For a week things weren’t too bad. The rations were no worse than usual, and the Nip engineer sergeant, a villainous looking old thug with a bad squint, turned out to be quite reasonable. As was so often the case, the tougher and uglier the Nip, so often was he the better man; the ‘pretty boy’ variety of Nips were invariably swine. We were started off in two places: one a stretch of embankment; the other a place where we were digging out the foundations for an 80 metre curved bridge. Reveille was a series of pips on a whistle in the pitch dark at 6.30. Breakfast about 7, and on parade at 8.15. The engineers turned up and took us away in parties by 9 o’clock, when we drew our tools and were out till 6 p.m. or so. In the first week the officers only worked to make the garden and everyone’s spirits were also improved by the receipt of mail from home.

Well I remember sitting on the floor of the Nuts’s tent, reading my first letter from home for fifteen months, tears in my eyes, and once again remembering that somewhere on the same earth people existed who did seem to mind what happened to you. My sister had apparently heard my name broadcast by ‘Lord Hee-Hee’ from Tokyo only two months after Singapore fell; most people had had no news of us at all. My sister, bless her, had heard, too, that the Japanese treated their prisoners well! And wasn’t the Japanese General in Singapore a Christian? About two thirds of us got this mail; rotten bad luck on the others who didn’t.