Anything could happen in Chungkai – good, bad, or humorous. While we were in our first hut, right at the far end of the camp that later was converted into the new hospital, one of our neighbours had a rather miraculous escape from death. He was a Messing Officer, and on his way down to the cookhouse early one morning, as he was passing through some bamboo clumps, he heard a sustained hissing noise and saw the head of a brown snake swaying about three feet above the ground some yards in front of him! Without a thought he picked up a stout bamboo stick and went for it. The snake, quite put out by this rash and very unexpected onslaught, turned tail and fled, only to be pursued by this officer who actually killed it in some scrub near the river bank. He thought, I suppose, that it was just another rat-snake – but it did seem rather large! Anyhow, he brought it back to the hut to show everybody. All the old Malayan planters came out and they looked at its colour, at its big scaled head and the clearly visible fangs that faced back into its throat and they unanimously declared that it was a Hammadryad, or King Cobra. The funny thing is that not only is the King Cobra one of the deadliest snakes in the world, whose poison can kill a man in fifteen minutes, but it has the reputation of being one of the few snakes that will deliberately and unprovokedly attack a man; so it must have had the shock of its life when some cad who’d never read any Natural History books went for it with a bamboo stick! Its length was precisely eleven feet eight inches and it was made into steaks in the cookhouse.

When the hospital moved across into these officers’ huts, the officers moved into the four most dilapidated huts in the camp, slap next to the P.R.I. canteen. Though these huts were old and buggy, with the aid of Bill Wills, a lawyer, known as the ‘Old Snide’, and a young and a very handy Scottish Signals officer whom we called ‘McStomach’, a bamboo table with bamboo benches was made for us to eat our meals at – quite unprecedented – and two armchairs neatly made out of a bamboo frame and two old sacks. The chairs were very comfortable though, being soft, within a week or two they were breeding some of the juiciest bed bugs in Thailand. Our Kongsi had now increased to about eight, for in addition to the two carpenters mentioned above, we had with us our argumentative friend who taught me to play bridge in Takanun, Douglas Kent, and John Charteris, with whom I started to learn Malay. In fact we had a sort of International Settlement around our table and the total languages attempted included French, German, Dutch, Spanish, Malay, Javanese, Sundanese and Swahili!