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.
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.
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
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.
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.
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.
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.
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 balloons from being in the water, some, no doubt, all
the way down the Pearl River from Canton.
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.
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.
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.