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O’Toole exchanged conspiratorial grins. ‘From faeces to thesis,’ quipped Pilchard, twinkling a pencil out from behind one ear and propping himself up against the hard surface of the bunk to begin rewriting his Cocos-Keeling fieldnotes—weeks, months of research distilled down to a few lines of what he himself recognised as a slightly lunatic hand—as O’Toole closed his eyes, chased images of Gracie Fields away and settled back to skeptically re-examine a referee’s decision about a touchdown that now lay some three years in the past. Soon it would be time for lunch.
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    â€˜Where the hell’s my pencil?’ Spratt let his eye roam over the rickety table, the floor. He checked his pockets. It was gone. Someone had nicked it. Men were always nicking stuff these days. It was a disease. He balefully eyed the men working on the truck. If this were Aldershot, he’d have the lot on jankers but, for the moment, he was too weary to enjoy his rage, make a proper theatrical production of it. Pencils were hard to come by. Now he would need to nick one from someone else. He wandered irritably out and over to the books piled in the handcart and saw several periodicals on the birds of Malaya, the sort with numbers instead of pictures on the cover, so you knew they were serious and full of Latin. There might be something by Pilchard in there. With a snarled ‘Carry on’ to the men, he bent and seized one and walked with purposeful buttocks over to the latrines, tearing at the pages as he went. It was hard, shiny, unabsorbent paper that gave off a chemical smell. It would just about do but you had to be careful. Crumple it thoroughly before you wiped. Cut yourself if not. Bible paper was better but he retained a superstitious fear of sacrilege. With the Japs against you, you didn’t need to risk upsetting God as well by wiping yourself on one of the abominations of Leviticus. Anyway, Bible paper was too good, absolutely the best there was for a roll-up. He closed the door of rough planks, twisted the bent nail that served as a bolt, tensing against the sudden heat, and settled over the hole, trying to ignore the hot miasma that rose with the buzz of flies and a sound like sizzling fat. The drains weren’t flushed out continuously any more. Prison bred a schoolboy obsession with entrances and exits, boundaries and barriers, control of the body, the ever-present threat of lethal dysentery. Contrary views existed cosily, side by side. When someone died of disease in here, the medics spoke of the invasion of the body by the hostile outside, while the chaplain of liberation and blessed release from the body and its confinement.
    He scanned the wall. Occasionally, important news from the hidden radios would be pencilled in the darker corners to escape Japanese eyes—‘latrinogrammes’ they were called—and had proved, on the whole, less confusing than the news whispered at roll call. There, ‘Rations are increased’ had become ‘Russians are in Greece’ which had led to wild and misplaced rejoicing among the Armenians—though the latrinogramme ‘French push bottles up 5,000 Germans’ had caused great puzzlement among the Asians. Today, there was only the standard wittily scrawled ‘For the war effort’ with appropriate arrow. He grunted and settled back and spread out a crumpled study of the mating patterns of the Brahminy kite. A hundred feet down the same pipe that led from scribbling Pilchard’s cell, scholarship was being returned to the soil of Asia.
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    The canteen was already packed, though it would be at least another ten minutes until the food was late. Pilchard settled in a corner with his back to the wall, clutching tin mug and spoon like a child at a Salvation Army bun fight and observed dispassionately. As at school, food was the internal clock around which all other activities revolved. Even