Though there was a fair handful of these criminals, there were also benevolent racketeers, and they all had pots of money. Among the latter were those who sold ‘coffee’ with gula (sugar) which they brewed themselves from goods either bought or stolen from the Nips. Their old cry of ‘Hot, sweet and milky!’ was generally more accurately corrupted to ‘Hot, sweet and filthy!’ The other class of benevolent racketeer was found among those who had Nip menial jobs, and the amount some of them stole from the I.J.A. and sold around the camp was colossal. From one of these men in his own unit, John Staff cashed a cheque at the rate of four-and-a-half tikals (5/-) to the pound, and generously let me have about 50 dollars in return for an IOU. The usual rate of exchange with a bad racketeer – and sick officers were sometimes driven to do it – was one tikal (1/2) to a pound. With our money we bought a tin of soya bean ‘condensed milk’ every alternate day at 2 dollars 50c a tin, and thought ourselves in clover.

Towards the end of August and the beginning of September, the sick evacuations began and so did the hut building programme. Due to the fact that the up country threat seemed now over, I had allowed my toe to recover – which it had been trying to do for some time – and took the risk of being a fit man again. My first job as boiler of the sterilising water in which we dipped our utensils before each meal, was not a success; and I soon found myself with others of the fitter members of the battalion on hut building. How we longed never to see bamboo again!

Day after day we went into the jungle hills and cut down those huge bamboos that at their base were as thick as nine inches, and dragged them down to the camp. In camp we sawed them up in the lengths for hut uprights, supports and cross pieces; and after the years of practice, we cut out the joint sockets in an expert manner. The frame of the hut then went up and the atap thatching was laid on it. When the roof was finished we sawed off the short lengths that were sunk into the ground to take the long bamboo cross-supports that held up the shelf of slats on which we would lie. The last job was the bashing, splitting and spreading open of the seven foot lengths of thick bamboo that made our slats. It was all very simple, very primitive and bloody boring.

In charge of the officers there was always a certain cretin of a Nip who could never stop mumbling and whom we christened ‘Nattering Norman’. He knew one word of English, and that was ‘bamboo’; and apparently only one word of Japanese, too, which sounded like ‘mortikoi’, and meant ‘bring’. Otherwise he just mumbled, dribbled and worked – a complete dopey; and as for us, well we ‘bamboomortikoi- ed!’ When we had finished three very long troops’ huts we were due to build one for ourselves; and by the time that was finished Takanun would be a ‘Fit Camp’ because all the serious sick would have been sent below.