224
DONALD C. BOWIE
Air alerts were frequent and raids were common, though no attacks were directed near to us. During alerts we brought our patients down from the upper two floors and the arrangement worked well enough though I was always a little fearful of our excitable guards urging haste to our patients whose gait and balance were disturbed by disease. Blackouts occurred regularly and added greatly to the difficulties of our night duty staff. I used to lie in bed on many nights when the hospital was blacked out but not alerted and listen to the big American planes flying over Hong Kong, probably from airfields in China on bombing raids on Japanese held territories. Emergency checks on our numbers continued to be held at night time about once a month in addition to the regular morning and evening checks. The night checks got us up from bed for up to an hour. In May we could still use our portable X-ray machines but this was of little value because we had no films. About the same time mosquitoes were a pest and we had a number of cases of fever among staff and patients.
During 1943 I find recurring references in my diary to shortages of fuel and we had parties out regularly on the hillside behind the hospital felling trees. The cooks had an unenviable task trying to make fires with green wood. Food supplies, too, came at intervals which were not regular, and in June for example the rice intakes were so irregular that we had to juggle a good deal with issues. Stocks of sugar both from the Red Cross and Japanese sources dwindled also and we had to cut issues in order not to run out of supplies. By September 1943 eggs cost 1.30 yen each and rising costs generally compelled us to re-examine the system of issuing extra food for patients in need. We established that first priority should be given to patients with suppurating wounds or who had pulmonary tuberculosis; next came patients with gross loss of weight; then came those with acute fevers and those who could not eat rice and with these were banded some of the patients with visual defects, the result of deficiency diseases. In July we had to reduce the flour ration to 104 grammes a day, though to offset this the daily rice ration was increased to 384 grammes. We experimented with combinations of atta, boiled rice and ground rice to make something we could call bread and we even produced some small buns using a little flour as well. We made and issued a soup made from fish heads but this was unpalatable to most and when we abandoned the experiment we thereafter issued fish complete with