I must have been feeling a little blue when I made my last entry! Since then a crop of more cheerful rumours have been circulating and the food rations have improved slightly so I am feeling a little more cheerful.
The flour ration has been increased of late to as much as 4 oz (112 grams) of flour per head per day. I do hope this increased ration will continue for it means that if we can build an oven we can have almost ½ lb of bread each per day and that will make a tremendous difference to our food. About 3 weeks ago the food situation seemed to be getting worse and worse and all of us felt we were literally starving: I felt weak and lethargic and we all lay down and just slept for about 2 hours after the eleven o’clock meal; at nights I was kept awake by the pangs of hunger and could do nothing but lie and think of food. It really was wretched.
Maudie Minhinnick who weighed 188 lbs when she first arrived in Hong Kong in June 1939 had reduced her weight to 156 lbs just before the war by a course of exercises: now, with no particular exercise at all, she weighs 133 lbs! Still, she is looking very fit and well and if she does not lose any more weight she will not suffer for this enforced dieting. Yvonne weighed 135 lbs at the beginning of December and she now weighs 115 lbs. She really has a beautifully sylph-like figure which greatly pleases her and she is even prepared to admit she was too fat before this internment. She means to keep slim after the war…………I wonder! I have always been pretty lean; I weighed 154 lbs when I came to Hong Kong in 1939. By last December I had lost 9 lbs which brought me to 145 lbs, this being exactly my weight on leaving school at the age of 18. Now, at the age of 29, I have lost 11 lbs more and weigh only 134 lbs (60 kilos). I have lost less weight than most people here, chiefly, I think because I have very little surplus flesh to lose.
Harold weighed 165 lbs in December; he now only weighs 134 lbs. He has lost 8” round the waist! Poor old Mr Wilmer has lost 50 lbs since he has been here and many of the stouter men and women have shed a similar burden………many of them, it must be admitted, look all the better for it, though the reductions have been a little too quick to be good and have now reached a stage where further reduction will only be weakening.
Many people are deficient in some food or another. Yvonne had an outbreak of spots on her face about a month ago which turned out to be impetaego. This was due chiefly to lack of calcium. In the early days of our internment the Canavals came to our room one evening and Helen mentioned the fact that the lack of calcium would have very bad effects on people – skin, teeth etc……and she wondered how we could possibly produce calcium. I suggested, that if the grissel and animal matter could be dissolved out of the beef or buffalow bones that are sent for our rations, it would leave more or less pure calcium. I had in mind dissolving it with acid. Helen thought that a good idea, consulted a little chemist here and in a day or two she issued calcium powder to all the people in these blocks 2, 3, 4 and 5. It was a very good effort. I think that after the bones had been boiled and boiled for stock, she gets them burned somehow so that all animal tissue is burnt away and then the hard calcium is ground down into a powder. I believe this particular form of calcium is not easily absorbed by our systems, but we must absorb some of it at any rate. Very little food is wasted in this camp!
There has been much trouble about the cooks. Many people have complained……… and often quite legitimately………that the cooks have been eating considerably more than their rations of food. Few people, if any, objected to the cooks taking their small perks, but unfortunately they considerably overstepped the mark in many cases. An enquiry was instituted, following some letters of complaint that were submitted by various people; Tim and Harold composed and signed one of these letters. The findings of the special enquiry committee were that the rations reached our store room in full measure, thus exhonerating the ration squad; the quantities issued to the cooks in full measure - clearing the storekeeper - but leakage occurred during the process of preparing, cooking and serving the meals. Mrs Lucas, the caterer and Keates, chief cook of the second cooking squad offered their resignations, which were accepted. Some caustic comments were shouted by members of Block 5 when Charlie Ingledew, chief cook of the first cooking squad, was appointed chief cook of the combined cooking staff; but Block 5 is, by common consent, the most ill mannered and disgruntled block in our community………more scandal and slanderous accusations seem to emanate from them than the other three blocks put together. However, they were ‘shushed’ and Mr Sanbach asked people to give the new rules and arrangements formulated by the committee a chance of working. Stores were to be issued by a storekeeper and the chief cook was to keep the key. This announcement brought forth fresh hoots.
Ingledew was not present, fortunately. From the beginning of this internment camp he has acted as chief cook for the squad of seamen (most of them skippers of coasting vessels who were caught here at the outbreak of war) who started cooking meals for the community in blocks 2, 3, 4 and 5 before the camp had any internal organization at all. In fact at one time they were cooking rice and soup stew twice a day for over 1500. They are a very nice crowd of chaps and have worked extremely hard, as I can witness because of my association with them whilst building additional kitchen stoves. One of the regulations was that supervisors should be appointed to inspect the cooking and distributing of food; another was that two groups of cooks should be appointed (mainly the same personnel as before) and should work as before doing 3 days on and 3 days off duty.
The Ingledew gang of cooks objected to both regulations and after much hithering and dithering and committees it was decided that their resignation en mass should be accepted and a new squad appointed. So now there are two squads, each with its chief cook, Capt. Ried and Mr Leslie, with Mrs Greenwood as caterer; she it is who decides how the food shall be prepared and she simply works like a Trojan, doing a good deal of the actual preparation herself and working day after day without a pause. I believe another woman has been appointed to take 3 days alternate duty with her but she evidently feels she is the only one capable of doing the job! The new arrangements seem to be working quite well at any rate.
All ‘burnt rice’ (the encrusted skin left on the rice pan after the boiled rice has been removed) is now sent to the clinic where it is fried in oil and given to the children for breakfast. It used to be eaten by anyone who managed to scrounge a piece - the cooks getting first whack - and there were crowds of people who flocked round the cookhouse door at each mealtime. I worked in the kitchen on the stoves and I always managed to get a big tin full of rice pan scrapings which I took back to our room and shared between the eleven of us. This rice biscuit is really excellent as it is very hard and is good exercise for our jaws - most of our food needs no chewing at all. I must say, though, that it was a hateful business hanging around and collecting this burnt rice with everyone else trying to get a piece, and I was quite relieved when the new regulations precluded its distribution to all and sundry. As a matter of fact, supervision of the cooks has already become a merely nominal duty that is hardly ever carried out by members of the committee due, no doubt, to the feeling of embarrassment caused by the hostile looks of the cooks! Anyway, a good deal of burnt rice still does not reach the clinic, though apparently the clinic gets as much as it wants.
It is significant that all the other blocks, with perhaps the exception of the bungalows where the numbers amount to only 40 or 50 in each, have had trouble with the cooks and the cooking staff in general. This must be because food is so scarce and is so precious that we all watch it and its preparation with eagle eyes; also, if the cooks and their families had plenty of food, there would be small temptation to take any from the community.
The standard of morals in this camp has sunk to a very low level: the imperceptibly fine line between scrounging and thieving has, in many cases, absolutely vanished. Peoples’ washing disappears from the lines; mugs, spoons, etc. that are not clearly marked have a tendency to disappear and if a mug, say, similar to a lost one suddenly is included amongst one’s after tiffin washing up, the idea is to hang on to it until someone enquires if a such and such coloured mug has been found, and if no one comes to enquire, well so much the better for you; little or no effort is made to find the owner - for the very good reason, of course that it might possibly be the mug that was pinched from you three weeks ago, and anyway, as yours was pinched you had a right to replace it if the owner was careless enough not to come and reclaim it!
One really forms a habit of automatically picking up things that one is in need of - of helping oneself, say, to a few screws from the precious store in the community tool shed without asking if they have been reserved for anything; of getting permission to obtain things for the community and then keeping some of the things yourself - say planks of wood or odd tools such as a hammer. I am sure a lot of that has happened.
The other day someone had left a roll of toilet paper in the lavatory (a very rare commodity these days) and really my first thought was to help myself to some of it! And then I realised I had no right to it at all. I wonder how long, after we get out of here, we shall continue to think in this manner!
Then, the spirit of camp life here is very low indeed. Everyone is just out to fend for themselves and their families and maskie anyone else. When the additional rations that hard manual labourers were getting were cut right out because of the very small rations the community as a whole were receiving, most of the men just stopped working altogether. True, most of us felt so weak that we could do only a little work, but the work had to be done, rations had to be fetched, wood had to be sawn, drains and gutters had to be swept and kept clean and refuse had to be disposed of, and most men could have managed 2 hours per day.
I have been disgusted by many people here; it takes the unusual in life, sometimes to show what we are really like. And some of the biggest grumblers and biggest talkers are often those who are least willing to do a job of work. I do not consider our small community in room 11 exceptional in any way, but Jack, Harold and Tim have kept on with wood sawing all this time (until Harold was ordered to stop work by Dr Canaval because he had overdone things and worn himself out); I have kept on with work in the kitchen (building three additional stoves entirely by myself - I have had to carry the heavy concrete blocks, bricks being unavailable, dig the red earth, fetch the lime and gypsum blocks and pound them up and burn them to make mortar, mix the mortar, and cut and lay the blocks - all unaided); Yvonne and Isa have kept on with their work in the clinic; Vera and Marjorie have their respective children to look after, Elsie is the only one who does nothing but her share of the housework, but she is not strong and at the outbreak of war the doctor at the military hospital, where she should have started nursing, told her she was not strong enough for it, so it is best for her to conserve her energies now. She joined Harold at Fire Brigade headquarters during the war and acted as telephonist, stenographer and cook! So I think room 11 has pulled its weight for the community as a whole.
But things have happened here that have made me ashamed of the European community of Hong Kong. I must record my disgust at the behaviour of Justice Cressal, Puisne judge of Hong Kong. His conduct during the war was most reprehensible when he seemed to loose his nerve. He was attached, I think to the Food Control and would not go out during any shelling. He apparently parked himself on the War Memorial Hospital, where he was not wanted, and was drunk for most of the days of the week. When he came to the camp it was found he had appropriated to himself a large quantity of the food from the Food Control stores that should have gone to the community - and strange to say Sir Athol Macgregor has tried to shield his actions. Sir Athol’s sense of brotherhood of the law must be very strong.
I have always disliked Mr Justice P. Cressal since the first time I met him at the Kilies birthday lunch at the Hong Kong Club shortly after Cressal had arrived in Hong Kong - a great mass of boastful flesh and blubber, full of his own importance; why the Minhinnicks ever tried to cultivate his friendship I cannot think; Minnie says she now certainly has no intention of continuing it. Cressal must have lost pounds since he has been here and he really looks very fit and all the better for it.
Cressal is by no means the only black sheep, but on the other hand there are many real heroes and heroines amongst us, of people who behaved and are behaving magnificently, and are worthy of our national traditions and spirit.