Getting adequate food to stoke up the energy in these atrocious conditions was a great problem. Fresh vegetables were a crying need in the camps in the hinterland. What miserable greens we received were mostly of the dried variety - dried seaweed and dried kankon, like the shrivelled outer leaves of decaying cauliflower. On the trek through the jungle to working sectors we had got into the habit of picking varying types of leaves and roots which might well have been poisonous for all we knew or cared. At any rate, we called them by euphemistic names - "spinach" or "watercress".

When we returned to camp in the evening we would boil them up in a billy-can over a small fire. Sometimes we were able to scrounge rock salt to bring out the flavour, which was often indescribable, but anything with a tang which might be even remotely called appetising was welcome to us. It was at least a change from the watery soup and the rice. All too often the rice itself, our staple diet, was dismally "off". It would turn sour in our tiffin boxes, although that did not stop us devouring it at the mid-day work break. Sometimes, I remember, it would have a remarkable yellow colour after cooking, and its taste was distinctly sulphuric. It was an abomination to some throats, but mine was, luckily, of the tough kind. I was blessed initially with a strong physical constitution and had never been encouraged to be finicky in food matters. There are times when the Spartan approach is distinctly valuable. Here it was obligatory - like it or not. Food faddism was not only unpopular, but likely to have lethal results.

The Jap engineers were out every day on the snaking rail track with their maps and measuring instruments, plotting the course and fanatically whipping up progress. They seemed to regard no problem as insuperable. Our lives were expendable, of course. With that basically accepted, it was not surprising that sometimes they seemed capable of achieving miracles. Rock faces were blasted; huge chasms bridged. At some places the embankment reached massive heights ..... or so it seemed in our bemused minds ..... in the attempt to keep the track from having too many gradients. The terrain and scenery altered considerably along the great length of the railway. At some camps there were banana groves and small trees in abundance; at others there was just stark jungle. Under the towering teak trees, heavily interlaced with creeper plant, all was in semi-darkness. In places there was plenty of bird-life, and work was sometimes done to the accompanying chatter of monkeys from the face of the cliffs overhanging the river. In other places there seemed hardly any life - or none that could be seen in day time - apart from spiders, snakes and other crawly things, until night came. I am no expert in animal matters, and at night my sleep was often disturbed by the jungle call. I had great difficulty in attaching names to the callers. The experience was often eerie and sometimes frankly terrifying.

Barks, snarls, vicious spits and sounds like the repeated tearing of calico interspersed with sinister, echoing hoots may be excellent night music for those with strong nerves; but to men weakened by terrible labour on starvation diet, twisted and tortured by nameless fears, reviled, booted, and rapidly becoming neurotic, if not already prize specimens, the night ordeal was often agonising.

The earth from which we dug so systematically changed in colour and content as we moved onwards. At first it was reddish brown; then later on came darker soil that would have been welcome in any English garden; and still later stuff that had to be scratched for under hard, concrete-like surfaces or scrabbled at near the roots of trees. But the worst soil of all was that which had to be dug in the monsoon periods. We filled the stretchers; two bamboo poles thrust through the corners of a rice sack - with muddy, glutinous stuff that was the very devil to handle. It stuck tenaciously to the sacking, it smeared our hands and bodies, got into the oddest places and refused to come off; and it was as difficult getting it out of the stretchers when we reached the embankment as it was putting it into them. The point of all this is that the daily stints of so much digging and tipping per man had to be strictly adhered to - that, I think, is the exact phrase - as the target was set each day by the Japs in their wisdom. Slithering and slopping about in the mud as we trekked back and forth inevitably slowed up progress, and there was frequent trouble from the master. Often, because the work we had done was not considered sufficient, we had to go on after the light had disappeared from the sky, slaving away by the acetylene flare. Those lights threw some grotesque shapes on the track. The light in the monsoon days was, in any event, never very good - it always reminded me of a typical November day in the north of England - and it often induced more gloom in already gloomy prisoners. On those occasions the depression deepened, and the normal subdued chatter vanished. Men dug and carried like automatons, moving stiffly in a hypnotic trance. The horizon was bounded by a green gloom and existence dominated by the crushing burden of one simple set of facts; the track was endless, the master intractable, and we should have to go on until we dropped.

When at last we were given the signal to stop labouring and trudge off to our bunks the half-crazed mind could scarcely take it in. Lying there on the bamboo, I would be attacked by fits of self-pity, reflecting miserably on the dysentery, the ulcers, the sores, the rations not fit for dogs, listening to the restless tossing and turning of companions in the darkness of the hutments. Was this what men were made for? Was this their destiny? One had been almost suckled on doctrines about the dignity of man the preciousness of each individual life; bathed from birth, as it were, in the very air of freedom - and now this! Here life was not worth a blade of shrivelled grass - our lives, at any rate.

The whole of my background seemed a hollow mockery, a preparation for the bitter let-down, a grooming for this sickening, degrading existence where nothing but the tiny flame of pride, flickering deep in the soul, kept one going. Then anger would burn and flare, darting out venomously against the Jap and all this god forsaken hole, this black dump, this rottenness - until I was exhausted with the fury of it and my mind was filled with nothing but the blobbing fading pictures of myriad memories; half-forgotten things floating out of the distant recesses about childhood, Bradford, journalism, the war, ships, men, hunger, blight, love and hate. The most fantastic unrealities would trouble me; Yorkshire parkin, pigs trundling along in a stupefying charade, ridden by wicked-looking Jap-in-armour wielding whips; Japs taunting me with my weakness and insufficiency; Jap dissolving into a maddening mist like things seen in an old silent film resurrected from the lumber room; Japs jibing, the bloody jibing, taunting, jabbering Jap; the jibing jabberwocky, the gibbering Jap, the Jap of the junta, the bloody, awful, gibbering Jap; and I would writhe, and sob, and fall into yet another tormented sleep, only to wake again to the even worse reality.

There were times when I felt I could rush screaming from the camp, pick up the nearest heavy implement and bludgeon the first Jap guard I saw into insensibility and death before I, too, was torn asunder and sent off to my "Maker". But in the long run I always came back to sanity. When my senses returned I would upbraid myself, spur myself into some sort of rational thinking. This was war, but it would end some time; all wars did. There must be hundreds of thousands as badly off as myself, or worse off, among them men who had lost one or both legs because of their P.O.W. experiences. There were, too, thousands who would never see the light of day again, whether it be from the monsoon sky or from a vault of blue pierced by the burning rays of the sun. Somewhere men were fighting on my behalf, suffering as I did, each bearing the brunt according to his duty or opportunity. All human nature was bound up in this, I would tell myself; this was the world's tragedy, arising out of the weakness of men. And my burning brain would relax, and be filled with a sort of calm as I recited the Lord's Prayer. There was a mystical comfort there; even to repeat the familiar words brought relief.

Sometimes, as if in answer to a prayer, our captors would announce a day's holiday for all workers. These were usually to commemorate some event which the Japs thought notable, but they were none the less welcome to us, although for vastly different reasons. What a pleasures it was to be able to rest a bit longer in the mornings; to have the opportunity of shaving - if one had managed to retain the tackle - and to talk without being stopped by the leering guard!

I would dip into my haversack and from the few possessions left to me pick up my bundle of letters from home. They were all back-numbers, but they buoyed up my spirits tremendously. In a flash the vicious present would he wiped out, and I could be back with my wife in the familiar haunts of Bradford and district. Even an apparently insignificant fact, a trivial reference to a place or a time, would have its magic power of reviving the memory, and take me winging back to what I knew best and treasured most. I could hear the soft voice of my wife, whispering in my ear, filling me with a terrible, sweet nostalgia, compound of all the things mind and spirit and body yearned for, love would come flooding into the arid spaces of my being, filling me with joy, making me tremble in agitated delight.

In the mind's eye I could see in clearest outline the church overlooking the Aire valley; I could recapture the tingle of excitement I experienced as I waited there before my wife arrived on the arm of her father on our wedding day; remember the swift glance that we gave each other as we stood before the surpliced clergyman ..... the vow .... "till death do us part". Now the simple words seemed to have a steely strength that had never struck me before; they stretched like an arm, a bond invincible, transcending time and distance, across the continents, linking us with inexplicable power. God, what would I give to see her now, with the hair swept lightly from the brow, the slim figure, the ready smile, and the touch that burned to my bones!

If only we could laugh and joke together for a few delicious moments, over the remembered ecstasy of that day .... the Day of the Deluge. It had been a dull morning for May, even in the north, and as we left on our honeymoon the rain came down torrentially, never stopping until we reached our hotel that night. That was our day; one of those shared days of bliss whose memory is kept locked in the innermost heart, forever bright, stainless, immune from all corrosion.

The mind leapt inevitably from that point, gliding over the uneasy months of that momentous year ... it was 1939 ... halting for a quivering moment over the September speech by Prime Minister Chamberlain - Britain at war with Germany - merging the world's agony with the pain and pride of the personal; my wife was expecting our first child in a few months' time. Memory flew on into the frost and snow of the following February, when my son was born. I had rung up the nursing home just before midnight on the thirteenth and the sister had told me that I was a father; "mother and son doing fine", in the time-honoured phrase.I got into a taxi which bumped and bucked its way over the frozen roads, as the searchlights wove a pattern across the sky. I remember how the beams crossed and re-crossed, as I watched; sometimes the signs in the sky formed a "V", sometimes an "X", and sometimes just a maze that held the eye in its strange beauty. I heard no zooming of planes. It was a night that might have been made for peace. The nursing home was a place of warmth and content. My son was snuggled up in a cot in a downstairs room. I saw my wife, touched with a new and tender maturity in her exhaustion, something nobler now than a slip of a girl, and stayed gratefully with her for a while. Then I went back home in the taxi, with the searchlights still weaving their beams in the skies of war, and myself wondering what the imponderable future would bring.

Now, three years afterwards, I had been carried to the other side of the world and Bradford, so achingly distant, seemed to me like a paradise unattainable; I could picture the whole scene; the sprawling city with the Town Hall thrusting the black bulk of its sturdy tower into the sky.

Lister's mill chimney dominating the horizon up at Maningham, and the salty, whistling winds sweeping the white clouds out over Baildon Moors, over the dark tarns, beating against the grey stone walls and the farm buildings, rustling the woods of the Dalas to stirring enchantment and giving the grass, ling and heather of the steep fells the interplay of colour and movement which is part of their magic for the lover of that countryside unsurpassable in beauty.

The days of leisured dalliance over the rough moorland paths, the picnics from the haversack crammed with good white bread and cheese, the delicious draughts of beer at tiny inns with warming pans over the inglenook and picturesque characters in the bar parlour - these days were gone. No return now to spotless sheets; only the split bamboo bed, the groan of despair, the fetid atmosphere, and the denial of decency. It was ironic, too, that I, a newsman, should be so cut off from news. Outside the immediate hovel we occupied, the camp of the moment, the section of rail track we were blazing into the unknown, life for us had really ceased to exist. Three quarters of the world may be in ruins for all we knew; the very scenes I had been fondly imagining might be now scarred through bombing and worse into featureless horror and the people I knew blasted into eternity.

Bradford might be blood-red with flame, the serried lines of mill windows, geometrically precise like crosses in a military cemetery, reflecting the glare. The stone figures adorning the Town Hall - they always caught my fancy when the snow fell and the cold wind blew to fill the crevices with icicles that hung from the beards of the kings - might be leaning drunkenly in the debris and the chaos, with the cloth caps of real men lying in the gutters and the bodies in the dark streets.

But it would not do to let the mind and the imagination, that arch-deceiver, run riot like this. Better to keep oneself on a tight rein, to confine oneself, if one could, to the facts one knew. The other way was signposted with the skull and crossbones - the road to madness.

Better, perhaps, to think of the days when I started work in journalism; the old office, the smooth banisters, the printer's ink, the snowstorm of copy, my pride when after a week's work I gained my first pay packet and felt a man. My regard, I remember, was three half-crowns. Almost 14 years later I marched briskly to the Army pay table at the camp in Gloucester. A smart salute, the left hand pushed out, the coins tightly grasped and the arm returned stiffly to the side; another salute, a neat about-turn and a march back to the parading pay file. The three coins? Three half crowns. Even then, we were like men with the wealth of Croesus compared with what we were now.