The George Tilly of Takanun was very different from the former escapologist of Chungkai. The food and the work and chronic boredom had deadened his fire and, though we used to talk, George had the habit of going into a sort of coma in the middle of a discussion which made things rather difficult. He also got scabies, and after fighting grimly against it and mortifying himself by the most painful disinfectant scrubbings, went to hospital covered in it from stem to stern; and there he lay, shrouded up to his red moustache, in one of the last sheets in Thailand.

It’s not really fair to laugh at George, but on one occasion when Jim, who used to visit him patiently and daily in hospital, was reading out an essay he’d just written, George slipped quietly into sleep and spoilt the proceedings by a loud snore. And on another afternoon I took over a long poem of T.S. Eliot’s for unravelling by George and he propounded it so slowly and monotonously that I forgot what he’d said about Verse I before we got to Verse II and so on; and when we reached the third page George said it was really quite simple and a very neat ending – and promptly went to sleep. I daren’t wake him up and tell him there was a fourth page overleaf which he’d completely forgotten about!

With Jim, in spite of his malaria, the case was the precise reverse. His energy was colossal and, in the cold weather of mid-November when we were all shivering and wearing every stitch we possessed, Jim used to sleep in the nude with a small rug over him and say it was all a question of good circulation. Gibby and I, who had always taken our early mornings in a gentlemanly and lazy way whenever we could, were now liable to be pulverised by Jim’s forceful brain before it was properly light. He’d written a very interesting book about Malaya, and he’d written a lot of philosophy – a new and intensely interesting experiment for him, and both these efforts were well worth listening to – but not in the mist of the half-light.

I mentioned to Jim that before breakfast I really couldn’t take it, and that I never seemed to be alive properly before nine o’clock; and without the least offence, he altered his programme. It was merely a re-channelling of his energy, and before morning rice-porridge, he’d be sitting outside scribbling off two or three thousand words in a chilly mist that moistened the paper he wrote on. This new arrangement suited him quite well, because now he was clear before his daily rigor.