Transcript
This guy that I'd become very friendly with. I never knew him before I was a prisoner of war, Jack Gilding from South Australia. And one of the first jobs I had in Japan was I had to go into a bin and shovel this black graphite dust out. And where I went in, it was only big enough for me to get in and I had to shovel this thing. I could only stay in for so long. I had to wear a mask and I had to have a white paste on my face.
And if you didn't have that paste on, as soon as the sun hit you and melted that, it burned your skin. My eyesight being bad as it was, it was making, I was going to go blind. I complained but this chap was a mongrel of a chap, we called him Speedo. He was the boss, I had to go in. This South Australian boy, Jack Gilding, he volunteered and he said "I will go in." We became very good friends. We finished up, we convinced this Speedo, you could make a shovel and pull it out.
Nobody needed to go in there, scoop it out. He agreed and that's what they did. So Jack and I became very good friends and we used to work on ... We were put on pushing trolleys like they use in the mines and we finished and we thought we're going to win this guy over. So we could even say "I'm Johnny-san." And Jack Gilding was Jackie-san. And he was Speedo-san. To finish up, we got him to learn more English and unbelievable how we won him over.
