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much any more. Further, I can't react very much to physical suffering or death.'
I asked Bill Clemence how he survived.
"A certain amount of it would be due to luck. There was always luck involved. On the other
hand I think youth was on our side. The older men -even blokes in their late twenties - didn't
take it as well as we did. Not all of them. A lot of the men who died - and I was terribly
surprised at this - were tough country blokes. They didn't come through. We all came from the
city. We were supposed to be mummy's boys who wouldn't last. But we did.
'We always helped each other. Right from the start two, three or four blokes would be pretty
close to each other. One bloke out of four would steal something and the other three would
share it. If a bloke was sick or something, the others would help him with his work. It was more
than friendship. It was kinship. And there were lots of laughs. You made jokes. You thought
deliberately about funny incidents that had happened in the past, about your
schooldays, your working days, whatever. You tried to make fun. And it helped. It really did.
No matter how bad the situation was.
'We used to talk a lot about home, about various things. We mostly talked about food. At night.
There'd be 100 men in a hut, and everybody would listen in. Somebody would say: "What was
your favourite meal?" And there'd be dead silence. And you'd dream up the most fantastic
menu. My favourite was a tomato and onion pie my mother used to make, sprinkled with
breadcrumbs and baked in an oven. It was absolutely magnificent. And I told this particular
bloke about it once, and when he got really hungry he'd say: "For God's sake, tell me about that
tomato and onion pie, will you?" And I'd have to tell him how it was cooked and what it tasted
like. And he'd say: "Thanks. I feel a lot better now."
'The married men used to get pretty upset, more upset than us. One of my friends was married
and he never stopped talking about her - how marvellous she was. And when he got home,
she'd gone. Nearly killed him. She'd gone off with somebody else. He came from Queensland,
one of the nicest blokes. He married again, a lovely girl.
'If you were ever miserable, you shared your misery with a friend. Some of the blokes were
miserable all the time. For three and a half bloody years! Others didn't show it. I never had any
doubts that I was going to get home.
'I never thought about escape. I looked at the situation early and I thought: Well, we're in
Singapore. Java and Sumatra are down there, India is way up there, Burma's up there, Indo-
China's there, Borneo is out that way. No way known am I going to escape. I reckoned you'd
have to be a ding-dong to try and escape. Always I was going to get home. I never doubted it.
Except once, when we were bombed.
'We were bombed by the RAF. At Non Pladuk. We were bombed three times. The first was a
day raid, and 1 watched the bombs coming down, and I said to the bloke with me: "My God! I
think this is it!" They were bombing a railway marshalling yard and the camp was right beside it.
They had to come across the camp and they caught a corner of the camp - three times. They
also made a hell of a mess of the marshalling yard, and we had to go and fix it up. We were
cross about that. But once the RAF showed up we knew we were almost on our way home.
'This was in the early part of 1944. It still took a while. But we knew we were winning then. We
were getting wireless messages throughout the war. There were a number of wireless sets in
every camp. We also got news from the Thais. I never listened to any of the sets. I didn't want
to be anywhere near them. I'd rather be a live coward than a dead hero. Because if they caught
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