After the show, which even the Nips enjoyed, another party was held in the M.O.’s hut, where extraordinary things took place, led by the normally dignified S.M.O. who set the ball rolling by dancing with the pantomime’s leady lady who was there still in her make-up. There was no Lights Out that night, but the force of the home-brew sent everyone soon to bed or to sleep and, shortly after midnight peace reigned once again over Takanun Camp.

After Christmas, life went gently forward, and by dint of frequent pressure on Stan Fane I got myself back to my old battalion and detached from the Officers’ Battalion. Stan Fane was an odd fellow. A small town merchant in private life, he’d blossomed out as a P.O.W. into the imagined pompous manners of a country gentleman; but when not surrounded by people whom he felt he ought to know or respect, he was a pleasant enough chap, and an indefatigable worker in the theatre.

Being back in the battalion meant very little beyond the privilege of dishing out the prophylactic quinine at the evening meal, for all my own men I had seen daily anyway. One particularly good corporal in my platoon had just come down with a friend of his from an old anti-cholera party that had been working to help Indians and Burmese in the bad days near the border. The stories they told far transcend anything that occurred in our Group. My young batman, too, after many months in Kinsayok, at last came up to Takanun; I was very glad to see him fit again but he told me that my haversack full of books and personal kit, which he’d hung on to for months, had only a few weeks ago been stolen from his bed. Our kit, though, had been surprisingly supplemented by the arrival of a barge load of our heavy kit that we’d left at Tarsao on the march up, months and months before. Much of it was mouldy and rotten and it had also been gone through and looted, but I got up my old army valise with a thin kapok mattress sewn into the bottom of it, and consequently became one of the capitalists of the place.