Ron Claricoates
Ron Claricoates was a medical orderly in the diphtheria hospital in ShamShuiPo.
He was a quiet, unassuming fellow, and one of the most dedicated and
hard-working of the kind and gentle men who risked their lives to provide comfort
for those of us who needed it.
As stated elsewhere in this rambling account, I was a patient in the "Dip" hospital.
Next door to our room was a fellow who was very sick and wasn't expected to
survive.
One night I awoke  with the urge to go to the bathroom down the hall. The
hallway was dimly lit, and as I came out of our room I saw a figure lying next to
the wall, and covered up over the head.
I assumed that poor old Joe had passed on, said a little prayer over him and
continued on to the bathroom.  When I returned, two minutes later, the corpse
was gone!
As the Englishman would say, "That shook me rigid!" What had happened? I
crept back to my mattress looking over my shoulder..
The next morning I found out. Ron had taken forty winks, lying down on the floor
with a blanket over his head. When I was in the bathroom he got a call and left
and took his blanket with him! Mystery solved.
Electric Cigarette Lighter
In the Jubilee Building that was used as a diphtheria hospital during the epidemic
of 1942, there was still electrical power available.
Tobacco was scarce. When we were lucky enough to get a cigarette, it was
carefully broken into four pieces, and the tobacco was rolled into four small fags,
using the brown toilet paper that was issued to us.
The toilet paper was a good substitute for the real thing, but even that became
scarce in due time.
But this story is about a cigarette lighter. As mentioned in the story about the punk
box, even a light was sometimes hard to find, However, mere prison life could not
thwart the ingenuity of the dedicated smoker!
Some bright lad had invented a lighter using a tin can full of salt water, a shard of
glass with a wire attached to it, and another wire attached to the can.
When the wires were plugged into the wall socket, they  would glow red,
providing a light for your cigarette.
Bright lad that I was, I decided to make a cigarette lighter. I got everything ready.
One wire attached to the can, one wire attached to the sliver of glass in the can of
salt water, both wires plugged into the wall.
Perfect! The wire glowed red, and my experiment was a success! Bright lad that I
was, I grabbed the can with my bare hand to set it back out of the way.
POW! I got an electric shock that threw me halfway across the room! That was
the end of my cigarette lighter! I was lucky that nothing worse had happened.
I could have been killed, or if the Japs had found out about it, I would have
received a royal hammering.
Yeast is Yeast
In ShamShuiPo, the Japs used to take a miscreant to the old tennis court to beat
him up. This became known as "a tennis courting".
In the early days at ShamShuiPo, many ideas were tried to stave off the effects of
malnutrition. One of the ideas that was tried was the drinking of yeast. Yeast is
self-generating as long as flour and water are added to the existing batch.
Every day we lined up and received a dollop of the foul-tasting stuff. At that time
we were grasping at straws to find anything that would fend off beri-beri and
pellagra.
Over the pot some wag had placed a sign admonishing us not to waste the stuff.  
It read, " Yeast is Yeast and Waste is Waste, and never the twain shall meet",
paraphrasing a line of Kipling's poem, "The Ballad of East and West."