And thus our existence began in Camp 206, for it could hardly be called living. We were separated from each other by yards of mud and in separate tents; there were no books, no facilities for doing anything at all. Day after day went by in gossiping, making new adjustments to the leaks in the tents, queuing up for food and perhaps a quiz or a sing-song after dark. In the next tent to us was Gus, now with a tin whistle instead of an accordeon, and growing a foul red beard as a sign of his disgust. Nightly we heard the tunes of Green Grow the Rushes-O and similar songs, always ending up as their spirits increased with I’m a Sailor you can tell, by my Oriental Smell, and Oh dear, what can the matter be, three old ladies locked in a lavatory.

My only compulsory duty in those days was to sit for one hour a day on the river bank and supervise the drawing of water. We were now only getting a very, very occasional cholera case and soon it should be finished, but the precautions, of course, were the same as before. We had to see that the English and Dutch troops as they went down with their empty tins to draw water and wash, all followed the correct ritual. No bathing or clothes washing whatsoever was allowed in the river itself; you drew your tin of water, carried it a little way up the bank and poured it into the communal wooden trough where it was disinfected with chloride that smelt of swimming baths and then you drew a clean bucket of it out again and washed yourself or your clothes on the sand of the river bank.

There were a few of my own proper battalion in the camp, all sick, and on these men I tried to keep a careful eye, though there was little enough I could do for them, and nominally they came under the control of Stan Fane, Nuts’s second-in-command, who was now sick in this camp.

The hospital at this stage was the only part of the camp apart from the Nip quarters and stores that was hutted. Even British H.Q. was still in a tent. In the hospital were two long atap huts, full of the most sickly men; row upon row of gaunt grey skeletons. The whole camp was sick, and the very fittest men would have gone to hospital at home for months. Everywhere was heard praise for Ginger de Huguenot’s selfless and heroic work in breaking the cholera; and everywhere, now that that was over, were anxious hopes that the Nips would evacuate all these sick men to Chungkai or Kamburi before it was too late. The evil presence of the ‘Horse Doctor’ was still in power in this camp, and he was now aided by a medical sergeant, Ada; a far worse swine than the ‘Doctor’ himself. A hut was in the middle of being constructed for our own doctors, and after that the whole camp was to be improved.