Everybody gets malaria - nobody dodges it - you can't

Jack Plant

You were subjected to weeks and weeks and weeks of burning sun.

The sun was directly over one's head with no shade. Or alternatively you were living through weeks and weeks and weeks of heavy rain during the monsoons.

That is the sort of climate in which one had to work and it was one which, of course, encouraged the breeding of malaria carrying mosquitos. Everybody gets malaria - nobody dodges it - you can't.

So amongst all your trials and tribulations - your dysentery, your beri-beri, which makes one's legs become grossly swollen and one's tummy fill up with water, due to a lack of vitamin B in the diet - you faced a life of pressures from outside.

With all these factors, you were very lucky if you continued to live.

You depended a lot upon your pals

Jack Plant

You depended a lot upon your pals. In those sort of circumstances one's immediate friend is an absolute necessity.

The friend would pour a drop of water through your lips when you were suffering temperatures of 100 degrees with malaria.

This literally keeps you alive for a few days until the attack has gone but you know only too well that in a month's time you will have another one and so you will go on and go on until you get out of the hellhole.

It was also difficult from the point of view that always - whatever job you were doing - you were expected to do it faster than it is possible for it to be done.

You were constantly harassed with the words "speedo", a favourite expression of a Japanese guard - "speedo", "speedo", "speedo".

And if you showed any resistance to that call, a bayonet was stuck in your back or drawn round your back for the blood to flow.

So you learn to at least make it look as though you are "speedo", "speedo", "speedo".

I am not a proud man but this memorial means an awful lot to me

Jack Plant

People ask why after 56 years are we are now talking about a memorial.

The truth is that we have been talking about a memorial ever since we got home and as the years rolled by, the number of survivors gets fewer and fewer and fewer and when we reach your 80s as all of us have, the urgency to do something becomes greater.

This tribute is the end of 12 months of damned hard work which, eight of us, all in our 80s, have gladly done.

I am not a proud man but this memorial means an awful lot to me.