Free The Devil's Garden by Nigel Barley

all bandy and physically unable to climb out of a trench so that they would perish, in their thousands, in the roadside ditches, like wasps caught and drowned in an old jamjar. They were short-sighted and with eyes so slitty they could not see at all in the dark or in rain. Good Aryans—no wait that was the other lot—good Britons had nothing to fear from them. That had proved to be untrue. They had pursued the retreating British with admirable agility, both in and out of ditches, and their snipers had acquired a fearful reputation for patience and accuracy in both rain and darkness.
    Beneath the coconut trees on either side of the road, ramshackle Malay houses had sprouted and dirty, nostril-probing, naked children gathered to watch him walk past with the hungry eyes of tiger cubs not yet grown big enough to eat him. Pilchard felt horribly alone. Among such Muslim folk, there were no barking dogs, naturally, but even cats had become scarce so close to the wire, transformed readily by the camp chefs into rank ‘catsoulet’, ‘catserole’, ‘purrgedel’ and spicy but gamey ‘tom yumm’. The grubby children were strangely mute. At the capitulation, it was the sudden silence of the Chinese—a people who normally lived life at full volume—that had been the really terrifying thing while, elsewhere in Malaya, loudly jeering Malays and Indians—in that first exuberance of ‘Asia for the Asians’—had spat and thrown stones at the Allied troops as they marched past into captivity and danced with delight in the streets, while villagers had hastened to denounce any Allied forces hiding out in the jungle. It was clear local goodwill could not be taken for granted. Now, they were at the uncomfortable stage of a man waking up from the bleary pleasures of the night to face the intrusion and threat of an alien presence. Yesterday, a boy near the camp had been shot dead for flying a kite. The Japanese, to whom kites were traditional weapons of war, had assumed he must be signalling to someone. Now all children expected to be shot at and childhood was suspended for the hostilities.
    The camp around the prison proper covered a vast area, being in fact several army camps collapsed together and penned behind barbed wire. Around the outer fence, left lazily uncleared of brush, was a maze of ditches and crawl-spaces used by the black-marketeers in their nocturnal comings and goings. It was tempting, but too dangerous, to take a short cut through all that tangled Apama corymbosa . Yet already, from this distance, he could hear the dull thud of the waves beneath the red cliffs of Tanah Merah, like an artillery salute, calling him down to the southern shore, while the siren rustling of the palm fronds above him spoke of sea and a fresh wind and a distant horizon and he found his steps taking a fork and heading in that direction, eyes suddenly wet with tears at memories of seaside holidays that crowded in unbidden. It took him a good hour to scramble down to the sea, on legs unused now to walking, to a little bay where, he remembered, the sand was purest gold and lapped by gentle waves that faded to a dimpled green. As he stepped out onto the beach and felt the wind that smacked the water, there was a fleeting impression of space and the salt taste of liberty on his lips. That sea there was the same one they looked at in Australia where they were free and there was no real fear—just the petty suburban worries that he would never consider again. Sand, eggtimers, tide, waves—a beach stopped the normal flow of everything, converted the straight line of time’s arrow into zigzag back and forth or to circle. It seemed impossible that he could not, by some mere act of will, shift perspective and transport himself across that ocean.
    He focused again. The beach had changed. Everywhere were coils of barbed wire rusting on great wooden posts. It was not clear which side had done it.