70 years ago: Hong Kong's wartime diaries

My Love, I hope we'll be able to laugh at it someday but this morning I'm in the mood to write a farewell letter!  We had a shock this week - Cressall the Puisne Judge died.  He caught "Landry's ascending paralysis" - it starts in your feet and goes right up.  He was eventually really suffocated or drowned in liquid in his own lungs which he couldn't cough up - an iron lung or oxygen might have helped.  He was a big strong man - though for the last few years he's played h-l with his constitution.  In Camp too.  He's been smoking innumerable cigarettes, homemade from filthy Chinese tobacco and I think he's also been getting vile alcohol - it's only crude spirits of  wine, coloured and sweetened.  and so all that may have caused the paralysis.  But we are all so semi starved that we might catch anything.  We are doing our best to let London know and the I.R.C. man had a wire from Geneva that there are "disquieting rumours" about our condition and asking for a report.  We must let them know how we are faring but I hate to think of you worrying your head off if you hear about it. A new man has come from Tokyo to be head of the Foreign Affairs Bureau here - he was Consul in Melbourne and was himself interned for 8 months.  Food has been a little better since he came but when our Red Cross supplies are finished at the end of this month the trouble is really going to start.  There are already 40 cases of semi blindness.

Personally I'm ever so much better again - my weight is up to 141 (some of it clothes) and I'm sure my blood count will be all right at the end of this week.  It's the whole general position that is so disquieting and disheartening - the C.S. is doing all he can and I know reports are going out though the Japs are stymieing the I.R.C. delegate in everyway they can.  We can't get money either but soon I fear there will be nothing to buy even.  Some more letters have come in but no more for me. - I have that one letter, No.4 too, of 3rd July last year which I got exactly 3 months ago and no more.  I've been reading it again -   I wish I could remember who "Pam" is - it couldn't be Miss Harrop who was sometimes called Pam - she escaped  into  Free China in Jan'42 and never was interned.  No no I do remember we christened somebody "Pam" - just as we had "Iron Biscuits" but who it was I can't remember.

I have had some lovely daydreams thinking of our reunion and then of course one wakens again to the dull world of a prisoner.  You'll probably find me changed a good deal - for the better I hope. 

Well now I'll stop again - with all my love always     B.