And the food was unvarying and atrocious! Every day breakfast was a ground-rice and soya bean porridge, plain – and easily the best thing in the diet. Lunch was so-called Nasi Goreng (Malay for ‘fried rice’ and always called by the troops Nazi Goering), which was in reality a grey stodge of wet rice with a few peanuts in it; and the evening meal was the notorious ‘Jungle Stew’ and rice. A ghastly programme, and for months it never changed for a single meal.

After a few months a ‘Rissole Club’ was formed, and daily we paid 10c for a privately fried rice rissole, flavoured with anything we could buy from the canteen; if the canteen had nothing it was plain rice fried in coconut oil. The rice, of course, was subtracted out of our normal rations. Everyone was very hungry; in varying degrees, all were greedy. In the dishing out of the troops’ meals when there was any left over due to the impossibility of absolutely correctly distributing the food to so many people, there was always formed what was known as the ‘Leggie Queue’ (Malay lagi, more). In the Officers Battalion for the first time I met a ‘Leggie Leggie Queue’, especially for ‘second leftovers’, and a considerable number of officers would be seen at each meal silently standing in this queue, eating their first rice as they waited, stolidly watching the food containers to estimate their chances of picking up a few more scraps.

The rights of this business I could never properly decide. A particular friend of mine, who had a huge appetite, was a regular leggie queue man; and he just used to say that I was a bloody fool if I was hungry and didn’t try to get extra food; or else I had only a small appetite. Certainly he was more realistic than I. We both lived through it all – but still I’m not sure who was right.

On our first medical inspection I told the doctor, who was from Malaya, and a ‘Double 1st’ in Classics as well, that my toe hurt a lot. As a matter of honest fact it didn’t, but it looked as if it might have done and I remained sick for at least another week. After a few days, the fit men went up to build more bridges, but before they went, I hobbled up to their camp to greet my old musical acquaintance from Changi, Gibby Field. I found him incredibly clad in a pair of dirty sacking shorts, sweaty and sooty all over his naked torso, and with a foul old floppy Dutch hat on his head. Here was an Old Etonian, an expert on Handel’s music, and a man brought up in every so-called luxury of civilisation, who had out-toughed the toughs. He had stuck it out with the Officers Battalion all the time, done his coolie work, and when volunteers were short in the cookhouse, in he went. He was going up as adjutant with the Fit on the morrow, which shouldn’t be quite so bad. It was good seeing Gibby again and, as I left, he crawled away into a particularly abandoned looking tent to hear the latest news bulletin sent in via Tom Stuart.