70 years ago: Hong Kong's wartime diaries

In the afternoon Y and I went to Christine Corra’s 21st birthday. I had made her an ash tray for the occasion. I cannot claim that the idea was original for I saw Hill making one first and it was he who gave me the principal piece of material, a rectangle cut from the shell case or cartridge of an AA shell. I don’t know the technical name for this metal or alloy, but I believe it is made from a compound of copper, tin and zinc. It is very tough; it can be brought to quite a bright polish but it seems to dull rather quickly though I imagine the metal quickly forms a protective oxide on the surface and further corrosion is then arrested. So it is not the most suitable of metals for this purpose.

However, with an ungainly 2 lb ball headed hammer and ye olde blacksmiths anvil, I managed to hammer out a rectangular ash tray with a lip, leaving an indented or ‘beaten’ surface finish.  Then I fished out our old matshed latch key, scratched its outline on the tray and with a small chisel, cut out the key shape from the centre of the tray. Then I filed the edges smooth, pushed the latch key into position (it was slightly thicker than the tray and so its surface is therefore slightly raised) and then got the tin smith to run a little solder into the crack or joint to hold it tight. It was a job scraping and cutting off the superfluous solder, but I managed it with the aid of Jack Armstrong’s pen knife (on condition that I sharpened it again for him!); Y polished the whole thing up with wood ash and it really looked presentable. I had not time enough in which to cut an inscription, but if Christine wishes, I can put on her name, date and ‘Stanley Internment Camp’. I wish I had thought of the idea for Yvonne’s 21st. The latch key purports to be a ‘Yale’ and on reversing the tray the words on the back of the key are ‘Made in Germany’!  A British shell case and a German key: not inappropriate and, I hope symbolical of better relations in the future.

The party was sumptuous and Christine had some lovely presents considering this is an internment camp. Someone had sent her a box of paints from town from ‘Daddy’, who is a prisoner of war at Sham Shui Po. The Corra’s are Austrians by birth and though they applied for British nationality some years ago, they have not yet quite completed the necessary 5 years. Mr Corra lost his very good job in ‘Standard Oil’  ‘A.P.C.’ or ‘I.C.I.’  (which ever firm it was) when the governing body of the firm decided to employ no foreigners. Mr and Mrs Corra and Christine were all interned as enemy aliens for the first few days of hostilities in HK, but I am glad to say Mr Corra was allowed to join his unit in the HK Volunteers, and Miss and Mrs Corra were allowed to resume their VAD duties. They are naturally sensitive to this position and some people in this camp have said the most unkind and outrageous things to them. I am quite convinced they are intensly pro-British and anti Nazi though naturally enough they love their own Austria. I have met Mr Corra once only, but Christine and Mrs Corra are really charming. Christine has a younger brother in America. She hopes after the war to go to America to study art.

Christine and Yvonne now take a class between them at the camp school at St Stephens. They take alternate days (Mons to Fri from 8:30 to 11 with 5 half hour periods. They have a mixed class of children, from 9 to 11 years old. They have worked out their own syllabus which I believe includes Scripture, French, Arithmetic, Dictation, Spelling, History, Geography and Drawing………oh, and English grammar. Christine is Catholic and Y Protestant and they both teach Scripture (Old Testament) so it is very democratic or interdenominational (or whatever the right word is), though I daresay they attempt nothing in the nature of doctrinal instruction. Yvonne seems to enjoy it considerably. They started about the middle of October. 

The other exciting piece of news is that there is a whole consignment of goods from Australia, brought here for war prisoners in the Kamakura Maru. The prisoners of war in Sham Shui Po and Argyle Street Camps have had their allotments and the remainder is for Stanley Internment Camp. The list of goods is as follows (to be divided amongst the 2400 now remaining here):- 3,600 individual parcels – 500 boxes of sugar – 100 cases of tea (Indian I hope) – 130 x 28 lb cases of cocoa – 30 cases of vitamin caramels – 76 cases of dried raisins – 27 cases of dried fruit – 113 cases of dried pears – 120 bales of assorted clothes – 4 cases of hats.

No one seems to know how much the boxes of sugar are likely to contain, but in any case we can get 1/5 of a box per person and I doubt if any box would be made to contain less than 20 to 25 lbs of sugar - so we should get 4 or 5 lbs each. That will be marvellous! One hundred cases of tea sounds a very liberal supply and the cocoa works out at 1 ½ lbs per person! And it seems we shall each have a fairly liberal helping of the other things. It sounds horrid to gloat over and calculate out the gifts in this way but one has to allow for the mental outlook of an under nourished internee who has been largely cut off from all his accustomed luxuries!  Anyway, our Australian friends who sent out the gifts would, I think, be pleased and gratified if they could see the excited anticipation that the news has created. Now we are only afraid it may never actually get here!

Mr Zindel has, apparently opened one of the individual parcels and says they contain 12 different things. What these different things are we are not quite sure and (as is usual in this camp) the length of the list and variety of articles has grown and grown and now includes a tin of bully beef, cheese, butter, milk, 4 lbs chocolate, a tinned cake, plum pudding, tobacco etc. Well time (we hope) will prove.