At long last, stiff, weary and filthy, we pulled into Bampong station. We got out at once and carried all our kit into the station yard. We were told that it was only a mile or so to the camp, and everything had to be man-handled there. The town of Bampong maybe held some 5,000 persons, and though we marched down the main street, there was little to see beyond the rows of Thai shops on either side and the grubby markets that filled the side streets. The road was very muddy outside the town, but the camp was only another half mile or so, and after a half hour’s trudge we were there.

Now Bampong Camp was at that time the base camp for all railway working parties, and had the only prisoners’ hospital in Thailand. It is worthy of detailed description, for the type of huts, hospital, cookhouses and latrines were to be the same in every camp we built.

It lay on either side of the road. At first we thought it must be the outhouses, or precincts, of a camp, or possibly the place where animals were going to be kept. But no, on closer inspection we saw the huts were filled with P.O.W.s. And then we saw Tommy Jenkins, who’d already had some months on the spot, coming to meet us down the road. He looked unhealthy, pale and blotchy, and had chronic dermatitis all over his body; Mark Cowell, our ex-Black Marketeer, who had gone up with him, had fever, and his legs were covered with small ulcers, so that he was confined to his bed. Tommy offered to show us round.

The entire accommodation was from atap huts. An atap hut is an inverted V-shaped roof, thatched with atap and supported on a crude bamboo framework. In Thailand, bamboo often grows to a height of 60 feet, and the biggest poles at their bases are as thick as a man’s thigh. Atap is thatch made from the Nipah Palm, and when well done, packed tight, makes a perfect rain-proof roof; where it is skimped, as by the Nips, it leaks pretty badly. Down the middle of each hut was a central gangway, flanked on both sides by a split bamboo shelf about six feet long, and raised a couple of feet above the ground. These slats within a few weeks were inevitably full of bed bugs. The huts were measured in ‘bays’ of about 14 feet, or four metres, and in and on that space of bamboo slatting, anything from four to ten men slept and lived – that was the total lebensraum per head.