Nuttin’ but mutton

All we got was mutton. We got mutton for breakfast, mutton for lunch and mutton for dinner. And we never ate anything else on that boat except mutton and that's all they had. It was a New Zealand boat and it was from Australia and they never fed us anything on that boat except mutton. We were so sick and tired of mutton by the time we got to Hong Kong and so some of the people wrote poems about “Nothing but mutton, we got nothing but mutton.” We were on for, well across the Pacific Ocean to Hong Kong is quite a few, it takes about a week I guess by boat to get across and then you stopped for a little while, but they never took any different stuff for us and we couldn't get off the boat in Hawaii. They brought some girls down and did some dancing and played some Hawaiian music down on the dock and they didn't come on ship. They just did it right down and we had to watch from the rail and they weren't going to let us, they had guards on the dock so nobody could get off of the boat.

Mr. Durant talks about the meals on the voyage to Hong Kong.

Gordon Durant

Gordon Durant was born on December 20thth 1921. Things were busy for him and his 7 sisters and 4 brothers growing up on the farm in Saskatchewan. His father lived most of his civilian life with a disabling injury from the First World War. Mr. Durant left school after grade eight to help out around the farm before joining the army at age 17. After completing basic training, he was sent to Jamaica for garrison duty and then to Hong Kong where he was captured by the Japanese. He spent the remainder of the war as a prisoner of war in Hong Kong and Japan where he worked in the mines and on the railroad.