The first air mail leaves today, and tomorrow the internees will be told there's one going every day. Thomas Edgar dashes off a note to his family:
H. K. Hotel
Room 321
Dear Mum and all
Great to be free again Lena & I are fit sorry no time to write any more have only just heard we can send this
Love
Lena & Ooke
The cookhouse staff, depleted by departures for town, take on a supervisory role as Chinese staff arrive to do the cooking. Perhaps some of them use their new leisure to peruse the English and Australian newspapers and periodicals - some as recent as August 18 - which are a much appreciated gift to the camp from the Fleet.
Kathleen Hackett writes to her parents-in-law:
It seemed so endless that it was often difficult to hope for any future and (we feared) that if were not starved to death there woud come a time when the Nips would butcher the lot of us.
The hospital ship Oxfordshire leaves with those former POWs and internees most in need of medical treatment. The ship had been at Subic Bay until it was ordered to join Harcourt's convoy on August 28. It took the patients to Australia and then returned to Hong Kong to evacuate more people.
Sources:
Air mail: Letter of Sybil Swift, reproduced in Andrew Leiper: A Yen For My Thoughts, 1982, 236
Thomas Edgar: Wilfred Edgar Papers, undated note, dated today on internal evidence
Staff, papers: South China Morning Post and the Hongkong Telegraph, 'Stanley Notes', September 4, 1945, p. 1
Hackett: Greg Leck, Captives of Empire, 2006, 420