He was posted to Malaya as the Medical Officer of an Australian infantry unit. He was used to the heat of Brisbane, but his overwhelming impression was of unrelenting humidity and unrelieved boredom. The men were healthy, and apart from treating malaria and the occasional surgical emergency in which he assisted the other medical officer in his unit, a surgeon, he did not have much to do. The surgeon was an Irishman who had settled in Darwin. He was good company and had a fund of improbable stories, but he drank. On many occasions he was barely sober enough to stand in the operating theatre and Dr St Clair was obliged to take over, receiving more or less intelligible instructions from the surgeon swaying behind him. ‘There’s a thing in the middle there,’ the surgeon said. ‘The name escapes me at the moment, so it does, but I wouldn’t cut that bit if I were you. Frightful amount of blood swirling around down there. So just take out that wee thingy over there and Bob’s your uncle. My God, I wish I could remember my anatomy a bit better. We had a wonderful chap in Dublin who taught us everything we knew about the subject. Great fellow, so he was. Professor Mac something or other. Bit of a Scotsman, like yourself. Had a moustache and a glass eye. Or a glass moustache, was it? Anyway, we put a leg in his car one day just to give him a wee fright and he took not a blind bit of notice. Pretended not to care, or so we thought, until one of the fellows pointed out that the leg was on the passenger seat and since that was the side that he had his glass eye he probably didn’t see it! We had to bring it back to the dissecting room. Terrifically amusing business. Those were the days, so they were. Whole world’s different nowadays. Lots of old women running the show. Careful! Not there – a bit further down, near the what’s it called? That’s better. Cut that bit off. I wish I had my glasses.’

At least the boredom ended when the Japanese invaded. Pushed south into Singapore, he was kept busy dealing with the flood of casualties from the fighting on the peninsula. And then suddenly it was over. He had been billeted in a bungalow belonging to a harbour official and had been catching up on sleep after a twenty-hour stint of duty when his host told him it was all over. ‘There are a few boats getting out,’ he said. ‘I can get you on one of them if you hurry.’

‘I have to get back to the casualty station.’

‘It’s in enemy hands. You can’t. You’ve got five minutes.’