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From Stanley to North Point
On December 30, behind a truck, on the tailgate of which was mounted two machine guns, and with an officer mounted on a horse, parading up and down past the column of prisoners, we were escorted to North Point Camp.Along the way we passed the signs of the recent conflict, burnt-out vehicles, battered buildings, dead bodies lying where they had fallen and rotting in the sun.
The dead bodies were not unusual for these troops, because they had just been through a long campaign in China and were thoroughly battle-hardened. |
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Page 26 |
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Page 27 |
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From Stanley to North Point is a long way, walking behind two machine guns pointed at your head. As I look back, it seems surprising that no one was shot on the pretext of attempting escape, or for any other reason, by those trigger-happy Nips, remembering that the battle was just over and just days before we had been shooting at them. |
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Page 29 |
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Page 30 |
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Page 31 |
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At North Point we were herded into some broken-down wooden huts that had recently been used for shelter for refugees fleeing from the Japanese Army as they pushed south from Shanghai and Peking |
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Page 33 |
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Page 34 |
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There was no furniture except for some double-decker wooden beds, and not many of those. The place was infested with bedbugs, fleas, and lice.There was evidence that the camp had recently been used as a horse corral.We had brought nothing with us except for the clothes on our backs and whatever odds and ends we might have carried. |
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Page 37 |
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Page 38 |
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Four other chaps and I occupied a small cubicle, six feet by eight feet, in the corner of one of the huts. It was a long time before food was brought in for us, and then it was mouldy rice and a sort of green cabbage. When you're hungry enough you'll eat anything. |
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Page 40 |
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Page 41 |
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It wasn't long before the lice got to us. Body lice are huge grey things. When the bite, and they do so continually, you itch and burn unbearably. Frank Bowerbank, a World War I veteran, identified them for the rest of us, telling us tales of the torture of lice in the trenches in France. |
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Page 43 |
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Some enterprising chap built a steam generating device out of an old oil drum, and we scrounged wood to boil water in it. It must have done some good, but as soon as the clothes were put back on, the lice returned.It was winter in Hong Kong, and quite chilly, so it was either suffer the cold or suffer the lice.We were lousy for the rest of the winter, and it was only when the warm weather returned that we were able to control the problem. |
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Conditions out side of the camp were obviously not much better. The camp was bounded on the south be a busy thoroughfare, and on the north by Hong Kong Harbour. Flotsam and jetsam of all kinds went floating by, dead animals, and dead humans, bloated like baloons from being in the water, some, no doubt, all the way down the Pearl River from Canton. |
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Page 50 |
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Photo Gallery |
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Click Here To Go To Part One
Home |
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I hope that my friend Bob Barter, with whom I shared a six by eight cubicle with Lance Ross and Bill Doull, will not mind me telling this account of a dream he told us about one morning.He said that he saw himself in the kitchen of his ancestral home in Grand Cascapedia, and on the kitchen table lay the Bible, open in the New Testament at the Book of The Acts, Chapter 8, Verse 8. We looked it up in the King James Version and the text read: "And there was great joy in that city." Chapter 8, Verse 8, eight words. What did it mean?I have since tried to understand the meaning of the verse, and what portend it may have held for us. I am not superstitious, or even religious, but the idea intrigues me still. |
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Click Here
To Go To
Part Two
Home |
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Our latrine was the harbour, To relieve ones self one had to cantilever his backside over the water and hang on for dear life.My memory fails me here, but there must have been some restraint, more in the interest of keeping prisoners in than in letting prisoners fall into the drink. Some drink. |
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There was a washroom between the huts and the "latrine" with cold running water. Without any soap available, cleanliness was a problem.For the life of me I can't remember where the cookhouse was.There was a parade square where we were lined up to be counted every night and morning, and sometimes in the middle of the night on any pretext. |
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