The work was not at all bad. Each morning the troops went up or down the line by truck, sometimes to ballast, sometimes to level a stretch of rails made bumpy by rain or natural sinking, sometimes to repair timbers already falling to pieces in a bridge. The hours of work were normal, but there was none of the usual great hurry. Fullsized locomotives imported from Malaya and Java had made their appearance already and, as far as we could judge the track could take them. This work went on daily for a fortnight. When we were not out in charge of a party, we collected bamboo and wood for the cookhouse in the morning, or did other mild camp fatigues.

But the golden thing about the Wun Lun month was the sense of the comparative freedom and the easy-going manner in which the work was supervised. For us this was particularly fortunate, as we heard frightful stories daily of an unholy sort of speedo up at a place called Wan Po. There, in two shifts, about 2,000 men were working night and day blasting a cliff face and bridge building; from all descriptions Wan Po sounded like a hotted up inferno, and the bridge they were making was alleged to be about a quarter of a mile long. One of our tasks was to collect food in the form of peanuts for the workers at Wan Po, and that was interesting work for us, though many of the troops suffered from chronic diarrhoea after a day on the job due to eating about three or four lbs. of raw peanuts!

These peanuts, that were worked in with a rotation of tobacco all round the Wun Lun area, were cultivated by Chinese, and all the small holdings were tied up with some Banking Corporation operating in China itself. The Chinese themselves were of two types: the agricultural coolie, with his huge brimmed straw hat and invariable blue coat and trousers, and the wealthier Chinese who were the officials and managers. Our first day on the job was the best.