The Dutch philosopher, Joop, was yet again quite different. He spoke English, French and German very well and was a very wise, quiet, modest sort of person. He was extremely friendly with Jim, and every evening used to come across to our hut, and we’d talk on every subject under the sun; but the only one of us who was at all sure of himself, was Joop. We used to invite Joop over to sup with the ‘Officers’ Mess’, and let it be recorded without malice, and to the defence of leggie queue men, that this well-known philosopher used to eat his own meal in the troops’ lines – for he was a Landsturmer, the equivalent of a Volunteer in Malaya – then he’d eat our meal as well and not really notice either!

It was also in these days that I first got to known Ginger de Huguenot well. As a doctor he was by now one of the best known in Thailand, but as a man Gibby and I liked him enormously, and we used to go over to the hospital after dark and sit on a bamboo bench high above the river and chat. Because Ginger had had quite a different education to the normal Englishman, his viewpoint was both unusual and independent. He was a mixture, and in his blood was Fleming, American, Austrian and English; he had been partly educated in Italy, France and America, and then he arrived at a normal English Public School at the age of 14, where he was regarded justly as a man of the world. The Public School system was then, and still is, rather a mystery to him, and he surprised his House Master when he became a prefect by declining the privilege of beating his juniors whenever they broke any of the scores of silly little rules beloved by the producers of the Old School Tie.

And so, among pleasant people, working monotonously on the road when we were fit, but now able to lie up when we were sick, we approached Christmas, 1943. The rations-road was actually finished a few days before Christmas Eve, and from then on we only had about 20 minutes work to do a day, either chopping wood for the cookhouse, or grinding soya beans or rice for the cooks. My usual partner for that job was Woolley, and as it had to be done early before breakfast our work for the day was over before it started, and back to bed we went. The grinding machine was a crude stone platform, and lying on it was fixed a revolving, flat stone wheel, worked by a man pushing and pulling on a bar. By our 20 minutes Woolley and I were sick of it; but Joop got the job daily for preference, and we’d see him grinding away (yes, in the end Joop saw that joke, too!) in his Jap-Happy for hours.