by Nigel Barley
* * *
The canteen was already packed, though it would be at least another ten minutes until the food was late. Pilchard settled in a corner with his back to the wall, clutching tin mug and spoon like a child at a Salvation Army bun fight and observed dispassionately. As at school, food was the internal clock around which all other activities revolved. Even though it was always the same, watery rice porridge, bubur, and tea without milk or sugar, a form of pointless expertise had developed around it. The rice mixture was brought in in buckets, crusted thicker on top and watery at the bottom and doled out into prisoners’ mugs. There were three schools of thought about this. The first held that there was most solid nourishment in the viscous, top layer so it paid to come early. The second held that all the mystical ‘goodness’ was leached out and lay only in the watery bottom layer so the trick lay in ensuring you got to the front of the queue towards the end of one bucket but before they started on the next. The servers knew this and some would deliberately switch buckets before they were quite empty just for the leering sense of power it gave them. The Bishop of Singapore, on his watch, had almost provoked a riot by stirring up the depths to the top with a muscular egalitarianism that had earned him a reputation for communist leanings. The third school held that it all depended on the amount of gritty lime the Japanese had added to the rice as an insecticide, which varied from day to day and so it was a lottery. The result was that the queue became a caricature of hypocrisy with an alternation of shoving and dithering punctuated with smooth ‘After you!’s or sharp little ‘Excuse me. I think it is my turn!’s as people tried to shorten the odds in favour of their own view of the world. Rarely, there was dried, salt fish or meat to add relish to the porridge but mostly it was a diet of tasteless or slightly mouldy wallpaper paste. In his pocket, Pilchard had his secret boy-scout ingredient—earthworms of the phylum Annelida, captured in the gardens and sundried on the window sill to little salty wisps of pseudo-bacon. As always when they lugged in the bubur, he smiled and thought of the Malay proverb ‘the rice has already become porridge’ something like ‘no point in crying over spilt milk’. No point indeed.
Today, it was pompous, suspiciously chubby Arthur Truefitt, from the water board, on duty at the rice table, wielding his ladle of authority like an alderman’s mace as the rice buckets were dragged in and the crowd fell hungrily silent and watchful. Changi was a very paradise for frustrated colonial bureaucrats with constant elections for camp commandant to deal with the Japanese, a representative to supervise each floor, endless specialist committees on matters as diverse as religious services and latrines and a complex system of rotating chores that ensured a constantly elevated sense of social injustice. Its administration required a greater density of officialdom than the Chinese empire. Pilchard rose to his feet and used his youth and height to drift with passive, genteel violence to the front.
By deft manipulation of his implement, allowing porridge to slop down the side of the mug and back into the bucket or not, he reckoned that the officiating ladler could adjust the amount dispensed by at least fifteen percent in either direction. Today, Pilchard knew, it should be all right. After all, he and Truefitt were on the Christmas planning committee together and in staunch alliance against those extremists who wanted to ban carols of German origin from the festivities. But they were also on the education sub-committee and there bitterly divided on the topic of whether geography and history should be taught to the children in secret defiance of Nip orders to the contrary, for Pilchard remembered his own childhood and knew that both were essential supplements to the thin gruel of reality from which they would otherwise build their worlds. Truefitt looked him in the eye and hesitated, then scooped the ladle around the bucket, not waiting for the level to adjust back down, and quickly plonked the ration squarely in the mug without further droolage. The Christmas committee meeting, after all, came before the education sub-committee meeting.
* * *
There was no shortage of doctors on the wing. In fact there were more than they knew what to do with, given the almost total absence of drugs and their helplessness without them. The hospital wing was known, with deliberate whimsy, as ‘Cripplegate’ and Pilchard was on the afternoon rota. It would be busy since people regarded medical consultations as a form of social therapy, comforting, validating, good in themselves. Miller, an Australian mine engineer with a swollen belly like a separate fitment hobbled in and sat down heavily, wincing.
‘It’s me Niagaras, Doc.’
‘Niagaras?’
Miller chewed at the air in frustration. He had a face like a collapsed lung. ‘Yeah, Niagaras. Oh Jeez. You know … Niagara Falls, balls. They aches something cruel. Wakes me up at night when I’m in bed. A while back one of the lads give me a bit of melon and I thought it was that upset me guts. Like I was melancholic.’
‘Have you suffered any recent injury in that area?’
‘In bed, Doc? Nah. That’s one place I keeps out of trouble.’
Pilchard sighed. He was not going to examine him. He recoiled powerfully from the notion. In peacetime, bodies might be variously erotic or medical. Years of training prevented their being both at the same time. Here they were simply universally repellent.
‘You’re sure it’s not rice balls?’ It was the local term for a common prison complaint. ‘Erosion of the skin of the scrotal sack with attendant inflammation and infection? The result of vitamin deficiency.’ The man shook his head. Pilchard looked him in the eye, man-to-man, no-names-no-packdrill. ‘Look. When did you last have an orgasm, Mr Miller?’
Miller rolled his head and blushed like a schoolgirl tickled under the chin. ‘Aw Doc. There ain’t no sheilas in here and I’ve had other things on me mind, what with the malaria and dysentery. Cripes, I hardly knows me cellmates.’
Pilchard grunted. His wife flashed across his mind. His other half. Perhaps less a half than a sixteenth as it turned out. Margaret had fled to Australia on one of the first evacuation ships. Not that he had had much time for the pleasures and duties of marriage. He refused to go down that gloomy path.
‘Not since your last bout of malaria then? Well, that may well be the trouble. The elevated temperature and so on. Hard on the genitals which function at their best at a lower temperature than the rest of the body. Hence their dependant siting. Find some way to drain away … er … try the usual form of release. You know what I mean.’ Miller blushed again and looked fixedly down into the corner of the room. There was a cockroach there, eavesdropping without shame, waving its antennae.
‘You mean crack one off, Doc?’ His voice was high and incredulous.
‘If that’s what you call it. At least once a day. For a few days. See if that clears it up.’
Miller shook his head in shocked disbelief. ‘First time a quack’s told me to do that. When I was a kiddie lots told me not to. Make you blind. Make hair grow on the palms of yer ’ ands. Priests too—though there was some of ’em at school only too keen to give a lad a hand. I grew up poor and I was lucky to be born a lad otherwise I’d have had nothing at all to play with. Here, it seems like a waste of good porridge. Still …’ He lumbered to his feet, all bony arms and legs, the chair scraping back and rubbed his hand over his grinning jaw. The cockroach ran for cover. ‘Can you give me a prescription for that, Doc?’
* * *
‘Singapore is a colony but it has its own colonies. It is an island become a prison and within that prison is this special place where women are further imprisoned. But we are not alone in this. There have been other places just the same. Imagine Australia on the map,’ said Pilchard drawing in thin air. His audience sighed wistfully. He had attracted a mere thirty-odd of them, mostly squatting on the floor, with chairs awarded to a few on grounds of infirmity or eminence—categories that were nearly identical in the women’s prison. Only thirty but then ‘Some Little-Known Facts about the Cocos-Keeling Islands’ was not a title to pack them in. Before the war, the room had been some sort of a warders’ commo
n room and dismembered remains of lurid pictures, random bosoms and necks—mostly Western—torn from newspapers, were stuck to the brickwork. The odd Islamic pinup—swathed from head to toe, all the provocation crammed into the face—peered and pouted between. Lady Pendleberry, in a chair in the front row, cleared her throat manfully and one woman sobbed and was shushed. ‘Now move your eye northwest to Java. Between the two, nothing but thousands and thousands of miles of empty ocean, punctuated by two tiny eruptions of land, Christmas Island and the archipelago of Cocos-Keeling.’ He made it dramatic, waved his arm again, pointed on the non-existent wall map to the invisible islands conjured from the dust motes dancing in the air. Outside, the POWs had their ‘university’, drawing on the prodigious and absurd mix of submerged expertise that the military normally ignored. Out there, they were learning everything from poultry-keeping to philosophy with one or two hiccoughs. ‘Introduction to the Japanese language’ had not proved a popular course but a pale clerk from the Pay Corps triumphed with a bloodthirsty history of the Byzantine Empire, interspersing tales of horror and voluptuousness with lyrical passages of art appreciation. Then an embittered Australian ranker had stirred them with a demotic examination of the heresies of the mediaeval Christian Church. ‘Jansenism? It means most of you are poor buggers, totally buggered from the start and there’s bugger all you can do about it.’ Then there had been trouble over geometric forms scraped in the dust, the guards taking a proof of Pythagoras’s theorem for an escape plan, while two Kiwi commandos had had a nasty fist fight over the pathetic fallacy in the work of Wordsworth.
The occupants of the female wing of Changi, known unflatteringly as the ‘bitches’ barracks’, had set their own sights somewhat lower. Despite malnutrition and deprivation, their lives were a whirlwind of colonial gentility—bridge and needlework, concerts and poetry contests that denied the reality of the occupation. They were yellow and papery-skinned, even the natural exuberance of the children dimmed by hunger and they all smelled seedy and unwashed, the armpits of their faded frocks rotted through by sweat. From somewhere Pilchard remembered that starving bodies give off acetone. Acetone removes nail varnish. But none of them were wearing nail varnish—from malnutrition many had no nails—and no unruly male desire stirred at the sight of them. Even the Japanese guards no longer made a point of coming round at shower time. The women were still scratching from delousing. The best way of dealing with lice infestation was to drape clothes and mattresses over an anthill in the yard. The ants rushed out and stung the lice to death, even digging their eggs out of hidden seams but then you had to drive away the ants by smoking the clothes which made everyone smell like kippers for a week. Unfortunately, they hadn’t had time to do that properly before the talk.
For now, edifying lectures were to be added to social life and special permission had been unexpectedly granted by the Japanese for male visitors to deliver them. Normally, mixing of sexes was not encouraged. In an act of petty spite, families were deliberately broken up and isolated from each other but love, as always, had found a way. One man per week was permitted, under guard, to take over the female dustbins delivered into the yard of the women’s quarters by one of them, empty the bins on the male side and bring them back. A stringent secret rota, organised on toilet paper pushed through a slit in the brick wall, ensured that married couples should be paired and briefly coincide over the reeking garbage. Hands might fleetingly touch, screwed up notes be dropped, damp-eyed, reassuring smiles be silently exchanged amidst the buzzing flies and the stink of decay. For these precious moments, wardrobes were ransacked, precious dresses borrowed, even a priceless dab of scent behind the ears might contend with the sickly-sweet stench. The Japanese never seemed to wonder why the only occasion when prisoners dressed up was to move dustbins and why the experience invariably seemed to move them to tears. For them foreigners were just crazy.
‘Christmas Island may be characterised as a large heap of guano populated by swarms of coconut-eating crabs and is currently otherwise under only Japanese occupation. On the other hand, I spent some time on Cocos-Keeling and it remains—thus far—held by our own forces …’ Lady Pendleberry, dressed in a vest under a ratty peignoir, like some impoverished aristo after the French revolution, rapped her stick loudly against her chair.
‘Dr Pilchard! I’m sure if my husband, the Governor, were here, he would wish me to remind you that you should beware of saying anything that might be of the slightest use to our hosts. Even here they have ears.’ She turned and glared at Miko, one of four inoffensive and unfortunate Japanese women, ears modestly covered by their hair, married to British husbands, who had ended up here in a sort of limbo of administrative disapproval. Japanese, but not Japanese enough for the Japanese.
He smiled ingratiatingly, ‘I am afraid, Lady Pendleberry, that any such information I may once have possessed has long since been seized by the Nips. My notes at the museum …’
‘I should have thought that any such dangerous material would have been destroyed in good order. And this is no time for defeatist talk or running down our allies. Don’t you know, young man, that there’s a war on?’
‘Oh, do wrap up Betty. Leave the poor lamb alone.’ This from the figure beside her, a stout lady with swollen and bandaged ankles and tired, mottled arms and dressed in an extraordinary patchwork dress. The Japanese normally left the prisoners much to their own devices, mounting the occasional search for illicit radios, contraband or simply objects they might want to steal. Yet, at unpredictable intervals, like a capricious wealthy relative, they gave unexpected and ill-judged presents. Recently, out of the blue, they had delivered two large crates of female underwear of a design so bizarre—capacious and flounced, some in loud, thick tartans—that they seemed to hail from an eighteenth-century brothel specialising in Scottish-themed perversities and had provoked real fears among the women that they were all to be shipped off to become ‘comfort women’ elsewhere in the archipelago. Possibly the INLA would be involved. Indians, after all, were known for their ragged and unruly bagpipes. Nothing of the kind had materialised, however, and gradually the huge knickers and vests had been reduced to reason, snipped up and stitched into a hundred more serviceable garments, the offcuts—too valuable to waste—being made into patchwork dresses and skirts. Pilchard recognised the wearer as Dr Voss, the elected women’s commandant. Doctors seemed to gravitate towards positions of authority—except for him of course. He smiled wan thanks.
‘Like so much else,’ he intoned. ‘Cocos-Keeling all began with Stamford Raffles, or rather with his friend, Alexander Hare, a trader who ran a company called the House of Hare and registered in the city of London. He was known amongst the British as “the eccentric Mr Hare”. We shall see why in a minute. Between 1811 and 1816, the British ruled Java, having seized it from the Dutch to prevent the French making use of it who, in turn …’ Lady Pendleberry cleared her throat and impaled him on her glare. ‘… Anyway, he came to an agreement with Raffles who sent him off to combat piracy in Borneo and there he wheedled a large estate out of the sultan and chopped down the trees to build ships. The labour was supplied by Raffles from among his Javanese convicts and Hare both charged for their board and lodging and then sold the ships back to the East India Company for yet more money. He was doing very nicely. And then, of course, the British withdrew and the Dutch came back and ran Hare out of town as a British stooge.’
Lady Pendleberry harumphed.
‘That is … our gallant Dutch allies came back and drove Hare out at bayonet point. And so he embarked his followers on his ship and set out on an odyssey around the archipelago. You see, he had become a collector and, like all true collectors, that passion had taken over his life—an omnivorous, all-consuming passion that devoured everything in its path—until he neglected everything else, his job, his friends, his family—everything. In fact, he became the outcast of the islands. By the time he finished, the eccentric Mr Hare would have over a hundred of the finest examples of their kind and
could never resist buying more—to the point that it became difficult to move the collection about.’
‘Then why on earth did he keep moving?’ interrupted Dr Voss.
‘Well … once the Dutch found out about the collection they always ran him out of town.’
‘But you haven’t told us what he collected.’
‘Oh. Didn’t I mention? It was ladies. He collected ladies.’ There was a stunned silence. Two Japanese women began whispering and looking puzzled. The word ‘ladies’ echoed around interrogatively. ‘An ethnographic seraglio, a harem. Female slaves, like one of the old rajahs. He wanted one of each tribe of the Indies and aimed for exhaustive coverage.’
Lady Pendleberry snorted and made to say something but Dr Voss put a restraining hand on her arm and threw back her own head and laughed. ‘How gloriously stupid! How appalling! A hundred women? Would any man think that would make him happy? A harem of the local races? The poor booby must have got more than he bargained for. It’s like a doctor deciding a drug was good for you so a hundred times the dose would be a hundred times better. How did he justify having so many?’
Pilchard smiled.
‘Well. It’s like a museum. In a museum, when you write a proposal to make an acquisition, it only ever comes in two forms. The first is “We already have ninety-nine of these so we must have another to complete our collection”. Or “We have ninety-nine of those but none of these so we must get at least one to correct the imbalance in our holdings”. I imagine Hare’s logic was much the same, one or the other, depending on circumstances.’
