of wood very finely indeed, and feed them one by one into a small contraption made of discarded tins, bits of wood and a bootlace. Those who were expert in making these little blown furnaces produced them for newcomers like ourselves. There was a wheel with a handle which could turn it, connected by a lace to a small fan in a tunnel leading to the tin in which the fuel was burned, and this forced draught directed on to the shavings, fed one by one to the base of the tin, produced lots of heat from a minimum of wood. It had to be a minimum because there was little left, and it was precious. I have vivid memories of another precious commodity. I came back to my upper bunk bed one day to find two of my steel straps supporting my ‘mattress’ of parcel cardboard were missing. That was no great loss, because there were pieces of strapping to be got with comparative ease. The loss was the nails that had fixed them to the side frames of my bunk. They had gone. I spent the whole of one day, from mid-morning to dusk, doing nothing else than walk the compound from one end to the other, eyes fixed on its earth, trying to find a nail or two. I found none. I was sentenced to having to rearrange my steel strapping nailed across the bunk frame so that I had now fewer straps for my six foot length, and lying on this poorly supported base could well have been used at some other time as a penance. I had wasted a whole day. But what else was there to do with it, anyway? We passed a lot of our time in chatter and discussion. Looking back, it is interesting that, although this was a close gathering of young men with very little to do except worry about food, talk of sex was minimal. One thing we had come to realise was this – being scared was the overriding emotion which drove all other feelings and thoughts from the mind and body. Hunger was the next, but fear would drive out worries about food. Sex was the last on the list, and hunger would take precedence to any thought of it. The three were categorised and put in order of importance as ‘the three Fs’ – Fear, Famine and the other one. We talked a lot about food, and spent hours discussing exactly what menu we would like to have for our first meal back in civilisation. The consensus came down in favour of tomato soup followed by roast pork with apple sauce and all the trimmings, plus bread and butter pudding. And we talked about our families and our longing to see them. I had scarcely seen little Colin since his birth in November, for after that four days’ leave I had enjoyed only quick visits to Oxford on the odd week-end pass. It was not to be too long before our hopes – yes, and our prayers – were to be answered. The date must have been May 1st, within a day. The time in prison camp had passed surprisingly quickly, although it was too long however quickly it sped by. We had, just around this period in our stay, one nasty fright. Some of the older hands had managed, before our arrival, to smuggle in the bits and pieces needed to build a wireless set which would receive the BBC.


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