Ma’s Bar was different to the others; its décor was Spartan to say the least, white tiles from floor to ceiling with a floor that was also tiled. Its walls were lined with four seater booths with a few tables dotted around. And Ma would let her regulars hold a tab to be settled on pay day The girls who worked here were very different as well, they were not the run of the mill bargirl, they were waitresses and as Ma put it ‘good girls’. I can only remember three of them well, Mimi, an attractive moon faced girl, Sadie, who would make a size zero model jealous and Elaine. Elaine was beautiful and knew it, she had perfect almond shaped nails and would spend ages painting them with oil, she could bend them completely around her finger end without breaking them. I met her briefly some years later in the street with her husband and child. She still had those nails.

Mimi, better known as Ma was an imposing woman of indeterminate age, she was large without being fat. Despite being single she had an adopted daughter who would be around five years old when I first started using the bar. Ma’s mother was also still alive and she and her grand daughter would sit on the kitchen steps outside the back door preparing vegetables for the restaurant next door, also owned by Ma. That child was soon to find a step father. Jack Philips was a bachelor with apparently every intention of remaining so. He was fond of a drink and having joined the unit as a navigator soon joined us at Ma’s. It became a joke to tell Ma that Jack thought she was wonderful, or, when Ma left the table to tell Jack she ‘fancied him’:- A joke that soon backfired, they began a relationship that grew stronger until Jack and Ma married. Once having completed his full service Jack retired and settled in Hong Kong. Ma worked tirelessly to get him of the booze and to some extent succeeded as I can remember him drinking his lemon tea in the bar.

As so often happens I lost touch with these bizarre though wonderful people though some years later I took my wife and new born son to see Ma and no doubt had we stayed in Kowloon would have done so again but having split toured from Singapore on promotion life took a different rout and some ten months later we returned to England. It was ten years before I returned to Hong Kong and by then they had disappeared. I enquired after Jack at the Ex-Pats club in Tsim Sha Sui but although people there could remember him no one knew what had happened to him. I did find out from an ex member of maritime by the name of ‘Pop’ Tye that Ma was in fact a very rich woman so one can hope they sailed off into the sunset.