by Nigel Barley
* * *
Over by the prison wall, Corporal Higgins was snipping away industriously inside a sort of frayed canvas lean-to that looked like a giant’s trenchcoat, trimming neatly around the irregular ears of a gnarled Aussie commando, perched on a soap box. Muscularity was a sort of disease that had invaded the man’s entire body. He even had clenched, muscular hair.
‘Always hang on to the tools of your trade, lad,’ me Dad used to say—not that he meant it in quite that way you understand—and it’s advice that’s stood me in good stead over the years.’ He was a tiny, impish wisp of a man, willowy and deft, like a tickbird on a buffalo. The commando was not listening, they never did. It made no difference. Chatter and snip came together even if it went right over their heads. ‘A little more off the top dear?’ The commando grunted and groped at his own head with blunt fingers, then shook it. There were no large mirrors in this ‘salon’, just a fragment hanging on a string from the doorframe that required a face to be viewed in parts and mentally recombined. The customer stood up, a long way up, reached in his top pocket and took out a single crumpled cigarette, considered briefly but weightily and broke it in half, giving one part to eye-rolling Private Higgins and replacing the other, then lumbered off on splayed feet.
‘Thank you, dear. I’ll put it in the vault.’ He leaned round the edge of the shelter and called after. ‘Anything for the wife?’ The next customer moved forward and slumped on the box, looking around with studied insouciance. Higgins poked fussily into the nest of red hair with scissors and comb. ‘I really am going to have to take my clippers to you dear. You can’t keep passing through here and coming out looking like the cat’s furball. Even the Japanese are going to notice. Let me at least trim the beard.’ Pilchard sat resentfully for several minutes as the scissors teased and snipped, squirming like a little boy suffering the wipe of a mother’s spitty handkerchief. Higgins sighed.
‘Oh go on, then.’
Pilchard rose and slipped nichodemously behind the sheet at the far end. On the other side stood the mildewed, stucco wall of the prison, surrounded by a fly-buzzing drainage ditch. He clambered down into the depression and approached the entrance to a big concrete pipe that led through into the storm-drain. It was barred by a grille of iron bars but two were rusted and removable. He lifted and climbed through, set them back in place and twisted their smooth faces outwards to match the rest. The drains were only flushed twice a day to save water so he removed his careworn sandals and splashed barefoot through unpleasant ankle-deep sewage and up, beneath the double outer wall, to emerge behind the latrine sheds in the area known whimsically as Crouch End or Lower Tooting, back into the jail itself. No one was on the lookout for someone breaking into a jail and Pilchard knew that security was brutally but only capriciously enforced so that the greatest risk was from a Japanese soldier grabbing a sly cigarette here out of sight. A bucket of water stood ready and he sloshed it, grimacing, over his feet and made his way, heavy-footed, up into the men’s section, hauling himself up the stairs by the hot and crumbly iron handrails.
Changi was an ugly, fairly new confection of iron, brick and concrete, perennially dank and—with only the sea-facing cells able to catch even a breath of wind—as steamy as a pressure-cooker. The contractor had enjoyed a cosy and mutually profitable relationship with the Public Works Department so that rising damp, penetrating moisture and leaks from the roof now met and pooled resources on the second floor. It had been built for 600 inmates and presently held five times that number, including—with poetic irony—several of the civil servants who had cut corners on its construction. The one extravagance, the expensive steel doors, imported from England, that had once been a matter of pride, with fine Bramah locks and a series of sliding panels and peepholes that would have been the envy of a Chinese conjuror, now stood useless, open flat against the wall, a mere, hard-boned nuisance.
The women and children were segregated off in a separate wing, but, in the male block, each cell had been built for two with the modern marvel of a crouchhole toilet. Most were now shared by five inmates, so three had no bunk but since this was only a slab of concrete anyway, the difference was less than might be imagined. The actual occupancy of any particular cell was in constant rearrangement as overcrowding and boredom bred feuds, fights or the furtive physical affections that could be even worse. At night, inmates stretched out on the steel mesh that denied the use of the central well to would-be suicides or crept out into the courtyards and offered themselves a living sacrifice to the mosquitoes rather than the heat. Apart from the tormented dentist called Churchill—that even the Japanese found funny—the most luckless prisoner was a pale and peaceful Czech embezzler, known inappropriately as ‘the bouncing Czech’, who had seen his rapist, murderous and bestial companions liberated by victorious General Yamashita and sent back slavering into the community while he was retained as a dangerous enemy alien. At least, as sitting tenant, he had been able to take the best cell in the house.
Endless discord had been brilliantly sown by the Japanese when, at the last moment, they drove in two hundred mixed Jews and Armenians, mostly money-changers from what the Europeans called Change Alley and everyone else knew as Chincharlie. The Jews were persecuted by Germans, therefore clearly not Allies, therefore enemies of the Japanese, but the British were horrified that the Japanese viewed them as white without further qualification. They had been anyway none too happy about the olive complexions of some of the Mediterranean French and a disquietingly dusky Spaniard in the wine trade. A petition had been sent to the nonplussed commandant suggesting they be reclassified as ‘Eurasian’ and removed at once to the Sime Road camp. Then the Jews further hardened the hearts of oak against them by not knowing their place. It was discovered that they even referred to the lavatories not by some patriotic and affectionate term of whimsy, derived from the Motherland, but openly called them ‘The Wailing Wall’. The other internees, shocked, had fussed and fumed like an outraged residents’ association. Now they sent another petition to Colonel Saito who puzzled wearily over the alien classifications involved. Finally, the interpreter threw up his hands. ‘British say Jews are Korean,’ he extemporised, and the British case was won. The Jews were accorded separate quarters in the old rice store—immediately dubbed ‘Aldgate’—and their womenfolk designated as cleaners and washerwomen in the women’s section.
Even within the British themselves, the rubbing along of different classes caused constant friction. The public school men fared best. After all, they had been raised in a system of arbitrary authority and violence with only scant food and distant dreams of ultimate liberation to sustain them. They knew from experience the dangers of such hothouse environments and the importance of battening down the hatches in order to retain their sanity and just face life day by day. Outrageous behaviour was dismissed with a sighed ‘It takes all sorts …’, Japanese-imposed indignities accepted with ‘We mustn’t make a fuss for the sake of the women …’ And women. They could live without them as they could do without tablecloths and napkins. Pilchard was an old Malvern College man. He had survived there by collecting beetles. Here, he had his Cocos-Keeling fieldwork to remember, to revise, to reinvent. He panted into the cell.
‘Good Lord, old man, what happened to you? Was it the Nips? The INA?’ O’Toole was a craggy rugger player in his fifties with a well-macerated face, his nose spread sideways to make a physiognomy that could have modelled for Picasso. Beside him was a housewifely stack of threadbare shorts and vests. He had been killing time, as he sewed, by trying to recreate games played in the past, attacking holes in his clothes with great swooping stitches such as a fisherman might use to mend his nets. It was hopeless. Like his washing, memories were all one grey blur punctuated by varied injuries. Occasionally, he had done a little banking to fill in between the matches and the rugger suppers that were yet another blur.
‘One darn thing after another, eh, O’Toole? Mmm? What happened? Oh, I see. You mean the beard.’ Pilchard tugge
d at a few random red strands of hair. ‘Higgins insisted on having a go at it just to keep his cover.’ It was thanks to the beard and the hair that he was no longer at liberty. The occupiers had been glad enough, initially, to retain the academic staff of the museum to keep looters at bay and give a token nod and a wink towards their own cultural pretensions, but shaven-headed Japanese could not cope with the sheer physical indiscipline of Pilchard’s body. The Professor, a suitably eruptive Tokyo vulcanologist appointed Director, had wandered in through the door on his first day and found him, shod feet up on the desk, digging in his ear with one finger while swigging from a mug of tea. Pilchard saw himself as paid to think. So he had been working hard, thinking about rearranging the display of Malay birds—the pose being one conducive to thought. For newly conscripted Tokyo professors, to point one’s feet at a superior was a grave insult in itself. To do so wearing extremely baggy shorts and no underwear, with an insouciant smirk on his face and a finger in his ear, had nearly cost Pilchard his life. But, even in his better days, Pilchard had never ‘dressed’. Rather, he had simply ‘worn clothes’. The Professor had been taken aback and asked to be introduced. Then he had inquired, in his most official, stocktaking voice, ‘Tell me. How many people actually work in the Gardens, Dr Pilchard?’
‘Oh … about half of them,’ he had replied with another casual grin. Of course, the joke had been unwise but also irresistible and he had been somewhat surprised when the Professor hauled a huge old Webley revolver from the sagging side pocket of his suit, ripping it in the process with the front sight, pointed it at him and screamed spittle-spraying words that he did not understand, Japanese words that flew past like shrapnel. An hour later, the soldiers had come for him and dumped him in Changi. Intercultural humour was always a difficult thing to judge. From this, he had learned that respect was not something you had to feel to make the Japanese happy. You only had to ritually show it and, in fact, the more clear it was that you showed it while feeling the very opposite, the better they liked it. Perhaps his present life, the whole war, could have been avoided if he and the Allies had understood that earlier. Anyway, he had offered the old fool a cup of tea.
‘Where’s Manson?’
O’Toole shrugged. Manson was their talisman, the reason they only had three to the cell. He was a former engineer on the Malay Railways but had never been the same since the attack by the Sikhs. For long periods, he now thought he was one of the steam engines that he had lovingly maintained and he ran around the stairs and landings chuffing and working his arms like pistons and with a beatific expression on his tooting face that was the envy of other inmates. Harmless but irritating, he had repelled several tentative boarders with his whistling and fidgeting and the constant shameless jiggling with his emergency pressure release valve. ‘He’s out shunting—running round somewhere with that stupid smile on his face. Daft as a Christian—as usual. Today, he’s started operating his wet season timetable.’
‘But it’s still the dry season.’
O’Toole mimed astonishment. ‘You don’t say. Could this be a sign Manson is going round the bend, do you think?’
Pilchard grinned ruefully. Even in peacetime, his medicine was helpless before afflictions of the brain, the mind, perhaps both. ‘I take your point but lunatics are usually the most ruthlessly logical of people. That’s why they are lunatics.’ He took out the banana-leaf package and laid it carefully on the bed, a slight gloating in his face.
O’Toole looked over. ‘You got it then? Not from the Javanese, I hope. You know how dangerous that is. They’re all bloody informers.’
Pilchard nodded. ‘They’re all right.’ He unfolded both ends carefully, unwrapped and peeled back the flaps of green leaf to reveal the treasure inside, held it up to the light, sniffed it. It was smooth and translucent, a relic of a higher civilisation now fallen. ‘Looks good quality. Not even second hand.’ Jeyes, onion-skin, medicated, interleafed for box dispenser—sheets of toilet paper blessed with the holy cross of Izal. Worth its weight in gold. He went over to the crouchhole toilet. This convenience had so impressed local inmates that they had nicknamed the prison ‘King Georgie Hoteli’ but, under British occupation, it had been unanimously decided at a meeting, that crouchholes should not be used for the purpose designed. “Point of ordure, Mr Chairman!” Pilchard had quipped at a sea of stonily uncomprehending and disapproving faces. Pilchrd flicked up the grill and reached inside. Another Player’s tin. He stowed the paper inside, carefully keeping back one sheet, replaced the lid and slid it back into concealment under the rim.
‘How much did you pay?’
Pilchard smiled. ‘I didn’t pay. I traded. A bulb from the headlight of Spratt’s truck.’
‘How the hell did you manage that?’ Grudging admiration showed.
‘I didn’t. His driver did. A Korean. I gave him Gracie Fields for it.’
O’ Toole sat up, all ears. ‘A Korean? You’re bloody mad. And your postcard? The one with her in a headscarf? The one outside Rochdale town hall?’
Pilchard nodded.
‘What the devil did a Korean want that for?’ He lay back again, frowning.
‘Maybe she reminded him of his mother? No. He just wants it to trade with. Some homesick Yorkshire lad, like as not, would give his eye teeth for it and eye teeth are worth a fortune in here.’
O’Toole shook his head.
Like most Western males, Pilchard cared nothing for matters of hygiene, whereas some of the women next door were almost incapable of doing without toilet paper and literally wept daily with humiliation over its absence. The Javanese, who had sold him the paper, would naturally have nothing to do with it. They washed carefully, with left hands, after defecation. Western practice was to them shocking, scandalously filthy, but they had experimented with using the paper for rolling cigarettes, the disinfectant flavour being the welcome revenant of the cloves they normally worked in with their tobacco. For Pilchard, it was the paper’s literary potential that attracted. The Japanese were obsessively opposed to the keeping of records and diaries and Pilchard simply accepted this as one of the irrational obsessions to which armies were prey. In a while, they would probably forget all about it in favour of some new idiocy, the possession of combs or torches. Toilet paper was easily hidden, might even pass disdainfully unexamined, could be disposed of without arousing suspicion. Occasional searches were made and anyone caught with informational contraband could expect to be dragged away to Kempeitei headquarters and tortured hysterically. At the museum, they regularly heard the results of such searches, the screams of their neighbours in the former YMCA, often followed by an abrupt silence even more terrifying. It was clear from those screams that the Kempeitei did not favour exquisite subtlety in their interrogations. No slow dripping of oil on the head, in steady rhythm and darkness, over the course of a month. Their methods were a matter of ripping boots and fists, ropes and barrels of water.
He and O’Toole exchanged conspiratorial grins. ‘From faeces to thesis,’ quipped Pilchard, twinkling a pencil out from behind one ear and propping himself up against the hard surface of the bunk to begin rewriting his Cocos-Keeling fieldnotes—weeks, months of research distilled down to a few lines of what he himself recognised as a slightly lunatic hand—as O’Toole closed his eyes, chased images of Gracie Fields away and settled back to skeptically re-examine a referee’s decision about a touchdown that now lay some three years in the past. Soon it would be time for lunch.
* * *
‘Where the hell’s my pencil?’ Spratt let his eye roam over the rickety table, the floor. He checked his pockets. It was gone. Someone had nicked it. Men were always nicking stuff these days. It was a disease. He balefully eyed the men working on the truck. If this were Aldershot, he’d have the lot on jankers but, for the moment, he was too weary to enjoy his rage, make a proper theatrical production of it. Pencils were hard to come by. Now he would need to nick one from someone else. He wandered irritably out and over to the books piled in the han
dcart and saw several periodicals on the birds of Malaya, the sort with numbers instead of pictures on the cover, so you knew they were serious and full of Latin. There might be something by Pilchard in there. With a snarled ‘Carry on’ to the men, he bent and seized one and walked with purposeful buttocks over to the latrines, tearing at the pages as he went. It was hard, shiny, unabsorbent paper that gave off a chemical smell. It would just about do but you had to be careful. Crumple it thoroughly before you wiped. Cut yourself if not. Bible paper was better but he retained a superstitious fear of sacrilege. With the Japs against you, you didn’t need to risk upsetting God as well by wiping yourself on one of the abominations of Leviticus. Anyway, Bible paper was too good, absolutely the best there was for a roll-up. He closed the door of rough planks, twisted the bent nail that served as a bolt, tensing against the sudden heat, and settled over the hole, trying to ignore the hot miasma that rose with the buzz of flies and a sound like sizzling fat. The drains weren’t flushed out continuously any more. Prison bred a schoolboy obsession with entrances and exits, boundaries and barriers, control of the body, the ever-present threat of lethal dysentery. Contrary views existed cosily, side by side. When someone died of disease in here, the medics spoke of the invasion of the body by the hostile outside, while the chaplain of liberation and blessed release from the body and its confinement.
He scanned the wall. Occasionally, important news from the hidden radios would be pencilled in the darker corners to escape Japanese eyes—‘latrinogrammes’ they were called—and had proved, on the whole, less confusing than the news whispered at roll call. There, ‘Rations are increased’ had become ‘Russians are in Greece’ which had led to wild and misplaced rejoicing among the Armenians—though the latrinogramme ‘French push bottles up 5,000 Germans’ had caused great puzzlement among the Asians. Today, there was only the standard wittily scrawled ‘For the war effort’ with appropriate arrow. He grunted and settled back and spread out a crumpled study of the mating patterns of the Brahminy kite. A hundred feet down the same pipe that led from scribbling Pilchard’s cell, scholarship was being returned to the soil of Asia.
