From the very beginning Dudley was told that a topical show was stale and wouldn’t go down, but he insisted and we had Thai-Diddle- Diddle. The two things that riled the Nips were the appearance of three comedians in a Wild West scene, clad only in Jap-Happies and singing an old song from Wun Lun days to the tune of You Take the High Road, which ended up with the last line of the chorus of each verse: ‘On the muddy, bloody banks of Kamburi!’ But the opening scene was the real trouble. It dealt with the return home from Thailand of Private Robinson. When he arrived home he found that his wife had had an American billeted on her and he was introduced to his youngest child, about one year old. But the whole point of this skit was that Private Robinson, after being a P.O.W., was quite unacclimatised to anything civilised, and spoke in the well-known pidgin- Japanese. When he wanted to ‘wash his hands’ he plucked some leaves from the aspidistra, stuffed them in his pocket and left the room. When he asked for a banana he used the Malay word ‘pisang’, and when his wife reluctantly passed him the fruit bowl, minus the fruit, the misunderstanding had to be explained. The constant use of the pidgin language sent the audience into such prolonged laughter as was never equalled again, and Dudley, dressed up as a Chinaman for his Front Cloth Act, was walking round the wings prodding the Committee members in the ribs and saying between the bursts of applause: ‘You see, you silly buggers – you see? Who was right eh? Who was right?’ There was no doubt about the answer, but the use of the Japanese words infuriated the Nips as much as it pleased the British, and the ban was imposed. Quite why they should have disliked us using such words as ‘Kurrah! Buggairo!’ or ‘Benjo speedo’, which were part of our vocabulary and theirs was never explained, but they are the most suspicious race on earth, and they thought they were being laughed at – so, ‘Pinish-Ga!’

After Thai-Diddle-Diddle the theatre was closed because the camp had one of its yearly floods and there was three feet of water on the stage and ten feet in the auditorium, where people were going to bathe. During that period Eddie stepped in again, week after week, and we had small musical shows near the P.T. centre, based on the famous ‘Swingtet’ and Eddie’s spotted talent. The Swingtet consisted of the double-bass, a guitar, trumpet, drums and accordion. The Dutch accordionist was the best any of us had ever heard, and he and the bass player made the Swingtet into a combination that would have been of a genuinely high peacetime standard.