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DONALD C. BOWIE
ment and my diary specially records that one incoming draft of patients were showing serious losses of balancing power. I recorded also that in October I was pressing for patients for admission to be allowed to bring with them a change of clothing. Earlier in the year in April an officer of the Hong Kong Volunteers was brought over to us as a special admission, having been operated on in Argyle Street ten days earlier as an emergency undertaken to close a perforated peptic ulcer. The excellent result for the patient must have been very gratifying for the surgeons who had to overcome many difficulties. I recall only about four occasions in two and a half years in Bowen Road when special admissions for consultations for individuals were arranged, and of these two were for non-urgent eye conditions.
From time to time we were given materials for boot and clothing repairs. The boot materials were good, but I noted that in August the clothing material included 18 old khaki drill trousers and 17 old white pants. I had myself been lucky with my own shoes because soon after our surrender one of my patients offered to fix for me rubber soles cut from the outer cover of a motor tyre. The result was a little clumsy but of course the soles never wore out. On 24 October we had a good intake of Red Cross clothing which I was told by the Japanese was for our staff only while stocks for patients would follow from Kowloon. I arranged distribution to the staff but accepted nothing myself, fortunately for the promised second delivery never arrived. There was much ill feeling among certain patients as a result. Over two years' experience of the readiness of a Japanese to make a confident pronouncement upon a subject about which he knew nothing, and of his own ability and that of his colleagues to state something entirely different a little later, should have made me more wary. The opportunity to make this sort of mistake had not occurred earlier nor did I ever repeat it and the allocation of gift stores in the future was made by public lottery. Leonard Mosley in his biography of Emperor Hirohito of Japan published in 1966 writes of the Japanese language "the language is made for inferences and circumlocutions which might be taken as agreement or disagreement, one can never be sure". I cannot give any opinion on this, but if his statement is true and I have no reason to doubt this, the Japanese with whom we came in contact translated their circumlocutions into English,