As 1944 drags on, it gets harder and harder to tolerate the foibles of the other internees.
George Wright-Nooth writes in his diary:
The Fomosan guard...offered cigarettes for sale at MY30 ((thirty Japanese Military Yuan)) a packet...there were some raving idiots who bought them but, foolish as this is, it is better than the bare-faced degraded begging - it makes me sick to see it - of cigarettes from the guards. It is always the same people who do it; they are like a lot of Chinese beggars with outstretched, clutching hands. The guards, rightly so, treat them with contempt and when they have grovelled enough they may get a cigarette among four or five.
Source:
George Wright-Nooth, Prisoner of he Turnip Heads, 1994, 191
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