Now ever since I had been in Thailand, either enteritis or dysentery had always been with me. Attempts to clear it up with Mag. Sulph. and four or five days of starvation failed to achieve anything, and when you were working, this treatment was anyhow impossible. Working on the bridge and creeping into the jungle about ten times a day could not go on indefinitely. One day I felt so lousy that the M.O. sent me straight into hospital, and thus I temporarily escaped from the work.

At this time the hospital consisted of two long atap huts and an atap operating theatre and office. The wards were full of scabies, dysentery and fever patients, and at the end of one hut was a general Officers’ Ward. Those who could borrow no camp beds lay on the slats which were full of bed bugs and lice; there were no spare disinfectants. Treatment for all forms of diarrhoea was salts and starvation for three days on tea only, then two days or so on fluids, and then straight back on to the full rice diet with its high content of river water grit and dirt from the vegetables. Strangely enough, cures were rather difficult to achieve! The hospital food was the worst in the camp, and sick men tried to recover and get their appetites back on the most unappetising ‘jungle stews’. For this privilege officers paid about 15 cents a day.

Our pay at this time was arranged as follows. All the officers received thirty dollars a month in cash, and thanks to Colonel Yanagida, ten dollars a month went to the hospital from our bank balances. This was the only revenue the hospital ever received; the I.J.A. gave nothing. From that thirty dollars, about seven dollars went to supplement the men’s food and another five to our own. We had very little pocket money to play about with, and on our monthly pay sheets we saw forty-two dollars deducted for the use of atap huts, food, mosquito nets, soap and toilet paper. In three and a half years the Nips issued perhaps five per cent of officers with mosquito nets, and enough very crude soap and toilet paper to last a couple of months. The soap was usually so crude and full of soda that it wouldn’t lather and crystallised away to nothing.

While I was still in hospital, two things happened. The first was another move up country to two camps ten kilometres away called Wan Tai Kin and Bangkau; this meant unfortunately, separation from Henry. It was impossible to arrange anything otherwise, and although I was only ‘sick in lines’ when the party went, Henry left for Bangkau and I stayed in Chungkai.