Every day in Chungkai we received a news bulletin. One of the romances of our existence was the way wirelesses were worked and secreted in every camp we were in up to June 1945! There were about eight different sets built by an almost legendary Tom Stuart, whom everybody had heard of; they were worked, also, by two Malayan brothers, Donald and Max Forrest.

Tom Stuart was one of the handiest men in Thailand. He had constructed the first set in Bampong and got it working there. In Chungkai he built at least another three, one of which, his own, was constructed inside a water bottle; the other two were made, one in a cylindrical cigarette tin, the other in a small flat biscuit tin. All the sets were made from odd, collected spare parts, and they all worked. Under oath of strict secrecy the officers heard the news each day and the troops got it a little later, re-hashed, and purporting to come from the Bangkok Chronicle, a Nip controlled paper that we sometimes were given. The batteries came generally through the agency of the Thai canteen owner, Boon Pong, who had a business in Kamburi. When the moves up country had come off, Tom had left one set for the Forrest brothers to work in Chungkai, had taken one himself to Wan Tai Kin, and had sent a third up to Bangkau. This news that the wireless experts produced for us, helped simply enormously, though in the early days there seemed little prospect of us getting out for quite a few years. It goes without saying that all the officers who worked these sets risked torture and death daily.

Towards the end of February I got the job of acting P.M.C. [President Mess Committee], as my friend the P.M.C. proper had gone to hospital with a bad foot. This was a good job, and interesting. During this period the rations reached a never to be repeated peak, and with the Mess secretary, a first-class cook himself, we fed splendidly. My job entailed looking after the finances and doing the ordering from the Thai canteen. Messes could buy there wholesale and in bulk, and we used to get such things as tapioca, flour, onions, garlic, curry powder, eggs and so on; sometimes there were little red tomatoes that grew in clusters, and were only the size of marbles. We used to go round the back of the canteen to place our orders, and while we haggled and gossiped, we helped ourselves to the little fried puff biscuits that they used to sell daily by the thousand.