The Devil's Garden by Nigel Barley Read Free Book Online Page A

the map,’ said Pilchard drawing in thin air. His audience sighed wistfully. He had attracted a mere thirty-odd of them, mostly squatting on the floor, with chairs awarded to a few on grounds of infirmity or eminence—categories that were nearly identical in the women’s prison. Only thirty but then ‘Some Little-Known Facts about the Cocos-Keeling Islands’ was not a title to pack them in. Before the war, the room had been some sort of a warders’ common room and dismembered remains of lurid pictures, random bosoms and necks—mostly Western—torn from newspapers, were stuck to the brickwork. The odd Islamic pinup—swathed from head to toe, all the provocation crammed into the face—peered and pouted between. Lady Pendleberry, in a chair in the front row, cleared her throat manfully and one woman sobbed and was shushed. ‘Now move your eye northwest to Java. Between the two, nothing but thousands and thousands of miles of empty ocean, punctuated by two tiny eruptions of land, Christmas Island and the archipelago of Cocos-Keeling.’ He made it dramatic, waved his arm again, pointed on the non-existent wall map to the invisible islands conjured from the dust motes dancing in the air. Outside, the POWs had their ‘university’, drawing on the prodigious and absurd mix of submerged expertise that the military normally ignored. Out there, they were learning everything from poultry-keeping to philosophy with one or two hiccoughs. ‘Introduction to the Japanese language’ had not proved a popular course but a pale clerk from the Pay Corps triumphed with a bloodthirsty history of the Byzantine Empire, interspersing tales of horror and voluptuousness with lyrical passages of art appreciation. Then an embittered Australian ranker had stirred them with a demotic examination of the heresies of the mediaeval Christian Church. ‘Jansenism? It means most of you are poor buggers, totally buggered from the start and there’s bugger all you can do about it.’ Then there had been trouble over geometric forms scraped in the dust, the guards taking a proof of Pythagoras’s theorem for an escape plan, while two Kiwi commandos had had a nasty fist fight over the pathetic fallacy in the work of Wordsworth.
    The occupants of the female wing of Changi, known unflatteringly as the ‘bitches’ barracks’, had set their own sights somewhat lower. Despite malnutrition and deprivation, their lives were a whirlwind of colonial gentility—bridge and needlework, concerts and poetry contests that denied the reality of the occupation. They were yellow and papery-skinned, even the natural exuberance of the children dimmed by hunger and they all smelled seedy and unwashed, the armpits of their faded frocks rotted through by sweat. From somewhere Pilchard remembered that starving bodies give off acetone. Acetone removes nail varnish. But none of them were wearing nail varnish—from malnutrition many had no nails—and no unruly male desire stirred at the sight of them. Even the Japanese guards no longer made a point of coming round at shower time. The women were still scratching from delousing. The best way of dealing with lice infestation was to drape clothes and mattresses over an anthill in the yard. The ants rushed out and stung the lice to death, even digging their eggs out of hidden seams but then you had to drive away the ants by smoking the clothes which made everyone smell like kippers for a week. Unfortunately, they hadn’t had time to do that properly before the talk.
    For now, edifying lectures were to be added to social life and special permission had been unexpectedly granted by the Japanese for male visitors to deliver them. Normally, mixing of sexes was not encouraged. In an act of petty spite, families were deliberately broken up and isolated from each other but love, as always, had found a way. One man per week was permitted, under guard, to