70 years ago: Hong Kong's wartime diaries

At 5:30 (or thereabouts) we have our evening meal. This generally consists of rice, half a sweet potato, one or two vegetables, a small cup full of soup and meat. The meat, usually a piece about 1½” x 2” is served in various ways: broiled and sliced into individual small pieces and served in gravy; cut up into small pieces and stewed; minced; mixed with rice and fried as hamburger steaks, minced and baked in pastry as sausage rolls or pasties. These last two are easily the most popular meals. The pasties are really quite large and we have only half the usual quantity of rice with them. In every four days we usually have sausage rolls in the evening of the second day and pasties on the evening of the fourth. Sometimes instead of sausage rolls we have a dinner roll each (about the size of an ordinary 1d roll) which is very nice; sometimes, though very occasionally, we have doughnuts. These are fried in peanut oil, the supply of which is very limited. The pastry for the pasties has perforce to be made with peanut oil in lieu of lard or margarine, so it is often rather leathery and heavy. Sometimes, though, we have a supply of pork sent in; some of the fat is then cut away and rendered down to a dripping or lard. The pasties and sausage rolls made with this lard in the pastry are really delicious.

The evening meals are always the better of the two meals; for one thing, the cooks have more time in which to prepare them. It used to be at this meal that I was given my extra manual workers ration. This amounted to an extra half helping of most of the things on the menu. At the beginning of this week, however, extra rations to most of the workers were stopped, and I must say I feel the difference quite a lot. The cooks, the ration gang and some of the sanitary gang still get the extras. Some dis-satisfaction has been felt by the workers, for none of us was consulted on the matter. It may be that some of the men who find they really need the extra food would have volunteered to work in the cooks’ gangs or the ration squad etc. if they had been given the chance. It is felt that the committee has acted rather high handedly in the matter.

One of the two wood cutter gangs (Harold’s gang) has walked out as a protest against this discrimination. I think that was a great mistake and a great pity, displaying a rather poor spirit. The committee has referred to the squad at the end of it’s weekly bulletin, saying in similar words: already one squad of woodcutters has refused to carry on with it’s work, because of the suspension of workers rations, thus displaying a disgracefully poor spirit; especially when one thinks of our prisoners of war and those who gave their lives, simply because they considered it was their duty and without considering what they could get from it. I think this last insinuation by the committee is unfair; but I think the woodcutters should have carried on with their work while the matter was being discussed.