It was a hot afternoon, but at three p.m. was one of the events of the day – the Races. A track had been made about 100 yards long down on the sandy beach; and the horses were the strongest men in the camp – largely from the cookhouses – and the jockeys were the midgets. The horses had all been previously ‘bought’ by syndicates who had privately tested their animals out on the course during the past week. There were three Licensed Tipsters and at the top of the bank was a skeleton Bamboo Tote. At most people could guess the form pretty well; the main difficulty was to get any decent odds.

The pairs of horses and jockeys with coloured armbands walked round an improvised paddock before the first race where the laughing public studied the possibilities for the last time. About ten minutes before the race commenced, Woolley, who was one of the three tipsters, made a tumultuous entry. He was carried along on one of the earth-carrying stretchers, fanning himself with a piece of atap thatch, and shouting out his ‘tips’ at the top of his voice in between sucks at a filthy looking cheroot. As his carriers started on the almost vertical bank that led to the arena below, one of them slipped, and the four of them plus the Old Firm arrived 30 feet below on the sand in an unglorified heap to the delight of the crowd. Then the races started, and as the very hot afternoon developed, more and more spectators melted away to their huts.

Just as it was again impossible to eat it all, so has the menu of the evening meal been impossible to remember; but to us it was very wonderful value for the one dollar a head we’d all subscribed in order to buy supplementary rations from the canteen. Our own brews were reverently poured out and heavily punished and we all swore it was extraordinarily good – ‘extraordinary’ was just about the right word!

Directly after the evening meal, and not really attuned to the right mood, we were Joop’s guests at the Dutch Christmas Service, held in the Dutch Hospital. Of the service we understood little, and the hymns, though well sung, were rather long and not very cheerful. But the attractive thing was a very clever and beautiful arrangement of candles and coconut-oil lamps in little groups, that lit up the whole hut in the proper, traditional manner. The hospital was full: Dutchmen and Eurasians, officers and men, their faces lit up and dramatised in the soft light of the many flickering lightlets.