them as comfortable as people could be who were sleeping on cement floors in the basement of the building. The American Consulate people were n on the Peak, in Mr. Bruin's house, there were twenty of them there id they were "all right".
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Later they were taken to Stanley, as also Sir Athol and Lady McGregor and a group of their friends. They all remained out of Stanley as long
they could.
About the 5th of January orders were issued for people to assemble on the Cricket ground, we hearg rumors of this at the Queen Mary Hospital. Everything was rumors, because all telephone connections had been cut, and my last chat with the Blackburns was a day or two after the capitulation. Then everything went dead.
The hospital lived on rumors, we were to be evacuated, the Japanese were taking over, we were to be taken to Formosa, all Hongkong was to be taken to Formosa, the war of nerves was worse than the war with the Japanese had been. Matrons were relieved of duty due to breakdowns, they reappeared after a few days. The kitchen staff walked out because they couldn't endure the brainstorms of the Sister in charge.A pretty little Portuguese masseuse who had been caught at the Jockey Club together with a number of nurses and A.N.S. from the Queen Mary Hospital, and had just escaped raping, many of the others did not, she succeeded in hiding under a bed for eighteen hours and later walked barefoot, disguised as a Chinese coolie woman from Happy Valley to Pokfulam, was severely repremanded by the Primpal Vatran for her carelessness in leaving her belongings behind in the upstairs room which she had been sharing with some other girls. She was told that she should have asked a Japanese officer to protect her while she went to fetch her effects. She told me this story herself, I knew her well and can vouch for it's authenticity.
The situation reached a crisis on, the 19th of January when it was announced that the Japanese were evacuating everyone to stanley Prison. Sick or well, everyone was to go. Packing began frantically, all Chinese patients who could be moved had already been shifted to their homes, or to other hospitals, as also as many convalescent patients of other nationalities. My husband and I talked the matter over quietly, and decided not to go to Stanley, to try our luck with the Japanese rather than go to a place where we would be completely isolated and entirely in the hands of people who had shown us very little consideration at any time. We were following an instinct only, but subsequent events entirely justified the decision. We therefore notified Dr. Selwyn-Clark that we proposed to remain where we were, if necessary with the Japanese soldiers when they arrived.
"
At six o'clock the morning of the 21st Dr.Selwyn-Clark telephoned to say that he begged us to go to the War Memorial Hospital on the Peak where we could be with our friends the Blackburns. He was so insistent that we agreed to this. I might add that orders for the evacuation of the War Memorial Hospital had already been given. The evacuation of patients had been going on all during the previous day, and during that morning of the 21st the Hospital Staff were packed into logries and trucks together with a mountain of furniture and various kinds of equipment. They were then kept waiting for about two hours, no one knew why, sitting in the glorious sunshine, it all happened on a most lovely Hongkong winter day, and was a picturesque sight, the Sisters in their white veils and redlined capes with gay paper parasols over their heads to shield them from the warm sun. Picturesque if one could forget the tragedy it involved.
The amount of luggage evidently annoyed the Japanese soldiers who began tossing out card tables and pouffs and other pieces of furniture and finally ordered everybody off the lorries and went through the mass of equipment, taking out all white blankets and mattresses as well as many other things. They could clearly be heard laughing, when they were not shouting, and seemed to consider it all a great joke. Those same women went that day into bare rooms, just four walls and a floor, and very often the window and door blown out by shell explosions, or perhaps a hole in the roof. I wondered how they slept and how they kept warm. I heard later that they dh't. They had neither beds nor mattresses nor chairs nor tables nor blankets, nor anything else they needed. The nights in the winter in Hongkong are very cold. And the floors in many of the rooms at Stanley Prison are cement or stone.
Dr. Selwyn-Clark told my husband later that never in his life had he seen anything to equal the savage cruelty the Japanese showed in the handling of patients taken there. One or two of them died on the way, if I remember rightly.
no
I