A brief night in the aerodrome hospital, and then over to the hangars. We saw our first English girls working in the canteen, actually they were both pretty, but how fat their legs looked, and how terribly pale their complexions! During the morning Lady Louis Mountbatten came into the hangar and talked with P.O.W.s all over the place and made everybody very glad to see her. Altogether we were a very pro-Mountbatten party! In the hangar were the R.A.F. pilots telling us how long it took to get to Rangoon and how soon they hoped to get off. They weren’t really allowed inside the hangar because of an incident the previous week. They’d seen a Nip officer dressed up complete with sword standing just outside one of the doors, and with a shout of ‘Souvenirs!’ they had fallen upon him, stripped him to his underpants and departed with the sword and clothing to their planes.

It was September 6th, only three weeks after we’d heard the first news, when we paraded in our twenty-fives on the airstrips, and at about eleven o’clock boarded the Dakotas that were to fly us to Rangoon. We packed along the little iron benches by the tiny windows and chatted with the crew of five, firing more and more questions at them, which they seemed to enjoy answering. There were ten planes leaving in that batch and ours was the fourth. There was no hanging around with the R.A.F., and soon the engines roared forth, and a minute or so later we were looking down on the padi-fields below us. Inside the plane they were handing round sealed boxes labelled ‘Breakfast’ and magazines to read, for the flight would take two or three hours. But it was difficult to do anything more than grin, peer down out of the windows and try to realise that we were on the way home.

We passed over Nakom Paton and its wonderful Pagoda. And then I had a brilliant idea. I asked one of the pilots whether he could fly over Kamburi. He hauled out a map and we showed him where it was. ‘O.K.’ he replied, ‘what do you want to do?’ ‘We’d like to drop a message on the Thai Paper Factory there for some Thai friends of ours.’ That was all in order. We must come forward, though, and point out the factory as we got near it.

Hastily we put a couple of packets of cigarettes in a tin with a message including all the Kongsi’s names, tied it up securely and added a length of white bandage to make it easier to see. Then forward to where the pilot sits at the controls, and in remarkably few minutes Kamburi comes into sight and there is the tall, white Paper Factory chimney. ‘I’ll circle round once, then come down low a second time, and then you can chuck it out,’ says the New Zealand pilot.