Some time before, all the 4 Group personnel who had been sick in Chungkai had been evacuated down to their own Group in Tamuang. With them had gone Fizzer and most of his cast, but before they went we squeezed in a ‘Promenade Concert’. This was due to the work and amazing memory of Eric Hill, a teacher of music and considerable musician, who trained up our light orchestra of 20 people in less than a fortnight to a surprisingly high pitch. Whenever Eric rehearsed I made excuses to leave Leo’s rehearsals to attend to Hand Props, Wardrobe or something, and went and heard Eric’s rehearsals in what was curiously known as the ‘Slaughter House Rehearsal Theatre’, because in this clearing the butchers had formerly performed the gruesome task of killing the camps’ meat with a sledgehammer. At the end of his two weeks, and in spite of several depletions in his orchestra, a programme was put on containing a movement from Schubert’s Unfinished Symphony, Mozart’s Eine Kleine Nachtmusik four of Elgar’s Enigma Variations and other small items that, with the help of Gibby’s choir that sang an arrangement of Jesu, Joy of Man’s Desiring and a doctor who sang Where’er you Walk made up a programme of an hour and a half, and resulted in a demand for further ‘Proms’.

As the camp shrank in size due to Japan parties going away again in June and Sick Parties going down to a base hospital at Nakom Paton and 4 Group leaving us as well, the Nips decided to close down half the camp, and in the closed area lay our theatre. We were given a new but inferior site on the other side of the camp and over we had to go. The last show in the old intimate theatre was one for which I was responsible, in that I conceived and arranged the show, and took the responsibility for it with several producers.

It was an all-dancing show and, though it had been originally intended to centre round a big Javanese Dance, in the end that was the only feature that didn’t appear. However, in one evening was seen the Lambeth Walk, a Scat Dance, a Hornpipe, Scottish Dances, Dutch Clog Dances, Tyrolean Dances, Balinese Dancing and a twenty-three-minute classical ballet! It was much too ambitious, but the theatre staff was keen on it, and it went down very well. It was during this show that Leo and I parted company for good.