When we arrived outside there were no orders from the guards to turn around and perform the ritual of bowing to the image above the mine entrance. This was incredible. As I looked around the yard I saw a number of Japanese women weeping. I had never seen people in the village so upset. "Perhaps someone has been killed in the mine - somebody important" I thought. "Yes, that's it". But then, why the omission of respects to the awful Mine God? It did not make sense.

There were no commands from the Japs; none of the familiar bullying. We were simply and quietly told to make our way back to camp. When we arrived there, we were quickly dismissed to our quarters. No roll-call pantomime. No clicking of heels and smart salutes. No reprimands. No rebukes.

Rumour was really rife now, Japan had been attacked; perhaps defeated. Perhaps surrender was imminent. It must be big. It must be colossal. It was like waiting for the end of the world. You didn't know whether you were glad or terrified. The drama went on with increasing oddity. The Japs had gone mad,stark, staring mad. You felt it in the air, in the bones, in every tangible and intangible thing. It got into the nostrils and the head creeping miasma. Even the huts looked different- less sullen, less hostile. When the evening meal came there was a marked improvement in quantity,if not quality. Then to our amazement there was an issue of five cigarettes a man. We sat and smoked like men in an opium trance. It was all too much to take in. But slowly, the realisation dawned on us that the Japs were making real gestures of decency, almost of friendship. Slowly it came upon us that the masters were behaving like equals - even with a hint of hidden inferiority. Slowly our dulled minds woke up to the facts hammering away insistently, clamouring to be understood.

We tottered in the new found freedom, like a man suddenly coming from the dark depths to the intoxication of fresh air, unable at first to accommodate ourselves to it; then gradually able to stand bigger gulps of it; then revelling in the excellence of it as the whole body and mind attuned itself to the new condition. This was Heaven. men began to chatter with a new liveliness There was a new content and a new interest. Faces all round had taken on the look of happiness. It was a feeling that all of us had thought had gone from the earth. We all agreed that the war was over. It must be so. This was it. After two days we were paraded inthe open.

The Jap commandant limped up. His face, usually pale, was flushed. He looked neat and tidy in his green uniform. His left hand, gripping the ivory top of his long sword in the polished sheath, seemed to betray in its immobility a sense of almost intolerable strain barely controlled. He stood stiffly to attention. His voice cut the silence. Hostilities, he said, were at an end. Speaking in broken English, he declared "Now you will be soon be returning to your homes and your loved ones. I want you take great care and look after your health". The hypocrisy of the remark, the rich irony of it, as we stood there rigidly in silence, took a moment to sink in. There was a slight sound of throats clearing, a sort of sigh as if breath was being let out under difficulty. I felt prickly sensations running up my spine.

The hillside was ringing with the echoes of our cheering. Men were shaking one another violently by the hand, slapping backs, roaring with laughter and gratitude, letting loose the pent-up flood of emotion, virtually dancing for joy. Tears of joy streamed from their eyes. The long dark night was over, the sun was shining again and the miracle of it was that we were still alive to feel it on our backs, seeping into the skin. Freedom, the abstract thing, was so real now that we felt we could touch it, caress its hair, gaze into its shining eyes, merge and fuse with it in an ecstasy of abandon. A handful of men, dirty, skinning, emaciated, riddle with disease, scarred with privation, were unleashing their emotions with almost childlike innocence and gaiety. There have been few happier moments in my life. The cheering went on and on, until the waves of it must have carried through the clear air to strike the little wood homesteads of the Jap mining village. We had no concern then for what they, the Japs, were thinking. Our jubilation was all-consuming. The great speculation started at once. "How long before we are released?". It was a question nobody could answer with any authority and it became more insistent in the next few days. Work in the mine had finished; the rations were noticeably better at once, but nobody had much interest in food now. The topic which had been our main concern for years had lost its savour. Only release mattered now. When would it come?

For a day or two we had spotted planes in the distance, but none came our way. It was precisely seven days after we had last gone down the mine when somebody raced through the camp yelling "The planes: The planes: They're here!" The cry was taken upon all sides. The throbbing of bombers in the distance changed to the roar of power as they began to circle the camp to the welcome of shouting, waving, wildly cheering prisoners. The planes were American Air Force B4's, peaceful, majestic, a splendid heart-warming sight. Men in their excitement clambered on to the roofs of the huts, hoping to get a better view.

Pride rose as we watched the bombers manoeuvre overhead. This was the visible sign of victory. This was the help we had waited for, for so long. Out of the belly of one of the planes in the blue sunlit sky tumbled several large drums. The plane was low. We could see parachutes stretching out as the containers came down. The drums seemed to get bigger and bigger as they came. But as we looked at them we had a sudden fear that something was wrong. The parachutes - that was it. They were not opening. I went chill and clammy. The drums hurtled down the hillside at the back of the camp and ricochetted on to the buildings and the men below. I had been standing behind a hut facing the hillside. I saw a large black drum drop on the hill half-way down and begin bouncing like a ball of rubber and steel straight towards me and two colleagues. We turned and ran, but the drum, travelling fast, was on us before we could go more than two or three paces. The drum struck me with a sickening thud. I had the sensation of being flung into the gully near the hut and then mercifully all went black.

When I recovered consciousness I discovered that my legs were trapped beneath the drum. Several prisoners were trying to prise the drum away. It needed all their strength to do so. One of the two men, who had turned and run when the drum came down, had been directly in its path. He was lying head down in the gutter. He had taken the main blow. He was dead. The other man had escaped with an arm injury. I could not stand. The prisoners lifted me up and carried me to my bunk. Soon afterwards I was carried to the medical room where the American doctor gave me drug injections. The drug came from one of the containers dropped on the camp.

Back on my bunk, I dozed off and slept for hours. I woke up feeling a little better. No bones were broken, but both legs were badly bruised and swollen. In the hut men were celebrating - again with the help of the drums contents. The drums had also been packed with food, sweets and cigarettes. A feast fit for a king was going on in a heavy smoky atmosphere.

Chris who had struck up a friendship with me, was at my bedside and felt that I deserved my share of the good things. He brought me a cup of coffee. Soon I was gulping down a dish of fine American dehydrated soup, too. I learned that the food drop had caused two deaths. The other victim was a young Briton. He had been standing on the warehouse roof when a drum crashed on to it and smashed into splinters, killing him instantly. Not long before he had been telling me of his ambitions for when he returned to civilian life. About six others had been injured. In this irony of fate two men who had survived so many trails at the hands of the Japs had thus been unwittingly killed by their own comrades. And once again inscrutable Providence had spared me. I felt humbled beyond description. I had been at death's door so many times in three and a half years of P.O.W. life that there now seemed an almost uncanny element about my escapes from those chilly, clutching fingers.

Around me the others went on celebrating. They had expressed their sorrow about the deaths and had returned to the joys of living. It was not that we were callous. We had rubbed shoulders with death, all of us, so long that inevitably sentiment dried up in us. We were free of the need for any outward show of mourning now. What we knew, we knew in our hearts. It was branded on them forever.

In the next two days I had more injections. Then, with others, I was taken on a long, bumpy journey by lorry to a Japanese hospital, where the treatment was excellent and the Jap nurses gave us efficient, if surly, attention. Within a few days I was able to get up and walk with the aid of two sticks. Though my legs were still sore and stiff, I could use them and for that I was grateful. I felt elated.

It was while I was in hospital that there occurred at the mine camp a scene which, in its way was so melodramatic that it might have occurred in one of those Western film epics the Americans produced with such panache; after the hero and his friends have been hounded, maltreated, out-gunned and out-general led the villain is cheated of triumph at the last moment, forced to drink the bitter dregs of defeat to the last drop, and unsullied virtue rides again in splendour.

Unfortunately, I was not able to witness it and had to rely on hearsay afterwards. It appears that relieving American troops arrived at the camp. They had with them a photographic unit which at once took film of the area, the men, and the mine where the prisoners had worked. When in the mood the Americans are nothing if not thorough. The ivory-topped sword, symbol of the terror, was stripped from the Jap camp commandant and the American corps put him to work alongside the guards he had previously commanded. His indignity was complete when, in view of the P.O.W's over whom he had lorded it, he was compelled to carry the photographers' heavy equipment boxes on every conceivable occasion, whether they were wanted or not. The revenge treatment went on ruthlessly until he was exhausted and began to appreciate what it was to somersault from conqueror to conquered. He was an officer of the Imperial Japanese Army. His ignominy was complete. After the years that have passed one has mixed feelings about this sort of thing. It is not civilised, one admits - but the conditions were near barbaric, anyway at that time. I know that in morals two black's don't make a white, to put it simply. But I must be frank. When I heard of it, I was chagrined that I had not been there. The brand had burned deep, and within the withered body our passions smouldered and sometimes flared uncontrollably. It somehow irked my sense of justice, too, that I had been denied the chance of looking on. If that is shocking in some eyes, my plea is provocation. For good or evil, most men who had undergone our kind of privation would, I think, have felt the same.

I stayed in hospital for ten days. We had the opportunity of listening daily to the radio announcements from the Allied headquarters in Tokyo. Prisoners everywhere, we were told, should stay where they were and not make their own way to Tokyo. Eventually relieving forces would come and collect them.

I remember one night a few P.O.W's who had not heard the radio announcements called at the hospital for food and shelter. They had left their camp and were heading for Tokyo. We told them the radio news, but after breakfast the next day they were anxious to move on - and did so. On the tenth day of my hospital stay I and others were told by a Jap officer that we were being moved to a sea port, where Allied forces were waiting. We had a two hour journey by rail and arrived at the small port of Moriaka, North of Tokyo.