To reach this benighted cutting you had to cross several of those single-baulk-to-walk-on Nip bridges. Slippery as ice and the baulk tops inches deep in mud, many of us preferred to go round. The poor old B.M., not being a real friend of the Government in spite of his former Staff connections, had to come out and work with us for a while till he managed to get a job as a cook in the camp. He cooked very well, incidentally, but when he came out to work with us he was always one of the ones to cross those bridges on foot, as sure-footed as a cat and weighing about 13 stone, still – very odd!

To go out in charge of the troops was now a rest cure, and came round about every fourth day. Odd fragments of that time stick in the memory. I remember the envied job of ‘the man who followed the elephant to see that the tree trunks it was pulling didn’t get caught up in the jungle’. A grubby Thai mahout used to urge the elephant on with repeated kicks behind the ear and with the use of a bloody knife; sometimes the elephant trumpeted as it pulled the massive timbers along, and there was the practically naked, matted-bearded Englishman trailing behind, having an ‘easy day’.

Scenes of Nip cruelty come back, too. The bridging engineers were beating up so many people a day that we could take no real notice of anything less than a broken limb. I remember that one day on cutting out a shelf from a nearly vertical hillside, watching a Nip guard squatting on a big branch of a tree just above the heads of the working men. One of the men laughed – a rare enough sound! The Nip glanced suspiciously down – it wasn’t possible to work and laugh – or perhaps those swine of Englishmen were laughing at him! Like a flash he was on the ground and whipping into the back of that startled Corporal with a wicked, thin bamboo. Those were the sorts of little incidents the officers had to sort out daily; and often the Nips used a crowbar or shovel instead of bamboo.