This event cast further gloom over us and we were glad to volunteer for labor in Japan. This volunteering consisted of being able to walk five paces without limping or falling down. Both Manchester and myself passed the test at Sham Shui Po preparatory to being shipped abroad.
At Sham Shui Po Camp conditions had worsened in our absence. An epidemic of diphtheria was at its height and assisted by malnutrition the death list was long. There was no medicine and it was some time later that a few inoculations of antitoxin were received. Every morning we felt our throats. It was the melancholy duty of the doctors, imprisoned in the Camp, to inspect our throats daily. Those found infected were removed to the so-called hospital, really a death house with no medical supplies and little food or attention. The chance of coming out alive was a slim one.
I awoke one morning with a sore throat and was examined for diphtheria, but was not removed until the doctor was certain. It was found I did not have the disease, which I accredited to the fact I had already had it in earlier years.
Supplies of food were getting scarce. That Christmas of 1943 we received one British Red Cross parcel. This was the only Red Cross supply I saw during my fourteen months stay at Hong Kong. What joy there was on the receipt of these parcels! The men hugged them to their chests as they carried them away and though close to starvation did not wolf them. We had learned the necessity of conserving food. A few thought, and said, “Now all will be well. We will be getting a parcel every week. Let us eat to the full.”
Most being governed by the bitter disappointments of the past carefully apportioned their parcel and used its contents carefully to supplement their meager daily ration. This is what I did though I ate enough at a time to derive benefit. A friend of mine, a very thoughtful fellow, had it all doped out that about a spoonful a day would make his parcel last a long time. I reasoned he would get no benefit from it. He went on his spoonful a day but soon quit. He devoured his parcel before mine was finished.
The habit of hoarding food for a last emergency became a fixed one. One prisoner got a tin of bully beef in his parcel and having eaten the rest hung onto this prize. It became a treasure, always in his thoughts, the most valuable thing in the Camp. He hid it by day and examined it at night. He suspicioned his comrades as desirous of stealing it, as perhaps they were. His first thought upon returning to the hut was to see that the tin was safe. Then he sickened and was removed to the hospital, holding tight to his bully beef. He was slowly dying of malnutrition but he still had his bully beef. He had lost the power to open it. He died with the tin clasped in his skinny hand. I wonder who ultimately ate the beef and if they did not feel his ghost protesting.
There was a Catholic Priest in the Camp who made vigorous protest against our treatment and of the disappearance and non-arrival of money apportioned by the Holy See for our relief. He became such a nuisance to the Jap Commandant, who possibly had misappropriated the money, that he was taken away by the Gempi and returned in a few weeks time with his finger and toenails torn out.
It was interesting to watch some of the prisoners trading articles and food out of their Red Cross parcels. A shrewd trader might, by trading cigarettes for a packet of raisins, trading the raisins for chocolate and chocolate for cigarettes, end up by having twice as many cigarettes then when he stated. If the boys had not eaten most of the stuff quickly, the really clever ones would have cornered the lot. I could see how our own civilization works right there. To the clever go the spoils.
In February 19433 about seven hundred Canadians and other prisoners were taken out in tenders and loaded on the Tatuta Maru. We were poured down the hatch and into the hold like so much coal. There were no bunks, nothing but steel walls and stanchions. We were packed so tight that there was no room to lie down. I sat on the metal stairs that went up to the hatch for three days it took to get to Nagasaki. Guards were mounted above and kept a constant watch over us. We thought of submarines but worried little. We were a miserable bunch. I thought of my boyhood and the stories I had read of the old slavers that sped through the night with their cargo of slaves battened down in filthy and stifling holds. I never thought then that I should live to experience something very similar. Many of those we left at Sham Shui Po sailed later in other ships. Some were torpedoed. I knew several fine fellows that went down. In January 1943 we landed at Nagasaki and were loaded on a train for Tokyo
