John was almost caught writing in his ‘dim, half-seen world’ (Dancing out of Bali, 20-21) several times during the three and a half years he spent in the Japanese prison camps. At one point he had to convince a Japanese guard, who walked in on him while he was ‘revising some early chapters . . . [and] trying to decipher my own writing,’ that his diary was actually ‘just an ordinary book’ (Railroad Chapter 11). John then proceeded to engage him in a discussion of the greats of English literature. Along with his close friend ‘Gibby’ (Gilbert Inglefield) John managed to barter for the guard’s silence—as well as an unexpected commission of a packet of sugar, some toilet paper and two fishhooks—in return for a nice fountain pen and some further exploration of the works of Shakespeare and Byron. Gilbert Inglefield, was a talented musician who was later to become Mayor of the City of London. Gilbert later described John as a ‘Bolshie subaltern made good’ in a letter congratulating him on the publication of the book and on the tour of Javanese dancers he went on to produce in 1947.

More than just a personal memoir, John had intended this diary to be published both for posterity and to tell the world about the appalling conditions that the POWs had endured; he had been editing and refining it from early on. But recording life inside the camps was always a risky business. On 18 January 1945, word went round the camp that a Japanese search of all POW kit was imminent. All writing materials and text discovered by the guards were confiscated and never returned. John’s manuscript, written in his small, intense hand, was buried under ‘an atap shack beneath a huge tree’ (Railroad of Death) in Chungkai before the Allied officers were to march back to Kamburi (Kanchanaburi) via Tamarkan. It was hidden, along with the diary of his enduring friend ‘Jim Dixon’ (James Richardson), to be retrieved after the war. Jim Richardson, an eminent government geologist in Malaya, was a ‘vast strong fellow of Cornish and possibly a little Spanish extraction . . . [whose] granite-looking physique was relieved by his ability to use his well-formed hands in a delicate and Gallic way, and also an oddly quiet and mild voice’ (Railroad Chapter 11). The map of the Bangkok-Moulmein railway reproduced in the first pages of this book was carefully hand-drawn by Jim for Railroad.

Other items buried by friends of John’s included evidence gathered during the life-saving work of Dr Hugh de Wardener (‘Ginger de Huguenot’ in Railroad), which would form the basis of two classic medical papers that were later published in The Lancet: ‘Cholera epidemic among prisoners-of-war in Siam’ (1946) and “Cerebral beriberi (Wernicke’s encephalopathy): review of 52 cases in a Singapore prisoner-of-war hospital” (1947).1

But while John found and returned Richardson’s diary after the Japanese capitulation in August 1945, his own had disappeared.2