The plane is now almost over the town, and we go straight for it, picking out all the so well-known landmarks. Then we bank steeply, round and down, round and down, and straighten out to run right across at about 500 feet. God! there’s the camp, the row of old atap huts looking up at us! And there are some of our chaps still there, for as we zoom down we clearly see them standing on the small mud square near the bathing place, shading their eyes and looking up at us. A very odd feeling! Then, as we flash low across the padang, out goes the tin and message, hurled well clear. A second later the chimney of the great factory is below us and the adventure is finished! Once more we circle round, slowly gaining height, and we look down out of the little windows for the last time, almost sadly.

‘Goodbye Kamburi! Goodbye Sowana, Achit, Aroong, Tawi! Goodbye dear old Pong! Sawat dee! Sawat dee! Lakhon!’

APPENDIX ONE:

TODAY I WENT BACK TO KAMBURI . . .

by John Coast (1947)

TODAY I went back to Kamburi. Whereas one might have expected a P.O.W. taken prisoner in Europe to get some primitive satisfaction out of revisiting the scenes of his captivity, the absence of Japanese in Siam made the trip back to Kamburi quite unvindictive. It gave a different satisfaction, though, and the ghosts are laid. No longer will I feel any urge or curiosity about Chungkai Camp, the Paper Factory or the financial state of Boon Pong: I’ve been back in a bus owned by Pong himself, and walked all over the old Kamburi and Chungkai camps, and I’ve taken photographs of all recognisable landmarks. In future, if a strange nostalgia should visit me, in comfort I shall turn to a small book of photographs. [Editor’s note: the whereabouts of the photographs is not known, unlike this accompanying article.]

The worst part of the day was getting up. This was at 4.30, and after breakfast of cold water and fruit, I raced down to Bangkok town to meet Pong outside the offices of the Thai Electric Company. He was ready and waiting, but I had arrived before Achit, who was coming with us, and who had been the Chief Engineer at the Paper Factory in the time when we were released and roaming Kamburi as newly-freed men. At 6.15 Achit arrived running, and the bus, a converted giant jeep with a blue and yellow flag with Pong’s initials on it flapping wildly before us, careered out of the town, over the temporarily repaired sector of the Rama VI bridge, and out onto the Nakorn Patom Road.

For the first time since returning to Siam, I soon felt that I was back in the country I once had known so well, for the trickery and futility and vitality of Bangkok was behind us, and we were almost immediately hurling along in peasant country. The road was of earth, and the bridges narrow, and although this was the bus’s maiden trip in its new role, we drove at a steady 50 kilometres an hour.