Next morning we crossed the river at the back of the big modern paper factory in Kamburi. This river was the Mee Kong Kwai Noi, and the course of the railway went parallel with it up country. It was a big, attractive stream, and literally our life-line, since nearly every camp lay on the river. During the monsoon, a season when the road would be quite impassable, our rations and supplies would be brought up it on barges towed by little ‘pom-pom’ motorboats, and without the relief of daily bathing in the river, there would have been thousands of more skin cases and troubles. At this time of year the river was still full of monsoon rains from up above and it was about 150 yards across, fast flowing and deep brown in colour. We disembarked on the far side, still pursued by women vendors, and started on our hike to Chungkai.

The way lay first along the river bank through clumps of elephant grass, and then the country opened out and we skirted fields of peanuts cultivated by small-holding Chinese. The country then got a little wilder, a sort of scrubby jungle, and we had to duck past bushes and low boughs of trees. And soon, through gaps in the bushes, we saw the outlines of the now familiar atap huts, and as we marched along prisoners wearing patched shorts and wooden sandals, or ‘clompers’, came out to watch us. They all seemed cheerful. The path continued on till we arrived in a small, beaten-mud square bordered by a very superior Nip hut, which was the Camp Office and H.Q., and which, under the shade of about six colossal trees, formed the heart of the Chungkai Camp.

After a roll-call and being given hut accommodation at the rate of nine O.Rs. or five officers to one of the 14 ft. bays, we were reassembled for a speech. This time it was given by Lt Col Yanagida and interpreted to us by Adachi. Yanagida was well under five feet high, a very ugly little man, and he stood on the top of the steps outside the Nip office to address us. He, too, favoured the lavender coloured gloves. He told us that he welcomed us all to Chungkai, which was the H.Q. Camp of Two Group, Thailand. We were about to build a railway through to Burma, a gigantic undertaking, and purely to open up the hinterland of the country for the good of the Thais. We must work hard and cheerfully, and the work would go smoothly ahead. We must keep ourselves healthy, and if we wanted to know how to do that, tomorrow morning he would give us a personal Japanese P.T. demonstration outside his hut; through this P.T. he himself hoped to live to be a hundred. Colonel Yanagida seemed a perfectly decent, odd, little dug-out – we were lucky to have him as our Commander.