Well, this confinement went on for ten days, when Nogoochi returned and allowed us out again in return for Colonel Champaigne’s agreement that we would work and like it! As we’d really had to do this all the time it didn’t make much odds, but the snag was that all the rules about smoking, sitting at the end of your bed, reading and playing games before 6 p.m., and the handing in of pencils and paper, stayed with us for good. The canteen and theatre were also allowed to continue as before. But still Bill Reeves was in solitary confinement. At the end of a month, bearded, filthy and pitifully thin, he was still there. For a fortnight, when Nogoochi wanted the No Good House for some Korean offenders, Bill was kept in a muddy half air raid shelter, in the open, a hole that measured about four feet square. Then he want back to the No Good House again, and once more Nogoochi refused to discuss the matter.

There was always, too, about this time the feeling in the camp that Nogoochi wanted an excuse to shoot us up. We’d heard stories of P.O.W.s being murdered by the retreating Nips in the Philippines, and with a man like Nogoochi in charge, and with absolutely no appeal beyond him, most of us lived for months with the fear somewhere at the back of our minds: ‘After all this, are they only going to shoot us in the end?’ Even those who laughed at the idea discussed it; those who didn’t discuss it thought about it; and another gloomy minority, led by ‘Mow ’Em Down’ Colin Boggis, proclaimed it. Oh it was a very cheerful little camp!

Meanwhile work under the Nips went on, slightly more fatigues being done for them than before, and we were forever scrabbling about in the bund, which had feet of water in it and which kept on falling in, and the fences never stayed up in the wet weather for more than a week together. While we were in such close daily contact with the Nips and while we lived so on top of each other and saw each other’s faults and weaknesses so clearly, it may be of interest to consider shortly the peculiar slang in which we used to express our opinions of the Nips and ourselves.