[
    {
        "id": 214209,
        "series_id": 26,
        "series_slug": "histsyn-rashkb-journal-engine",
        "series_title": "RASHKB Journal 皇家亞洲學會香港分會學刊",
        "series_use_hku_proxy": false,
        "document_key": "RAS-1998",
        "page_number": 67,
        "title": "RAS-1998",
        "content_text": "30\n\nThe author, as a soldier himself, recalls a 'lecturette,' in Britain, while expecting the country to be invaded by Germans in 1940. His army squad was being instructed how to set booby traps. A thin wire was stretched from tree to tree, across a country road at the appropriate height, so that it could slice off the head of a motorcycle despatch rider. This was effectively demonstrated by a mock-up on film and just about everyone present, who were all generally good-hearted, genuine people, laughed. They were acting 'out of character.' But, after all, there was a war on.\n\nThe author recalls during the invasion at Salerno, in Italy, when there was a possibility that the British and American forces would be pushed off the beachhead, British soldier comrades told how they had gone on patrol and how in order to keep two German soldiers from shouting out, knifed them as they slept in their trucks. A Gurkha who was listening to the conversation immediately piped up. 'That's not fair! You should at least wake them up before you kill them!' Everyone thought it a huge joke. Today, looking back under peacetime conditions, it all seems terribly macabre and gruesome.\n\nLin Yutang is quoted as saying, 'Humour is the product of contentment and leisure.' Yet the British tommy was able to crack jokes even when faced with abysmal conditions. It is recorded that, in the defence of Hong Kong in December 1941, the men of the Middlesex Regiment 'never lost their sense of humour' (Lindsay, 1978; 136). Probably the Chinese Communist soldiers, on the 10,000 kilometre Long March, which lasted over a year in 1934-35, did not either, although their sense of humour was, no doubt, different. For instance, the Chinese soldiers used to sing, 'Don't fall behind, don't get wounded, don't get the eight silver dollars' (Lee, 1999). This can be likened to the English World War Two song, 'Pack up your troubles in your old kitbag ....'\n\nBut jokes can offend and one needs to be careful, in some countries especially, not to give the wrong slant to sexist jokes which can ruffle feathers. When talking to a Chinese, whose traditions value filial piety, you do not in the main tell mother-in-law jokes — although there are a few jokes about mothers and their relationships with sons-in-law. Again, in Chinese society, you do not say, where death is more or less a taboo subject, 'You're too slow for your own funeral', or 'He's got",
        "txt_file_path": "txt/dfo323lmgvd/RAS-1998.txt",
        "external_url": "https://digitalrepository.lib.hku.hk/catalog/1g05n0794",
        "rank": 0
    },
    {
        "id": 216090,
        "series_id": 26,
        "series_slug": "histsyn-rashkb-journal-engine",
        "series_title": "RASHKB Journal 皇家亞洲學會香港分會學刊",
        "series_use_hku_proxy": false,
        "document_key": "RAS-2002",
        "page_number": 389,
        "title": "RAS-2002",
        "content_text": "HONG KONG IN THE 1950S AND '60s: REMINISCENCES1\n\nDAN WATERS\n\n323\n\nIntroduction\n\nWhat was it like in the \"good old days\" sailing through the Red Sea in mid-summer with no air-conditioning? Pretty warm I can assure you. That was why, on liners, so-called posh passengers sailing between Britain and Hong Kong used to choose their cabins ‘port (side) out starboard home.' There was a bit more breeze that way. When I sailed through the canal in the summer of 1942, shortly before the Battle of El Alamein, I was on a terribly overcrowded troopship with appalling food, living conditions, and severely rationed drinking water. There were rumours bromide was put in the tea to dampen libido.\n\nAfter the Desert campaign finished in May 1943 we, the troops, were inspected by Winston Churchill who proudly proclaimed: \"When the War is over, all a man will need to say is, 'I fought with the Eighth Army'.\" After victory in North Africa there was the Salerno Invasion and the Anzio Beachhead, both in Italy. I was wounded three times. Half a century later in the 1990s, a puzzled x-ray technician said to me at the Tang Shiu Kin Clinic in Hong Kong: 'Do you know? You've got pieces of metal in your body!'\n\nIt was a bit of an anticlimax, in 1946, when I returned to the building business established by my great-grandfather in 1853. Then my father died and I became managing director. I enjoyed working on churches and other ancient buildings but I did not really wish to do that for the rest of my life. To supplement my work I also went back to college as my studies had been disrupted by the War. I later taught building science part-time.\n\nI\n\nColonial service\n\nEarly in 1954 I applied for a job in Trinidad and went along to the\n\nThe Author delivered a lecture, based on this article, illustrated with slides and transparencies, to the HKBRAS on 7th December 2001.",
        "txt_file_path": "txt/dfo323lmgvd/RAS-2002.txt",
        "external_url": "https://digitalrepository.lib.hku.hk/catalog/mp4901278",
        "rank": 0
    }
]