North Point Camp

They left us there for about a week and then they came in and said we’d have to march to this awful place there in Hong Kong, North Point. It was designed for refugees, they weren’t brick buildings which they usually had. The frame was the usual frame we’d have on the building here but it just had clap boards on the outside, hotter than the dickens, you know. I never saw such a filthy hole. It had the horse lines in there. We had to go in there. We didn’t have nothing and we had to clean all that filth up, overrun with rats. It’s a nightmare that place was.

Well the basic diet was rice, of very poor quality, a lot of dirt in it. You could see where the bags probably burst open, they would sweep it up and everything else would go in with it, that’s what would happen. The place, rats would open up the bags, you know. I assumed it was rats, there were plenty of them around. Well what they would call vegetables, they don’t grow the nice vegetables like we do in the temperate climates, you know. They were leaf vegetables, belongs to the cabbage family, lettuce and stuff but we couldn’t, didn’t dare to use them, eat it raw because you would get all sorts of parasites so we had to put it through boiling water and cook them and that’s less, but for health reasons, of course that’s less appetizing. Fancy eating cooked lettuce and it wasn’t as good quality of lettuce like as we have here. The best vegetable we would get once in a while is what they called yams.