Back in the house we amused ourselves by just sitting and watching. One of the Chinese girls there, though deaf and dumb, was married and had a small child, a cruel little creature who spent its entire time plaguing and tweaking one of the ‘Pi’ dogs, the climax being reached when the small, naked infant of about three, lifted a wicker basket over the dog so that its tail was outside the rim, and which the child could then pull to its heart’s content. Then there were two old gentlemen sitting on the verandah methodically hammering open the castor oil nuts that had been dried in the sun and putting the collected beans in baskets; and, of course, we had the game of talking with the Chinese – those conversations so uniform and so many hundreds of times repeated, that never got much beyond ‘Nippon no f . . . ing good! How soon you think war finish?’ And the reply a laugh, and the Chinese lisp of ‘Nippon, bloody bastard. English, America, China all samo-samo. I tink perhaps war soon finish.’ I fear that the three or four words of English indelibly impressed on all races in Thailand, after ‘O.K.’, ‘very good’ and ‘no good’ are the foulest and commonest swear words in the English language, and which you could hear Thais and their children laughingly using wherever you went.

By six o’clock there was absolutely no sign of our Nip returning and we posted a watch on the river bank to look for his return and to keep an eye on the peanuts. By seven o’clock, without anyone asking, the Chinese produced a second excellent meal; but you could see they were a little restless – were they going to be expected to put up 40 people the whole night? At the second meal I fed with the Chinese, and a very good meal it was; but for the inexperienced there were dangers about, for although it was fairly safe to dip into the little bowls of meat, prawns, beans, and other succulent vegetables, a careless dip into any of the spice dishes that landed you anywhere among something impregnated with the little red ‘Birds-Eye’ chillies, gave you a mouthful like molten lava that brought tears of agony to your eyes and tears of mirth to the eyes of your beholders. By eight o’clock it was dark, and it was not until nearly nine that a barge appeared with an anxious Nip and the British Camp R.S.M. The peanuts were slung on board, the troops numbered and found correct, and two muscular Thais poled us the five river miles back to Wun Lun.