It was the first camp for some while where we’d seen cooking done out in the open in all weathers! The cookhouses were not yet built and for the first few weeks the cooks worked out of doors while their atap roofs were built over them, bits of bamboo and rotan falling into stew-pots and clouds of dust and dirt layering over the rice in the Kulais. There was a theatre and two shows a week, but as rehearsals were only permitted on the stage for about one-and-a-quarter hours a day, obviously the standard could not be very high. Gus was here again, with a moderate band, and later Fizzer Plumbton arrived, complete with his old gang and with the addition of a very clever lyric writer known as ‘Biggs’. The Canteen was the only high spot, and there you could buy hot coffee, brown sugar, various little cakes and sweets – ‘peanut stars’ being the most famous – and cooked peanuts and plantain bananas. There was never sufficient latrine accommodation because all the available sites on the camp perimeter had already been used when the camp was a small O.R.s Camp.

In this delightful spot were eventually about 2,000 British and Australian officers and just over 1,000 Dutch officers, plus 180 mixed O.R.s.

In the Nip sector of the camp were about 200 to 250 Nips and Koreans. The total population density worked out at about two-thirds that of the Selarang confinement in Singapore, and was frightful. Any hope of privacy and quiet was out of the question and during the whole of our stay there the work was always exactly as much and as long and as degrading as the Nips chose daily to make it.