Sometimes the sentry who escorted us on these parties would bring us back down the main road and allow us to enter the Indian and Chinese shops. The small and varied Chinese cakes tasted delicious and we got occasional ripe papayas or bananas. But in spite of that attraction, unless one had reasons of personal interest in these excursions, the job was very unpopular.

Our last expedition was back to the Adam Road and the quarry behind it, where our battalion had spent the last few days. Our H.Q. had been in a parson’s house, and our company dispositions forward, on and over the crown of a slope. There we had stayed and been mortared, shelled and bombed, once again as infantry unable to do anything except try to hold on. In the whole of the battle for Singapore we hardly saw an Allied plane. Judging by the number of Nip graves in this area we had done some harm; but we had lost two officers killed, several wounded and more than a score of men. It was here that one of our batteries, firing from a map, fell short at repeated intervals. We could not trace them at the time, and had quite a few casualties. It was rather a shattering experience being shelled by our own people as well. We had already had three days without a blink of sleep and food was rare. Our last positions, round and in the quarry, were slit trenches in jungly scrub, where we had had an average vision of about ten yards.

The things that remained in my memory from those very unpleasant days were mixed and curious. The snatching of a quick cold bath with soap in the house next to the parson’s, with the roof gaping open and bullets flying. Then, a visit from Battalion H.Q. officers, which precisely coincided with a heavy ‘75’ barrage – we were rather glad of this, for we had thought before that Battalion H.Q. didn’t realise how unpleasant the forward company positions were, particularly when communication, due to the dense country, was quite out of the question. I remembered too, how under heavy fire we took turns to cross over to a nearby R.A.S.C. camp, and came back clutching bottles of beer and tins of Libby’s Unsweetened Milk. The whole battle we had craved for drink, but were seldom hungry.

The most unpleasant and confused memory was of the night a wood behind us was set on fire, burning fast towards us, forcing us out on the road of gravel in the middle of the night. And then as soon as we tried to take up positions, up went the red signals of the Fifth Column, and over came the mortar shells. But that time their range was wrong, and the shells exploded one hundred yards beyond us.