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Terry fought against the stranglehold of the bedclothes pinning him to his narrow bed. He was hot and feverish. His body ached. No surprise to that, every man in the hut was hot, feverish, and aching. Some of them had tropical ulcers, some had head injuries from the beating of their Japanese guards, some had malaria, and all of them had dysentery.
For a few minutes, as he finally kicked off the bedclothes, Terry experienced a return to reality. The memory of three years of imprisonment faded, and he knew where he was. The bedclothes were to protect him from the cool damp of his mother’s cottage. The door was to keep strangers out, not to keep him in. The window curtains covered a small lattice window with no bars, and outside the window was the village of Rose Hill, not the hell of Burma. He was safe. He was home.
His stomach gurgled and his bowels cramped. He had left Burma, but Burma had not left him. Burma was in the scars on his back, the neuropathy in his feet, and most of all in the parasites that still infested his stomach and bowels. Now that his mind was restored to fragile reality, he recognized the need to go down the garden to the lavatory and the need to put on a coat and shoes. The noise in his head was not the noise of slave laborers sleeping the sleep of the exhausted, but simply the sound of rain lashing against the window. He was home.
He shuffled his feet, damaged by working barefoot, into hard leather shoes and shrugged on his father’s overcoat. His father had been a big man, and the coat hung loosely on Terry’s wasted frame. As he cracked the door open, he heard his mother stir in the bedroom next door.
“Terry?”
“It’s all right, Mum.”
“What are you doing?”
“Going down to the lav.”
“I put a pot in your room.”
“Not that, Mum. The other.”
“Oh! Well, be careful. It’s a wild night.”
“I like it. I like the rain. I like feeling cold.”
He heard his mother turn over in her creaking bed. “That prison camp has made you daft in the head.”
“Go back to sleep.”
Terry made his way down the narrow stairs to the kitchen and found the flashlight his mother kept by the back door. He turned the key in the lock and stepped out into the night.
Thunder rolled overhead with a quick flash of lightning. The noise would have been sufficient to confuse him, but the lightning added to the confusion. He was at the harbor in Singapore again, with explosions all around as the British Army destroyed docks, cranes, and warehouses, ahead of the approaching Japanese.
“We’re going to surrender.”
Word had spread through his squad as they laid charges and ducked flying debris.
“God help us all.”
“We’re going to surrender.”
“They’re killing the wounded.”
“Japs don’t take prisoners.”
“Bleeding Churchill. Wants us to fight to the death.”
“Unconditional surrender.”
“Slave labor. We’ll all be slaves.”
Terry’s bowels cramped again, and his mind was gone from the chaos on the docks. He was in the labor camp.
Latrine. Where was it? Had to get to the latrine. Couldn’t be found out here. What was he doing out here? If anyone found him, he’d be three days in the hot box. Three days and as good as dead.
Panic overtook him. How had he managed to get out of the hut? He dropped the flashlight. How had he even managed to get a flashlight? Prisoners were not given flashlights.
He stumbled through a tangle of bushes and found himself in the open. The ground squelched beneath his feet. Monsoon season. He knew about the monsoon season; he had survived three monsoon seasons. Even rain that fell as though the heavens had been split wide open was no reason to stop work. The railway was all that mattered. The Japanese wanted a railway, and the prisoners would build it, if they lived long enough. Most of them would not.
Terry knew very little except that he was alive and somehow out of the hut and free of the guard towers and the wire fence. He shuffled forward through the clinging mud. Sheet lightning lit the trees around him, and he glimpsed a figure coming toward him through the rain. This was it. He would not go back. He would die here. Oh, please God, let them kill me. Don’t let me go back.