327
in China. They did not complain. In any case Government did not answer letters written to newspapers but people did not generally criticise Government. That was why, when a column called "Tiger Talk" was written by an English solicitor in 1962 and published in the Sunday Tiger Standard, it attracted considerable attention.
The district of West Point, where legalised brothels for Chinese had been situated up to the mid-1930s, was still an important entertainment district in the mid-1950s, with restaurants with 100 or more Chinese tables capable of seating in excess of 1,200. Sing song girls, the Chinese version of the Japanese geisha, could still be found there.
My Chinese wife, born in 1936, lived in Hong Kong during the Japanese occupation. After the War Canadian Sergeant Major John Osborn, who was born in Norfolk, the same county where I was born and raised in England, was posthumously awarded the Victoria Cross. It is the most prestigious British award for gallantry on the field of battle. It was the only such award ever made in the colony.
During the Japanese occupation my wife recalls seeing arms and legs lying in the streets first thing in the morning. Breakers of the curfew had been mauled by Japanese police dogs. Women did their best to make themselves look old, ugly and undesirable. People wandered the hillsides and seashores as hunters and gatherers looking for anything to eat. Occasionally, human flesh was on sale in butchers' shops, something sometimes denied today. As my wife's family owned a salt-fish shop they were better off than most. They had food and something to barter. My wife and her two sisters survived the occupation although their father never forgave them and his wife for not having a son to "buy water" for him at his funeral (Today a symbolic ceremony based on filial piety and the washing of the corpse by the eldest son.).
When I arrived in Hong Kong in the mid-1950s conditions had already improved considerably. Although there was rationing still in Britain, you could buy just about anything in Hong Kong - provided you had the money. I stayed together with other government servants in Winner House, a small hotel at North Point, a district sometimes known as Little Shanghai. A number of Fukienese also lived there.