Then George told us an interminable story in pidgin-Nip that made everybody laugh. It was a story about a very simple Nip private who wanted a tame duck owned by a P.O.W. to quack at him. The chief phrase of the Nip, according to George, was: ‘You ducko! You speakospeako quacko-quacko! Heh? You no speako quacko-quacko? Heh? You No Good ducko! Speako! Kurrah!! Inggeris sodier – he no speako. Why he no speako?’ and so on for about ten minutes. Drink a little rice-beer and perhaps you’ll see the humour of it.

We then asked Sowana if he could find us an elephant; we said we thought it would be rather a good gesture to walk round the bund on an elephant and to drive through the old bamboo Guard Room. But Achit merely suggested that our next party should be on horseback; however, I remembered Jack Shelley’s adventure on horseback when he rode those eleven kms to the paratroopers and wasn’t very keen. We left again about midnight, intending to come back the next day, and picked up some wonderful flowers at Sowana’s garden. We laid them in a bucket of water at the bottom of the Padre’s bed and went to sleep . . .

At about 2.30 a.m. we were woken by a voice saying: ‘Do you want to go home to England or Malaya?’ We recognised the voice of an old friend, George Knott, and ‘Go back to bed, George,’ we said kindly, ‘you’re tight.’ ‘All right you cynical buggers,’ said George, ‘but if you want to go home to England, you pack up now, parade at 4.30 a.m. and the train for Bangkok leaves punctually at five!’

So we got up and packed. This was wonderful – we’d expected to wait for weeks yet, and here we were due to leave Kamburi only 16 days after we’d heard the war was over. Supremo Mountbatten certainly was a mover!

Henry and I decided we must go and say farewell to our Thai friends, so we marched out chuckling along the dark road round the padang and knocked up Sowana, for he was a bachelor. Luckily he had no dog, and standing there in the still garden in a soft moonlight night, we called up to his windows: ‘Sowana! Sowana!’ He heard us, and a servant came to open the door. After a few minutes little Sowana came downstairs, smoking a cigarette and wearing a rather tousled white shirt and trousers. We told him what was happening, apologised for pulling him out of bed, but said we just couldn’t have gone off and left him. Would he please say goodbye to Achit and Aroong and all the others for us? We handed him some packets of Players dropped by the planes that morning, and we left him standing there in his hall, still half asleep.