‘It’s about time this was over. We’re a bit fed up

It was a simple enough process, but Dick was 87 at the time, and it had taken him 60 years before he felt ready to tackle the job.

This was no ordinary diary.

At the time it was written, its mere discovery could have resulted in his summary death.

The papers had been hidden in the fake bottom of an Army-issue water bottle.

Its discovery could have seen the diarist tied to a tree and left to be eaten alive by insects.

Whatever her issues, Bridget Jones never had to face up to that sort of problem.

As a soldier with the Essex Regiment, Dick Wilkins was captured when the Japanese overran Singapore in 1942.

He spent three and a half years as a prisoner in jungle camps.

He was a worker on the notorious Railway of Death.

He was on the scene when the first pile of the Kwai bridge, immortalised in the film The Bridge on the River Kwai, was driven into the river-bed.

Around 13,000 British servicemen perished, victims of disease, starvation and ill treatment. Dick survived.

Like so many Far Eastern prisoners-of-war, Dick has taken a long time to put his memories on record.

But the army of survivors from the jungles of the Second World War grows smaller all the time, and with them vanishes the living memory.

"I had a friend, Les White, he lived down the road, he'd been in the camps," says Dick.

"But he died last year, and since then there's nobody left close enough to see or talk to."

Ex-POWs who had been through the Japanese camps often found that the only people they felt able to unburden to were people who had shared the experience.

Now that his friends have gone, Dick has finally turned to paper. His book All Men Work 'Til Die has been written primarily for the next generation.

"I've talked to a few groups in schools," Dick says. "They seem interested. They ask intelligent questions. It's right that they should know what happened."

Dick hopes the book will be used by local teachers when he is no longer around to tell the tale himself.

The words of the diary are compelling, but Dick also summons up memories of the camp in another way.

He is an accomplished amateur artist, and he can still pluck a scene from the prison camps out of the back of his head and set it down, with complete precision, using just a few strokes of a pencil.

Dick was just married, and working towards his dream to become a fireman, when he was called up for active service.

He was in Singapore when the Japanese overran the British colony, and the British Army suffered the biggest mass surrender in its history.

The early days of imprisonment sound almost acceptable, though punctured by the odd bizarre incident.

Working in the cookhouse, Dick bumped into a four-foot snake.

It was obvious what to do. The snake was killed and popped into the daily stew.

Soon, though, the POWs were transported into the jungle to begin work on what was to become known as the Burma Death Railway.

Many accounts have been written of this terrible project, but Dick's account is remarkable for its immediacy.

The urge to set down the record, on the day it happened, seems to have been almost stronger than the will to survive.

His record of the unremitting labour of work on the cuttings and embankment tells us all we need to know about why the word "death" became synonymous with the Burma railway.

"It is strenuous, heavy work, carried out beneath scorching sun, losing pints of sweat and also the essential salt," he observes. "We stagger over the uneven, loose ground, then as the embankment rises above ground level, we climb up the slope to drop our baskets of rubble at the top, sometimes as much as 20 feet or more."

The truth of the book's title quickly becomes clear.

The account of ordinary camp life is punctuated by matter-of-fact statements about men who drop dead or lie down to die.

"One man from the latest party to arrive died while working in the sun yesterday - he was probably not used to the heat," or "one died from pneumonia through getting soaking wet" are typical entries.

As the death toll rises, mention of individual deaths changes to lines like: "Men keep dropping dead like flies", or, even more matter-of-factly: "Digging graves all day."

He also notes: "So many men are being buried now that the Last Post is only being played every morning and evening instead of at every burial."

The ravages of tropical disease are noted as drily as everything else.

"Some of the beri-beri victims swell up like balloons then split down the back when their skins cannot take the strain any more. Some have lost control of their diaphragms and are hiccoughing continuously day and night till they die, while others who have cerebral malaria are screaming and shouting all the time.

"Some, with their limbs being eaten away by ulcers, cry out for the surgeon to amputate their arms and limbs because they are in so much agony."

Yet, bizarrely, in the middle of these horrors, some aspects of life almost resembled suburban England.

There were regular concert parties, attended by and enjoyed by the Japanese guards as well.

Three officers wandered through the camp offering a bizarre mind-reading act.

A stray dog gave birth in some bushes, and the puppies were handed out to anyone who fancied a pet.

There was even the chance for the odd nature ramble in the jungle - carefully avoiding king cobras and poisonous spiders, of course. Dick actually started an insect collection, and made himself a net to collect butterflies.

With the threat of starvation haunting the camp, the men got ever more ingenious at living off the land, and grabbing anything that looked remotely edible.

On one occasion, Dick spotted what he thought was toffee lying on a table in the camp. "I unwrapped it and took a bite, but it burnt my lips so I put it back on the table," he writes.

"I washed my mouth out with some precious water from my bottle and said to my mate I wonder what that stuff was?'"

He soon found out. It was gelignite, a notoriously unstable explosive. "I could have had my head blown off."

The re-invasion of Burma by Allied forces actually made conditions harsher for the POWs as food became scarcer and the Japanese guards more tense.

The prisoners were subject to gruelling forced marches from camp to camp.

Then, in the spring of 1943, cholera hit the railway.

The diary still doesn't lose its straightforward style, but the scenes in front of Dick Wilkins' eyes as he scratched away with his pen were from hell.

It seems astonishing that anyone survived, but camaraderie and dreams kept them going.

For Dick Wilkins it was the love of his wife back home. Many men were kept going by a very specific dream.

One poignant memory concerns a man who had been a farm-labourer in civilian life.

Dick recalls: "He came from a small country village where there was a small shop that sold bicycles. He told me that he had always longed for a brand new Raleigh Roadster that was in the window.

"When he got back with all his back pay, he would go into the shop and say I'll have that bike in your window, Mr Brown - and pay cash for it. Almost the best thing will be Mr Brown's astonishment, because nobody can afford to pay cash for a big thing like a bicycle.' "That seemed to be his ambition since he wasn't married and had no family to go back home to."

Sadly, though, the dream never happened. The lad, who was known just as Farmer's Boy, died in the jungle.

One thing you will not find in Dick Wilkins' diary is anything resembling a whinge.

However terrible, he sets things down as he sees them, with a steady gaze.

He is, after all, British. The stiff upper lip never wavers, and the worse the conditions, the greater the understatement in describing them.

Looking at men who have been reduced to walking skeletons by malnutrition, he simply writes: "It's about time this war was over, we are getting a bit fed up, but not literally."

Dick always felt in his heart he would survive. Time and again he believes his guardian angel stepped in to save him from certain death.

Of course, he was right. He and his diary did survive. Dick was reunited with wife Muriel, and is now familiar to many Echo readers as a contributor to the letters page.

Perhaps the diary, for all its risks, helped him.

"I did have dreams after I came out," he says.

"I am running through the jungle with the Japs after me. But the thing is, I always escaped."