by Maggie Ford
Chapter 20
The rain had ceased. The flood within the railway cutting had subsided and with it part of the earth wall which must now be shored up. The guards, tempers uncertain at the best of times and now made more vile by the appalling conditions which they and prisoners alike were compelled to share, were calling for more speed. Anxious to return to their dry quarters and some warm food, they backed their demands with stick and stone aimed at any prisoner who flagged at his task.
The cutting rang to their demented yells, to the screech of steel being dragged from antiquated lorries, the clang of hammers on the metal spikes securing the rails in place while the sickly glow of carbide lamps gleamed on the glistening shoulders of those who toiled into the night.
To Matthew’s fevered mind the whole thing resembled scenes from Dante’s Inferno as on hands and knees he groped in the yellow mud for the bolts of the fishplate that would join together the two rails placed there.
His last meal of cold boiled rice diluted by monsoon rain had been eaten at mid-morning, eight hours ago. He would not eat again until their overseer, the shoko, called a halt to measure the day’s quota of work sometime just before midnight. His brain felt it was bursting from the most recent attack of malaria; he dared not dwell on how he would get through the remaining hours, but get through them he must.
Evading the prospect, he found himself turning his thoughts inward – a sort of mental escapism he’d long ago learned – a way of withdrawing into the depths of his own brain as into a dark little world secluded from all this misery outside. Slowly a wonderful phenomenon would occur, though it was only imagination. Inside his head there would appear a bright disc and within the disc he’d visualise Susan’s face, smiling, gentle as she reached out to him. The clamour around him would recede and he would seem to float on a tiny island of peace, remote from the violence and hunger that made up the world he now existed in. A figment of a feverish mind, perhaps. What did it matter? It sustained him, and with a fanaticism born of sheer desperation he clung to that wavering disc with an insane – because one could become insane in this place – but obdurate conviction that while he could conjure up that disc of light inside his head, he would survive.
He had never dreamed he would, that day of his being taken prisoner. Hands raised, his pockets being rifled, he’d protested at Susan’s photo being torn into pieces, had taken a step forward. One of his captors had sprung at him, bayonet whipping round. It was then he’d thought his life over, but the bayonet just scored his outstretched forearm.
The captives, bound together by their own belts in twos, had been pushed and prodded along jungle tracks with the noise of the river, which had meant safety, receding; they had finally been incarcerated in a small bamboo enclosure, full of Indian and British soldiers, which became filthier as the days passed with no latrines and a constant scramble for water. His arm had swollen to twice its normal size from the shallow bayonet wound bound by a piece of his own shirt.
Rangoon fell a week later. He had joined a lengthening column of POWs, taken back across the Sittang River, by then spanned by a hasty bridge flung up by the Japanese, past shattered metal and unburied bodies and into the city.
The poison from his festering wound had spread and he remembered little of the trek across the Irrawaddy Plain beneath a burning sun, but it was then that the strange disc-like brilliance with Susan’s image inside it began to fill his head. Bob, who had been with him, and still was, had said that he was holding whole conversations with her. But he’d been convinced then as now of the telepathic origins of that bright light. Susan’s thoughts were encouraging him, spanning the thousands of miles between them.
It had been Bob Howlett who’d practically carried him into the Rangoon jail from that seventy-mile trek, who had badgered him into putting one foot before the other, holding him up, telling him not to give up, that he had Susan and a baby to get home to; Bob who had fed him with tiny morsels of watery rice and bits of fruit as he lay desperately ill.
Now it was Bob who lay desperately ill with dysentery, so pernicious that Matthew feared he would lose him. So many friends had been parted, they had been fortunate staying together this long. If Bob died, there’d be no panacea of shared comradeship, nights spent in their rotting tent talking quietly of their hopes of what they were going to do when they got back home, their wives, their memories of happier days. If Bob died, he’d be totally alone.
With the wall shored up and this particular group of railway workers at last clear of the cutting, a whistle blasted; work ceased abruptly while the shoko went forward to inspect the quota completed. Silence fell, broken only by the dripping of rainwater from sodden vegetation, the drowned earth sucking and bubbling, the laborious breathing of the men, a cough or two, the idle clink of a metal tool and the sigh of the sick, their mates waiting to help them back to the huddle of tents they called home.
With the shoko signalling permission, each man lined up for his mess-tin of cold rice doled out from an old oil drum positioned under a strip of leaking tarpaulin, afterwards to slither their way along a morass of a path to their tents and sleep. But first there was water from the river to be boiled, to cook the edible lizard he’d caught and killed that morning. Anything caught was supposed to go into the common pot, but he meant to cook it himself and feed the broth to Bob, who would have done the same for him.
Armed with a bent and battered petrol can, he made his way from the tent designed to hold three Japanese schoolboys comfortably but now used by eight men, and headed a quarter of a mile down the slippery path to the stagnant backwater of the river. It had to be the backwater. The torrent of the main river could wash away a man, especially one in a weakened condition. Men were already there scooping up the cloudy liquid, a perfect breeding ground for disease. The last to arrive, Matthew sank down on a decaying log to wait for the pool to clear, his head buzzing from his malaria. He watched each man depart with a full container, slipping, sliding, shambling back up the greasy track, all the spring of youth gone out of their step. Sitting here, he too felt like an old man, trying to summon the will just to raise himself up and fill up his can with the cloudy water.
Holding the petrol can below the surface to fill, he stared across the river into the darkness of the jungle. The roar of the river was deafening. A slow, lethargic thought came. What was the point of it all, squatting here, a half-naked, emaciated travesty of a man, shaken by fever, tongue raw from pellagra that made every mouthful of what food he got an agony? Would he drag on for a few more months in this hopeless corner of the world, or somewhere like it further along this growing railway, lost, forgotten, to succumb and be buried under a bamboo cross, one among all the countless other bamboo crosses that lined the route?
‘God! Why in Christ’s name did you do this to me? Why in Christ’s name won’t you help us?’
The roar of the river bore away the insane cry. The buzzing night-jungle swallowed it whole. There was no one to hear, just some unseen monkeys disturbed by the strange man-cry, replying with a distant demented howling while the incessant chirruping of myriads of insects in this primeval tangle of sodden vegetation continued uninterrupted.
There was a reply – voiceless in his own head, the memory of a smile, Susan hovering in his head across thousands of miles of sea and desert and mountain and jungle, waiting for him. He couldn’t let her down. He couldn’t let Bob down, sitting here nursing his own misery while Bob hovered at the edge of death. Rationality returned. The can was full and he had jobs to do.
It was heaven to close the door, to curl up in one of the old armchairs in the partitioned-off part of her room upstairs, to be alone.
Emma was a wonderful and supportive friend, but her chatter could get a bit much sometimes. With Mattie being looked after downstairs by a willing Emma, who adored girls, she could relax with the latest paperback romance, identifying with the beautiful heroine in the embrace of the dark handsome hero, who in her imagination was Matthew, until it was
Mattie’s bedtime.
But all the imagination in the world could never compensate for the real thing. She and Edie spent most Saturday nights being whirled around a dance floor by Uniformed worthies, one of them invariably whispering a certain invitation in her ear. It was a source of pride to her that she resisted, loyal still to her married state. But sometimes she envied Edie leaving with a partner’s arm around her waist. ‘You be orlright goin’ ’ome without me?’
She’d nod and watch her leave then go and sit at the side of the hall knowing that the next partner – there always was one – asking her to go for a walk with him, the question heavy with innuendo, would get a short answer. But oh, how she envied Edie.
Once, hurrying to catch her bus home, she’d passed a couple hidden in a dark doorway. In the blackout she would have missed them but for a girlish giggle she recognised as Edie’s. She heard the deep drawl of a GI and knew that tomorrow Edie would be displaying a fancy bar of toilet soap, or a bar of chocolate or a pair of nylons, perhaps even, with a brash flourish, bring out a packet of US government-issue contraceptives to shock her friend.
‘It’s safe as ’ouses, Sue, an’ what ’arm are yer doing, keepin’ the poor things ’appy, far away from ’ome, making yerself feel better in the bargain?’
But she couldn’t do that. What if she did fall by accident? How would she ever face Matthew’s parents? Yet it had been so long since a man’s hand had touched her, really touched her. Her whole body ached at the thought of it. It was now August. August 1943, seven months since she’d heard Matthew had been made a prisoner of war; almost two years since she had last seen him; at times she couldn’t remember his face unless she looked at a photo of him first; Mattie’s first birthday had come and gone two weeks ago and he had never seen her. She often thought nowadays of herself and Mattie, never herself, Matthew and Mattie.
‘I wish I had your courage,’ she said to Edie on the Monday morning, knowing Edie had throughly enjoyed her Saturday night by evidence of yet another handful of Hershey bars and a pair of nylons.
Edie ran the gauzy stockings through her fingers. ‘Can’t get these in this country,’ she tempted.
It wasn’t the gifts American boys could dish out that made Susan squirm at Edie’s efforts to tempt but the thought of someone’s arms around her. It was a terrible thought and made her want to cry. Her first joy at the news of Matthew having been traced had long since dwindled. She had been allowed to send him a message if that was what it could be called. Fifteen words on a form, all the Japanese permitted. Whether Matthew received it who was to say? There had been no reply. It felt for all the world as though her message had been written to a ghost. She had never dared voice those sentiments to his mother, who had sent off her own forlorn fifteen words of encouragement and love that day. She would have been appalled. How much more appalled would she be were she to know how his wife yearned for the feel of a man’s hand fondling her even though it wasn’t her husband’s. No, she couldn’t.
All very well for Edie in the arms of some frustrated warrior far from home. Edie had changed a lot this year, voiced a different slant on her husband these days.
‘Two years away – and God knows ’ow many more years. I mean, the man’s stuck out in the Falklands. When’re they goin’ ter give ’im leave from there? Meanwhile I could go barmy waiting fer ’im ter come ’ome and make love.’
‘But don’t you feel some loyalty to him?’ Susan asked and received a sceptical chuckle as Edie sorted out men’s small from men’s large, ready for despatching.
‘’Ow do I know ’e’s not ’aving it off with some Falklands floozie? I do know ’e ’ad a rovin’ eye, even when I first married ’im. It didn’t matter then, I was there to keep my eye on ’im. But now, miles away. Why shouldn’t I ’ave a bit of pleasure too? You must feel the need too, Sue? Keepin’ yerself like a nun – it ain’t natural. What the ole man don’t know won’t ’urt ’im. You ain’t gonna confess all when ’e comes marchin’ ’home, are yer? Fer God’s sake, Sue, you’ll be a physical wreck by the time ’e does if yer don’t let off a bit of steam now and again.’
Frustration had its own way of dealing with things. Alone in her room, her senses keened from reading cheap romances about larger-than-life heroines and handsome forceful heroes, she would furtively turn the key of her door, quietly so no one would hear it. Secure behind the lock, she would slip out of her clothes and survey herself before the mirror, run her hands slowly, slowly, over her body, gently following the curve of her small breasts, still firm; over her flat stomach that child-bearing had not marred at all. Closing her eyes she would imagine her fingers to be those of Matthew, tenderly exploring, growing urgent until her disquietened senses shrieked for relief. Then, throbbing from the lack of fulfilment she would fling herself on to her bed to squirm and weep in self-torment. How tempting it would be at these moments to follow Edie’s example, to find herself someone to fondle her, fulfil this emptiness inside her – surely more honest than this pathetic self-pleasure that was no pleasure at all and left only misery in its wake.
‘I wish I knew if Matthew was all right,’ she confided in Emma. ‘It could be years before I ever know. I’m so lonely.’
‘At least yer’ve got Mattie,’ Emma said, busily darning one of her Geoffrey’s socks. He’d gone away for a day or two as usual.
‘You have her most of the time these days,’ Susan said.
Emma looked up sharply. ‘It’s you wot asked me ter look after ’er. You goin’ ter work an’ all. I’m not keepin’ ’er away from yer.’
‘I know. I didn’t mean anything.’ She was glad of Emma’s help. She wasn’t cut out to be a mother, she didn’t think, driven to distraction when Mattie got herself into a temper, shrieking at the top of her voice. A child’s shriek could be like a hot iron searing right through a person’s eardrum. Smacking only made things worse. Many times Susan had been forced out of sheer frustration to resort to a smack on her legs, finally having to rush her down to Emma to pacify her. Emma was a natural mother. At times Susan felt quite envious of her.
‘I’m just a bit down, I suppose,’ she excused herself now. ‘I hope she don’t play you up too much.’
‘Good Lord, no. She’s a real dear. ’Cos, the only fing is we ’ave ter put everyfink up out of ’er reach now she’s ’oisting ’erself up on ’er feet. Got ’er little ’ands inter everyfink. Real explorin’ character she is. Quick. An’ if she don’t get wot she wants, gets a real tantrum on ’er. Strong-minded. It’s good. She probably takes after ’er dad. You’re more of a pliable person, you are. She don’t look as if she’s gonna be. She ain’t gonna be moved from wot she wants in life.’
‘Sounds like she takes after Matthew’s mother. Nothing can move her either.’ She didn’t say it in bitterness, just stated what was the truth. Mrs Ward had never deviated from the certainty that Matthew would come home, even though her poor little message hadn’t been answered; had not deviated from continually telling Susan that she must be strong and pray for him to come home and not to give way to ‘any temptation that may come along’. Such instructions made Susan shudder. What did the woman know of the feelings she harboured? Probably nothing. She was merely wise to such things, being older and having seen and learned more, for all her primness.
‘I miss Matthew so much,’ she said in an effort to evade thoughts of those temptations Mrs Ward hinted at with more emphasis than Susan cared to acknowledge. ‘I know Geoffrey’s not in the forces but he’s away a lot too. Don’t you miss him?’
‘Miss ’im!’ Emma put away the sock she had darned and picked up another, studying the dangerously thin place on the heel that next week would become a hole. ‘I’m glad to see the back of him sometimes.’
Shocked, Susan stared at her. ‘You don’t mean that.’
‘Yes, I do.’ Emma gave a good-tempered chuckle. ‘So will you when he’s bin home fer a few years. Most wives do. Not nasty-like. But it’s nice ter ’ave ’em out of the way occa
sionally and get on wiv yer own fings. Before ’e ’ad this job of ’is, it was, “Wot yer goin’ out fer? ’Ow long’ll yer be? I don’t feel like goin’ ter the pictures ternight.” So I couldn’t go either, could I? Not on me own an’ leave ’im ’ere on ’is own. Married people don’t do that. An’ when yer spend all day mendin’ ’is socks an ’ironing ’is shirts, an’ bringin’ up ’is kids, an’ gettin’ ’is breakfasts and dinners, an’ makin’ ’is sandwiches, an’ bein’ woken up out of a deep sleep because ’e wants a bit of the other … well, yer’ve had enough, ain’t yer, an’ yer want a bit of time to yerself. Miss ’im? I think this job ’e’s got ’as bin a godsend. I know ’e’s safe, not overseas somewhere in the fick of it all. But Geoff’s the limit sometimes – expecting me ter be runnin’ after ’im. The least sneeze and I’m ’is nursemaid. Men!’
Her darning needle flew fast but without ill will. ‘Babies, most of ’em. I expect they’re brave enough amongst themselves, but get near their wives an’ they’re little babies, straight they are. I’m a bloomin’ muvver to Geoff.’
She stopped to tap the hand of her youngest trying to fish into her workbasket for the glass marbles that always got in there. ‘Yer’ll prick yer fingers, yer silly little bugger! I’ll get ’em out for yer after I’ve done this. Jus’ wait!’ She directed another laugh towards Susan watching. ‘Even at that age. You ’ave ter fink for ’em. Mind, I don’t mind Geoff wantin’ his rights. I’d love ter ’ave a little daughter, just like your’n, it’s just ’im waking me up out of a sleep fer it …’ Another tolerant laugh. ‘My mum use ter say, “Before yer married yer could feel yer could eat it. After yer married, yer wish you ’ad!” ’
‘I hope I never feel like that,’ Susan said fervently.
‘You will, luv. You will. Anyway I’ve got my little remedy – just tell ’im I’m out of bounds fer a week. I’ve told ’im, if ’e wants more’n I can give ’im, ’e can find it wiv a bit of skirt on ’is travels.’
