salute. Somehow I managed. But the time came when the doctors decided they could do no more and that I would have to return to a cooler climate. Equipped with salves and potions, I was discharged into the temporary Royal Naval barracks built on a dusty plain on the outskirts of Sydney, supposedly to await a passage home. But the United States dropped the atom bombs and Japan quickly surrendered.
I was in Sydney on VJ Day, August, 15,1945, always the lone and interested observer rather than a participant in the celebrations. Within a day or two I had the awaited draft chit — but to go to Hong Kong rather than back to Britain. The Japanese in Hong Kong, and no doubt elsewhere, were ready to lay down their arms, but not until there were British or American forces to protect them from the civilian populations they had mistreated. The Royal Navy scrambled to sweep up all the spare bodies it could find and ship them off to former colonies now to be reoccupied. With hundreds of others, I went from Sydney to Hong Kong on an aircraft carrier, arriving when the actual surrender was still underway and the colony was in turmoil.
During the Japanese occupation, the harbour ferry service between Hong Kong island and Kowloon on the mainland had fallen into disrepair, and there were even pirate junks operating in the approaches to the harbor — pirate junks being in the main regular trading junks which saw an opportunity for a little private enterprise on the side. I was assigned to a party based in the old British naval dockyard in Kowloon, on the mainland, with the task of running a small boat ferry service across the harbour for a month or so until the regular service could be restored. My job was to arrange to feed and fuel the fifty or so men in the group, and the problem was that there were no supplies and no place to cook anyway. I scrounged food off ships in the harbour, but attempts to cook over an open fire, using the top of a metal depthcharge container as a large pan, were not successful.
Equally or more serious, there was no rum. When he was first lord of the admiralty — that is, civilian minister in charge of the Royal Navy — Winston Churchill was asked by a pompous officer to remember the traditions of the service, and famously replied that the traditions were rum, buggery, and the lash. The lash was no longer in use during my service, I’m happy to say, and the occasional incident of buggery of which I was aware, although nominally a serious crime, was ignored. But rum was almost a religion, and it fell within the responsibilities of the supply branch. Ratings aged twenty and above were entitled to one-eighth of a pint of rum a day, mixed with two-eighths of a pint of water to make grog, the idea being that grog could not be hoarded because it would not keep for more than a day. Chief and petty officers got neat rum, while commissioned officers had a private bar in which pink gin was the favored tipple. The rum was bought in barrels and tended to vary in strength depending on where it came from, but it was always stronger than the pub rum we know today. So at age twenty men who might never have tasted spirits before were issued every noon with three eighths of a pint — six ounces — of potent grog.
It was easy to make it a habit — almost a precondition of eating the unappetizing naval lunch, or dinner as it was called — but it was more than that. The daily issue was a secular ceremony of almost mystical importance. “Spirits up” was piped throughout the ship, the rum and water measured exactly into a wooden tub under watchful eyes, and the grog issued to a representative from each mess who would be found in grave default by his mates if it were short even a drop. So it was not enough to dip a measure into the tub and fill it more or less; the level in the measure had to be convex — filled to the fullest extent possible. And every drop of rum in the ship had to be accounted for, which created real problems because the stuff tended to evaporate from the barrels. Anyway, there I was in Kowloon with no rum for sailors demanding their rights. Japanese brandy made from pine needles, which I discovered in a store in the dockyard, was sampled, but found to be no substitute. Nor were the sailors comforted by the knowledge that in lieu of rum they would receive sixpence a day. But the navy knew a crisis when it saw one, and rum was somehow procured after a day or two.
Shortly, catering was turned over to Chinese contractors, known as compradors, who, amazingly, could make both passable meals and a profit out of the naval ration allowance, and I was ordered back to the main base on Hong Kong island. It was a fascinating time, almost like living in a rip-roaring, lawless frontier town. Although the war with Japan was over, the Chinese civil war was still raging, and much of the country was devastated. The United Nations Relief and Rehabilitation Commission (UNRRA) was sending in freighters loaded with food which was offloaded onto queues of waiting junks to be carried up the Pearl River to Canton — although the occasional junk scooted off in the wrong direction, causing much shouting and fist-waving. Divisions of Chinese Nationalist troops passed through, on their way, aboard American ships, to Shanghai to fight the Communists. The Happy Valley racetrack, which had served as a Japanese internment camp for civilians, reopened for business, amid dark suspicions that all the races were fixed. If they were, I saw one sailor who must have been on the inside: Coming away from the track, his shirt was stuffed to overflowing with HK dollars.
The former civilian internees began to trickle back from Australia where they had gone for rehabilitation and were much annoyed to find that their colony had not reverted to prewar customs. Imagine, the insolent soldiery did not automatically step aside on the sidewalks. The securities markets reopened to wild speculation, and it was said that someone had made a killing by tapping the telegraph line to Shanghai and inserting false information. Because many things were in short supply, the black market boomed, a predictor, I suppose, of the remarkable cowboy capitalism that has since made Hong Kong an economic dynamo. Luxurious restaurants reopened, and for a short time even common sailors could afford to eat in them. Japanese officers — mostly, it appeared, short, fat, middle-aged men in stiff, high collared uniforms — were made to run through the streets on their way to be tried as war criminals. But, again, routine health problems removed me from the scene. I was struck down by fever first diagnosed as malaria but then as the much less serious sand fly fever. For some reason, recent cuts and sores reopened and had to be drained by lint wicks soaked in some strange mixture of Epsom salts as I lay on the floor of a primitive sick bay. Then, running closely behind a mate to catch a tram, I went straight into an iron lamp standard which he dodged around. After several days of insisting that it was nothing worse than a strain, a naval doctor conceded that I had broken a small bone in my wrist, and as I couldn’t take care of myself in barracks with my right arms in a cast, I would have to go to hospital. Such luck!
A few more pleasant weeks of leisure, during which I solved the puzzle of why there was a yellow line on the grass all the way around the building: The rumour had got around that the yellow tablets we were supposed to take daily to ward off malaria were in fact a drug to suppress sexual desire, so instead of swallowing them the patients were dropping them out of the windows, and they dissolved in the grass. With my arm out of cast but weak, I was sent to a convalescent camp, once and now again, I hear, a famous resort. And then, after nine months in Hong Kong, I was shipped home to Britain — via the Suez Canal and the Mediterranean, which meant I had circled the world — as a working passenger on a mighty battleship, to await my turn for demobilization. I spent those last few months in what had been a harbour defence base near Devonport, where the important task was to try to get the quantity of stores on hand a little closer to the quantity shown on the books. That involved various tricks for writing off more food and materials than we actually consumed, and the problem, as usual, was rum. It sometimes took several sample tots for a warrant officer to decide that, yes, this gallon jar had gone off, and to sign the necessary papers. When my turn for demobilization came I handed on the task to my successor, and he no doubt to another, and so on until the books were balanced.
I left the navy in the fall of 1946, two years and ten months after I had joined, aged twenty but a “veteran” in today’s absurd terminology. We were offered none of the benefits provided to Canadian and American servicemen and women, but we could choose a suit of civilian clothes from a mass-tailored range. I chose a grey pinstripe suit, natty shirt with a blue weave printed on one side, herringbone overcoat, and a distinctly conservative trilby hat. For years, you could identify former servicemen, including me, by their demob clothes because replacement clothing was still rationed. But if little in my material circumstances had changed, I was not the shy, awkward, naive youth who
