Sobbing with humiliation, I complied. Later, much later, I grew so hardened that I began to undress automatically as soon as the door of the examination room was closed behind me, but on this first morning the emotional torture was worse than that of any burn or blow.

I was returned to my cell for another day of filth and lice and waiting. Each morning I was brought back to the room, and again stripped, grilled, and subjected to beatings and indignities.

My failure to confess to knowing anything stung my inquisitors. They decided to try a new refinement of torture. ‘If you will not tell the truth, you shall walk the streets of Kediri naked,’ they said. ‘Everyone shall see your shame.’

They ripped off the last pitiful bit of covering I had. And with bayonets they forced me to walk down the very centre of the street.

But the Japanese had not reckoned with the Indonesian mentality. The Javanese are frank about the facts of life, but modest. One glimpse of what the Japanese were doing to me and they were horrified. They fled in every direction. Doors and windows were slammed shut. My tormentors hurried me back to the prison for another severe beating, and then tossed me into my cell. But they knew that they had, somehow, lost face.

After three weeks of almost daily interrogation, the commandant, for some inscrutable reason, set me free.

I found my next confinement quarters to be a cell underneath the Surabaya Kempetai Headquarters. I was quickly informed that what I had suffered at the hands of the Japanese in Kediri had been as nothing compared with what I would go through in the Surabaya Kempetai.

At first they were reasonably gentle, trying to make me talk. I insisted that of all the Japanese I had associated with not one discussed anything with me except art and literature. The grilling became sharper. Before long I had been battered into semiconsciousness.

They stood me on the table, tied my hands behind my back, fastened my elbows together, and then – twisting my arms backward in their sockets – looped my hands over the hook that dangled from the ceiling. Inch by inch they moved the table away, demanding with each pull that I tell them what information I had received, and from whom. With a last pull the table slid from under my feet. I was hanging. I screamed in unbearable agony. When my mind cleared I was on the floor. Then the guards carried me back to my cell.

The tortures went on.

The Japanese officers came to my cell late at night, and talked to me in very quiet and serious voices. ‘We have decided that there is no use going on with this,’ they said. ‘We know that you are guilty of espionage. Therefore, tomorrow at daybreak you will be shot.’