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Kanburi was now a staging camp, with only enough fit men being retained to unload supplies from barges, and to load them on to trains bound for up country. Our first day there was spent in unloading rice out of barges on to a jetty. The river was outside the camp boundary, so water for camp use still had to be drawn from the well.

Our guards on that first working party were some of the best we ever came across in Thailand, and treated us more like comrades than captives. The second day out on this job, the rickety bamboo jetty started to collapse under us. The water was deep and many prisoners could not swim; when I pointed the danger out to them, the Japs asked me if I could strengthen it, but they had no tools to offer.As they were so friendly I took a chance and told them that I had tools back at the camp, and they took me back to collect my ‘illegal’ things.

They took considerable interest in what I did, and stayed watching until I was satisfied my repair was safe, and made to join the others, unloading. However, they told me to wait, and brought out their office table for me to repair.

For the next few days I was kept busy on interesting furniture repair work. During my stay in Kanburi I was also to earn myself quite a lot of cash by doing jobs for those prisoners who had more than I.

One of my best money-spinners was collecting empty pea-tins from the Jap cookhouse, and making them into mugs by cleaning off the rough edges and riveting a handle on. I sold them for ten cents each.
I was also able to get a few leaking four-gallon tins thrown out by the Japs, and salvage enough good tinplate out of them to make into buckets.

I became quite proficient in joining smaller pieces together by folding the edges over, and some buckets were made from five or six separate pieces. I had made a mandrel from a length of teak tree-trunk about nine inches in diameter, and used this upon which to form the buckets, and for turning over the seam round the bottom edge. They were water-tight without solder.

The wet season now came in, and the camp soon became a sea of mud again. All fit men set to digging trenches in the hope of draining off the flood water to avoid the huts becoming flooded once more; and the trenches worked satisfactorily.

On the sixth of May at seven-thirty in the evening, we moved out of Kanburi, and I was quite sorry to leave. Especially as we found out that we were destined for Chunkai once more, where we arrived at ten-thirty that night.

However, I need not have worried, as we were only to stay for one day, and during that day were issued with Red Cross parcels. These had been opened by the Japs, cigarettes and other items they fancied removed, and the remains issued at the rate of one parcel between six men. There should have been one parcel per man, so there was not really very much to share.

At three o’clock in the afternoon we boarded open rail-trucks in pouring rain, and travelled up country in the deluge for eleven hours, arriving at what we were told was Kinsio camp in pitch darkness, at two o’clock in the morning; we could not have been wetter had we just emerged from the river.

As dawn broke we were able to see that the camp was derelict, and had not been occupied for many moons. Most of the huts had fallen in, and this included the erstwhile cookhouse, where there were now no cooking facilities at all.

The C.O. sent for me, and asked if I would take on the job of organizing repairs to the camp, and I my first task was the building of a new cookhouse; I commenced work immediately.

As everything was so filthy, and the camp looked as though it had been left in a hurry through disease, I thought to make a priority of providing a sterilizers for mess tins and eating utensils. I ‘won’ a steel forty-gallon diesel oil drum from near the Japs quarter, and started to cut round the top with one of my chisels and using the back of my axe for a hammer.

When I had nearly worked my way round, I tried to pull the flap up, but my hand slipped on the oily surface, and I made a nasty jagged cut across the ball of my left thumb. I went to see Dr. Gotla who had accompanied us, to try to get it sewn up, but he said the wound was too ragged and dirty to sew, and that I just had to keep it bandaged as well as I could. To my surprise, the wound did not fester, and the piece of flesh (half my thumb) which I had nearly severed, grew back again over the next few weeks with only the scar as souvenir.

During the next few weeks I worked pretty much alone, putting the huts and cookhouse back into shape, and making utensils, as most of the men were out on daily work parties maintaining the track.

One day the guard saw a wild pig running through the camp, and took a pot shot at it with his rifle. He only injured it, and the animal twirled round on its behind snapping fiercely when we approached it. I ran over to the cookhouse and collected my axe and a knife, and returned to tackle the task of pig slaughter, something I had never done before.

I put on a confident air to impress the guard; first of course I must render it unconscious to put it out of pain, and to prevent it from biting me when I cut its throat, so I started to hit it over its head with the back of my axe as hard as I could; but no matter how hard, nor how many times, the poor animal refused to lose consciousness, and in desperation I hit it between the eyes instead of on the top of the head; it went out like a light. I later saw that a pig’s skull is over two inches thick at the spot I had been attacking.

The next job, that of cutting the carotid artery would, I thought, be comparatively easy, but how wrong I was. I fiddled about with the knife waiting for the stream of blood to tell of success, but none came; so at last, when the pig began to stir, in desperation I cut off its head.

The guard had said that if I prepared the carcass, our cooks could have half, and as this arrangement seemed too good to be true, I left my other work and got cracking straight away before he changed his mind.

I had not so much as drawn a chicken before, so I cannot pretend that I made a very good job of scalding, scraping and dissecting that pig, but I did eventually finish up with two heaps of bruised flesh, one for us and one for the Japs. Our cooks complained at all the bone splinters produced by my axe, but the men ate their boiled pork with gusto that evening, on their return from work.

As we had no butcher in Kinsio, after that many other beasts of different kinds passed through my hands, and in learning from my mistakes I was to become a fairly proficient slaughter man.

The rations were as bad as I had encountered anywhere and consisted of rice, dried greens and ‘stinkfish’, the last two items having been rejected as unfit for Jap troops consumption.

The fish were full of maggots and dropped to powder when we tried to get them out of the boxes, and of the so-called greens, all that remained was the bits of string left from the stalks when the leaves had rotted off.

The fish had been something like kippers during early life, now like little Bo-peep’s sheep they had left only their tails behind them. There were, however, usually a few fish in each box that had not quite reached this stage of maturity, and if we grilled these on a piece of tin, many of the maggots would wriggle out, and those that stayed behind would at least be sterilized.

The fish themselves tasted so foul that many could not eat them, and the maggots that were eaten probably tasted better than the fish. I ate my share, however, not willing to miss out on my necessary protein requirements.

I was asked to build an oven for the cookhouse, so that we could have baked rice-balls or ‘doofers’ as we called them. Although only made from boiled rice, they made a change, and were much in demand from the workers.

When I looked round the camp to see what materials were to hand, there seemed to be nothing suitable for oven building. Well, one step at a time, I could at least start off by making a heap of sun-baked bricks, and accordingly made a wooden mould.

Next I dug a hole and by treading earth and water together produced some nice glutinous mud, and soon I had a fine row of bricks drying in the sun. The following day however, when I tried to stack them, they dropped to pieces in my hands, and I realized that something must be wrong with my technique.

Yet they used sun-baked bricks in biblical times, and the sun must have been as hot there. Yes, the Israelites, in bondage to the Egyptians, had to make bricks without straw, and found it difficult; that must mean that it is easier with straw. I looked round the parched camp with absolutely nothing growing in it.

Then I saw the useless boxes of dried greens the Japs had issued; they were just string and powder, surely they would do for straw. My next batch of bricks were perfect and within a few days I had made more than I would need.

During the following days I searched every inch of the camp trying to find something to use for the inside of the oven, but without success. Outside the camp boundary the railway line ran, and in the distance I could see a heap of empty five-gallon tins, and a six foot length of railway line. By next morning they were safely concealed under my heap of bricks.

Now I was able to start building, and mixed up another lot of mud to use as mortar. I dug a long fire-pit with a low wall each side, and built in the oblong tins resting cross-ways over the fire, all the open ends facing the same way. The fire was to be drawn up to the far end of the tins, and back over the tops, and I intended to build the chimney over that end to draw the heat and carry the smoke away.

I used the railway line to form the lintel which carried the top brickwork and chimney, and completed the effort with the oven door made from flattened tins, fitted with a handle riveted on. The final job, I thought, as I surveyed it with pleasure, only requires a few wheels to look like Puffing Billy.

I had been forced to build it much longer than necessary in order to conceal the end of the railway line I’d pinched, as I hadn't the means of cutting it to size

‘Let’s try it!’ said the cooks, so I laid a fire in the trench, and after fanning it for a minute was delighted to see the smoke rising beautifully from the chimney. As the clay began to dry out the oven heated
and I had to push the damper in to prevent it becoming red-hot. The cook made a batch of rice balls and they came out as brown as berries, so the oven was declared a success.

Before I was able to eat my first ‘doofer’, three Jap engineers came stalking in, and searched the cookhouse. One barked at me ‘You see Nippon line, so-ca?’, and he held out his arms to indicate that it was a long piece. Looking as innocent as I could, I pointed to all the railway line running past the camp. ‘Bagero!’ (fool) he shouted, ‘Smoroo (small) line’.

We all commenced helpfully to look under the sacks and boxes on the cookhouse floor, but the Japs turned impatiently to go. Wait though, one of them caught sight of our new oven and he turned round to give it a closer look, because the Japs do not use ovens in their cooking.

With much curiosity and murmuring they walked round it, and seeing the door handle, one of them took hold of it; his yell would have awakened the dead.

We then saw one of the others pick up a piece of sacking and lift the door off. Seeing the next batch of ‘doofers’ already nicely brown, they demanded one each, but when they tried them and found only plain rice, they threw them on the floor in disgust.

The Thais do not use ovens either. They do, however, make a kind of cake the texture of crumpets. They make these with a batter of ground rice and water, and bake them in earthenware ‘bun-tins’ with lids, which they heat over their charcoal fires. These buns only took five minutes to cook, and were delicious.

Men returning from the outside work parties told me that there were camps of Tamils nearby, employed on maintaining the permanent way, and that they appeared to be treated worse than us - much worse; like animals, in fact. Moreover, at this time the Japs were pumping propaganda into India about the wonderful all-embracing Nippon plan for an enlightened Greater East Asia.

Less than ten per cent of the Tamils press-ganged by the Japs in Malaya were still alive when the capitulation eventually came.

Our captors were now printing very crude Thai money on what looked like their toilet paper. When we first came to Thailand only the Tickels (Baht) were of paper, lesser denominations were all in the form of zinc coins. The new Jap money was all in paper, right down to ten Stang (or cents).

At about this time, a party of men, clearly a nomad people, came walking past our camp accompanied by a herd of skinny goats. Very short and stocky, these fellows had bright red hair, and looked more like Europeans than Orientals.

I asked our guards who they were, and was told that they were a tribe of Indians who came through Burma and Thailand each year, taking their goats with them and carrying goods to trade. There were no women with the party, and their skin was as fair as ours. I have since been unable to identify the race of these folk, and have often wondered who they were.

Two of our men broke into the Jap food store shortly after this, and helped themselves to a 100 kg. bag of sugar. The next day, as so often happened, word flew round that the Japs were starting a search. One of our first tasks on arriving in a new camp was always to prepare secret hiding places for one’s forbidden articles, but there wasn’t one suitable for this huge bag.

Within minutes of the warning, the two miscreants came staggering into the cookhouse with their cumbersome bag of the best Jap sugar, and being half-starved they weakly dropped it on the floor and stood panting helplessly.

We looked blankly at the sack; there had been none of this stuff issued to us in Kinsio (or in any other camp), and if the Japs caught us with it, it would mean a beating up, and a spell in the cooler at best; at worst - one could not bear to think.

One of the cooks was a short, red-headed Welshman, very strong. He was one of those men who hated being told what to do, and I had never hit it off with him. He was the first to wake up; ‘Give us a lift Sarge!’ he said as he grabbed two corners of the sack. With a lift and a swing the hundred kilos was on his back, and in the twinkling of an eye he was trotting out of the back of the cookhouse.

Thirty yards away the path crossed a ditch, and we always had to jump it when we walked that way. Our cook threw the sack of sugar in the ditch and it was just about level with the path. We trod it well to flatten it out, and kicked dirt over the top for camouflage. As we ambled back in to the rear of the cookhouse the Jap search-party was coming in from the front.

After searching for ten minutes they left the back way, up the path we had just left; but they did not notice that they did not have to jump over the ditch now. We left the sugar there for a week, daily expecting a visit from the dreaded Kempi-ti.

We need not have worried, as it seemed our guards could not report the loss, since they had themselves filched the sugar from rations passing through on their way to the front line in Burma. When we felt safe we retrieved the sack, and I made a special measure to share the sugar fairly between everyone in the camp.

Chapter 33

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