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Major General Christopher Maltby, general officer commanding, had only just sat down in his pew from reading the lesson on the morning of 7 December 1941, when a messenger slipped down the nave and handed him a note. He read it, stood and left the cathedral quickly, his party following. The Japanese were not yet invading. The Sunday morning attack on Pearl Harbour was still to come on the other side of the international dateline, but the 52,000 men of their 38th division were making ominous moves along the Sham Chun River. They invaded Hong Kong at 8 a.m. the following day. Maltby’s hurried exit was the first of the events that altered St John’s irrevocably through the fall and revival of Hong Kong in the years to follow. The cathedral saw no battling or bloodshed. There was damage though, a collapse of all that was familiar, and decay and anxiety. The light of worship flickered within it for a while and then went out. Prayer continued elsewhere in the internment camps and in the Bishop’s chapel, which the Japanese mercifully neglected. Then darkness receded suddenly and thin, drawn men and women made their way back to St John’s. A new light streamed in, literally, through plain glass windows, onto a church stripped bare of ornament as they were of fat. Many welcomed the austerity and simplicity of the place as an opportunity for a fresh start and, in many ways, that was taken. The decade of death and resurrection from Christmas 1941, also described by the tenure of Alaric Rose, was a catharsis in the congregation’s history. Attitudes did not change completely, nor did direction alter entirely. Colonial distinctions were not yet dead, but the superiority of the white man certainly was. An awareness of a world in which they were simply a part rather than controller was dawning in the core of the congregation. A new humility was being born. Chapter 6 Out of Darkness, 1941–1953 174 Imperial to International During the battle for Hong Kong itself, services in the cathedral were conducted by Alaric Rose as priest-in-charge and the Reverend Charles Higgins of the American Episcopal Church, who had been seconded as a temporary assistant chaplain. He could have left earlier in the year but chose to stay with his wife and 2-year-old son. They were repatriated from Stanley Camp to the United States under a swap deal with the Japanese, and he submitted a detailed account to Bishop Hall of how matters stood in Hong Kong as he left it in August 1942.1 In the fighting, between eighty and one hundred people attended St John’s on Sundays. They sat quietly as shells fell around the cathedral . The church attracted so much fire because of its proximity to the barracks and the Volunteers’ Headquarters which stood right next door. Altogether, it received around fifteen direct hits from medium shells, including one in the north transept, which passed through the organ loft. David Leigh, son of the first Chinese archdeacon of Hong Kong, a music student and later an honorary canon of St John’s himself, was due to play the organ that day, probably because the organist was fighting with his unit. His mother forbad him to go because of the dangers. Had she not, he would have been sitting there at the moment of impact. The fighting touched the cathedral in poignant ways. Alaric Rose remembers ‘a bunch of Indian soldiers who had been shelled and nerve shaken and wanted sleep’. They found it in the tunnel under the sanctuary. This is one of the rare references to any use being made of that feature. They slept there with their rifles and left cheerfully . ‘I hoped they fared well,’ he says.2 On the last fateful Christmas Day, Higgins reports that he drove, as usual, with his wife, Mary, to celebrate Holy Communion at the Peak Church. Nobody came. He carried on nonetheless and restored the Communion vessels to a cupboard from which they were ultimately rescued by Jesuits. He drove down to the cathedral under sporadic shellfire, to be stopped only by a futilely officious soldier who threatened to report him for unauthorised use of petrol. He was robing for matins when the most damaging shell hit the cathedral tower. It left a gaping hole in the arches of the top section and broke the beam supporting the bells. As the...

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