Jim Brigginshaw - Survival on the Death Railway and Nagasaki

He’d lost sight of Snowy, but when he heard a loud crash some distance away, followed by the compound wire twanging and rattling, Jim’s heart fell. It had to be Snowy running headlong into the wire in the dark. The noise would have brought the guards running, which would mean the end of Snowy.

Meanwhile, Jim had problems of his own. The three Japanese guards were close now, because he could see the light of their torches. With no time to get under the wire, he fell on his stomach among the sparse tree stumps and fallen timber and held his breath.

The guards were near enough for him to hear them speaking. He started to breathe again when they turned and went back the way they had come. It dawned on him that they’d heard the noise made by someone running into the wire, thought it was him and that he’d now been caught by the prison guards.

When they’d gone, Jim crawled under the wire, sick at heart to have been saved by Snowy’s bad luck. Inside the compound, Sol and Bill were waiting, still holding the pig he’d thrown. They saw he was alone. ‘Where’s Snowy?’ Sol asked.

Jim relayed the bad news. ‘You must have heard the crash of Snow hitting the wire in the dark. The guards would have grabbed him for sure, poor bugger.’

‘We heard the noise’, Sol said. ‘We thought the Nips had got both of you.’

They all fell silent. The death of a mate was a heavy price to pay for a pork meal.

Though his heart was as heavy as any, Jim snapped them out of the sad moment. ‘Come on, you blokes. Snow wouldn’t want us to stand around mourning him. He’d want us to get the pig out of sight before the Nips find us with it. Let’s get it into the hut and hide it until we can knock it over.’

The inside of the hut was dark. The three men and the pig were feeling their way around when a voice said, ‘Evening all.’

Jim lit a match. Snowy, whose body was covered in cuts and scratches, was lying on the sleeping platform smoking a cigarette.

Sol was the first to recover from the surprise. ‘We thought the Nips got you. What happened?’

Snowy grinned. ‘I hit the wire.’

‘We know you hit the bloody wire. We heard it. Why aren’t you dead?’

‘I reckon I should be. I made enough noise to wake up every Jap between here and Tokyo, but the bastards must have been on the sake or something. Nobody came looking, so I decided to go to bed.’

‘You went to bed!’ Sol howled. ‘And there’s us smelling like pig shit thinking about where we’d plant you.’

Jim wanted to know why Snowy had stayed at the bamboo with the first pig when he was supposed to take it to the wire and toss it over.

‘I didn’t think you were much of a pig handler. Thought I’d stay and give you a hand with the second one.’

‘ I’m not much of a pig handler?’ Jim snorted. ‘Who was it dropped the first pig just because a few Japs were running around with fixed bayonets? If I hadn’t picked it up, we’d have gone through all this for nothing.’

‘All’s well that ends well’, Snowy said, settling back. ‘When do we eat pork?’

The pig was slaughtered the next day, and with proper food in their stomachs, everyone agreed it had been worth all the trouble.

THE lanky frame, the unruly crop of wire-like black hair, the perpetual half-grin that seemed to be enjoying some private joke, meant that it could only be Tellamalie, the larrikin Jim hadn’t seen since early training days. Nobody knew what his real name was. The Tellemalie tag had been hung on him because of the careless way he handled the truth, particularly when he needed to talk his way out of trouble. And Tellemalie was always in trouble.

But there he was now, among the sea of faces in the Changi compound.

Jim slapped him on the shoulder. ‘Tellemalie! Last time I saw you was at Caloundra in 1940.’

The man wheeled around. ‘Sorry mate, you’ve got the wrong bloke. The name’s Jack Martin.’

‘Come off it. You’re Tellemalie. We were at the Caloundra camp together. Jim Bodero… remember?’

‘You’ve made a blue. I ain’t never seen you before in me life.’

‘Hey, this is me you’re talking to, Tellemalie. Don’t give me that “Jack Martin” bullshit. And what’s with that Mobile Laundry colour patch? when I last saw you in 1940 you were heading off to the Middle East with the 2/25th.’

The man held up his hands and looked around. ‘All right, all right, you’ve sprung me. But don’t talk so bloody loud.’ Tellemalie drew him into a corner. ‘It’s like this.’ He lowered his voice. ‘The 2/25th didn’t go to the Middle East. We got posted to Darwin as garrison troops. I joined this bloody army to see a bit of the world, and I wasn’t going to be stuck in god-awful Darwin for the duration, so I start playing up ... you know, making a bit of a bastard of meself.’ He gave an impish grin. ‘I can do that pretty well, as you might know. Anyhow, I figured if I played me cards right I’d get tossed out of the army up in Darwin. Then I’d re-enlist under another name and get a posting more to me liking.’

‘So you got tossed out?’

‘Nah, got tossed in. Into Darwin’s Fanny Bay jail.’

‘Into jail? What for?’

‘It’s a long story. I’ll tell you about it someday. It wasn’t so bad in Fanny Bay, easiest bloody slammer I’ve ever been in. They even let you out to cut the grass on the footpath and ask you if you’d mind coming back to jail later. Well, one day I forgot to go back. I went bush. Shit, mate, it’s a long way from Darwin to Sydney. It took me months to get there. I walked, hitched rides, pinched horses, but I made it. In Sydney I joined up as Jack Martin.’

‘So you got what you wanted-an overseas posting?’

‘Got to go overseas all right’, Tellemalie said. ‘They stuck me in the Mobile-bloody-Laundry unit and sent me up here to bloody Singapore. Well, you don’t think that was a bit of good timing. I arrived just in time for the Nips to grab me and stick me in this joint. Bloody sight worse than any of the clinks I’ve been in. The jail tucker was a hell of an improvement on what we get here.’

Jim couldn’t help laughing. ‘Never mind, Tellemalie, you wanted to see the world, and at least you’re seeing something of Asia. And you can’t get into too much trouble here.’

‘Don’t you believe it. Trouble’s me second name. I get into trouble so often that if I was a sheila I’d never be out of the maternity hospital.’

‘You ask for trouble, Tellemalie. What about the CO’s horse at Caloundra?’

Tellemalie chuckled at the memory. ‘I’ll never forget the old bastard’s face when he thought he was riding back to front.’

They laughed together at the memory. It had happened when the new CO, a stiff-backed colonel with a Pommy accent and a bristling white moustache, arrived for the first inspection of his men mounted on a prancing black horse. He dismounted and handed the reins to a sergeant, who passed them on to Tellemalie who was loafing nearby.

‘Why give it to me, sarge?’ Tellemalie complained. ‘I don’t know nothing about horses.’ He held up the reins. ‘I don’t even know what this is called.’

The sergeant shook his head at such ignorance. ‘They’re the reins. And you don’t have to know anything about horses to hold on to them. So start holding.’

‘If I’m standing here holding on to these reins things and someone asks me something about the horse, I should be able to answer them, shouldn’t I, sarge? How about giving me a few pointers?’ He proceeded to ask what the various parts of the horse were. The sergeant patiently told him.

Tellemalie kept a straight face as he listened. He’d roped, saddled, broken and ridden more horses, including wild brumbies, than the sergeant had ever seen.