Before he left he had a cringing letter from Sokusawa, the Nip Colonel who was responsible for all P.O.W. camps in Thailand. Sokusawa said he’d no idea what had been going on (why not, we wondered?) and sent his humble apologies and lavish presents that included six bottles of French brandy. Bill’s only reply was that he was taking legal advice. We then heard that Nogoochi had been arrested in Bangkok by the Nip Secret Police, mainly over the Reeves affair. Next, two Japanese lawyers came down to interview Bill on his sick bed with a view to prosecuting Nogoochi, but they used the impolite form of speech towards Bill and he told them the Nip equivalent of ‘go to hell’ and refused to talk any further with them. The Camp Commander sent them away, saying that it didn’t matter two pins what the Japanese did about Nogoochi, because he would shortly be tried by a British Military Court.

Thus Bill Reeves survived eleven weeks of the most savage solitary confinement, dirt, starvation and sickness, which had definitely been aimed to kill him. He told us, too, that the little beast Namura – who fortunately for him had been drowned crossing a river en route to the new Officers’ Camp – had added to his misery by telling him that the whole camp was being punished for his faults, that he would be killed in the end, and that his family had already been notified of his death.

To return, though, to this first day of freedom . . . It was still impossible to grasp the implications to the full of what had happened – that could only come slowly. We were still shut up in Kamburi Camp, still living off rice, still with filthy rags for clothes, still sleeping on bug-ridden bamboo slats. So first we had to try and change all that though clearly we’d have to stay in Kamburi for some time.

The first thing was a flat refusal to go to the new camp; and if the Nips had been foolish enough to attempt to force us; the Thai population would never have allowed us further than Bangkok. Then dear old Pong, the spectacled smiling Thai whom every P.O.W. knew by name and whom a lot now saw for the first time, came into the camp and forthwith came a flow of chickens, bullocks, pigs, hooch, fruit and tinned food, the best that Kamburi could supply and the cheapest that Pong could make it. Pong superintended it all, smiling, being shaken by the hand and constantly thanked for all he’d done for us in the last three years.