The officers at 206 had been 12-hour-a-day coolies for some weeks before us; while we, having finished our tree felling job, were next put on the task of re-clearing the already overgrown trace in certain areas near the big Nip camp. But that was all over now and the work selected for us was the making of a cutting that went 16 feet down. The site of this cutting was a kilometre or so outside our camp, and after breakfast in the dark, we paraded with the men and made our way there carrying our tools. We started off at changkuling out the sodden ground next to a party of medical Nips who were out for a couple of hours; and we went on till lunch time, came out again afterwards and worked through till seven o’clock. The old gunso used to blink his eyes to us occasionally, and we sometimes left earlier. In the bad days that particular gunso was known as Father Christmas, because he used to go up and down the line every few days with a sack and distribute ‘Tojo Presentos’ to the working troops – packets of cheap Nip cigarettes. One of the Nip guards, though, said that the gunso paid for the cigarettes himself.

Now the first three or four feet of a cutting were not too bad, but when you got six, ten, fourteen feet down, it was absolute hell. In the first place you stood in inches of water, and as you dug it out, the earth just stuck to the shovel and simply wouldn’t leave it. When it rained very hard we’d shelter under the atap eaves of a nearby Nip hut; sometimes they’d let us stay there awhile, sometimes they drove us out. The privates in charge of us varied, for they were all ‘lightsick’ Nips on a cushy job.

The technique of cutting-making was simple. One party picked and dug the clinging earth at the bottom, and loaded it onto stretchers; the other party staggered away through the slush, up some crude steps in the bank, and dumped the load clear away. Then back for the next load, and so on and so on, hundreds of times each day. If the earth had dried out a little you attempted to throw it up from the bottom onto a ledge on either side of the cutting; other men standing there then shovelled it clear. As you got deep down and found great blue boulders sticking out of the cutting’s side so as to block the way, you spent a morning collecting masses of wood and bamboo (a better job) in order to make fires round these boulders to heat and strip them away. It didn’t work, of course, and later on the engineers dynamited it.