Crowded trains full of Japanese fighting men began to rattle along the railway line in the direction of Burma. I was struck by the extreme youth of some of the one star soldiers; many of them were obviously no more than 16 years old.

We stayed for a time at the final railway camp, cutting down trees, chopping them up and stacking them alongside the railway for refuelling the wood-burning engines. Then we went back to the camp we had helped to construct lower down the line. It had no name and was known merely by a number.

Without warning, cholera hit the camp. The wasted bodies of our men could offer little resistance to the dreaded disease, and scores were stricken down. Prisoners showed the symptoms one day and often died the next. The swiftness of the disease was frightening. As usual, the Japs had no vaccine or injection to fight the epidemic with. For a month I was among a dozen of our men on daily detail as a burning party. Cremation was the best way of trying to check the disease. Streaming in the monsoon rain, we felled bamboo and saplings to make fires for the crematorium. We dug deep communal graves for the grisly end.

A cremation pyre was made of bamboo or other wood, built into a shallow trench about eight feet square. We would take the bodies, covered in rice sacking on roughly made stretchers, from the hospital area to the burning site about half-a-mile from the camp. We put the dead on the pyre, and placed more wood and bamboo on top in a sort of lid container. Sometimes the Japs provided a small amount of paraffin to help us fire the pyre, but mostly none was available; the wet wood would take an unconscionable time to catch fire and many attempts would have to be made. When at last the pyre was burning in the rain we would return to camp, letting the blaze do its work overnight. Each morning we would return to the pyre, scoop out the ashes and put them in the grave. A padre used to come from camp for the last rites. The stench from burning flesh was nauseating, but we stuck to our job in the knowledge that it was vital for the camp's well being. Sometimes, the heavy rain had put out the fires overnight and the following morning we would find a gruesome sight awaiting us - charred bodies sitting in grotesque positions as though mocking our efforts at extermination. They had to be manoeuvred about with the aid of long bamboo poles into a place where the wood beneath could be rekindled. Corpses would be left in the flames as we moved off to cut down more fuel. Often many trips for wood were needed before the task was done and the ashes could be removed. We put in many, many burial hours, thwarting death to preserve the living.

After a week a member of the burning party caught the disease. The next day we had the grim duty of putting on the fire the man who had toiled so hard at that very job, and consigning his ashes to the communal grave.

One by one others suffered the same fate ... two gone, three gone, four, five, six, seven .... who next?

When the epidemic mercifully died down only five of the original party were still alive.

Halfway through the epidemic the Japs had become seriously alarmed. It was the only time they showed any real concern; they were undoubtedly thinking mainly of their own skins. With their lives in danger, they arranged to have vaccine rushed to the camp. The supplies arrived late at night. The sleeping camp was roused. Queues of prisoners lined up at the medical quarters. Doctors and orderlies worked feverishly through the night injecting the vaccine, and finished the job in the dim light of storm lamps. Doctors said later that the vaccine had come in the nick of time. If it had been delayed any longer, the death-roll would have been fantastically high.

The work of the doctors and orderlies merits the greatest praise. The way they toiled on in the primitive conditions, massaging limbs, pumping saline into the sick, setting a magnificent example of patience and devotion to duty, will never be erased from my mind. These were Noble Britons.

About a week after the cholera epidemic had ended I began to suffer violent pains in the arms and legs. I could get no relief even when resting. I attended a medical parade and was ordered into camp hospital. There was no treatment for the complaint, but I was kept under observation. The pains increased and became agonising. I could not bear to sit down for long and when I walked round the hospital hutments I experienced the oddest darting jab in the bones. I could get little sleep either, and this was most tiresome, but, bad as I felt, I knew there were scores in the hospital in a far worse plight than I was. From other camps had come prisoners suffering from ghastly ulcers. Some were so badly infected that even the attention they received in hospital could not enable them to survive. Lacking any medical supplies at all in the camps in which they had been working, they had been forced to cover their sores with banana leaf dressing.

When they arrived at the camp hospital, they literally stank with decay. Some could not walk. Their deeply pitted flesh was infected from knee cap to ankle. When the medical orderlies pulled away the banana leaf dressings they had to take tweezers to free the sufferers of maggots. Some amputations were done by the surgeons. I watched several of these operations from some way off. They went on for hours as the surgeons worked skilfully with blunted instruments on a makeshift operation table. When I saw this, I forgot my own troubles, which seemed puny by comparison. At last the pains in my bones subsided and I was able to leave the hospital and go back to the main camp.

"Hockie" and I were still together. We met several others whom we knew from our H.Q. days and talked of what we had done in the various camps. Inevitably, too, there was talk of the "good old days" in England and of our relatives there. And again those tattered photographs were handed round. What should we have done without them?

We talked, too, of food. We had reached the stage when we could dream about it without difficulty; but we always woke up to the same reality; another day of rationed rice and soup. What tricks those dreams of ours played on us!

The Japs began issuing orders again and those of us physically fit for more work were transferred to the large camp at Kanburi. There we were left idling for a time; our only duties were camp fatigues. One of our duties was to carry 200 lb sacks of rice, slung across the shoulders, from the river landing stage to the store sheds. The Japs guards took little notice of us at this period.

I remember that for the first time since our capture we received Red Cross parcels. In the first distribution eight men shared a parcel. The delicacies were welcome. The taste of bully beef, tinned salmon, and tinned fruit seemed ambrosial, and it was a joy to smoke a real cigarette after the meal. This was no dream.

Then the Japs released another issue of parcels. Each parcel was to be shared by six hungry mouths. The Japs were really opening their hearts to us. We gorged, but most of us did not eat everything at once; we were past masters in the art of conserving. We carefully planned distribution so that we had a portion of meat, fish and fruit for each meal for a number of days.

It was generally felt that these two food issues out of the blue meant that the Japs were relenting and showing a little humanity after the prisoners had accomplished so much for them on the railway. The tasty English food gave everyone renewed hope, and there was optimistic talk of a possibly swift release from captivity. But it was all a mere flash in the pan. The Red Cross parcels had been distributed merely to build up our strength before we were transferred to further hard labour. Those of us who gave the appearance of being capable of more work were sorted out. We set out on another long rail journey to Singapore. It was very much like that we had experienced 18 months earlier. There was one notable difference; the trucks this time were not as crowded as they had been then.