CAPTIVE SURGEON IN HONG KONG
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singlets at 0.50 each. Salt then cost m.y. 1.20 per pound and sugar 1.00 per pound. Many items however were quite useless to us because no one would spend money on them under our conditions. For example there were pipe cleaners, mosquito coils, leads for eversharp pencils, mirrors, after shave lotion etc., and these obviously came from peacetime stocks which the compradore could not sell anywhere else. As time went on the stock lists grew shorter and the prices higher. In January 1944 Taikoo treacle cost m.y. 10.00 a tin and syrup 10.80 a tin (two months later syrup cost 19.20 a tin). In March 1944 corned mutton was m.y. 9.00 a tin. In January 1945 syrup cost 85.90 a tin and by July 1945 the price had risen to m.y. 528.00. These figures indicate the collapse of the military currency introduced by the Japanese during their occupation.
The account I have just given might be described as lawful trading. Trading between Japanese guards and hospital staff and patients was forbidden by the Japanese, but as I have already described our guards were not notably well nourished and their clothing was poor in quality. They also were interested in trading, and a brisk business sprang up between those on our side who had goods to spare and guards who wanted goods to sell in the market outside. I knew all about this though not usually about detailed transactions and I judged it to be no concern of mine to interfere. I had however to intervene when hospital inmates began to sell hospital property in the form of sheets, blankets, towels etc. Our stocks of such items as these could not be replaced and as we needed what we had I forbade the sale of hospital property of all kinds. I would not care to assert that no further transactions of this kind took place, but the danger of running out of equipment receded.
Ready marketability provided a great temptation to thieving among our people. At the beginning of my charge when thefts occurred we carried out searches, but these were never rewarded since a theft would always be so timed that stolen articles could be passed at once to a sentry and so beyond our jurisdiction. On one occasion the theft of a small suitcase became known to the Japanese by some means unknown to me, for I adhered strictly to the principle of never asking the Japanese to play any part in our internal affairs. This time there was a great to-do and I was ordered to produce the culprit. I never found out who this was but even