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pick up bodies lying about the place and bury then, Chinese mainly. They were enemies and
saboteurs, the Japanese said, and the Japs just shot them willy-nilly. One detail was down at the
beach one day -1 wasn't among them - and there were 20 to 30 Chinese bodies bobbing about
out in the sea. They'd been shot. Our boys had to bring them in and bury them.
'It didn't seem real. We still didn't know what was going to happen next. We thought the Japs
would do something else with us. And then they started taking people away from Changi on
working parties. Some were away for several months.
'When we were first taken back into Singapore we had to clean up a lot of rubble from bombed
buildings, and jobs like that. And then we were taken down to the wharves. The main job there
was carting rice, from ships to godowns, or from godowns to trucks. Or to ships going
somewhere else. This was pretty rough - because we had 220 pound bags on our backs, and
we were wearing just shorts and a hat, and boots. If we were lucky, we carried 100 pound
bags of flour instead. The Japanese guarded us, all around the docks, and marched us to and
from.
'The Chinese in Singapore were marvellous to us. They went out of their way to give us food.
They used to stand along the road when we were being marched down to the docks, and they'd
hand us breadrolls, butter, a bit of jam, all sorts of things. And the Japanese would rush up and
bash them. But they'd still be back the next day. We said: "Go away! We don't want you to be
bashed." And they still came back. Men, women and children, even little Chinese babies. I think
they were giving away their own food. The kiddies didn't get bashed. But the Japs bashed the
Chinese women. They used to hit you
with whatever they had - rifle-butts, or sticks, or baseball bats, or a bit of iron. Or a fist - but
that didn't hurt that much.
Things started to get quite rough from then on. Maybe part of it was our own fault. When we
were working down on the wharves we were short of food, and by this time we were getting
very hungry. You'd set off in the morning after a feed of rice and sugared water. That was your
breakfast, and it was supposed to last you all day. So naturally you looked around for
something to steal to eat. You stole to live, and you took terrible chances, because you really
would get a bashing out of that. In the evenings you'd usually get a cup of rice and a mixture like
a cup of soup with a bit of meat and vegetables in it. It varied. Sometimes it would be quite
satisfying, but mostly it wasn't. But with what we were stealing we didn't worry too much, and
we became quite adept at stealing as time went on.
'I was on a working party when I met up with my cousin, Len Allen. He was a captain in the
AIF and in charge of a transport group. He arranged for me and a number of Anti-Tankers to
join his group, and we became the best lot of scroungers you would ever meet.
'If they caught someone stealing, they'd make him stand for several hours holding a couple of
bricks or a chunk of wood. And naturally you could only hold whatever it was for a certain
time. But if you dropped it, you'd be bashed. Once we were going out the gates of the wharves
and there were two Chinese strung up by the gates on barbed wire. They'd been caught
stealing. They were tied up with barbed wire and it was wrapped around them. They were still
alive. The Japs did this mainly to the Chinese. The Indians very rarely got into any trouble
because basically they went over to the Japs - particularly the Sikhs. The Sikh civilian police
were a foul mob, absolutely foul. The Sikhs were supposed to be the elite of the Indian army.
But they still went over to the Japanese. The Brits didn't like it at all.
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