We started off with a very polite Nip, and arriving at the river’s edge we found that there were no boats available, so we forded it by holding our clothes above our heads and wading. Arrived on the other side we met a guide who led us along little paths to the various small houses where we packed the peanuts – kept in huge piles – into sacks, and stacked them ready for collection. All these houses were similar, being good atap huts with a large, beaten earth floor, which acted as the store and work room, and then at either end would be a raised section that formed the living quarters some five or six feet above ground, and there was also a kitchen. The Chinese were invariably friendly to us, and were out to cheat the Nips as much as we could help them to do, but as in this case we knew the peanuts were going to our own people, we had to insist that full weight was given.

After visiting two houses we set off for the third and final house where most of the work lay. Apparently it was a long distance off, and our paths skirted various villages, and we passed several monasteries, noticing in one of them the fattest collection of bullocks we had seen in Thailand tied up round a central feeding trough in one of the temple yards. After about half an hour’s walking through the undergrowth, it became very obvious that the Chinese had lost the way, but wasn’t prepared to admit it. Our Nip, who spoke a little English and had been to some Japanese university, kept his temper remarkably well. He was a very decent fellow, and I had to report to him every ten minutes on the condition of one of my party who had started a rigor soon after starting out; he seemed really concerned.

After retracing our steps twice, the men began to grumble and curse; the Chinese smiled at the Nip with his lips but his eyes were anxious and the torrent of Chinese excuses that he poured out deceived no one. At the next village we reached, a big one, half the Thai population gathered round us on the grass under huge mango trees. There was a three-language conference and eventually, pursued by a fat old Thai woman with a coarsely reddened mouth due to chewing betel, we struck the correct path at right angles to our previous course, and after another march for half an hour we found the right plantation.