Boxing Day dawned fair and quiet. I peeped through a back window shutter to discover a machine-gun post at the Shan Kwong Road corner, fifty yards away, with a young Japanese soldier keeping silent guard. To avoid seeming furtive, I banged open the shutter noisily. The wrong thing to do; he sprang into action and swiftly brought his rifle round to cover me. I grinned; he turned to his pals and laughed, and I breathed again.
At the front of the house an amusing little scene. A Portuguese neighbour, an air raid warden, sauntered up and down the roadway, in full uniform and smoking a cigar. I called to him. Had he not heard that the battle was over? He had not, had just come on duty from his flat further up the road. He registered indignation and doubt. I assured him it was unhappily true. Suddenly realizing his position, he shed his equipment and scuttled off home.
Later in the morning many Japanese soldiers appeared in the streets. Some Chinese youths helped them to start up cars parked in the streets, and they set off on joy rides. They perched all over the cars, laughing gleefully, and some sitting in the open boots. Their progress was a crazy jerking and swerving. In the middle of the road was a small shell hole, a foot deep, and most of them hit it with a terrific bump and much hilarity. They soon tired of their fun. Some of the men looked clean and neat, but some were shabby and dirty as though they had been campaigning for months. Some were very young. Some urinated shamelessly in the gutters. Then with a clatter of hooves more soldiers went by, coming from the stables, mounted on race ponies and army mules which they had found at large.
Two soldiers knocked at our street door, and the family panicked. I took my wife and the children upstairs to join the kind Chinese family there. The callers, one a decent-looking young officer, the other a ruffianly ranker, inspected the flat. They helped themselves to cigarettes, a tin of tomatoes, a cake of chocolate and the last of our oranges. We had carefully put all watches, cameras, fountain pens out of sight. They went upstairs, where the householder gave them a fountain pen and let them take a valuable watch in exchange for their own cheap one.