He got off his bicycle. He was a bespectacled, ugly and Low- Cartoonish Nip, incredibly wearing white gloves. The column halted as the Nip stood in front of me. Then followed the angry, animal whines that in Japanese means: ‘Why the hell didn’t you salute me?’ And having made himself sufficiently indignant, he jumped and hit me across the face as hard as he could. The glove took the sting out of the blow, and the Nip’s topee fell off. He picked it up, put it on back to front, and repeated the process. Again his hat fell off, and grunting savagely he took a vicious swing at my chin that didn’t connect as he didn’t jump. The performance was then over; it had been so comic in execution that I found it hard not to laugh.

The same day I went into one of the Chinese houses to try and sell a broken Ingersoll watch. I tried to prove how valuable it would be when it was repaired, and managed to get a dollar fifty (about 1/9d) and a packet of cigarettes for it. While we haggled we solemnly drank little cups of sweet black coffee ladled out of an enormous tin jerry.

In the beginning of October the first batches of Dutch troops arrived from Java. A very well mannered young officer with raw feet was billeted in our Mess and we spent the first ten minutes trying to pronounce his name correctly. The Dutch troops were a very new sight for us. There were full-blooded Dutchmen, but the great majority were Eurasians, who theoretically have full European rights in Java. After a little mutual suspicion the Dutch and our troops mucked in. They had far more clothes and equipment than we had, and their kit was good, the material being a strong cloth of jungle green colour. The oddest part of their dress was the enormous floppy, green straw hats that looked like collapsed Panamas. Of course, the Dutch had timed their arrival just right, for now they could share in our Red Cross rations, but they worked well and cheerfully for us, splitting wood in the cookhouse. Generally these parties only stayed about ten days and then they were shipped to Burma, where they were fated to start the railway coming south, as we were to start it from Thailand going north.

Another curious party stayed with us a couple of days, all R.A.F. personnel. They were told by the Nips, and honestly believed, that they were being shipped to Portuguese East Africa for exchange with Japanese technicians. We never heard of this party again, but I suspect they went to the Isle of Ambon to make airstrips, and lived on sago and tapioca as their basic diet, and where they had very heavy casualties from malnutrition.