Christmas 1944 came and went. The new year came in with a flourish. We could tell by the number and frequency of the air raids that the end would not be long in coming, but how would it come to us?
The Japanese were putting on a brave face as if nothing was happening, but the little bits of news and information we obtained told us otherwise. Even the locals were getting braver. Those who had always been loyal to the British were coming out into the open, but we still had to be very careful as we did not want to cause them any danger.
We were taken much further afield on working parties. We saw the troubles the enemy had gone to to camouflage the areas of the city and its suburbs. Even the main roads were covered with camouflage nets.
The Yorkshire NCO and I got our little job back in the wood factory, but this time we were making food bowls. It was there that we got news, quite by accident from a Japanese guard himself, that the 14th Army were at the gates of Mandalay. He casually asked us how far Mandalay was from Rangoon. We told him the estimated mileage. Then he asked how long it would take an army to get from there to Rangoon. Here one of the youths broke in and with his fingers crisscrossing to denote fighting, said, ‘Engliss, boom, boom, Mandalay.’ The Japanese shut him up and sent him away, while the other youth winked his eye and walked back to his machine.
The Yorkshire NCO and I could not get back to the jail fast enough to deliver the latest and best news that we had received.
After that we barely went outside to work. We were given jobs to do inside. This included digging a huge air-raid shelter beneath one of the compound buildings near the guardhouse and the guard quarters. They got all the Yorkshire men who had been miners to dig under the building and use wooden props to make it like an underground bunker, while others acted as labourers to take away the unwanted earth in baskets.
Herds of cattle were also being driven down from the north and brought into the spare compound. Most of them were in a sorry state for they must have been driven for at least three hundred miles.