Now by the middle of 1944, the prices of all basic commodities such as eggs, oil, rice, vegetables and fruit had risen by anything from 200 to 400 per cent, and we needed money for food and drugs very badly. Two officers in our hut, tough and courageous men, decided that they would break out of camp regularly at night and try to contact friendly Thais; and if they continued to bring in the hooch supply and flaunt authority, well, it was fair enough to make a bit of money out of it. The chief of these two was an Irishman, Mick Donovan, rather strong headed perhaps, but he did actually contact some Thais in the end who offered the camp 20,000 tikals in cash or kind as a start, in exchange for the Camp Commander’s signature on a cheque. As we were every month still paying out 10 dollars for the hospital, this outside money would have relieved the officers as well as the sick. But the Camp Commander was very suspicious of Mick whom he thought, quite wrongly as it turned out, was a bad type and, after much shilly-shallying and various friends of Mick’s seeing their C.O.s and agitating, the opportunity was at length accepted – but too late! The rich Thai who came up to meet the two officers arrived before the offer had been accepted and the money was never offered by that offended Thai again.

By mid-1944 the Chungkai-Kamburi area was very definitely under regular surveyance from the Allied Air Force. We used to regularly see and hear single recce planes, very high indeed; and periodically a dozen bombers or more came over and raided Tamarkan Bridge, three kilometres away – a double bridge, one of concrete and one of wood. At the first attempt they missed both, though we felt the blast in our camp; and because the Nips had built Tamarkan Camp very near the bridge, quite a number of our people were killed. But later on they came over again, and the concrete one was shaken and made impassable and many spans of the wooden one were destroyed. From our point of view, however, that only meant work for the Tamarkan prisoners, who toiled long hours repairing the wooden bridge and had to start building a ferry. In spite of the casualties, which at first really frightened Tamarkan, in Chungkai we always felt safe, and the more of our own planes we saw, the more it cheered us up.