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Next morning, the passengers had to make their own way on foot along the riverbank, while their lightened boats were poled and even bodily lifted over the biggest sandbanks yet. By 1 p.m., the men from MTBs 07, 09, 11 and 27 were at least an hour ahead of everyone else, since their boat had found the best route through the shallows. As the leading group walked round the final bend in the river before Longchuan, they were hailed by a small party that had come out from the town to meet them. Towering over the Chinese officials around him was the unmistakable figure of Lieutenant Colonel Harry Owen-Hughes. There was no sign of his famous white steed (in days to come he was often asked, ‘Where the hell were you and your bloody white horse?’). Nor of the battle bowler and gas mask he had worn as he strode through the crowds at Kai Tak. ‘What surprised us,’ recalled Gandy, ‘was to see him dressed in a Chinese merchant’s silken gown and skull cap.’ Whatever he was wearing, the sight of the six-foot-three-inch British military liaison officer excitedly spreading his arms to greet his travel-weary compatriots like long-lost friends was a very welcome one. He became an instant source of badly needed funds, making them less dependent on Chinese hospitality. And he had already managed to procure them each a meenlap, or padded jacket—though these turned out to be on the small side for many, being standard Chinese Army issue. He had also been busy planning their onward travel: they were to set off next day in hired lorries for Kukong. Owen-Hughes had driven down from Guangdong’s wartime capital with two Chinese major generals, representing the provincial governor, General Li Hanhun, and the regional commander, General Yu Hanmou. They had got in the previous evening and begun making hasty arrangements to ensure that Longchuan laid on a suitably grand reception for the returning hero, Admiral Chan Chak, and his escape party. 25 ‘Bow, You Buggers, Bow’ 4 January 1942 . . . 194 Escape from Hong Kong The only problem was that the Admiral himself had not yet arrived, since his boat had got stuck on a sandbank. The men of the MTB flotilla thus found themselves receiving his welcome for him. Drawn up along the riverbank were massed ranks of boy scouts, girl guides and soldiers with coloured paper flags on bamboo sticks stuck down the barrels of their rifles. Ordinary citizens armed with firecrackers lined the surrounding streets. The boats had been expected since early that morning, so the assembled crowds had already been waiting in the blazing sun for some hours and were more than ready to let off steam, irrespective of whose arrival it was they were celebrating . The British sailors did their best to rise to the occasion, but it wasn’t easy, as David Legge explained: We had to make a sort of triumphal march through the town. A more down at heel set of toughs you never saw before. The firecrackers were more of a trial than any of the bombardments in Hong Kong, especially when they kept landing down our necks, setting our bedding alight and generally deafening us . . . You would have thought that we had won the war, instead of being the fleeing remnant of a beaten army. Luckily they did not have far to go. The naval ratings were being put up in a middle school near the centre of town where the headmaster , a Mr Chan Fong, had made ‘excellent preparations’ for them. The school was for children who had been evacuated from occupied Canton. The students had moved out of their dormitories and given up their bedding ‘for our comfort’, noted Barker appreciatively. The officers were assigned to two hotels. Goring described these as primitive, but according to Ashby, the one the MTB officers were in was very comfortable. Gandy merely noted its paper windows. After leaving their gear, they repaired to a large open space in the centre of town where a civic reception was to be held at 5 p.m. Chan Chak’s boat had by this time finally arrived. Owen-Hughes and the Chinese generals had gone downriver in the first of the motor boats to meet it. There was supposed to be a formal greeting ceremony at the jetty, with the British lining up with their Chinese counterparts to salute the Admiral as he...

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