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Hullo, Again, Hong Kong! Ian H.F. Kerr Ian Kerr went to school in Hong Kong and in North China, and to the University of Hong Kong where he completed his first year of the Inter BSc (Economics). After four years as a prisoner if war in Sham Shui Po he went to Pembroke College, Oxford, where he gained an honours degree in French and Spanish. He worked in business in Japan with Edgar Brothers in Osaka, and in Hong Kong with Swire & Maclaine, Ltd, and then trained in the UK as a teacher. After graduating in 1960 from St. Andrew's University with a Master's degree in Educational Psychology he became an industrial psychologist in London. In 1966 he moved to the University if Sussex where he ran the Appointments Service until retirement. He has since returned to Japan a number of times, with a year at Tohoku University as a British Council Visiting Prifessor, and has travelled extensively in connection with his studies in medical sociology. His home is now in England in Hove, on the Sussex coast, where he is writing a book on his travels entitled Volcanoes I Have Known. W hat started all this was a letter from the University of Illinois popping through my door on a hot July morning in 1995, at my home in Lewes in England reminding me of the fiftieth anniversary celebrations of the liberation of Hong Kong taking place in September. My name was on a Volunteers' list and would I be going? asked Clifford Matthews, recalling that we had been students together many years ago at the University of Hong Kong. Later, after we met at Robert Black College where we were staying during the celebrations, he asked me if I'd contribute a piece to this volume he was planning. I said I'd be glad to, although I wasn't sure how to tackle a subject so far in time from my usual activities. Memory is a funny thing and recalling long buried happenings can be a bit traumatic 221 222 Ian H.P. Kerr at times, especially when they include violent and calamitous events, in my case the war in Hong Kong and subsequent imprisonment. Until quite recently, I had given little thought to my experiences in Hong Kong before and during the prisoner-of-war years. It seemed comfortable for me to leave things that way. But, jolted into looking again at the past, I was stimulated into thinking a little about the nature of memories. How truthful are they, after so long a lapse of time? Can they be trusted? And horrible memories can dominate a whole lifetime. Last summer the UK media carried an astonishing spate of hatred-charged recollections of the war, many of them about Japanese soldiers and the awful things they did. These remain incredibly sharp in the recollections of British veterans. But about my personal war the curious thing is that my own memories are not at all extreme although my battle experiences contained moments of sheer terror and real danger. I emerged from all this without a scratch, physically and mentally (so far as I am aware), despite the fact that many awful atrocities were undoubtedly being committed round me in those confused last days of the war near Stanley and Repulse Bay as I pursued my way unscathed to safety at Stanley. Was I lucky or was I just young? This probably says something about the reactions of an eighteen-year-old. Nothing is taken very seriously, and you accept whatever happens to you without complaint or bitterness. My younger brother who was interned at Stanley during the war told me a curious story. After the Japanese had crossed the border into the New Territories he and my youngest brother, the two then aged fifteen and eight, were in our house in Taipo on their own. Their job was to pack in a few suitcases what they could carry of the family valuables. No one else was there, apart from the servants, who had their own worries. My father and I had already been called up and my mother, too, had to leave for Hong Kong on war work. A good neighbour drove the two boys into Kowloon, only just in front of the enemy. My brother said that they were among the last people to escape and as they drove along they noticed that British army units, following the British plan of retreat, were...

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