We Considered Them a Source of Protein

The Japanese used a daikon, which is a white radish, you see it in grocery shops now, they’re a long white radish. You’d see a daikon chopped up in some soya sauce and water and that was soup. In North Point, when the rice came in, we’d get a bad bit of rice at first there, when you’d get served rice, you’d see little, what do you call them, little worms you know, maggots. We used to chuck them out. After a while we considered them a source of protein. Bed bugs, which stink to high heaven if they go across your face, you know. Lice. A lot of the places we couldn’t get a bath. I’ve been three months without a bath. That was in Japan. And it wasn’t a bath. It was when a section would get this big bath tub, maybe half the size of this room, you know, and a fellow would be on one side, the other side and your feet would just touch. And, that was the longest I went without a bath. You try to wash yourself off any way you could, you know. Soap was at a premium too, hard to get it. There were all sorts of diseases. Beriberi, which can take either a wet form, where your, the edema in your legs would swell up and all over your body, or a dry form which is just like putting electric wire to your foot and getting nerve shocks. Body sores. You had no resistance to anything. I had a lot of cellulitis, which is infection under the skin, like a big boil. Boils were another thing. Some of the fellows had a lot boils on them. And, I had pneumonia, pleurisy. See, the system they had there is that so many men had to go out to work every day and unless you were really down and out with your particular disease, you went out to work, because it was based on work. I’m not sure if it was North Point or Sham Shui Po. I can’t remember the exact time frame there, where diphtheria was going rampantly. You were either a carrier or you had it. The medical officers up there had asked the Japanese to give them a horse. They figured they could make a serum to combat it but they didn’t get it. There was no Red Cross medicine. Matter of fact, in nearly four years as a prisoner of war, I saw three Red Cross parcels, never more than one split with maybe five or ten men. That’s when you’re starving, you know. Some fellows would trade it off for cigarettes.