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roads or the bridges that were guarded by the British, but would manhandle their artillery over the rough terrain. Their light canvas and rubber split-toed boots were ideal for a silent approach at night. The Japanese commanders must have pondered over their meals of prawns, miso and sake, as to why the British seemed totally unconcerned at their close proximity. The answer was simple: arrogance. The Japanese were thought of as coolies.
    To the surprise of the British and Commonwealth soldiers in Hong Kong, it was the Japanese bars that sold the cheapest alcohol and the pretty girls working there were certainly the best listeners. The combination of a pretty face and alcohol (worldwide) overwhelms and disengages a man’s tongue from his brain. Everything the girls heard of military importance would be passed on to their paymasters.
    In the back street shadows, the dimly lit “last-stop” opium dens flourished. Young Chinese men handed over their life savings for this long looked forward to moment. They would never know hunger or pain again. The rest of their short life would be spent in the confines of a small bamboo cubicle gently slipping from one moon-poppy induced dream to another. Their final dream would be a dream of painless death in the soft arms of Morpheus’ beautiful daughter. A noisy funeral with gongs and cymbals, plus a loud “wailing and a weeping” (real tears shed) by a crowd of professional Chinese mourners, were all included in the initial price of entry.
    Hong Kong was also a haunt of various dissidents. One of the better known was Nguyen Ai Quoc, better known in later life as Ho Chi Minh. We saved Uncle Ho from the French. In the lantern lit shadows of the Chinese quarter, Triads lurked.
    The British troops soon realized that they could have made-to-measure cotton shirts and slacks within an hour for a pittance. These items of clothing would be used by those who harboured devious intensions of gaining sexual pleasures without paying. “Jolly Jack Tar a-shore” was the most consistent offender and had all the advantages: a moveable home that had more passageways than a termite hill, bulging pockets that had to be empted in fourteen hours’ shore leave and a sailor’s desperation and poor taste in judging the qualities and age of the opposite sex when “Oliver Twist”.
    Servicemen found that all the best places and bars were out of bounds to the common ranks. Snobbery in the British Armed Forces was rampant. Each layer of humanity looked down on those below. A common serviceman could get drunk several times a week, eat well and still have some money over for other pleasurable pursuits that alcohol seems to inflame. Friday and Saturday nights were usually the same for the Royal Scots and the Middlesex Regiment. Primed and ignited by alcohol and the old jokes concerning the Jocks favouring the company of sheep etc. would erupt into fights. Once these matters were settled, there were other attractions of the female variety.
    If a soldier had the money, he could afford the price of a higher class female. These beauties resided on Golden Hill (where the officers went). At Golden Hill, a common soldier could nimbly caper in the chambers of a beautiful Chinese girl without the fear of catching the dreaded “French disease” – or, as the French called it, the “English disease”. The dispute as to which seafaring nation had introduced this unpopular malady to the innocent natives of the beautiful Pacific Islands had gone on for centuries. In 1941, the treatment for this aliment was akin to the worst kind of torture. It was a case of “five minutes pleasure on Venus; two years of agony on Mercury.” The instrument of excruciating pain was the dreaded “umbrella” applied to the one eyed “trouser snake.” Old soldiers and sailors of that period loved shocking younger men like me with tales of the umbrella and it was always