30 Jul 1944, John Charter's wartime journal

Well the typhoon turned up alright on my birthday. It blew up during the night and was going quite hard in the morning, though it had more or less abated by the evening. It was not a severe one as typhoons go, but it played havoc with many of the precious gardens, flattening the sweet corn, blasting the pumpkin creepers and uprooting many plants. Our string beans were blown all of a heap. Fortunately they were nearly finished anyway.

Our pumkins were just coming on marvellously, forming quite a number of female buds which, after fertilisation, would have produced the pumkins. Our pumkin vines had made a slow beginning but they would just have borne fruit nicely by the middle of August which is almost the end of the pumkin season (though there is a minor second season later in Sept and Oct.). But the typhoon blew off half a dozen buds and small fruit – a most serious loss to us. However, four quite big ones remained and a fifth in a sheltered spot managed to survive and is now growing. We cut the first one on the eve of my birthday and it weightd 8 ½ lbs – quite a substantial addition to our larder. Ours are the marrow shaped variety, not the flat round kind. 14 and 18 pounders (and I daresay even more) have been produced in camp, but our first one lasted us 5 days.

We cooked it in different ways: diced it, and with some cooked rice, chopped onion, bean flour and salt, mixed it up, put it into a coffee tin, poured some bean oil over it, put on the lid and had it baked in the bakery; it was delicious. Another way was to use much the same ingredients and fry it in a frying pan (that was when we could not use the bakery and had to manage on the chatty). When we got to the stalk end we cut off thickish discs and fried them in oil. It really has a most delicate and delicious flavour. It will be interesting to try some of these dishes when things have returned to normal again (if we survive) and see if we think them so tasty then, or whether it is because of the poor food we get here that fresh vegetables and our own cooked dishes taste so good by comparison.

We picked the last of our tomatoes in the middle of this month; they lasted marvellously well and saved spreads for our bread. We have had several pounds of sweet potatoes already, though we are keeping them for our standby during August and September when hardly anything else is available from the gardens except summer spinaches.