Our Mess in camp consists of a large Nip green mosquito net draped over a split bamboo table surrounded by bamboo benches. The net helps keep the flies away. We go to the cookhouse, draw our food, and come up and sit there. If it is fine we all sit there; if it is drizzling half of us sit there; if it is pouring Nuts sits there – he hates eating in his tent! The food, comparatively speaking, is not bad and quite plentiful, and I gulp down a quick lunch so that I can rest in my tent for half an hour before going back to the work. But today is one of those rare days when a watery sun has broken through and the rain stops for a while. Quick! I must get my blanket and shorts out to air – it can’t be helped if there’s nothing to lie down on today.

Back on the work in the afternoon it’s already started to rain again and the work goes miserably forward. One of the men goes into a rigor about 4 o’clock, and I bring him up to the Nip: ‘This man fever, Nippon. He very hot.’ The Nip feels his forehead, which is very warm, and looks at the man who is gooseflesh and shaking all over. He gives a grunt and a condescending wave of the hand, and the man is free to go his own way back to camp.

There is another casualty later on: a man’s fingers are caught under a teak baulk and badly crushed, but no arguments can persuade the Nip to let him go back to camp: one man he has already let go; two he dare not allow. So the wretched man sits under a tree and waits for the evening to come while his wound aches and goes septic. I stand by him and we watch without emotion the tricky manoeuvrings of the big timbers into position. The Nip engineers in their cloven, black rubber boots, are very nimble and as sure of their balance on the slippery baulks as monkeys: they expect clumsy and undernourished troops to be able to spring about in the same way, and if they’re too slow, they’re hit. But it’s not worth bothering about all those blows that don’t really do any damage; my job really begins when the Nip stoops to pick up a shovel or bamboo . . . The men’s backs glisten with rain and sweat, and dirt and mud is unconsciously scratched by them into their already unhealthy skins.

At 5.30 the last hour of the day commences, and oh God, how slowly it always seems to go! Very little work is ever done for the men are rocking on their feet; but the Nips just muck about, finishing off here, tidying up there, themselves tired as well and very irritable, but not permitted or daring to let us go before the earliest scheduled hour of 6.30. But at length comes the order to pack up tools and check them and we drift back to camp, checking the tools once again at the tool tent, and expected to bring in a length of bamboo for the cookhouse fires.