Food terrible today.
Assistance wanted in hospital - office work, and I'm to start tomorrow, feeding there.
Electric lights on.
Diary pages from this date
Second death in Camp, this time from dysentery: John Oram Sheppard, a freight agent with Canadian Pacific, aged 63. Before being sent to Stanley he and his wife were held at 177, the Peak.
The Temporary Committee hears that arrangements are being made to transfer some aged and infirm internees to St. Paul's Hospital in Causeway Bay. Nine have already been sent.
Morris 'Two-Gun' Cohen is taken from the room in the Kempeitai Prison where he was being held with 7 others. He's put in a basement room with nothing in it but an empty gasoline tin that serves as a lavatory. He spends his time thinking of answers to the questions he knows are coming. (See also entries for Feb 2 and Feb 11.)
Professor Gordon King, who has been allowed to remain living at Hong Kong University to fulfill his medical commitments, begins his successful escape to Free China.
So does Jan Marsman. He wakes at dawn, drinks coffee, and dresses so he looks like a Chinese at a distance. The nephew of a Chinese friend who's helped him plan the escape arrives at 8.30. They leave town and walk fifteen miles up and down mountain sides. They come across a Chinese man in coolie costume sitting beside the road; he is, in fact, a well-known scholar and now an underground leader. He takes them 'a long and devious way', as they have to skirt villages regularly visited by Japanese patrols or inhabited by pro-Japanese Chinese. Eventually they arrive at an abandoned schoolhouse where a payment is made to the agents of the guerrillas and he's handed over to them. In the schoolhouse he finds Gordon King. The escape party is six people: Marsman and his friend's nephew, a distinguished Chinese man, a Russian, Gordon King and his Chinese 'bodyguard'.
Also escaping today is Mr. Warrow, a naturalised American, who will report on the mistreatment of the Maryknoll Fathers.
Sources:
Death: Geoffrey Emerson, Hong Kong Internment, 2008, 186; http://www.geni.com/people/John-ORAM-Sheppard/6000000014690930625 (this source gives his employer as the Pacific Mail and Stemaship Co.)
Temporary Committee: John Stericker, Captive Colony, 1945, Chapter IV, page 10
Cohen: Charles Drage, The Life And Times Of General Two-Gun Cohen, 1954, 291-2
King: Tony Banham, We Shall Suffer There, 2009, entries for February 10, 1942
Marsman: Jan Marsman, I Escaped From Hong Kong, 1942, 191-196
Warrow: http://www.weihsien-paintings.org/NormanCliff/history/DOCUMENTS/Letters/1942-May14.htm
Death of J.O.M.Shephard (63)
This diary cannot keep to dates. I must go back and write an account of the brief war here; and then later, a year old account of our wedding; and later still a somewhat hazy account of the two delightful weeks I spent in Ceylon with Mother and Father. At present my manual labour (supervising and bricklaying for our new communal kitchen) keeps me very busy during the day, and as we are blacked out and it gets dark at about 7:30, there is at present little time left for writing a diary.
The weather has suddenly become very much colder. The thermometer at St Stephens School registered 36’ F (2.2C) which seems almost too low to be accurate, but with insufficient food and no heating whatsoever, added to the fact that HK summers considerably thin one’s blood, conditions are certainly rather miserable at present.
We hear an important announcement affecting the European community is to be made on 15th February, Sunday. Everyone is full of conjecture as to what this order will be; the most popular theory being that we will be allowed back to our homes. We wonder if this would be to our advantage as the price of food now is exorbitant and so far we have heard no news of being able to withdraw any money from the banks. Here we do get some food, even though it is only half as much as we could eat.
Got power on today. Cold & damp. Nothing worthy of note. Japs told firmly re Convention & Int. Camp rules.