Some weeks before Christmas, the Nips had given us permission to build a theatre. After the monsoon and the river had gone down again, there was a good sandy beach below, surrounded by a natural amphitheatre just at the back of the camp near the bathing point. On this site a sand stage was built up, and a proscenium arch of atap appeared, primitive wings, and a sort of dressing-room behind. The first few shows, supplemented by Gus on another accordeon that belonged to a Dutchman and by a Sergeant on a 7s 6d Red Cross fiddle, were mainly musical try-outs, duly attended by the Nip interpreter as censor and a fair sprinkling of Nips. The big production was to be the pantomime, written by Gus, and entitled, The Babes in the Wood, starring Ginger de Huguenot as the Fairy Queen, and Woolley as one of the Babes.

That Christmas Day may not compare with 1945, but everybody in Takanun found it very, very good. Unfortunately Jim and George had both been evacuated to Chungkai at the beginning of the month, but we had had the addition of Carl Bucks in our bay, a good-humoured journalist, who was the inventor of the name ‘Gas-Cape Stew’ for jungle stew when made out of the literally uneatable Nip dried vegetables. This name went up and down the line, and indeed, the browny-green, shredded, leathery weeds might easily have been bundles of torn up gas-capes.

The celebration started on Christmas Eve, when Gibby’s choir, with the aid of a tuning-fork and a hand-pumped old harmonium the size of a portable gramophone, made a tour of the camp singing carols. The choir had worked hard for a long time, and sang, really beautifully, a selection ranging from 14th century melodies only rarely heard in England, to the typical Christmas Day hymns. We had men carrying flaming, musky, sputtering jungle torches for illumination, every now and then there being a period of darkness when the torch burnt low and the surface of the resinous stuff inside had to be scraped lower so that it could burn freely again. About 27 carols were sung that evening, some in the hospital and some at either end of the camp. It was an amazingly satisfactory performance, and after it came the important ceremony of broaching the home-brewed ‘beer’.