The next day, with an effort, we began to clean up our future abode. I think it very true that Englishmen are seen at their best when faced with adversity. The worse the situation, the stronger their spirit becomes to face it. Under the appalling conditions we found ourselves, it was heartening to see how all worked with a will, to better our conditions.
How true became the saying that necessity is the mother of invention. Using some make-shift brushes the camp was cleared of rubbish, holes were patched up and some of the R.E.'s attempted to sink a well for a water supply. Unfortunately, due to our location on the waterfront the water was undrinkable. Flies were so thick that we could swot them off the walls and ceiling and gather them up in a shovel. Our discipline was good and gradually we became organised. The R.A.M.C. personnel gathered the sick and wounded into a hut to be used as a hospital, and other units straightened up the camp to make it habitable.
One of our biggest problems was water. For the first few days we were limited to one pint per day per person. Our food consisted of a small bowl of rice at about 9 a.m., although most of us at that time were able to supplement it with rations, we had carried with us.
In spite of the fact that Japanese guards were posted all around the camp, the original fence surrounding it was broken in many places, and for the first two or three nights, quite a number of our men crawled past the guards and visited Chinese families nearby, returning in the morning, because it would have been practically impossible to escape from the island. These excursions ceased when the Japanese re-wired the camp.
Each day our numbers swelled as troops, who had been up in the hills and had not known of the surrender, were rounded up. Later we were to find instances where some of our troops had hidden in the hills for weeks, dodging Japanese search parties, and in a few cases, had managed to get hold of small boats and made their escape to Macau (a Portuguese possession about 40 miles west of Hong Kong).