The whole camp was inches deep in black mud, though the monsoon only extended mildly so far south. Heavy boots were the only possible footwear, and then it was like walking through black treacle. The cookhouses were atap shacks, and the cooking was all done in kualis, giant frying pans of very crude iron, and in these food was fried, boiled or steamed. The flies were everywhere as thick as they’d been round the swill-points in Changi, but Tommy said that so far there was not much dysentery. The part of the camp we were now in was the transit portion, and we would stay there for two days and then go on. The permanent part of the camp was across the road, and thither we went.

We saluted a disinterested sentry and guard room, and found ourselves in a quagmire. There was only one thing the Nips in Bampong cared about, and that was to buy as many good watches and pens from the P.O.W.s. as they possibly could; from that nuisance we were never free until they’d collected the lot.

First we visited the officers’ hut. It was not quite so crowded as the others, and had a ledge of a few planks along the floor so that not too much mud was taken to bed with you nightly. The inhabitants, who all seemed amazingly used to it, had worked out their routine as best they could. Then we visited the Latrines, P.O.W. for the Use of, Universal Japanese style. The approach to the latrine was through a morass, and the pit itself had originally consisted of a deep trench floored over with bamboos with open slits about nine inches broad left in them; and there one squatted, cheek to cheek, so to speak, with no partitions and not even a protecting screen. The whole area was alive with dirty, great grey-white maggots that had crawled out of the trench, and were seeking some hard and dry piece of ground where they could burrow away and chrysalise, after which they would turn into enormous bluebottles. Our latrines were always like this, though when the Nips gave us time we did eventually get low atap screens round them, and rigged up various sorts of fly traps.