 For his parents, almost all of 1942 passed without a word, before learning by an official telegram that he was a prisoner of war; they continued a constant stream of letters, most of which reached him and gave him great comfort, even though his postcards in the opposite direction were censored or injected with random text like "tell Susan not to worry".Susan was fictitious, but by 1944 she did indeed not need to worry about him; with the railway completed, he was back in Singapore, with enough leisure to learn both Persian and Mandarin, as well as "cooking, gardening, bridge and poker".Thus, with the added inconvenience of starvation rations once again, he lived out the rest of his war.