Lying on the ground next afternoon under the eaves of the new hut and waiting for the bamboo slats to be put in the bay Gibby and I were to inhabit, I propped myself up on an elbow and began revising some of the early chapters of this book. As I read through trying to decipher my own writing, I became aware of someone watching me. I turned round, and saw a Nip with huge horn-rimmed spectacles apparently reading over my shoulder.

‘Diary-kah?’ he said slowly, reaching out and seizing the book. I was so surprised that I said ‘Yes’ without thinking, and rapidly had to pretend I didn’t understand what he’d said, and assured him it was NOT a diary, but just a book, an ordinary book because before the war I was a journalist. The Nip, who was suspected of being a Kimpi, one of the Nip Secret Police, thumbed the pages through slowly, but to my relief I could see that the writing was quite beyond him. Perhaps I might get away with it yet – at first I’d anticipated nothing less than a broken limb.

So I flattered the little brute, asked him where he learnt his very good English and so on, and then we started an incredible conversation on English literature. ‘You know Sakespare, Enggeland Number One poet?’ he asked. I enthused over Shakespeare. He then told me he read Byron at school. ‘You-a-read Byron?’ Yes, I knew Byron, but I didn’t read him much; I was more interested in writing myself, and the book he held in his hands was my first effort. I turned some of the pages over for him, telling him some completely phoney story about the contents, pretending that I thought he could read it as well as I, and the long and the short of it was that after one-and-a-quarter nerve racking hours I got it back. That evening I didn’t dare hide it lest he asked to see it again and should get suspicious if I said I’d lost it; so for the present I tore out all the most unpleasant things about the Nips and hoped to brass it out if it were called in.