unease that she could recognise but not identify, that had nothing to do with what had been happening here in the brightly-lit room.
She said, ‘Hedley —’
Mrs Morgan misunderstood, something she was good at. ‘He’ll be proud.’ While thinking, privately, that there was nothing for him to be proud about, so far as his role in things was concerned. She finished with the baby, popped it into the bassinet beside the bed. If men saw what I see, she thought viciously, they’d tie a knot in it.
Although, knowing what men were like, they probably wouldn’t.
In the bed, Kath was drifting, half-asleep, knowing that any minute now she would have to accept a visit from her mother. She’d have given it a miss if she could, but that was out of the question. So long as she doesn’t hang about, she thought. This business of having babies is hard work.
The moment’s fear or intuition — call it what you like — was past. If there was anything she ought to know, it could wait until morning.
7
HEDLEY
1942
They’d reckoned they were prisoners in the army. Now they knew that by contrast with this they’d been as free as birds.
Disobedience to the rules brought swift retribution: neglecting to bow to a Japanese soldier or salute when passing a guard post; failing to work to the satisfaction of the conquerors; dealing with the locals; bartering cigarettes for food; possessing a radio; saying the wrong thing at the wrong time; saying anything at all at the wrong time.
On and on.
But there were lighter moments.
Nippon planes, Australia, boom boom!
Yeah?
Nippon planes, America, boom boom!
Yeah?
Nippon planes, British navy, boom boom!
What about Swiss navy, eh? Boom boom?
Yah, yah. Nippon planes, Swiss navy, boom boom!
Beatings were another matter; some died of them. Others died of weariness or malnutrition or loss of the will to go on. Some of the locals died, too. A pregnant Malay woman, bartering for cigarettes, was caught by the ammunition-booted guards. She was kicked in the belly, viciously and at length, then left lying outside the wire. Eventually, blood everywhere, she stumbled to her feet. Doubled over, hands clutching, she dragged herself away.
God help her.
Outrage was commonplace. ‘Soon as the war’s over, I’m going to nail these bastards …’
But the war was a long way from over and, in time, even the beatings became routine. As did starvation.
‘Me old Dad always said I’d got too much gut on me …’
No longer.
One day, with a group of other skeletons, Hedley was taken to the station and piled aboard a line of railway trucks.
‘You go to well-equipped convalescent camp,’ promised the Japanese interpreter. Immaculately uniformed, he warned against leaving the trucks once they were aboard. Savage as bayonets, sentries prowled ferociously to reinforce the warning. Each truck was supplied with two buckets, for water or rations or anything else they might want to use them for. The sliding doors closed. In semi-darkness they waited. And waited.
Eventually the locomotive chuffed smoke, the trucks clanked into motion. Stinking and desperate, close to death, the prisoners were taken north.
Through a gap beside the door, Hedley watched the countryside as they passed. It was hard to believe that it had been around here that they had sweated and fought so desperately. The sight brought back unwanted memories: the constant, all-pervasive fear; the gun fight outside Gemas as the darkness of the jungle closed its fist upon them; holding Hamish Laird in his arms and feeling the hot, ugly gush of blood, the convulsions of the shattered body, violent, then fading swiftly into stillness; the frustrated fury of a man who could do nothing, nothing.
And all for this, to be heading north to an unknown destination, prisoners of a hated enemy that had vanquished them so effortlessly.
He could not take his eyes from what was passing. The ordered lines of rubber trees were interrupted at intervals by kampongs. The attap-thatched houses were built on stilts in clearings, neatly swept and bare, surrounded by coconut palms, by
clumps of bamboo and banana that shone in the sunlight in abrupt exclamations of emerald light. In a frantic flutter of wings, chickens fled squawking from the sudden appearance of the train. Children ran, while sarong-clad women, slender brown hands raised to their eyes, stood in the shadows to watch them go by.
It all looked very peaceful.
Pressed against the truck’s steel side, eyes glued to the narrow gap through which the warm air brought the tantalising smell of freedom, Hedley saw not the peaceful villages but the contradictory orders, the promises meaning nothing, the frenzied skirmish, the long and futile flight into captivity. Towards evening the rubber gave way to padi, the setting sunlight flowing golden across rice fields where Chinese women laboured hunch-backed beneath straw hats, round-brimmed and enormous, that rose to pagoda peaks above their bowed heads.
Rubber again, as the sun sank. Darkness came scything swiftly down.
Hedley turned away from the gap, conscious once again of the spastic lurching of the truck, the rumbling wheels, the crush of the other men jammed in with him. He could touch them, smell them, share their very breathing in the fetid night, yet could not see them. The darkness remained absolute.
They muttered and groaned, and from somewhere came the jagged sound of a man weeping, yet in their invisibility the truck might have been peopled, not by men, but by phantoms clad in the rags of suffering.
There was no room to lie down, not enough height to stand up straight. Hedley hunkered down on his haunches, back against the truck side, and closed his eyes. He shut his ears to the sounds about him, instead willing himself to remember images — not the slowly-passing sequence of kampong and rubber and padi, but something distant yet as close to him as his own being.
Amid the steel rumble of wheels, sheep the colour of earth moved steadily through sun-bright paddocks; across the long breast of the land shone the ripening splendour of wheat and barley, golden with heat; in a slow creaking of machinery, horses drew headers through a cloud of dust as yellow as sunlight.
Hedley drew closer still, discovered other, little things: the green-tinged gleam of water in the dam behind the house, the clatter of steel windmill sails when the red wind blew down from the north, the colony of red-backed spiders that inhabited a corner of the shearing shed and that returned no matter how many times they were cleared out.
Swaying in darkness peopled by the living dead, he tasted the tang of dust upon his lips, felt the Australian sun upon his back, revisited the land that after the war would be his. He drew into his lungs deep breaths of his future, determined that nothing on the face of the earth would prevent his returning one day to claim it.
He dozed, and woke. The train stopped in Kuala Lumpur. There were latrines, food, even the chance for a brief wash under a tap on the platform. Then back into the trucks again, prodded by the ever-present bayonets. On they went, while once again Hedley summoned the visions that he was determined would keep him alive through the months that lay ahead.
After five days and nights, the train arrived at a shabby little town of unpainted wooden buildings surrounded by forest. Amid an explosion of yells and jabbing bayonets, the prisoners stumbled into a moon-bright darkness. It was bitterly cold.
They were harried into a long column. Surrounded by guards, bent under blows, driven by yells and the thud of rifle butts on flesh, they set off along a trail into the forest. Their scanty possessions were slung on poles that they carried two by two on their shoulders. They blundered and swayed along the broken track, falling often, stumbling always, cursing weakly as long as the strength remained to curse, while all the time the guards goaded them onwards.
No food, little water. Nothing to do but walk, and walk, and not think. Thinking was fatal. Face the reality of what was happening and they would lose the will to carry on.
To some it happened. They collapsed by the side of the track, unable to go further. The guards watched, a feral gleam of eyes and teeth, while other prisoners tried to get them on their feet again. Sometimes they succeeded. When they didn’t, the guards intervened, kicking and bellowing. If that didn’t work, a bullet put an end to argument.
Stumbling, anguished, the column staggered on down the jungle path amid the sullen repetition of gunshots.
Hedley survived by counting. Ten steps. A hundred. A thousand, ten thousand, a hundred thousand if needs be. He slid into a lunatic world where nothing happened, nothing mattered, where the act of placing one foot before the other, the mindless ritual of the count, built a rhythm to anaesthetise pain.
On and on. Night became day, then night again. They passed rickety, fly-blown camps. Bamboo structures lurched like drunken skeletons out of the leprous gloom of a forest so dense that it was doubtful whether the earth beneath had ever seen the sun. In the perennial dusk orchid-shaped fungi flourished, white as a Chinese funeral. The jungle drew ever closer; the fingers of vines and creepers, fleshy and riotous, clutched them as they passed. Stop, even for a minute, and it seemed that the fungi, the predatory vegetation, would engulf them.
They came to a forest of bamboo. Individual canes soared fifty feet and more into the air. Immense, shiny, steel-hard, they looked as tall and unmoving as cathedral spires. It was impossible to find a way through them, yet through them they had to go, and the deadly finality of gunshots grew more frequent.
Twice a day they stopped for food, or what was supposed to be food: polished rice boiled to a kind of glue; one or two tiny pieces of rotting fish; when they were lucky a shred or two of meat, fly-blown and maggoty, that they gobbled with the insane gluttony of starving men.
On again, the metronome ticking endlessly in Hedley’s brain: a hundred steps, a thousand, ten thousand …
At night they lay like the dead, surrounded by the dead, so that it became impossible to tell one from the other.
They marched or at least stumbled-cursed-fell-crawled for twenty-three days, a dreamscape of sluggish movement. Days and nights, beatings and food, life and death — all became as indistinguishable as the slopes of the jungle-drowned hills among which they struggled.
Afterwards Hedley remembered it as a featureless time of unceasing movement, ephemeral as mist, through which they passed ghostlike, bearing their pole-strung possessions, the heavier burdens of fear, exhaustion and pain.
One day they reached a river flowing dark and silent between banks crowded with forest. There was a clearing, platoons of guards, a commander who laughed a lot, boyishly, but whose eyes were as hard as jet. There was nothing else: no buildings, no latrines, nothing.
Some convalescent camp, Hedley thought.
Through his interpreter, the commander explained that if the prisoners wanted shelter from the monsoon that was due in less than two months, they would have to construct it themselves.
No-one knew how or if they were going to survive, where on the map of all the agonised and suffering world they were, yet — wherever it was — it seemed they had arrived.
8
KATH
1943
It was thirteen months since Hedley had been captured. In that time Kath had heard twice: pencilled messages on rough cards forwarded through the good offices of the Red Cross.
She stared with sick fascination at the incomprehensible hieroglyphics of the Japanese script, the other words printed in small characters in the top right-hand corner:
Kriegsgefangenenpost
Prisoners of War Post
Prisonniers de Guerre
To look at the few scrawled words made it easier to believe, not only that Hedley was alive but that he had ever existed at all. The child notwithstanding, Kath thought that without the cards she would have doubted whether Hedley had ever lived.
It was 1943. The war had been going on for three and a half years and it was becoming more and more difficult to remember a time when they had been at peace. Even now there was no end in sight. Some days Kath caught herself wondering whether it was ever going to end at all.
Walter had had his first
birthday last month. She couldn’t help wondering what things would be like by the time it came round again. He had been born on the day that Singapore had surrendered. Since then, identity cards had been issued (horrible things, thought Kath, along with everyone else), the Top End had been placed under martial law, Japanese submarines had attacked Sydney Harbour, there had been a few days excitement when prisoners of war at Tatura had tried to break out. Only last month a Japanese plane had been sighted over Sydney. There seemed no end to it.
At least the news wasn’t all bad. Our boys were pushing forward in New Guinea, and the Germans had lost a big battle at a place called Stalingrad. Ruth Ballard, whose father had a farm on the other side of the valley, was home after some horrendous experiences in Burma; only the other day there had been news of a Japanese convoy being sunk in the Bismarck Strait.
Kath was so sick of it all. Every day she stared at her reflection in the mirror, reminding herself how lucky she was. She was safe; as a prisoner of war Hedley was safe, too; Walter was growing up a healthy, sturdy little boy.
Think how well-off you are, compared with so many others, she told herself fiercely. Think of the Noacks, whose son Arthur was killed in Egypt a few months ago. Think what it must be like for them, and stop moaning.
Yet it remained hard. Life was a night without end, a darkness seemingly destined to go on forever. There were more and more restrictions, too, which didn’t help. Necessary, perhaps, but so petty. She’d read an article telling people to save paper by writing on both sides, instead of one. It made sense, of course it did, but oh dear …
The government had brought out new rules telling you what you could wear and what you couldn’t. Some bossy mob calling itself The National Council of Clothes Styling (could you believe it?) had decided to ban full skirts, had declared that petticoat skirts were out, that embroidery was out, that belts more than two inches wide were out. They were even making up rules about the sort of undies you could wear.
