There was a stir in the darkness and the sound of a very softspoken voice, and a few seconds later Ginger was bending over the stretcher and examining my throat with an electric torch. He didn’t express any opinion and he only spoke a few quiet sentences, but he had then, and always did keep, that invaluable quality in a doctor of both appearing personally interested in your case and at the same time inspiring confidence. His soft, level voice sounded as sympathetic as it did efficient, and after half a minute I felt as if a great pressure had been lifted off my chest.

‘Don’t worry, we’ll have a proper look at you tomorrow morning,’ he said, and I was lifted onto the slats between the dim outlines of two mosquito nets and left to my own thoughts. After a few minutes my neighbour whispered: ‘Is that you, John?’ ‘Yes,’ I replied, ‘who’s that?’ It was another young officer whom I knew slightly. I asked: ‘Where have you got it, James?’ ‘In the nose and throat,’ he said, ‘but there’s no need to worry any longer these days, Ginger’s got it properly under control. No one has died for several days, and tomorrow you’ll get the home manufactured serum.’ We tried to sleep.

At dawn, the hospital came slowly to life, heralded by the piping notes of the mynas which roosted in the mango trees outside. Breakfast was a glutinous, half mess tin full of transparent tapioca flour, which wasn’t actually too bad a diet for a very sore throat. Suddenly, on that first morning, there was a sort of scrubbing noise on the other side of the ward, and an O.R. on a stretcher tried for some reason or other to climb out of his bed, only to fall back exhausted onto the slats. What he wanted no one knew, but he was an old, bad case, and one of the orderlies stood by holding his pulse while Ginger was hurriedly sent for. But the effort had taxed the heart of the man too much and he died that morning of toxic poisoning. It was a sobering start, and one calculated to make us obey the orders about keeping flat on our backs.

The treatment for the disease was simply this: you lay for at least two to three weeks flat on your back and moved about as little as possible; you got serum from a recovered patient; and you saw no visitors. The whole purpose was to strain the heart as little as possible so that the poison set free in the system by the diphtheria should not cause the heart to conk out. Every other morning Ginger overhauled you unless there was anything in the way of a complication – there were some eighty cases under him – and on the first morning he took a case history going back several years and examined you very thoroughly.