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Everyone who went to this camp may have thought it was a rest camp until our release, but that was a mistake. By that time the Nips were taking a beating in Burma and the railway was put to good use transporting troops and stores back and forth. Therefore, the Nips required groups of men to maintain the track and cut timber for fuel for the engines. After a few months’ rest in that camp, I was on the move again in a wood cutting party. We were taken somewhere up in the jungle to a small camp. The railway for which we were to cut the wood to fuel the engines was the old Thai State Railway going to the Burma border in the north, not the railway which we built. We were more isolated than ever before. The job was to work in twos, select a tree, and with an axe and a double handed crosscut saw, cut down, trim and cut into half-metre lengths. Then, anything more than about seventy millimetres across had to be chopped and stacked until the stack was one metre high and two metres long. Imagine fifteen or more pairs of men all competing to find the easiest trees to cut, and the ones nearest to the railway track. All the stacks of wood had to be stacked in line, close to the track. When your stack had been checked as being to the required daily two metres by one, you could sit and wait for the others to finish. A lot depended on luck, whether your allotted axe and saw were sharp, and whether your judgement of an easy tree to saw and chop was good. Then again it depended on the distance from the track that you had to go to find those trees. Each day, of course, it became farther into the jungle away from the track. It was a hard back-breaking job and a difficult daily task. The slowest groups were seen by the Nips as idle, so they quite frequently got a beating with sticks or rifles. On one occasion I slung the axe until my back gave way. With a Nip standing next to me I feared the worst, but luckily he had watched me get slower and slower and knew it was genuine. He was maybe one of the better ones.

This was the pattern of events for quite a while to come. When we had cut sufficient for that area we moved to a camp farther north. The jungle was sometimes very dense so it was necessary to make a mark on the trees with an axe to find your way back, from excursions to find water, or any other reason. We never knew when we would come across a wild animal or snake. The Nips occasionally shot a wild animal to help the supply of food, which was scarce for them, as well as us, in the small camps that we worked from. We, of course, only got the left overs after they had the choicest pieces. We also had to search for and cook anything found in the jungle that was edible. Without the extra vitamins we got through our own initiative there would have been more sickness and deaths. It was an extremely lonely place to be in that part of Thailand, cut off from any outside help. The nights, from dusk to dawn, were at times very frightening, sometimes because of strange sounds, at other times because of strong monsoon winds and rain. It was necessary at times for everyone to get up in the night to hold the hut up. Several men would lean on the centre support bamboo poles to counter the force of the winds.

One day, out on the working party, I was given the job of sharpening the saws. It was a change from the job of cutting and chopping trees and much easier. The job became regular each day for some time, but it kept me fully occupied because everybody wanted a sharp saw. I first had to find two small trees close together and cut them to a suitable height with a notch on top to hold the crosscut saw rigid while it was filed. At first, when the files were good, the job was alright, but as the files wore, the pressure exerted had to be more, so my fingers became sorer. It was like getting blood out of a stone to get a new file.

Going out to our place of work one morning we found leaflets hidden for us to find. They had been dropped by Allied 'planes at night, and collected and placed discretely for us. The cheerful news told us that the war in Europe was nearly over, and Japan was as jittery as the Germans. We were very happy to hear this news but we couldn't show our happiness, nor even let the Nips know about the leaflets. A punishment would have ensued if any of us had been caught with one. I took the risk and took care of it to take it home. From now on the news was good for us and served as a tonic.

Whenever we thought we had something to be happy about, the Nips nearly always seemed to sense it, and turned the screw a little bit harder. They enjoyed finding some excuse to punish certain individuals severely bashing them and then putting them in a confined cage with little food and water. As the air raids by the Allies got closer their tempers worsened. In one camp about this time, we were set a task to dig a trench in front of our hut. This, they said, was to take cover from the air-raids. The width of the trench was two metres and it stretched the length of the hut. From this work, and news received, as well as intuition, we guessed we were digging our own graves.

It was with great relief to find that we were going to move to another camp away from that sinister camp. I remember marching out of this camp with my few possessions, the heaviest of which was the chessboard table, dismantled and tied up under my arm. No-one ever knew how far we would have to walk whenever we moved. I reluctantly had little choice, before very long, to sling the table into the jungle, as it was an unnecessary burden. I would have loved to have been able to keep it.

Our party was quite small by this time as we moved yet further north doing our usual job of wood-cutting from small camps. The pressure on us to work hard grew less as we sensed that the war must have been going in our favour. Then we heard the rumour that the war in Europe was over. It was a great talking point which brought happier faces all round. That was until we realised it would make very little difference to us. Our hopes were high whenever we thought our time must come when the Nips were defeated and we would be able to get away from this inhospitable jungle of Thailand and our hated captors.

In all the years as a prisoner, I only received a sixth of a Red Cross parcel on two occasions. We were only allowed to send two or three printed messages home, and I only received one or two letters, the last dated 1944.

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