Plotting his return to Southeast Asia, John took a job at the Foreign Office. While he wasn’t yet able to reach Java, by the summer of 1947 he was offered a junior position at the Embassy in Bangkok, where he sought out ways to make himself useful to the republican cause. This was a precarious move while still working for the British government, which was by then attempting to deal with the increasingly bloody situation mounting between the Indonesians and the Dutch. Arriving in Siam it seemed essential to revisit the sites of the railway; he was one of the first former prisoners to return. John had kept in touch with the Thai businessman Nai Boonpong Sirivejjabhandu (‘Boon Pong’) who had saved so many prisoners’ lives through the ‘V scheme’ that smuggled desperately needed supplies into the camps; after war he had established a bus company in Kanchanaburi. As detailed in the eight-page memoir of this visit on 8 June 1947, reproduced in Appendix One, John rode one of Pong’s buses while he visited the scenes of his captivity, which were almost unrecognisable—either overgrown with jungle or replaced with village shacks—after this short time. Again, his balanced attitude and poise is remarkable: ‘the absence of Japanese in Siam made the trip back to Kamburi quite unvindictive,’ he writes ‘and the ghosts are laid’ (Coast, unpublished novel: 1). The ‘drama’ of the place and his hatred for the Japanese (which he hadn’t felt ‘for ages’) hits him again when he sees the Kamburi Base Cemetery for the first time and encounters the grave of his batman (ibid: 3). Years later, when John was drafting his autobiographical novel Bachelor in Bangkok, his character ‘John Burnham’ speaks of how he came to feel resolved in Thailand and Southeast Asia, despite having been a POW: ‘I feel that if you’ve lived in Siamese forest, built your own huts from bamboo you’ve felled yourself, survived malaria, eaten food that the local people could have thrown away, well, that country can hold no further terrors for you, and, whether you like it or not, you become part of it’ (Coast, ibid: 21).

By 1948, John had left his job in Bangkok and been accepted into the inner circle of the Indonesian republican government: first as an advisor to Sutan Shjarir in Jogjakarta and then as an international public relations official for President Sukarno. This period of John’s life is recorded in his fascinating book Recruit to Revolution: Adventure and Politics in Indonesia (1952). That he was given such intimate access to the machinations of the anti-colonial government was testament to his newfound cultural sensitivity and linguistic skills developed in the camps. As Independence dawned for Indonesia, John felt the time had come to realise the dream that had taken shape during his captivity. With Sukarno’s support, he moved to the island of Bali and—together with his Javanese wife, Supianti or ‘Luce’— found a group of musicians and dancers and prepared them to embark on a grand tour of the West End and Broadway. John’s memoir Dancing out of Bali (1956) recounts this next extraordinary chapter of his life. His Dancers of Bali of 1953 sold out at the box office and was feted as a major breakthrough in East-West cultural relations. It also established John as a theatrical agent and impresario, a career in which he would excel for the rest of his life, and which would take him back once more to the River Kwai.