Being spread out like that, with no proper headquarters or anything else like that, we didn’t have a lot food wise. It was all K-rations- a pack you get that will do you, 1 day, 2 days, up to a week. It’s all crystallized stuff and you mix it with water. Breakfast, lunch, evening meal, but it was quite good. And that’s all we had to keep us going all the time.

We heard that the war in Europe was finished. There were big celebrations all over the place. We couldn’t celebrate much as we were scattered about and had no means of celebrating- no beer, or drink or food other than our K-rations so unbeknown to us our catering company went off with landrovers and trailers looking for something that would give us some kind of a feast.

All our units gathered together for that one day. Down the road we saw a dust storm coming in. In fact what it was was our catering corps coming up the road, driving in front of them, 50 goats and about 200 ducks, making an awful lot of dust. They got to our place were there was over a thousand of us to feed. Most of us had only seen a duck at a distance. They got huge boilers, about 6ft diameter, and we got wood out of the jungle cut it up and made a fire. They gathered the ducks and the goats, killed them and skinned them.

We all had to get hold of a duck, kill it, take the feathers off, well some of them, anyway! And throw whatever was left into the big pot. You couldn’t see the top of the pot for fluff, and feathers that hadn’t been plucked properly. After we scraped the top of that off we’d find a duck that hadn’t been butchered properly, with the innards still in it. We got one duck each and the other camp on the other side had a harder job to do – they had to skin the goats. I thing they roasted them.

So that was that, and there was one bottle of beer for every man.