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and get permission for us to move into the War Memorial Nursing Home, where the British staff were still functioning under the wing of a Japanese Doctor-Colonel and a gendarmerie post. He was able to arrange this for us, and we were fetched in a car and installed in the Nursing Home next day, January 6th. Dr. Talbot, an ear specialist attached to the hospital, looked at my ear and said the postponed operation should be performed without delay as the earhole had become completely blocked with scar tissue and pus was accumulating dangerously inside. On January 10th I was sent down to Queen Mary Hospital for X-ray photos to be taken both of the ear and the knee. The Martins were still there, and this was the last time I saw them. The expedition was of great interest to me since it was the first time I had visited the town since the Japanese occupation. The streets were crowded with Chinese, most of them in mile long queues trying to get cooked rice from "co-prosperity" congee kitchens. All the shops were shut and barricaded but the pavements in Queen's Road and the central district generally were lined with hawkers selling bread ($4 a loaf) and other foodstuffs, and large quantities of looted articles; bedding, silverware, cutlery, etc: one could have got almost anything one wanted, and all this without any apparent interference from the Japanese.
As the X-rays confirmed Dr. Talbot's diagnosis I let him operate on January 13th. He found it necessary to do a radical mastoid operation and make me a new earhole. At the time we expected to be left in peace for a month or so as there were a number of severely wounded British soldiers in the Nursing Home and we thought the Japanese would not insist on them and us being moved until they were fit to be moved. Eight days later, however, they announced that they needed the hospital and that it would have to be evacuated next morning. The military patients were sent to the military hospital at Bowen Road, and the rest of us to Stanley. I was told I need not go to Stanley Camp unless I wished, and I was given my choice of two other hospitals but I said I must go where my doctor went; so I was put on a long chair which was put on a lorry, and with my wife and our few belongings and half a dozen lorry loads of doctors, sisters and patients we went off to Stanley. That was on January 22nd. The place was in a turmoil as lorry loads and boat loads of people were arriving from all the Chinese hotels in Hongkong and Kowloon where the Japanese had congregated them and they were all scrambling for billets. The British personnel from Queen Mary Hospital (from which they and all the British wounded had been moved the previous day) were busy trying to get a hospital organised in a block
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