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Things soon started moving and we had a foretaste of what was to come when we had a request from the Red Cross for a list of all casualties and internees in our district. Our “district” was by then no small one but we set to work as best we could be questioning refugees and anyone else we could get hold of, including junkmen from Amoy and Swatow.1 We produced a card-index, on small cards made of cut up envelopes stacked in little wooden boxes: we had no stationery such as to produce a beautiful modern index as we see in the advertisements. Consulates never do see such things; the average Chancery or Registry has a heterogeneous collection of cupboards, sometimes appropriately called presses, filing cabinets of steel and various types of wood, and card-indexes of every variety except efficient ones. Not far from me in my office in Rome I am sure I could find furniture marked V.R.,2 a tribute if you like to the durability of Office of Works furniture but hardly a tribute to the modern mindedness of those who supply us. British traditional conservatism has much to answer for if our offices are not as efficient as they might be. That, however, is a cri de coeur which has little to do with Macao. There we had to improvise; we had not even supplies of all those forms which are supposed to be dear to the heart of a bureaucrat but which are in fact anathema to him as they are to the public. The first glimmerings of the spirit which was to animate my staff throughout began to make their appearance, a spirit which was later to be crystallized in our unofficial motto, a piece of vile dog-Latin composed by myself with full knowledge of its grammatical shortcomings: “Nihil descendit nos”, translated as “Nothing gets us down”. Chapter IV Organization The Lone Flag 32 We therefore card-indexed vigorously the many rumours which reached us, checking where we could. Sometime or other while we were hard at it Wilfred appeared. That is really the only way I can describe it because it seemed that one day he was not there at all and the next day he was at a desk card-indexing. I feel sure that he must have asked if he could help but I have little recollection of his doing so. My impression is simply that he walked in and sat down and my improvised staff had begun. He belonged really to Cable and Wireless,3 was Mauritian by parentage and had come over with the refugees as his wife was Portuguese. Anyhow there he was, making himself useful, a performance he kept up with increasing degrees of usefulness to the end of the War.4 I should point out here, to avoid tiresome reiteration, that my staff grew gradually as new work and more voluminous work had to be dealt with, or as new needs had to be met. They were, if you like, as improvised as the office equipment. I have been criticized for not taking on the older members of the communities, for having mostly comparative youngsters except in specialized jobs such as accountancy and teaching, though even my doctors were, when they joined up, far from old. The reason is this, that the job was essentially a young job, a job for people who had had no time to become routine-minded. Policies and methods had frequently to be changed to meet new circumstances. In addition I was myself young and I had to be the boss, not I hope in a dominating sense, but in a way which might not have worked out well if the staff had been composed of men who, by long experience , felt, perhaps rightly, that they knew much more than myself. I do not say that I could not have found older men who would have joined in well; indeed I did find one or two; but I do say that it was better to get young men and to train them for their specific jobs. This policy I pursued and did not regret it. It is to be remembered that to all intents and purposes, except for the chapter on Nationality, Consular Instructions became on the 8th December 1941 a book of little value to me. It had been one’s gospel, but it was a gospel whose preaching had become outmoded in the peculiar...

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