The only bright patch for me in the general gloom, were my evenings with Bloem and his friends. Thanks to the help of Jan, after five months hard work I was beginning to make myself understood in Dutch and could at last honestly claim to understand much of what was going on around me. As chance had it, Bloem and his friends worked, two in our cookhouse, and two in the Nip cookhouse, but all of them fed on straight Nip cookhouse food. As our own rations had not only dropped off but had got so poor that for lunch we regularly had a half mess tin of rice and about a thimble full of greens, it was doubly fortunate for me that these friends of mine ‘had their ladders so well up’, and they insisted that I should swallow my pride and some of their Nip food, and quite a few of mine and the Kongsi’s meals were only made tolerable thanks to additions of pork crackling, gravy, potatoes and sambal more or less openly borrowed from the Nip rations.

These four Indische Jongens were probably among the best fed and healthiest in the camp and they played basketball in a way that would have been impossible on normal rations. They were all pleasant characters; Bloem was the only one who instructed me as a Guru, and the conversation used to be on all kinds of subjects. The chief Nip cook next to Bloem was a regular sergeant in the Dutch Army and a very generous fellow. He was jazz mad, but tolerated my extraordinary preference for classical music and kronchongs. On the other side of Bloem lay the best centre-forward in Java, a huge strong chap with the heart of a child. The fourth man was the cynic of the Kongsi, a planter in Sumatra and a woman hater, but nevertheless a shrewd enough and pleasant fellow. These four men, plus the fat, jovial cousin of Bloem’s who was an officer in the camp and a born leg-puller of the arrogant English, made my evenings enjoyable, and life a little more worth living.