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Bill Dunn about Roly Hull
Life and death in Thailand were closer together than we ever realised.
In action in the battle for Singapore, we naturally expected there would be some deaths, but it came as a shock to us to see so many deaths when the war was over and we were 'simply' POWs.
One of the first anti-tankers to die as a POW in Thailand was at Kenyu, working on Hell Fire pass. Young 'Snipe' was a healthy young country lad, barely twenty. He had been accustomed to hard work as on the farm, a habit that was not easy for him to toss as he toiled on the line. Often the Japs would reward him for his hard work with a portion of sugar or a dixie of Jap rice. He was a 'Joto' worker and they tended to set him up as an example for us to follow. We had the feeling that if he kept working at that pace he would burn himself out and did our best to encourage him to slow down, but old habits, more so the good ones, die hard.
Snipe contracted dysentery and to our great dismay, suddenly died. His body was wrapped in a shroud of rice sacks and buried in a shallow grave in the jungle alongside our camp. Our senior officer did his best to remember the things one normally did at a burial and the words one normally said at the graveside.
From then on, deaths occurred more often and bodies were buried with as much dignity as circumstances would allow. In some camps, we had a padre, in others, a bugler, who in spite of all difficulties, had managed to cling on to his bugle and was able to play the Last Post at the graveside.
During the cholera plague, bodies were laid on a pile of logs, set ablaze and cremated. We hardened to the sight of the charred remains of our mates as we passed them to and from our way to work.
During the Speedo Purge, the Japs were determined to get every ounce of effort they could out of us and rigidly controlled our work on the job. Working on Hellfire Pass, there was no way we could be seen idle for a second without incurring the instant wrath of the guards. We grew accustomed to hearing the bugle echoing through the jungle, but work had to go on, so on hearing the all too familiar call, we simply worked on as silently as we could.
Strange as it seemed, the Japs had an inordinate respect for the dead and later when the pressure had eased, there were occasions when we were noisily occupied on our jobs, one of the guards, on hearing the faint echo of the bugle, would summon us to stop work. Then they too would stand in silence until the sound of the bugle faded away.
So it was that we gradually became accustomed to death, corpses, cremations, burials, the loss of our mates and the dying echoes of 'The Last Post'.
Yet, strangely, we never thought it might happen to us. The boys had cottoned on to a new expression, a Malayan idiom, 'Tid Apa', translated as 'Not to worry'. To us it meant - 'She'll be apples - anyway what the heck can you do about it'. So with a shrug of the shoulders we took life as it came. 'Tid Apa'.
Roly Hull, among all other things, was our battery bugler. He was one of those happy-go-lucky souls with a great sense of fun, but his looks and his mannerisms belied him. He put on an air of not being all that smart and enjoyed the consequences of not having to indulge in the more arduous army chores the rest of us were compelled to carry out.
When he first arrived at Puckapunyal, a young lad still in his teens, our 15th Battery Commander, Clarry Owen, took a fatherly liking to him and desperately tried to fit him in somewhere within what he perceived to be Roly's limited span of ability. To Roly's great joy, Clarry appointed him battery bugler. Roly had not the slightest idea of how to play a bugle, in fact he was one of the least musically minded boys in the regiment - one only had to listen to him sing. So Roly contrived to spend most of his time practicing, sitting in the cool shade of a spreading red gum tree on Battery Hill, just beyond our camp at Pucka, spasmodically blurting away on his bugle, while we slogged on our army drills and route marches in the hot December sun.
Roly cleverly concealed his unique skills which only came to light when we were doing our machine gun drills and he could no longer restrain himself from showing us what clots we were. Blindfolded, Roly could strip and rebuild a Bren or Lewis machine gun in half the time it took us with our eyes wide open and all our wits about us. He also turned out to be a natural gun layer.
The nature of the man persisted throughout our POW days and he continued to be on the lookout for less arduous tasks than the usual ones we always seemed to land. What's more, he always found one. And so it was that at our base camp in Nakhon Pathom in Thailand, Roly conned one of our medical orderlies into giving him a job in the hospital. As always, he struck it lucky once again.
Roly knew he was on a sweet cop as the work involved looking after his mates. The sick were well looked after by our doctors and orderlies, so it was merely a matter of giving them a hand. The orderly in charge of Roly's induction told him that one of his first jobs was to help move the poor devils who had died, to the morgue. Hell! What were a few extra 'stiffs' to Roly? He'd seen them all before. The job was a pushover.
The orderly took Roly around the hospital to brief him on how to make sure the bodies were dead. As they came to one and bent over to look at it, he explained to Roly, "You can see by this fellow's eyes that he's dead."
A very soft voice came back from the 'corpse', "I'm not dead yet mate."
Roly's confidence and enthusiasm for his new job began to wane.
A special window-less hut, appropriately darkened, had been erected adjacent to the hospital to serve as the morgue. They checked out the next body and carried it to the morgue placing it on the 'adapt', the name we gave the slats of bamboo on which the bodies were laid.
They then took out the next corpse and just as they were about to lay it down, the last of the air from the lungs of the corpse they had just previously bought in, suddenly expired in a loud and startling death rattle.
What was left of Roly's confidence swiftly deserted him. "KEE - RYST!"
There was no time to make it to the door, Roly took off with one great leap straight through the atap side wall of the morgue and quit. Tomorrow he would find another easy cop, but this time, one without all the drama. .
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