Up Country Malaya – Kotta Tinggi, Jungle Warfare School out at Lombong Waterfall. My friend Yorky, with the google eye, has the bright idea of increasing the number of beer chits we get by volunteering us for the poo pit duty. 2 shillings and 11p a day for “objectionable duties” is not to be sneezed at, quoth he. So, every morning before we went off on training,  we had the signal honour of emptying the squadrons poo buckets, known as elsans, into a large pit, slinging some lime on it and depositing the correct amount of that blue poison Racasan into the new useable elsan. It could have been the heat or the lack of a copious amount of Tiger ( every time 15 organised the airdrop the palette with the beer on creamed in) but after a while Yorky started to take, what I thought was, an unhealthy interest, in the contents of said elsans. So I was not surprised when he appears at my side in the queue for breakfast (another advantage of the poo pit team, you went to the front)

“quick Geordie come and look at this, I found the worlds biggest turd(WBT)”.

Faced with a mess tine full of powdered egg, swimming in some form of liquid grease, I joined him and, sure enough, he had indeed snagged a monster. My little inner voice of caution started to murmur when he started to measure it and then using his gobbling rods(knife fork and spoon – KFS, in the parlance of the blanket stackers) carefully lifted it out for close examination. The only flat surface we had was the bonnet of OC 15 Sqns rover, all very spruce with a lovely white canvas cover for the spare wheel on the bonnet. Yorky then tastefully arranged the WBT into an arrangement like an upside-down ice cream cone on the white tyre cover. At that moment, Mick, our sergeant, grabbed me to go and draw the A43 ground to air radio set for the days training so I left Google Eye gloating over his prize. Perhaps my inner voice was turned down too far, anyway after a hard days training, standing in the cookhouse tent queue that night minding my business, the Sqn WO comes up and looks at me and Yorky and says “you two CO’s Tent NOW!” One didn’t argue with Big John and so we paraded at the CO’s tent. Piggy the CO came to the point quickly   “what sort of insult did you intend when you left that turd on OC 15’s vehicle”. I was starting to hear the inner voice hitting the loud pedal and listening to the gibbering loon going on about how long we had been on the crap house gang and imagining the end of a promising military career.  The loon dribbles on further about how we had taken time to make sure there was no one suffering from any foreign disease and inspected the output every day. Piggy was having a good day so we got a lecture about taking mundane duties too seriously and we could get out back to our meal

Result –  the inner voice shouted and I got as far as the tent flap before the CO asked Yorky which pit it came from – quick as a flash, the crafty one says “Officers toilets Sir” to which Piggy had a wee smile “out ,the pair of you”. I actually got my hand on the tent flap before the loon asks “Any idea what caused it sir?”

“For your information it was babies heads ( Ration packs steak and kidney pudding)
and Bacardi and coke” thus confirming it was his – so somewhere in the ulu north of Lombong waterfall lies the last resting place of the Worlds Biggest Turd where the dawn comes up like thunder – outer China – “crost the bay (with apologies to Kipling)