Shortly, catering was turned over to Chinese contractors, known as compradors, who, amazingly, could make both passable meals and a profit out of the naval ration allowance, and I was ordered back to the main base on Hong Kong island. It was a fascinating time, almost like living in a rip-roaring, lawless frontier town. Although the war with Japan was over, the Chinese civil war was still raging, and much of the country was devastated. The United Nations Relief and Rehabilitation Commission (UNRRA) was sending in freighters loaded with food which was offloaded onto queues of waiting junks to be carried up the Pearl River to Canton — although the occasional junk scooted off in the wrong direction, causing much shouting and fist-waving. Divisions of Chinese Nationalist troops passed through, on their way, aboard American ships, to Shanghai to fight the Communists. The Happy Valley racetrack, which had served as a Japanese internment camp for civilians, reopened for business, amid dark suspicions that all the races were fixed. If they were, I saw one sailor who must have been on the inside: Coming away from the track, his shirt was stuffed to overflowing with HK dollars.
The former civilian internees began to trickle back from Australia where they had gone for rehabilitation and were much annoyed to find that their colony had not reverted to prewar customs. Imagine, the insolent soldiery did not automatically step aside on the sidewalks. The securities markets reopened to wild speculation, and it was said that someone had made a killing by tapping the telegraph line to Shanghai and inserting false information. Because many things were in short supply, the black market boomed, a predictor, I suppose, of the remarkable cowboy capitalism that has since made Hong Kong an economic dynamo. Luxurious restaurants reopened, and for a short time even common sailors could afford to eat in them. Japanese officers — mostly, it appeared, short, fat, middle-aged men in stiff, high collared uniforms — were made to run through the streets on their way to be tried as war criminals. But, again, routine health problems removed me from the scene. I was struck down by fever first diagnosed as malaria but then as the much less serious sand fly fever. For some reason, recent cuts and sores reopened and had to be drained by lint wicks soaked in some strange mixture of Epsom salts as I lay on the floor of a primitive sick bay. Then, running closely behind a mate to catch a tram, I went straight into an iron lamp standard which he dodged around. After several days of insisting that it was nothing worse than a strain, a naval doctor conceded that I had broken a small bone in my wrist, and as I couldn’t take care of myself in barracks with my right arms in a cast, I would have to go to hospital. Such luck!
A few more pleasant weeks of leisure, during which I solved the puzzle of why there was a yellow line on the grass all the way around the building: The rumour had got around that the yellow tablets we were supposed to take daily to ward off malaria were in fact a drug to suppress sexual desire, so instead of swallowing them the patients were dropping them out of the windows, and they dissolved in the grass. With my arm out of cast but weak, I was sent to a convalescent camp, once and now again, I hear, a famous resort. And then, after nine months in Hong Kong, I was shipped home to Britain — via the Suez Canal and the Mediterranean, which meant I had circled the world — as a working passenger on a mighty battleship, to await my turn for demobilization. I spent those last few months in what had been a harbour defence base near Devonport, where the important task was to try to get the quantity of stores on hand a little closer to the quantity shown on the books. That involved various tricks for writing off more food and materials than we actually consumed, and the problem, as usual, was rum. It sometimes took several sample tots for a warrant officer to decide that, yes, this gallon jar had gone off, and to sign the necessary papers. When my turn for demobilization came I handed on the task to my successor, and he no doubt to another, and so on until the books were balanced.
I left the navy in the fall of 1946, two years and ten months after I had joined, aged twenty but a “veteran” in today’s absurd terminology. We were offered none of the benefits provided to Canadian and American servicemen and women, but we could choose a suit of civilian clothes from a mass-tailored range. I chose a grey pinstripe suit, natty shirt with a blue weave printed on one side, herringbone overcoat, and a distinctly conservative trilby hat. For years, you could identify former servicemen, including me, by their demob clothes because replacement clothing was still rationed. But if little in my material circumstances had changed, I was not the shy, awkward, naive youth who had joined up. I was leaner, without specs, more worldly, and with a durable shell around the soft centre of shyness.
I was not then much interested in politics but my experiences had shaped my response to the political wars already raging in what we called “civvy street.” Many of my shipmates were from the working class in regions of Britain where the Labour Party and the dream of socialism were strong, the sort of people who would never have been my friends in peacetime. And the sharp division in the navy between officers and men — far sharper, I think, than in the army or the air force — made me resentful of the sort of class distinction between bosses and workers that I might have accepted as natural in civilian life. The landmark election of July 1945 had occurred while I was still in some remote corner of the Pacific, and it had made little impact on me. I was too young to vote anyway, but I remember that the petty officers, conservative to a man, were deeply concerned that the Labour Party might win and bring their familiar and hierarchical society crashing down.
The Labour Party had helped to make Churchill prime minister, and faithfully supported his national government. But with the war in Europe won, it withdrew from the coalition, forcing an election. At once, ferocious party warfare resumed, and Churchill contributed with an extraordinary attack on the Labour leaders, many of whom had served in his Cabinet: They would, he charged, if elected, introduce “some form of Gestapo” to enforce their plans, and their socialism would lead inevitably to totalitarianism. The press also resumed the prewar party warfare with most national dailies supporting the Conservatives, but Labour won in a landslide, despite Churchill’s immense personal popularity. The vote, I think, was essentially a vote for the values that had been established during the war, for fair shares instead of class and privilege, for a planned and directed economy that would guarantee full employment instead of relying on a market that had in the 1930s produced massive unemployment; in short for liberty, equality, and fraternity, a.k.a. socialism. The war had shown what government could achieve in organizing the national resources of labour and materials, and now we could set about building that famous land fit for heroes. To the extent that it was a negative vote, it was not against Churchill, but against the Tory party which was held to blame for the prewar depression, the years of appeasing Hitler, and for leading the country into war so ill-prepared that we came to the brink of defeat and disaster.
I shared those values and ideas, so when the time came to choose sides in the postwar political wars, I chose Labour. That displeased my father, a typical-middle class Conservative with no confidence at all in the ability of the working class to govern itself, let alone its betters. When the august Times newspaper, which sold for three pence when other dailies cost a penny, supported the Labour government in its early days — as in fact it thought proper to support all new governments — the businessmen’s club to which my father belonged declared it to be a mere “threepenny Daily Worker,” the Worker, of course, being the Communist daily. Indeed, any hope that the wartime spirit might continue was soon shown to be hopelessly naive. Nevertheless, having found my political home — what we now call social democracy — all those years ago, I have never seen cause to change. It seems undeniable to me that democratic government is the best, perhaps the only, agency through which ordinary people can hope to make progress against capital and privilege. By progress I do not mean merely higher incomes, but fuller and more equal participation in a society that raises the quality of life along with the quantity of goods and services we are able to buy. This does not mean I have always supported a party calling itself social democratic. In Canada I have voted for the CCF/NDP, the Liberals, and the Conservatives when that seemed the best way to advance social democratic ideas. The war years did not make me, but they shaped the attitudes I carried into journalism.
A WORKING JOURNALIST
~ Chapter 4 ~
Funerals, Fleet Street, Family Man
Having