Back then to the tents, throw down the mess tins and spoons on the muddy slats, and down to the river to bathe. Food is at 7.30 – plenty of rice and stew and probably a rissole, or ‘doover’, as it is called; it’s not very appetising but enough to fill and warm the belly. Then lie on your bed, and as you see the rain trickling down the canvas above your head in little channels and then beginning to seep through where that damned channel hesitates and ends, you dent the canvas with your finger and attract the trickle further down so that it doesn’t leak directly over your head. By 8.30 it is already dark again. Christ! think the men, what couldn’t we do to a newspaper full of fish and chips! Oh for a long, hot bath, think we, with a pleasant smelling soap and a room of our own to go to.

Such then was the daily, dreary routine of our lives, day after day, week after week. Sometimes you weren’t on the bridge, but were miles out in the jungle felling and shaping trees that were dragged by elephants back to the distant trace. On that job, bitten to madness by mosquitoes, the Nips’ tempers were always vicious. If your task set for the day was 40 trees, you were lucky if you got away with less than 70. Out in the jungle itself, away from any restrictions and with a completely free hand, the Nips were little swine. They took a malignant delight in stopping you smoking, cutting out yasmes, and adding yet one more job to do when the alleged task was finished.

If you were embanking or cutting you were expected to keep at it all day, unceasingly. The earth was heavy with water and so sticky you had to shake each shovel load off. The Nips would shout out: ‘Inggeris sodier no good! One Nippon sodier samo ten Inggeris sodiers!’ and one of them would jump into the cutting, hit some man, and then throw up earth like a lunatic for five minutes to show what he wanted and what a ‘Nippon sodier’ could do. But these demonstrations never seemed to last more than five minutes.

As can well be imagined the health of the camp after two or three weeks only was appalling. In addition to the normal diseases, pellagra and other horrible deficiency diseases brought on by the hard work, were reducing the men steadily to skeletons, and more than half of them had tropical ulcers.