A vast, strong fellow of Cornish and possibly a little Spanish extraction, he looked like a swashbuckling, Elizabethan pirate, and to heighten the likeness he wore a sixteenth-century beard, a magnificent, jaunty beard, and the tips of his moustache touched his eyelids. His granite looking physique was relieved by his ability to use his well-formed hands in a delicate and Gallic way, and also by an oddly quiet and mild voice. His job was Government Geologist in Malaya; he must have been a unique man in his department for he’d won every possible geological scholarship and prize, and was a Ph.D. Of physical and mental energy he had masses – just the man needed to stir us up a bit. He was full of fever, and had a sort of controlled rigor daily, but somehow it didn’t worry him. With him he brought a close friend, Joop Tinnel, an official in the Department of Health in Java, and a man who was known in academic circles as one of the cleverest young philosophers of Holland. Here was interest indeed: life in Takanun was looking up.

CHAPTER 12

THE month of October was the turning point of our up country existence, for on October 17th, almost exactly one year after its commencement, the railway was finished. Some tens of thousands of European, and some hundreds of Asiatic coolies had completed a railway over 400 kilometres long through jungle and mountains in rather less than twelve calendar months. At long last the Nips could afford to relax a little, and to let up on our conditions.

The place where the railway parties working towards each other from Burma and Thailand actually met was at about the 254 km mark, and there the Nips solemnly laid a copper rail and pegged it in with a golden peg. Great personages whistled up and down the line on cattle trucks with atap roofs, generally called ‘Flying Kampongs’, to take part in the celebrations. All the fittest and fattest men left in the various camps were sent up to 254 kms to be photographed as the heroic workers who had toiled for the Greater East India Asia Co-Prosperity Sphere and photographs of these men duly appeared in the Nip papers to show how fit and happy all their prisoners were. And Japanese bounty! Each man out of the 11,000 who’d never been sick – there were about 40 of them and all administrative – was given one tikal each! And in addition, every up country prisoner was rewarded with one large tin of Nip fish, and two small tins of sliced pilchards!