Harry and Ian came from the same small northern town. They had signed up for the Northumberland Fusiliers on the same day, although they had not known each other before that. Harry was a tough little man, with a tanned face lined like a walnut. He had been a store manager in a clothing factory, and he was fond of telling anecdotes about his workmates or his boss. He had a jovial manner and a quick sense of humour. Harry had a wife and a young son back in Lancashire, but he rarely spoke of them.
Ian was different. He was younger, and quieter than Harry, but he had a steely edge. He had been a draftsman in an engineering firm. Tom quickly saw that he had adopted a few ground rules to get through his ordeal. He never let anything get him down, and took every situation as it came without complaint. He was resilient and resourceful, taking the opportunity to bargain for food with the locals whenever it arose. Under his slow, deliberate manner lurked a deep, thoughtful intelligence.
They had been in Changi for over six months when one day, after the morning parade, several hundred men were selected to leave the camp. They were to be sent up-country to work. Rumours had been circulating that the Japanese had started to use prisoners to build a railway through the jungle in Thailand, in order to supply to their troops fighting the Allies in Burma. The three of them had discussed it before and wondered what it might mean for them if they were selected. Perhaps conditions would be better there? They could hardly imagine that they would be worse. But when they were selected, there was little time to discuss this development. They were ordered to leave straight away.
The guards herded the men, like cattle, into steel railway trucks. The heat inside was unbearable, as hot as ovens; thirty men crammed into each truck, with barely enough room even to sit on the floor. Sweat had poured from Tom’s body; he had struggled for air. No buckets were provided, so when someone wanted to relieve himself, the others had to hold him out of the steel door, so that he could go over the edge of the track and spare the floor.
The journey lasted for four days. The train only stopped once each day for food, when a bucket of rice and soup was passed around, and each man had to dip his mess tin into it and eat what he could. The hunger that had plagued them at Changi became far worse. At night it became bitterly cold, and they found themselves shivering. Then everyone had to take turns to lie on the floor to sleep. Tom, Harry and Ian had shared a corner, changing positions wearily every few hours.
It was not until they arrived at the end of the line that they had met Archie. On that long exhausting tramp through the jungle from the final sidings at Ban Pong to the base camp where work on the railway was to begin, a boy with ginger hair and pale skin, red-raw from the sun, was stumbling along in front of Tom. He was clearly suffering from exhaustion and fell down repeatedly. The guard in charge of their section kept yelling at him and prodding him with a bayonet. In the end Tom and Ian had picked him up and helped him along.
‘Thank you,’ he whispered through cracked lips, barely looking at them. Tom saw that the boy’s face was a mass of sores and inflamed insect bites. There was even one on his right eyelid, so swollen that the eye would not open properly.
When, after hours of marching, they had finally arrived at their destination, they were drained from the march, weak from hunger. The guards ushered them into a clearing, where a few small huts had been constructed from tree trunks and thatched with palm leaves. The boy had flung himself down beside his pack under the trees at the edge of the clearing.
‘You can’t stay there,’ said Tom. ‘You’ll have to come inside the hut. It’s not safe out here.’
‘I’m not going in there,’ said the boy with sudden spirit, looking at him in the eye for the first time. ‘I can’t stand it, lying so close to everyone, people coughing and puking. It’s disgusting. I’d prefer to be out in the open.’
‘But you haven’t got anything to lie on. You’ll get sick.’
‘I’m already sick. We all are. Anyway, I’ve got my kit bag to lie on, and I’ve got a shirt for a blanket.’
Tom had hesitated. For some reason he felt responsible for the boy. He seemed so vulnerable and lonely. But, he reasoned, he couldn’t force him to sleep inside the hut.
‘It’s your choice.’ He had reluctantly left the boy where he was.
The next morning, as they queued impatiently for breakfast beside the temporary cookhouse, the boy joined the queue and it looked as though he had been crying. His swollen eyes were bloodshot, and he seemed even more miserable than the day before.
‘What’s up?’ asked Harry.
The boy just shrugged his shoulders and looked away. Tom had the impression that he was struggling to keep back the tears.
‘Come on, lad,’ coaxed Harry gently, ‘you might as well tell us what’s wrong.’
‘My kit bag and shirt are gone,’ he muttered at last. ‘I woke up and found they’d vanished. Some bastard must have had them.’
‘What was in there?’
‘Everything. Everything I had. My spare shorts, my mess tin and fork, my penknife. And my pictures …
