Phyllis Harrop goes to Rosary Hill Military Hospital to see if she can get a note through to the POW Camp (Shamshuipo):
{This hospital} is a large building in a compound of many acres and normally is a Spanish Dominican Monastery, but had been requisitioned as an emergency hospital.
While she's there she's taken to see the grave of her friend Brenda Morgan, 'with whom I'd arranged to spend the Christmas holidays':
She had been killed when the hospital was shelled and had been buried in the Monastery Garden.
Dr. Harry Talbot operates on Sir Arthur Blackburn
Sir Arthur is the Counsellor at the British Embassy in Chungking and he's been caught in Hong Kong after coming to the Colony for medical treatment - he sustained damage to his ear and knee during a Japanese bombing raid on the wartime capital of Free China.
On January 6 he was sent to the 'War Memorial Nursing Home' where the British staff were still at work, and on January 10 he went to the Queen Mary Hospital for X-rays, which confirmed Dr. Talbot's opinion that an immediate operation was necessary. This takes place today - 'he found it necessary to do a radical mastoid operation and make me a new earhole'.
Sources:
Harrop: Phyllis Harrop, Hong Kong Incident, 1943, 112
Talbot: A. D. Blackburn, Hong Kong, December 1941-July 1942