The camp itself was a flat rectangle, surrounded by a bund as in Chungkai, and beyond the bund was a bamboo fence and two rough barbed wire fences between which the sentries patrolled. There was only one gate into the camp, by the guard room, and in the whole of that end of the camp were the Nip quarters – roomy, and with a small grass padang and a few trees. Our part hadn’t a real tree in it, was absolutely bare mud and consisted of one straight row of huts, 13 or 14 in number, each a hundred metres long. The farthest hut was part store and part hospital. There was a bathing place that consisted of a partitioned square of ground, and through it and across it were ditches dug; at metre intervals across these ditches were little bamboo platforms, and two of you stood on either side of these platforms with a tin between you to bathe. The water supply for the camp came from two wells, hand worked, known as the British and Dutch Pumps; the former had to pump all the water that was required for Nip purposes.

During our day in Tamarkan we had learnt that this camp was hardly what it had been cracked up to be, but when we arrived, had our third search in three days and looked round the camp, it seemed even worse than we’d feared; and what was more dismal, it was so small and shadeless that improvement seemed impossible on any real scale. Its overall size was about 325 yards by 150, and at least a third of that area was taken up by the Nips. The huts in which we were to live were still in the process of being built and each new party arriving had to sleep on the floor till it had made its own bed of slatting shelves. Everyone in the place was working from nine till one and from three to six on building, water-drawing and carrying, cooking, etc. There were only 180 O.R.s in the whole camp, most of whom had to work as Nip servants, and the rest were either skilled cooks or batmen. The scale of batmen worked out at about three to a hut containing 200 officers, so they barely managed to wash more than a couple of bits of clothing a week for us. We were badly overcrowded in the huts, four to a small bay, and having less than a yard of living space per man. The only prospects of expansion would mean the altering of the bund, and therefore the digging of a new one by ourselves.