Our chief agent was a young Malay called Bidi. An attractive, smiling fellow of 21, he looked a bare 16. He spoke very little English, though previously he had been a casual caddy on the golf course. Bidi’s family of sisters used to fry little chaupattis, cakes and sliced bananas in front of their house for 2c each, and Bidi would cycle into Singapore to get us tinned food, bread and so on. They also made thick, black delicious coffee as only Malaysian peoples can. Officially the kampong was out of bounds, and on occasions furious Nip sentries had found strayed members of working parties there, eating chaupattis; this led to trouble and cloutings, but with considerable näiveté the Nips allowed us to patrol the kampong ourselves with our own M.P.s, who acted as our intermediaries.

So then, when we wanted a canteen, all we had to do was to introduce Bidi to the Nips as an accredited agent. Unfortunately, none of us were ex-Malayans, and only one officer could speak a little Malay, otherwise we should have done far better. In the end, the canteen became a stall divided into two sections, one for three Chinese who provided the bread, the other for Bidi and his family, who brought in tinned milk, tinned fish and cheese, packets of dates, packets of gula sugar, pineapples and other fruit. Each evening, before the canteen opened at 7 o’clock, there was a long, patient queue. In these days goods were procurable, and not yet more than 100 per cent above former prices; you could even buy fresh butter, but this did not last long.

Our rations while we were working were better than at Changi, and we actually got up to 27 ounces of rice a day! Otherwise there was not so much, though meat and vegetables began to improve. Consequently, those who had money at the capitulation were much better off than the others. Henry Baird and I had had little cash (Henry was now lecturing in English at Changi), but Mike Oakley had plenty. Underneath his bed, rather like Pooh and his honey, was a reserve of a goodly number of tins. This embarrassed Mike, who didn’t like to rub it in by eating in front of us, so he hit on the idea of opening a tin of pineapple secretly before going to bed, and then after dark, inside his mosquito net, he quietly sucked it down. We couldn’t see this, and we couldn’t hear it: but we would smell it! So Mike had his leg pulled a bit, and he was told just to carry on in front of us – we all understood!