Australians at War Film Archive

My pleasure.

Alright, I was born in China and so were both my parents and my father is from Shanghai and my mother’s from Harbin. My father was Chinese and English and my mother was Russian and German. I was also educated there and so were both my parents. I was born in a place called Tsingtao, which

is now called Qing Dao. When the new regimen took over they changed a lot of the names of the places in China. Tsingtao is in the Shandong Province in the north of China. I was born on the thirteenth of June, 1928, so that makes me pretty ancient. My Dad was the manager of a large import export company called Jardine Matheson

and we lived a very comfortable life. We had five servants and my mother entertained a lot and played a lot of mah jong and it was just a great social life. Tsingtao was just a very cosmopolitan place. People of all nationalities lived there. There were schools of all nationalities as well and as a child I spoke five languages and most people spoke at least

two languages. They spoke Chinese and whatever country their parents or grandparents came from. Could be Russian, German, whatever. In our case it was English and because my mother wanted me to speak Russian, she spoke to me in Russian. At home we spoke English. My grandmother could not speak English very well so I had to speak to her in German and my

parents chose to send me to a convent with many French nuns and French was compulsory in that school, so there’s your five language. Now I can only speak English and I still understand Chinese and Russian. Life was very social, very comfortable. There were sports of all kinds in Tsingtao and generally speaking everybody was happy there but one announcement on the radio changed our lives for ever and

that was on the 6th of December Pearl Harbour was bombed. The announcement on the radio said, “Ladies and gentlemen, Pearl Harbour has just been bombed, stay at home and I will inform you further.” Well Mother panicked, “What does that mean?” My Father said, “It means that Japan is at

war with Britain.” Within an hour a Japanese officer came to our house and he put a wooden board up against the door with big characters in Japanese, “Enemy”. We were handed armbands. He asked how many people lived in the house. We said “four.” Four armbands were handed to us. “How many children?” “Two.” “Sex?” “A boy and a girl”. At that time I was just getting over typhoid so my hair was

cut very short and I was wearing slacks to hide my skinny legs and the Japanese officer would not believe that I was a girl, so to make a long story short, Mother had to prove I was a girl. We were put under house arrest immediately and liberty only nine a.m. to twelve noon, just long enough to go shopping. That’s how we lived for a few months. Then we were put into our first, they called it a civil assembly centre, which was a large hotel and there we had our first Christmas

and then after about twelve months there they transferred us into another camp in a place called Weifang, which was about two and a half hours away by train. And there were about two hundred of us by now, British, American, Dutch, Belgian, etcetera and we were the first to arrive in this big camp and within the next twelve months

there were more people coming into the camp from other parts of China. There we were interned. The Japanese were not prepared for us. We had to scrounge around for furniture and all that. It was a big missionary training centre. We were there. I was only thirteen at the time. My brother was only getting over TB [Tuberculosis] and within the next twelve months there were two thousand of us in that camp. There we stayed,

lived, had to make a life, big change of life of course. And then, I’ve forgotten the date when we were liberated. I’ve got it written down, I might have to check it.

Anyway then one day seven parachutists, American parachutists, parachuted outside our camp and liberated us and it’s a long story to how they liberated us

because there were always guards posted outside the camp and the camp had electric wire and a machine gun and a large search light on little pill boxes. Well we didn’t go back home until September. After we got back home I had to get a job because I was past school age. I was seventeen by then

and I got myself a job with the American Red Cross and then when they folded up I got another job with the US Port Facilities, Naval Port Facilities and I worked for them for many months and then we were advised by an Australian, a United Nations worker to come to Australia because he said, “You’re so far away that you’ll

never see anymore trouble.” So we took his advice and came to Australia and when I arrived in Australia we all had to get jobs. My younger brother, four years younger than I, had to go back to school but I worked, worked hard and saved enough to go back East. I was not happy here. It was such a different lifestyle, went back to Singapore. I couldn’t go back to China because the

Communists had taken over and we would have been literally kicked out. My father, as a matter of fact, had sent my mother and my brother and myself to Australia first and he caught the last boat out of Tsingtao. So I went to Singapore after four years in Australia and I worked there for seven years and then I came back to Australia. Mother was fretting

and I had intentions of going to London but I had to get a job again, with the police department, where I met my husband and didn’t get to England and now here we are, forty five years married and I have three grown up sons.

We paid our own fare to start with and

my Dad’s cousin was already here and he found a room at Forest Lodge for my mother, my brother and myself. That was the very first place we stayed in, one room for the three of us. It was one of these little terrace houses and then when my Dad came out we had to move, we moved to West Ryde and stayed in another room until he bought this house at West

Ryde and then a year or so later we were able to move into the house.

Yes.

I was nervous.

He was a very gentle, very gentle man. He was a family of one, two, three, four, five, three boys and two girls and his father was an auctioneer. They lived a very comfortable in Shanghai and as a young

man he was a jockey, he played football for the Emperor’s, the Chinese Emperor’s soccer team. He went to school in Shanghai. They called it the Shanghai Public School, which is not as public schools in Sydney. At Shanghai Public School you had to qualify for it, which he did but a very gentle person. I never

knew his parents. His mother died at childbirth, giving birth to the youngest and his father died, never knew him. What else do you want to know about my Dad?

Chinese English. His grandfather came from Bristol, England. He had a verbal altercation with his parents and

left home, joined a sailing ship coming out to China. On the way to China the captain of the ship was murdered and somehow or other he took over the ship. His name was Cook and he bought the ship into China and then he left the ship. This is my great grandfather I’m talking about and at

about that time there was trouble in China. The long haired rebels were fighting, there was a bit of a war there so my great grandfather joined General Gordon who was also known as Gordon of Khartoum and later was called Chinese Garden. He had a little army helping the Chinese to fight these what they called long haired

rebels, so my great grandfather joined him and when all that was settled, when that war was over and settled, he stayed on in China. He did become a general but he always wanted to be known as Colonel Cook. He stayed in China, married a part Chinese girl, had six children and one of these children was my Dad’s father

and that’s how my father came to be in China. My father’s mother was born in England. She was also part Chinese. That’s my father’s story.

He was the managing director and it was an import export company. They exported

beer and I don’t know what else and I’m not sure what they imported but I know Tsingtao imported a lot of American goods. It had a very strong American influence, a lot of American tin foods, American magazines, so maybe he had, was importing that. But unbeknown to me he was also

attached to the British Secret Service and Reuters and I only found out all that after the war started.

Wonderful, very close, took a great interest in the children and was a great grandfather too to my children although he died when my youngest was only two years old, no, three, third birthday. He was a very kind man,

very good but he used to help me in my school work. Maths was very difficult for me. I was a whiz on algebra but maths, straight up maths was terrible and I remember sitting up till late at night trying, he was trying to explain to me all the sums and occasionally he’d hit me on the head with a pencil and say, “For goodness sakes, I’ve just told you,” whack, on the head with the end of the pencil. “Now listen, I’ll go

over it again,” again and again, poor Dad. Another thing he used to be trying to make me eat my porridge for breakfast. I hated porridge, that’s rolled oats. I love it now though and I would not eat it. I’d bring it up, back into the plate, and he said, “Alright, you either sit there and eat it all before school or it will be served up again.” And it was served up many more times

and I ate it. Very caring, that’s all I can remember.

I was very close to my mother also, although at times she was quite domineering and we did have a lot of rows. At the time I was able to speak to my mother more than my Dad I think, even though my

Dad’s parents died when he was barely twenty one and he being the eldest was left to care for his two very young sisters and one had polio and was bedridden, one of the sisters. Yeah, I think my mother maybe, I was close to her. We used to go shopping together, she used to do my hair for me, I did her hair. If that’s close, alright but after I grew up

I did not get on with her very well, no. She was too domineering, wanted to know all my business and still treated me as a child I think and that’s when I decided I had to get out and I went to Singapore.

My mother, I don’t know very much about my mother and I’m sorry I didn’t ask more questions now. Her father and mother met during the

Boxer Rebellion in China. He was a medic, she was a nurse. After getting married and the Boxer Rebellion was all over he got a job with the East Asiatic Bank in Harbin. He was Russian. He was the manager of that bank, so my mother was born there and she had another sister

and two brothers and she used to tell me about her wonderful life. They lived a very comfortable life also. She used to tell me about the cold, snowy weather in the winter in Harbin. They had their own coach with a horse that used to have bells around the neck and she said how wonderful it was all covered in furs to keep warm and this coach galloping through the

roads with the bells ringing and that was a very fond memory for her. She was educated partly in Italy and partly in Switzerland and one day while holidaying in Italy with my mother, my grandmother, her father was not with them, he was left back in Harbin.

They received a telegram saying, “Come back, father very ill.” When they got back to Harbin, they found he had committed suicide because the bank had gone broke and he just committed suicide. Now how he did that, I don’t know. I think, my mother says he probably shot himself. That was a big tragedy and Grandma was left to bring up the children herself.

She had to get rid of the nanny, they too had a lot of servants, one of them was a Russian nanny called Anna Palner and she didn’t want to leave because she had been with the family since the children were very young, so she stayed on and she said, “You don’t have to pay me, I’ll be part of your family, I’ll eat what you eat.” and that’s how they lived. So Grandma had a

hard time once the money was all used up. She had to do little odd jobs here and there to bring up the rest of the family. In the meantime my Dad working, used to travel quite a lot in his business and he used to go to Peking quite a lot and my mother once she finished school got a job as a nanny in,

called Beijing today, with an American family who knew my father and he met her there. According to both my parents they fell in love right away. My mother was only sixteen or seventeen and Dad said “I’ll wait” and he waited. When she was about eighteen or so they got married. I was born when Mum was only nineteen years old and of course she had to leave her nanny’s job and came to

Tsingtao to live and that was it.

Yes.

Russian, all her mah-jong friends except for one lady were Russian, the other lady was Chinese and they played mah-jong all the time, all the time, either in a friend’s place, or our place and the husbands used to drop the wives off on the way to work and

they’d come to pick up the wives from our place but they would always stay for cocktails before leaving, cocktails and d’oeuvres, and then they’d all drive home and I heard Russian in the house all the time, and she wanted me to speak Russian. She said, “You never know when you’ll need it”, so she spoke to me in Russian. I used to answer her in English. That’s

why my Russian was never excellent, but I could understand more than I could speak and I can still understand a lot more now than I can speak.

We celebrated two Christmases, our Christmas and a week later was Russian Christmas so we always kept the Christmas tree an extra week or so. We celebrated our Easter

and then the Russian traditional Easter. We had the traditional cottage cheese dessert, which is called paska, that my mother used to make and we had the Coolidge which is like a sweet bread with orange peel and raisins and everything in it. It was baked in a

tall cylinder like tin and it was decorated with icing and it always had an X and a V, which means in Russian “Christos”, Christ, and “Visgrace”. Visgrace means risen, Christ is risen and that was an X and a V, made out of icing on that Coolidge. I used to occasionally

go to Russian weddings. I was a flower girl at my mother’s brother’s wedding in a Russian church, so I was bought up like that and then Grandma spoke German and she taught me how to read and write German and even Russian, I took Russian lessons in writing, reading and writing as well.

Very British,

he belonged to the International Club as did all the other British and at that time Australia was British as well and we had our, all our friends were many different nationalities but he was very British I think. He wore the blazer with the gold buttons and the long white trousers at that time. At that time the spats were fashionable and

the plus fours and he was very British. And he spoke beautifully. He was very fastidious about my accent and he was forever correcting me, forever. Any mispronunciation in the words, “What did I tell you?” “Oh sorry Dad.”

No, no.

We were all very casual. My mother did not speak with a pukka accent. Actually my Mum spoke similar to me I think and the same with my Dad.

The home was one storey, very much like the homes over here, only larger rooms. The bedrooms are much larger. I have a photograph which I’ll

show you later, of the house. You enter the front door and it’s a large, what we called a verandah but it was in actual fact a room with cane furniture and our house had windowsills, wide windowsills, so we were able to have pot plants on those windowsills. We had a very large curio which was made of solid black bronze.

It would be from the floor to the ceiling. I think it was a Chinese antique. It came in about six different parts and it belonged to my Dad’s father and the verandah we had brass coffee tables with Chinese lacquered legs. It was like

a frame, you put the brass tray on and the morning tea or whatever was served on there and then you move into the big glass doors. You open those doors and that was our lounge room with a fireplace and a cabinet, a silver cabinet as my mother called it but it also had cut glass and a lot of trophies. My parents played a lot of tennis and they were the champions of Tsingtao in singles and

doubles. They seemed to beat everybody, so the trophies consisted mostly of silver tea sets, cigarette boxes, all silver, silver ware and heavy crystal cut glass trophies and all that was in the big glass cabinets. Then you opened curtains, there were curtains into the next room and that was the dining room with the usual, the same

as over here. You had a sideboard, a buffet and table which accommodated about eight to ten people and then into the bedroom. The bedroom swinging glass doors but it was, how could I put it? It was the glass you couldn’t see through. It looked like crystal. You couldn’t see through it though. You pushed those doors open from the lounge room and the bedrooms and the

main bathroom was there and the bedrooms had built in cupboards, so they’re not that new. We had them then, each bedroom and in my parents bedroom that is where my Dad hid my mother’s jewellery during the war so that the Japanese wouldn’t find it.

Yes we had a cook and his job was just to cook. We had what we called a boy and he wore a long white gown, white gloves and he served us at the table. Unlike the norm here you dish your food out, or you put it in the middle of the table, no. The servants came with a tray and with the dishes, for instance, potatoes and peas and Dad used to carve the meat on the table, the servant

would take it away, put it into a fancy dish and he could come with his gloves and from the right hand side and you helped yourself. Everybody helped themselves and their was no food on the table. We had servants to bring it in and to take it away. The only thing on the table were the condiments and the condiments were crystal and silver and I have, I have inherited that little condiment.

I have got it in my own cabinet here. Then we had what they called a boy. He did a little bit of the gardening, not much but his job was to clean the silver ware and polish the shoes, all the shoes had to be immaculately polished, he swept the floors. No vacuum cleaners in those days, he used a millet broom and he sprinkled used tea leaves on the carpets.

We had big square carpets and polished floors and he used to broom to sweep, to collect all the dust and what else did he do? Occasionally he helped the cook with the washing up and all that and then we had the amah who had little tiny feet. In those days it was customary for a child to have their

feet bound. The popular age to bind a child’s foot was between five and seven and well the child’s foot would grow to well you can imagine a child’s foot, maybe so long, that’s when they would start binding it. They would put the toes underneath the foot like this and put like a bandage right up to the ankle and that would stop the foot, the toes from growing, only the big toe grows and

consequently their foot would be, the smallest one would be about three inch. My amah’s [house servant] one would be about so long and very narrow, and very painful. She used to walk on her heels and my brother and I used to run away from her, knowing she’d never be able to catch us. Well she looked after us. She did the hand washing in the bathtub on a scrubbing board. There were no laundries. A laundry

room, it was my mother’s dream when she came here and found out, “a laundry, a whole room to do your washing in?” She couldn’t get over that, no washing machines in those days, so the big pieces of washing like towels and sheets were collected by a man on a bicycle and taken to the laundry and bought back all nicely pressed so that was her job. Then we had what we called a social amah. She

used to come and do the patching and also make little pieces of clothing for us, maybe a pair of pyjamas or nightdress. She also used to knit our dressing gowns for us and there are your five servants.

Chinese.

Yeah, they were all Chinese, all Tsingtao dialect and I was fluent in that, I was bought up in that. I used to play marbles with the little Chinese beggar boys

when I was young, out in the street.

Same as the kids used to play marbles here. You had agates and I don’t remember. Little bags of the better quality ones, the bigger ones and you’d make a little area. This was right on the side of the road, a little area, you’d dig a hole here, you’d dig another hole here and the

idea was to put your marble here and flick it, try and get them right through all the holes. Then I used to play, I don’t know the name. I think they call it knuckles here in Australia, little bags of sand we had, about four and you’d throw one up and pick another one up and catch it. I don’t know the name of it here but I have since seen it in

some of the stores where they sell toys made in China and they are a little plastic knuckle, looks like pig’s knuckles. Do you know?

Jacks, is that what it is?

We celebrated Chinese

New Year. Oh yes, we all went to the Chinese restaurants with our Chinese friends, our English friends, our Russian friends, our German friends. We celebrated Chinese New Year, once a week to a Chinese restaurant was a must. We ate a lot of Chinese food. My mother was taught by the cook how to cook Chinese food so she used to get herself into the kitchen and the two of them would produce this wonderful home style

Chinese cooking but otherwise once a week was a must for the really top stuff, roast duck and things like that in a restaurant.

The area where we lived it was a little bit hilly. It was a residential area. We had,

in the winter months there weren’t that many people, it was a residential area on the beach front. How can I describe it, as for instance, just pretend you are at Manly, Manly Beach and there are houses, not shops, forget the shops, but think about houses in place of all the shops and we could walk just a few minutes across to the beach, our

house was. Across the road from us there were about six Japanese houses altogether with a wall around it, a very low wall and Japanese families lived in them. There were lots and lots of holiday homes. It was called Idleshope, that was the area that we lived in. Next door to us was a large hotel called,

it will come to me later. It was run by a French woman called Madam de Rush and she was a good friend of our family being next door and during school holidays every morning I used to go across to her place and the two of us would have tea with toast and strawberry jam, which we would dunk into the tea. As a little girl that was a must every weekend and holiday time.

Her hotel was open mostly during summer holidays because Tsingtao was a summer resort and you got people from all over the world used to come and they would occupy all these empty houses in the winter, but summer all occupied because it was right near the beach, it was a summer resort. Behind us was another very large hotel with a tennis court and from our backyard, if you climbed a wall about the height of the

top of that door over there, you could look over and it was a tennis court. That hotel eventually turned to be our first internment camp.

We had no contact. Never hardly saw them. Occasionally I remember seeing them hanging out clothes

because our front yard faced their backyard. Their front yard faced the beach so I had no contact with them. We hardly saw them. I don’t even know whether they were business people or not and the Japanese women in those days always wore the Japanese kimono.

My first school was at the Holy Ghost Convent in

the city part, in the CBD [Central Business District] area, run by nuns of course.

Oh it was about a twenty minute drive by car and the whole journey from our home, you get to the main road, and the whole journey, practically the whole journey was along the water front,

along the water front, yeah.

Very busy. There were all the shops, my father’s office. There was a pier from the waterfront leading out into the water and the ships that came in, because it was a sea port, there were all ships anchored there and

the R and R [Rest and Relaxation], navies from all over the world came for their R and R and they would come in little boats to the pier and get off the little boats that would ferry them across. Their was the post office, there was the town hall facing the, in the CBD area. There was the large, two stories was very tall in those days compared to here now and

buildings which housed different businesses, chemist shops, stores, material stores, all the clothes had to be made. There were no stores there that sold ready made clothes. Everything had to be tailor made so there were many material shops. China in those days was very well known for their beautiful cotton materials and there were plenty coffee shops, little coffee shops, mostly owned by German

people, delicatessens, German people and little cake shops by the Armenians, two Armenian families owned bakeries and they made the most beautiful cakes as well. There was also a knitting shop that sold wool and made to order jumpers and I remember their names. They were a Russian family and called Mieffscis and they eventually migrated to Australia as well.

Okay.

My amah she used to have to do the ironing, poor little amah with her tiny little feet. She’d get so tired too. I remember seeing her, how she used to wet the clothes if she didn’t think they were damp enough. Everything was cotton in those days. There was no such thing as nylon or whatever we wear today. It was all cotton, everything had to be ironed. There were no little spray bottles with

which you could dampen the clothes with so she would take a mouthful of water, by glass and then spit it out, but spray it out, literally spray it out onto the clothes and then the iron and there were no electric irons in my day. She had three irons and they all had to be warmed up on the kitchen stove which was a fuel stove, and incidentally you might be interested

to know we had an ice chest at that time, no ice boxes, no electric refrigerators. Ice used to be delivered on the back of a bicycle, so that’s what the amah used to do, iron. Sometimes I would help her and spit all over the clothes as well but they all turned out very beautifully ironed. Amah’s job also was to look after us, take us to the beach and play in the little rock

pools and there were plenty of periwinkles which Amah loved to eat so we would help her pick periwinkles in a little bucket. They are for those of you that mightn’t know what periwinkles are they are little shells which have like a crab inside and they walk carrying their little house with them, like the snail. We used to bring them home and she would cook them on the stove, boil them up and then we’d have a feast

out the backyard, squat down on the ground outside and she’d get pins from her hairpin, from her hair and give my brother and me each a pin and we would dig them out of the little shells and eat them. They were boiled in salt too. If it was too heavy to carry saltwater or she’d just put them in fresh water and put a bit of salt, but most times we had to bring them home in buckets with a little bit of

salt water too and that was really lovely, really nice. And I used to prefer the Amah’s food and the cook’s food, to my own food. They ate very plainly, rice, salt fish, salt cabbage, dofu, what do you call it? Today you don’t call it dofu, bean curd. There is another name the Australians have given it?

Tofu, but it’s not, it’s D O, dofu is the

real Chinese name and I used to often say, “I prefer your food,” and she’d give me some of her food.

The chicken man, he would bring spring chickens. I don’t ever remember us eating full grown chickens. They were always called spring chickens, not quite adult and he would bring them in the back of his bicycle in a large,

round wicker or bamboo, made of bamboo I think but it was a big, round, wicker basket. He’d have about a dozen of them all crammed into this big basket on the back of the bike. My mother would have to go out and pick two, or three or even four and the way you tell how fat they are or how much meat, you’d hold them by, grab them out by the wing and she’d

feel the breastbone and if the breastbone felt full of meat, “Yes, I’ll have that one, I’ll have that one,” and the cook used to kill them and crumb them for us, spring chickens all crumbed which were delicious. What else used to come? Oh the fruit man used to come. Also on the back of a bicycle he would have baskets all piled up high, gooseberries, raspberries,

cherries, whatever was in season was bought but all that had to be soaked in Condy’s Crystals. Milk had to be boiled, water had to be boiled because of germs. There was no pasteurisation and most of the cows had TB anyway, but I did mention earlier or maybe I didn’t, my brother did catch TB and he caught TB through smoking the cook’s cigarette butts. The cook had TB but we did not know at the

time.

Oh the iceman, on the back of the bicycle. It was covered in sawdust and tied up about six or seven, oh it was quite high, tied up with a rope and full of, I think it was sawdust to stop it from melting

or salt, rock salt, even that stops it from melting and what else? Oh crab apples, on skewers, all stuck on a rod. He was called the ton chew man. They were little skewers with crab apples, crystallised sugar, just like your toffee apples here only they were little crab apples and we loved them. And he would have

a little metal gong about, it looked like a little miniature brass tray with a thing that he used to bang it with, and make it dong, dong, and as soon as we heard that we knew it was the ton chew man and we’d run out and always had some money that my parents would give me to buy a couple of those. And then there would be another man who also had one of these dong, dongs, with

a different tune and he would sell, I never knew the name of it, but it looked like a piece of dough with flour, a lot of flour, that’s what it looked like. It was about that small and it was in actually fact gooie, sweet, with powdered sugar over it, don’t know the name but it was delicious and we loved that.

What else did they bring, let me think. Vegetables sometimes but my parents used to often buy most of their stuff at the big market. Clothing, the tailor used to come and measure up. He would come on a bicycle with magazines about that high, little samples of materials

and all the magazines were American fashion magazines up to date and he’d come into the room and measure us up and the shoes the same thing, all had to be hand made. There were no shops that sold ladies clothes ready made. There was one shop run by a German man called Peter Hansells. You could

buy imported German men’s suits, that’s about all but Dad never bought them. He had everything tailor made.

Oh we all wore what I would wear now, Western style clothes. The Chinese people there wore their own style clothes, chungsams with the big slits, the young girls. The poorer people couldn’t afford

chungsams. They just wore ordinary brightly coloured cotton materials, pants and jacket but I remember most of the young Chinese women had very long hair. They didn’t cut their hair and their hair was always tied at the bottom part with different coloured ribbons which was so pretty. They all wore earrings, all the young girls wore either little gold earrings or jade

earrings. They wore jewellery, they liked their jewellery and it was such a shame in later years when the new regime took over and they banned all that.

Business wise only,

only business wise. We certainly didn’t have any house to house Chinese friends other than a couple of ladies that used to play mah-jong with my mother, otherwise no we, our friends were all English, American, Russian, German, but the main market, they had a huge market,

a three storey market. Down below on the ground floor was food, vegetables, meat, no refrigeration in those days so all the meat was just hung on the side of the wall with big hooks and you could go there and prod. And my mother used to prod the meat, the carcasses and said, “This is tender, cut me off that,” and the butcher would cut if off, wrap it up and you’d take it home. So shopping

had to be done for food every couple of days but this big, the big market we used to call it, had a toy shop the next level and the level after that was like a hardware store and every year they had a Chinese fair that used to come into the city and the road outside the big market was closed and the Chinese used to set up stalls and they sold hand made

corsages made from velvet and silk and all that, things to wear in your hair, everything you can wish for. Coloured ribbons, Chinese slippers, you could buy that but you could only buy that when the fair came every year and that was a great day. Everybody went , all the people, all nationalities went there.

At that time there was no such thing as a Japanese concession until Japan invaded China in 1937.

Well I was telling you about the long hair. Well when my Dad was a young teenager, the men had long hair, long pigtails and my Dad told me about incidents at the races.

He used to go to the races with his Dad and he and a friend used to stand at the back and when everybody was cheering as the horses were coming in to the end, they used to jump up and down cheering, he and his friend used to go around and tie all the pigtails up together. So at the end of the commotion and cheering everybody moves to go their own way and they are all tied up,

about four pigtails all the end, because the Chinese wore these little hats, like a little button made of cloth, Chinese button up the top and their pigtails were hanging up to their bottom I think, longer than their waistline, so they were able to go and they tied them all up together. And then they stood behind and watched them and had a good laugh when they tried to separate. I told you about that.

Yes.

It was a big event as far as Chinese musicians would sit on the side of the road, the stalls were set up selling very colourful materials, little pieces of wool for your hair, all bright colours, ribbons,

bobby pins with brightly coloured stones for the young girls to wear, little handbags all made of cloth, little Chinese shoes, tiny little ones for those with small feet with embroidery on the top of the shoes, all handmade. Of course the fair because it attracted just about everybody in the little city, all the beggars suddenly came out and there

were plenty of them, plenty of them. Little children in those days, this is unbelievable but it is true, you would see a lot of children come into beg minus one or two fingers. They would be deliberately chopped off so as they could go off begging and in most cases the parents with little children old enough to beg,

they would send them out to beg and we would all donate a coin here and there and that is still done in China today. The horse and carts, we had a lot of horse and carts and rickshaws in those days too and they would all be bringing the people to the fair. It was a long walk to the main market. If you were a good walker you make it sure but a

lot of elderly came in by rickshaw in those days. Rickshaws, for those of you who don’t know, is a seat on wheels pulled by a man. He would have a handle here, a handle here and a bar across and he would manually pull it along and he worked hard. And the rickshaw coolies by the way, would not live a very long life because they would get hardened

arteries from running downhill and pulling up and they always had a little towel hanging on their shoulder to wipe the sweat off their faces. We had horse drawn carriage which would accommodate maybe six people at a time, maybe eight. Some of them were bigger, drawn by two to four horses and that was another mode of transport.

Apart from the cars there were the rickshaws, the horse drawn carriages which were called mah cha, which means horse carriage, buses, school buses and government buses, the odd motor bike, very old fashioned motor bikes with a side carriage, that was the mode of transport.

There were lovely things to eat during the fair, unusual Chinese delicacies, duck feet, chicken feet, which I still love to eat. My Dad used to tell me that in certain parts of China they ate monkey brains. There was in restaurants a hole in the middle of the table and a monkey

was put under the table in a cage with the top of the head exposed and everybody could crack the head and pick out the brains. That does not appeal to me but there was a lot of very lovely food cooked outside on the big walks and like over here when you have outdoor stalls on the weekend. Sometimes you go to

places where they cook it in front of you, well at the fair, that was only done at the fair, otherwise there was just restaurants.

Well Tsingtao was a small city in those days but it was just as you see in Sydney but on a much, much smaller scale, much smaller scale.

You’d see the latest cars, the old model cars in those days, people on motor bikes, as I say, very much the same thing. People go to work in the morning, they start work very early. My Dad used to drop me off at a park on his way to work which was about eight o’clock in the morning. I would have to walk through a park and I saw some very sad sights during that time.

That’s basically what there was, very much like Sydney but in a very much smaller scale. Behind our house, about a mile up the road were the villages, Chinese villages. Mud huts, mud floors, bicycle repair shops, that’s where you’d go. Those were the poor people and they kept their own pigs and geese to eat, their own chickens. You could go

there and buy fresh eggs, otherwise even fresh eggs were bought on the back of a bicycle to the home but very often I would go on a bicycle and bring home fresh eggs from them and dirt roads. There were no dirt roads in the residential area in my day, only the main road taking you to the CBD area.

Very sad, very often this happened, walking through this park on the way to school, I’d see little bundles wrapped up in either a cotton rug or what looked like a bunny rug, little baby girls. Little girls were not welcome.

Were not welcome in China in those days and I believe they are still not. Everybody

wanted a boy because they said, “Little girls you bring them up, they get married, they are the property of the husband, boys they grow up they can help their family in whatever business the family is in,” so nobody wanted girls. You loose the girl and she goes to stay with the husband and you’re on your own, so they used to just dump them.

And that is still done today. In fact in an article last year, in the newspaper, The Herald put out an article that somewhere in China, I forget the name of the place there were two Chinese women caught on a train with six little babies, newborn babies in two suitcases. They were taking them to another province

to be sold and when they were caught by the police on a tip off the suitcases were opened, they were on a train rack above the seats, one of the babies had died, because they were cramped in, six of them in two suitcases, so they were arrested. They have been trying very hard to stop that but I don’t think you are ever going to stop it. There are six

million Chinese baby girls all over China waiting to be adopted and I actually saw children being adopted in 1987 when I was back in China.

Yes, and also that’s why they get rid of the baby girls straight away and then they can try again and hope it’s a boy.

Yes, elderly women hanging from a tree, with a rope around their neck. I would walk by in the morning and see this woman hanging, all dressed in black, but then that didn’t mean anything because most of the elderly Chinese women did wear black and this was in the winter months that I used to see them mostly.

And in the afternoon on the way home, somebody would have come and lowered them, because they were in a kneeling position, and they would have a bowl of rice, incense, and a bowl of fruit. They were kneeling, still with the rope around their neck tied to the tree. The next day the body is gone, don’t know what happened to the body. The reason for this I was told is because China

never ever had social security, the pension, old people’s homes, nursing homes, so when these elderly Chinese women got old they felt that they were no more use to anyone and the best way out would be suicide. I never ever saw a man. They were always elderly Chinese women. Very sad, but it did happen.

The first time you see it, the first time I saw it, I can only speak about it myself, my personal experience, the first time I saw it well, you look and what’s inside that bundle? You look at it and there’s a head poking out and later on I found out it was baby girls and once I got to know that was the reason

you’d walk by, you wouldn’t even look. And with the Chinese women there were other schoolkids walking through and you’d stop and look and be horrified the first time but afterwards you’d just keep walking, maybe have a quick look, but keep walking. It was just part of life.

Another short little walk

to the school and the school, the gates they had a door which was always locked and an old German nun used to open it up and let us in and it was like any other big, no it wasn’t. It was nothing like the Australian schools here. This was a convent. A very large stone building and

the playground was inside. It had an iron gate all around, an iron fence, what do you call it with the iron spikes, all around it and the main entrance was always locked. It was just a large wooden door with a brass knocker and you walk in there and your cloakroom would be on the left.

On the right was a long corridor, concrete or cement corridor leading to the chapel, it was a Catholic convent. If you walked straight ahead you’d go down a few steps and it was a large playground. And then you keep walking straight ahead and you go down a few more steps and that would take you to our large hall where we used to have plays. And

also to the right of the hall was the nuns used to live there and it was also the servants quarters back there. Our convent was a three storey convent. The ground floor were all the primary classes, the high school classes were upstairs and the next level up was the nuns accommodation. It was steam heated for the winter.

No fans or anything, you’d just sweat in the summer months.

We had nuns of all different nationalities. The nuns, some were lovely, delightful, very friendly. There was another one that not many of us liked. She appeared to be a very cold person. There was nothing gentle about

her. She was strict and in my opinion and in the opinion of some other friends of mine, she took every advantage to belittle you. So to the extent that one of the girls in our class at one stage was standing up there reciting poetry and she forgot her

lines and this sister, Sister Mary was her name, she called her a dunce, she called her all these things and the poor girl wet her pants. And she said, “Look at you, look at you,” she said, “look what you’ve done. Go out to the toilet,” and there was a puddle of water and we were a little bit frightened of her. Whereas in other cases the nuns were so very, very nice and then there was another French nun. I remember

her so well. I was bought up a Catholic, although now I am a retired Catholic, but I was bought up as Catholic and the only reason I used to go to church was to look at all the ladies’ hat. But because my mother was not Catholic, she was Russian Orthodox, my father was Catholic, he wasn’t a very good practising Catholic either but we did go to church

and every Friday, nearly every Friday I would have meat. The cook used to make up my sandwiches and he wouldn’t know Good Friday you weren’t supposed to eat meat, so I would turn up with roast beef or ham or whatever, schnitzel or something, that was left over from the night before and on Friday this nun used to know all the Catholic girls. We had all different religions of

girls in our convent and she would go through all our lunches and nine times out of ten I was the one that came with meat and she used to say, “Mon dieu, mon dieu, Mademoiselle Cook, à la salle à manger,” “My God, my God, Miss Cook, straight to the dining room.” I didn’t mind because they had either eggs or fish or chicken and I loved

fish and I still have a love for fish lunch, but I never forget her, “Mademoiselle Cook, mon Dieu” and she’d put her hands up like this and “meat again”.

The dining room, salle à manger, is a large dining room with maybe eight girls, the boarders had to eat there but all the day girls had to bring

their own sandwiches and we all, as far as I can remember, always had a little bottle of milk and water, well the nuns, if you were that thirsty that you needed a drink. I don’t ever remember drinking any water during school hours, don’t know why but I don’t remember it and if you were really desperate for a drink of water you’d go to the nuns and she’d send you to the dining room and they always, I

remember seeing a large bottle of water, glass water with upside down tumblers, and you’d just help yourself. But I don’t remember drinking much water during the school hours. I drank my bottle of milk that I bought from home, that had to be bought beforehand and that was it. Fruit, we always bought fruit as well but I looked forward to Fridays

and hoped the cook forgot again.

Gosh we had Russian Orthodox, we had German Lutheran, Jewish, Buddhists and Chinese girls, Japanese girls, Spanish, Portuguese,

so many different nationalities, so many different, Italian. My best friend was an Italian girl and my other best friend, who I still keep in touch, she lived on the Central Coast now, she was, her mother was Russian and her father was Portuguese and she was a boarder and her grandfather used to live up in the hills and he sold goats milk and made goats cheese and

she very often used to come and stay with me because this grandfather lived too far away. Her parents lived in Shanghai, in another town altogether, another state and she used to come to my place as a boarder and we used to pick her up and take her home at weekends. Yvonne Ausorio was her name and we still keep in touch, by phone. We don’t see each other that often but we still keep in

touch.

No, English speaking.

Everything was taught in English but French was compulsory, so we had to just change classrooms and go into another classroom for French. The French teacher, Maree Clarisse was her name and she was also the one that took my sandwiches. I don’t know what she did with them.

School friends mainly. During the summer months the people, we had the regular visitors to Tsingtao from Shanghai. They were called the Bell family and they had about sixteen children. They had a two storey house not far from us up on the hill and the father, their father was my godfather. They lived in Shanghai, they used to always come to Tsingtao

during summer holidays and that was the only time I saw them. Then there was a Danish family that came also who had a house there that was closed up during the winter months and I used to play dolls with her when she came. But during the winter months my friends were just the girls at school, and my friend, Lietcha, who also lived in Tsingtao and was a day scholar

like myself and another Armenian girl whose parents owned the bakery, she was also real good friend of mine and I still keep in touch with her.

Oh swimming, we had a little boat, just a plain little wooden boat with oars that we could take out, no surf. It was flat

clear water and on the beach white sand. The summer clothes, I loved the summer but we all had to wear topees, the children all wore topees. A topee is a cork hat with a white canvas top with lined, lined with cork to stop the sun from coming through. The sun in Tsingtao was very, very strong and of course in winter it was so cold it snowed. But it meant swimming,

it meant going to tennis, watching my parents go to tennis. I tried very hard to be a tennis player but I was pretty useless. They used to go to bowls more often in the summer. There was more activity, more people in the streets, more entertainment because our friends came from Tientsin, from Shanghai, from other

parts of China to Tsingtao, mainly because of the beaches and the weather so there were more people, more entertainment, it was just alive in the summer and I liked it. More parties to go to, more birthday parties and you could wear pretty dresses, light dresses and you didn’t have to huddle up under a cat skin coat or a camel hair overcoat and hoods to hide your hair and face

and it was so cold in winter, so summer was lovely.

Did my own?

I have never ever been out of China, neither had my parents until we came to Australia. My Dad being a businessman of course had to travel a lot throughout China. He spoke so many different dialects in Chinese because of that.

He was fluent in, oh I could name Shanghainese, Hokien, Fuchien, Mandarin, Cantonese, he spoke all the dialects very fluently. He travelled a lot and I can only remember twice when Dad had to travel to Shanghai and I was left, my brother and I were left in the care of Grandma.

And we stayed with her, at her place, and our house was being looked after by the servants. We always had dogs. We always had a goat and I wasn’t bought up on goat milk but it was always available but travelling, the first time I ever went out of Tsingtao I must have been about nine years old. I went with my father to Shanghai.

He went to see his very sick sister who was bedridden with polio in Shanghai and he took me with him. I remember walking into the bedroom, she was laying on that bed, her head was crew cut like that. She could not move. She was just fully paralysed and she had a permanent Chinese amah looking after her and the amah had to turn her head

for her to the side so that she could meet me and she could hardly speak. And I’ll never forget the feeling, I was frightened when I saw her. I’d never seen anything like that before but after a while it was my auntie. But that was the only time I ever went out of Tsingtao.

Safe as in what? Sexually or?

I was fine. I was with a, how could I put

it? A European, a Western family. We had, the only thing Asian was furniture, like my little table there and all that, like this but we ate Western food, pork, beef, chicken, whatever you eat here, roasts and everything, sweet potatoes and all that. English was spoken at home, only English. My

father couldn’t speak Russian or German, so English was spoken. Chinese was only spoken to the servants. We never spoke Chinese amongst us. Our clothing was all Western style. The Chinese wore their own clothes and that was it. As for murders, rapes, as a child I never heard of that. Maybe it happened but I wasn’t told. I never heard about it, it was never in the paper and as far as

I was concerned I had never heard of those things so when we first came to Australia you opened the paper, murders, rapes, oh my Mother thought,“What are we doing in Australia?” We never heard of it. You cold walk in the dark in those days. Nobody is going to attack you or steal you or anything. You didn’t even think for one moment “Oh I’m not safe, look behind my shoulder,” no, nothing until I came to a

Western world.

Well I think it was 1937 Japan invaded China and I remember seeing the bombs dropping behind us, up in the villages

where the Chinese villages were up behind our house and that’s when my father said “What’s happening? Oh my God, Japan is invading China.” The aeroplanes were dropping bombs. I actually saw them, I heard them exploding and it was very sad to see hundreds of Chinese families rushing past our house to get to the mountains which was towards the beach. We had big mountains there and

they were all going up to hide in the mountains. I don’t know why but there were hundreds of them, all carrying whatever they could carry in bundles and I thought, “Well maybe we might be joining them,” but remember I was only nine at that time and the only thing that went through my mind was, “Oh people are running away, do we have to run away too?” But that didn’t last long.

Bombs in the distance, aeroplanes up in the sky and you would see some dark thing, well from a distance it looked about that big, but no doubt it was a lot bigger, funny shaped things like missiles dropping from the aeroplanes and then you would keep looking and then you’d hear boom

and then you’d see dirt and smoke coming up and Dad said “Oh my God, they’re bombing, the Japs have attacked China”, and that was 1937.

Too far to walk too, too far to affect our house. It’s just like here we had a gas explosion here a few years ago and it just rattled

some of the windows and that’s all. They didn’t come close enough to bomb our house. Mum was frantic, Dad was no doubt worried, no doubt as everybody else but it didn’t come any closer, it only lasted for about one hour then quiet. From then on we saw Japanese soldiers in Tsingtao

and much later Japanese families started to move in, they opened big Japanese toy shops. Yeah, a lot of Japanese, we saw many more Japanese from then on because the soldiers lived there. They bought their families out. Incidentally we had a couple of Japanese girls in school before

this happened too. There must have been just a few Japanese families that had little shops in Tsingtao.

I don’t know, I have no idea, no idea but I remember seeing them. We had a large town hall, it looked like a town hall in our area, Idleshope area, it looked like a council building but Japanese soldiers obviously took it over.

It might have been a Chinese police headquarters, I don’t know. As a child you don’t think about those things but looking back now it might have been a Chinese police station, brick building, very tall brick building with about many, many steps leading to the main entrance. And after all the bombing, from then

on the Japanese started to come out of that building and walking in and out so I suppose they took it over. We did have a little Chinese police station within walking distance of our Idleshope residential area, but that closed down. There were no more police there and nothing, just closed down. But I think, looking back now it must have been Chinese police headquarters or something

like that and then the Japs just took everything over and we saw lots more Japanese people within the next twelve months or so, or years, a couple of years, lots of Japanese people around the place. Japanese restaurants were opening then and little Japanese cake shops and then they set up a little Japanese concession, a little area where all the Japanese seemed to congregate. Just like over here you have

Korean people congregate in a certain area, Cabramatta, full of Vietnamese, well the Japanese had their own little area where they all congregated and they had their own little restaurants and shops and we could walk and shop there and eat there if we wanted too, because Japan was not at war with Britain yet, so we were not their prisoners and life went on. There were too many Chinese to intern. The Japanese they took the country over,

but they could not intern all the Chinese, they could not put them in concentration camps. There were millions of Chinese and there still are. You just can’t sort of put them anywhere. There were too many of them, so they just said, “Well we take over the country and you do as we say,” and that’s it. But I didn’t notice any changes other than more Japanese people.

Well the Chinese and the Japanese they had been feuding for many years. I know that the Japanese don’t like the Chinese and the Chinese hate the Japanese and the Japanese don’t like the Koreans and the Koreans don’t like the Japanese. They’ve always been feuding but this was the first time that the Japanese actually took China over and I believe in Nanking they were very

bad when they took the whole of Nanking over. There’s a book The Rape of Nanking, you might have heard of it? I recommend everybody read that book. Bob read it, I haven’t read it but he told me some horrific things of what they did. They raped all the women, they set them on fire, oh God, there was a film. Was it last year or the year before? I’ve cut the newspaper cutting in

my souvenir album. A film where six Japanese army officers were interviewed about the atrocities that they themselves committed and they confessed on film, Channel Two or something like that I think it might have been, ABC Channel and they showed that whole film and I sat up, Bob sat up and he said, “I am going to bed.” Other people I have spoken too, my brother

started watching and he couldn’t watch it anymore. I said “Well I’m going to sit through it and watch it,” and I saw, they showed films of the Japanese officer throwing the bomb and it blew up a whole family, a Chinese family in Nanking. They stuffed petrol material, cotton material, they stuffed it into the women’s

uterus and it set the woman on fire. It was horrific but it did happen. It is all on film. The ABC has it. I saw it and Bob asked me the next day, “You sat up and watched it, how was it?” I said, “Horrific.” I rang my brother. I said, “Did you see it?” He said, “I started watching it but I couldn’t Joyce. It just made me sick in the stomach.” I’m glad I watched it because now I know what happened.

They did horrific things to the civilians and but I never heard as a child, I never heard about it. They maybe did it in Tsingtao where I came from, I don’t know.

I don’t know, not me. Nothing happened, school resumed and nothing. I just went to school,

normal living like we used to so there you are.

Well that’s when they took over and life went back to normal. The only change that I noticed was many more Japanese people in the streets, many Japanese army officers still in uniform in the streets,

that is all but people went about their business everyday, do your shopping, markets, coffee shops, everything was open again. The people came back, went back to their villages because they had to pass our house to go back to where they came from, the one’s that were fleeing from the bombs up to the hills. We saw them come back the next day,

but they weren’t rushing, running like they were the first time. They just obviously went back to their little villages and life resumed but as for atrocities maybe it did happen. I never heard of it, I was never told about it so I don’t really know. Maybe my parents knew but didn’t tell me.

Well nothing other than what I’m telling you, a great life for children, birthday parties. Birthday parties as a child in my home I had about twenty children and weather permitting it was always outside on our

front lawn, a long table with sandwiches and cakes and homemade ice cream. At the Powerhouse Museum they’ve got a wooden ice cream maker and I said, “Oh my God, that’s what we had at home.” You could not go and buy ice cream in the shops. You had to make your own and ice cream was only for special occasions, done in a wooden bucket with a metal or iron cylinder in the middle

that you pour fresh cream, sugar, vanilla flavouring and then you put the lid back on and then at the end of the oh, between the cylinder and the bucket there’s a space about so much and you fill that up with ice and rock salt because that stops the ice from melting too quickly. And then there is a handle on the side of that wooden bucket that you keep turning and one of my very interesting moments was to

help the cook turn that handle and within three quarters of an hour or so, beautiful pure ice cream and it is in a museum that similar bucket and I thought, “My goodness, I remember using that.”

Oh it was delicious. I never had a sweet tooth but homemade ice cream I used to eat. I never tasted my own

birthday cakes. I did not go for cakes but homemade ice cream, yes.

Probably like any normal child, naughty at times. I got my last whack across my face when I was seventeen, in my other camp, in the camp, for telling my mother to shut up.

I had the slipper, the leather slipper, Dad had leather slippers when I was naughty, whack on the bottom, I had red marks on my bottom. I was naughty. Like everybody else you tell lies but in those days you tell lies, you have to go to confession, the Catholics had to go to confession. And there were times when I would think, “Well I was good this week, I have nothing to tell. I didn’t tell lies, I said my morning prayers, I said my night prayers, there’s nothing to tell.”

But the nun says you’ve got to go to confession, so you go to confession and you make up things and I asked my girlfriend Yvonne, who I still keep in touch with, “You got any sins you can lend me?” “Yeah, I’ll lend you mine this week. If I haven’t got any next week you lend me some of yours.” Sounds silly, but it did happen but I had a normal childhood. I loved dolls, oh I just loved dolls and I had so

many dolls. Every birthday, Christmas, there was always a doll. And a doll’s house, I had a huge doll’s house and I played a lot of dolls. I liked paper dolls which you cut out but in those days paper dolls came out of comic strips, like Blondie and Dagwood were my favourite. You cut them out, you cut their clothes out and I loved fashion. Even

at that age, as a little girl, I loved to look at nice clothes and I used to draw dresses and use my imagination, with a frill here and a bow here and colour them in and then stick them on the paper dolls to see how it looked. But I lost most of my dolls during the war, including the dolls house. I loved animals. I used to go and put my arms around little mangy dogs in

the street, little orphan dogs and then the amah would go and tell my mother, “She’s been with a mangy dog again,” so I had to be disinfected but we always had dogs in the house, always, and my dogs and I only saved one dog and she is still with me.

Yes, changed our lives.

Yes, the announcement came on the day that Pearl Harbour was bombed. The radio announcer, his name was Carol Allcott, he announced from Shanghai and it came through to us in Tsingtao. He said, “Ladies and gentlemen, Pearl Harbour has just been bombed, stay indoors and I will come back and try to keep you up to date as to what

is happening. We are at war with Japan,” and that was it. My mother said, “What does that mean, what does that mean?” And Dad said, “Well it means what he said. Britain must be at war with Japan and we being British, we are at war.” “What’s going to happen?” “I don’t know, wait and see, keep the radio on.” Within an hour the Japanese officer comes in, a knock on the door, “British?” “Yes.” He already had

a wooden plaque about so high, so wide and he came with his offsider and they hammered it on the front of our door and it had big, black Japanese characters, which they told us meant “enemy”, on the front, hammered on the front of our door. “How many people live in this house?” My Dad said, “Four”. “Alright.” Handed us four armbands, which I still have. I can

show it to you later. White armbands with a big B with British and you had to wear it at all times. “How many people are at home? Children?” “Two.” “What sex?” “A boy and a girl.” Because I was just getting over typhoid my hair was very, very short because of the high fever and we were told your hair drops out

so I had my hair cut very short, wearing slacks because I had lost a lot of weight and my legs were just like two sticks and the Japanese officer said, “You are lying, why are you lying? You have two boys?” My mother said, “No, she’s been sick and that’s why we cut her hair.” Anyway this went on for five or ten minutes and in the end my mother said, “Here, I’ll prove it,” and

she had to prove I was a girl and he was satisfied. Anyway we were put under house arrest, liberty only from nine a.m. to twelve noon, just enough time to go and do shopping and you must wear the armbands every time you leave the house, at all times. And we realised then that we were at war and we were under house arrest for many months. I’m not quite sure how many months but I

remember it was a long time, no school. I didn’t that but I wasn’t a school for a long time anyway because I was so sick with typhoid, so I wasn’t able to go to school, but this prolonged going to school.

My mother used to knit for Britain, socks, scarves. She belonged to the British Red Cross and helping to raise money, knit and all that for the troops overseas. She was quite involved along with all the other British ladies. I don’t know what else they used to do but I remember her knitting and she said, “These are for the soldiers that are fighting.” That’s all I knew about

the war in Britain and Germany but nothing else. I was thirteen years old and in those days any atrocities of any sort, even the mildest of an atrocity, it was a no-no for adults to talk in front of children. In my days children were to be seen, not heard. Every time they had a big cocktail party or something they dressed me up nicely, my brother and I, “come on out and say hello to Auntie so and

so and Uncle so and so.” Everybody was auntie and uncle, even if they were not related and, “Now you can go back to your rooms and play with your dolls, go and read.” No television, so I was a great reader and my Dad subscribed to the Girl’s Own Annual for me. Every month I used to get a big thick book and that was how we were bought up. We did not know anything about what was going on, but of course

when Pearl Harbour was bombed that is when we all became involved, even the children. My brother was nine years old and even he had to become involved and he was just getting over tuberculosis.

Yes, so I was isolated in my own bedroom and my friends used to come and visit me, and wave to me through the window. They were not allowed inside. It was very contagious

so at that time, I don’t know about now. People don’t get typhoid, do they? I don’t know.

I remember having a very sore throat and the doctors came to see me and they said it was very red and my mother had to paint it every day with, it looked like iodine, but it was sort of sweet, sweet in taste and it was a brush. She had to

dip it in this iodine stuff and I had to open my mouth and this little brush went right down to here and she would swizzle it around and paint my throat. And I remember feeling very, very hot many times and I was delirious because suddenly I said to my mother “what are the hot, hot dogs doing on this plank of wood?” And I remember seeing hot dogs, I loved

hot dogs, frankfurters, I love them. And I remember I must, I was delirious and all I could see in front of me was like a, what I know now is a conveyor belt, with hot dogs going round and round and feeling very, very hot. I remember seeing the Amah and my mother with wet rags to cool me off, towels on my head and on my body.

And that is why they had to shave my head but those I remember distinctly, those damn hot dogs sticking out there. But I got over it thanks to my Mum. Most people died of typhoid then.

I didn’t go to school for I think it was nearly a year, there was so much I, and the nuns

all felt sorry for me. They were going to pray for me and they told my Dad to come and pick up little relics which were supposed to be hung around my neck. They were relics and one was supposed to be sand taken from where the Christ, the bottom of Christ’s cross and I don’t know what the other, oh a bit of garment from Christ and my mother put them all in a tiny little bag, sewed it up and hung it around my neck on a

string and everybody was praying for me.

Yes, yes I missed a lot of school because of that. My brother missed a lot of school because when he got TB he was so weak and so sick. They had to lift him out of him bed onto a camp stretcher in the garden to get a bit of sunshine and he had to drink hot

milk with a teaspoon full of zarg which is pork fat. In those days that was the known cure and he drank that either in hot milk or hot chocolate. But I have since found out there was no need for all that because TB eventually cures itself.

Oh golly, he was smoking

cigarette butts since he was about five years old. The cook had TB. We did not know and he used to flick his butts just over the rails near the kitchen door and my little brother and used to run around there, pick up the cigarette butts and finish them off. We didn’t know that he had TB and I think he was caught, somebody in the house caught him smoking, “Where did you get that from?” Old cigarette butts, we think that’s how he caught it anyway,

but then again the cows in Tsingtao all had, most of them had TB but most of the milk was boiled, so we don’t know. I don’t even know how I caught typhoid. Every year we had to be inoculated for cholera, that was every year occurrence, everybody. That’s how I remember.

No, he was getting over it when I got typhoid and he was just getting over it, starting to get over it so my poor mother had both of us. He was alright, he was able to walk but he was not at school yet, not back at school. I think he had just started school at the age of five and had to give it up and then he never went

back to that school again.

I missed my friends at school. They used to come and wave at me. My brother I don’t know. He was too young to realise anything. People got sick in those days, no antibiotics

and it was many years later that somebody discovered sulphur to cure sores and things and then penicillin came in but that was many years later. There was just no known cure for things like that and it was thanks to my mother’s nursing me and a good doctor. The first doctor we had, he nearly killed me so my mother went to her mah-jong friend’s husband, Doctor Divinsky,

a Russian doctor, who said, “My God, this is serious,” and he told her what to do but all I can remember, because I was so young, was this throat paint, which I hated, being painted with this iodine, but it was slightly sweet in taste. But it was accepted, people got sick, they got dysentery. People

suffered from dysentery and diarrhoea and that was a known thing in those days.

Probably while I was in the first camp, when we were put in our first camp. My hair was growing back and

I think, probably no, not in the first camp, during the house arrest. My hair started growing back and I was putting on weight. By the time I was ready to go into this prison camp I was almost back to normal. I was able to dress normally. When they cut my hair, I must tell you this, my mother kept my hair. I had very thick, very strong,

dark brown hair and as I was getting better, I wouldn’t go out anywhere because my hair was so short and so she bought out the hair and she sewed little kiss curls on my hat, all around the front and I was able to go out. I felt quite comfortable then.

Yes, and I always wore that hat. It was a navy blue felt hat with a

big bow down here and a red and green pom-pom but it had all these little kiss curls around here.

That I remember so well, that hat. We all got over it and of course when the war

broke out nobody thought about us being sick anymore. The next step was what to do because we were told we were going to be put into a CAC, a civil assembly centre.

I never went shopping with my mother because I was still too skinny and I was wearing slacks and all that but I was getting better

all the time. I never left the house, I don’t remember. Nine a.m. till twelve noon, you had, after twelve noon you mustn’t be caught out of doors. So in fact three hours you had to get in the car, drive about twenty five minute drive to the local markets, and pick up whatever food you had to eat, everything. Because

the people on bicycles, apart from the laundry people, the food people were not allowed to come into our house. Well maybe they were allowed, I don’t know, I retract that. They were probably frightened of being accused of collaborating with enemy, because our front door had enemy written on there, so I never saw the deliveries of chickens, and fruit and all that. They never came near us anymore.

No, we were all treated like that, no. They all had similar stories to tell. British, American, Dutch to start with, as my father said, “All the bad people.” BAD, but later on, the Belgians, Armenians, we were all put under house arrest. No they were singled out. The only

time my Dad may have been singled out was is when they suspected he was spying for the British Government, which he was, but I didn’t know that and they must have suspected it because they came and questioned him everyday.

Yes, and the first day the officer arrived, he was a Korean, I remember my Dad said, “He’s not Japanese, he’s

Korean.” My Dad would know and he would say, “What do you know about the Japanese ships? What do you know about the Japanese ships?” And my Dad would say, “I don’t know what you’re talking about.” My Dad used to photograph every Japanese Navy ship that came into the harbour. He would put the photographs into a large envelope, pass it onto the British Consul and he in turn would send it off to

the Secret Service, the British Secret Service. Well the first day this Korean came to question my Dad in the lounge room, my mother and I and my brother and the cook, we were all in the kitchen trying to listen what the questions were because my Dad said just leave the room. We were in the kitchen and my mother sneaked out into the dining room and peeked through the curtains. We had curtains that opened out to the lounge room and she peeked through the curtains and she could hear better and

she came in and she said, “Oh my God, the big envelope, it’s right on the coffee table, right near Dad. Joyce you go out there and just normally walk up there as though nothing is going on, pick up that envelope and bring it here as fast as you can.” Which I did and for the next ten minutes we were tearing every photograph he had and burning it in the fuel stove. No gas or electric stove, just a fuel

stove in those days and we burnt all the photos. Had that officer found those photographs I think he would have shot my Dad on the spot and I remember saying to my Mum, “What are these photos?” And she said, “Never mind, just burn them, kept tearing and throwing into the fire,” but apparently this was part of his job. He was also a member of Reuters and he collected news, local news for them.

That’s another thing I didn’t know.

No, it was explained to me much later in camp, much later in camp.

Yes, I didn’t know what was going on. I knew something strange was going on,

at thirteen, “What’s going on? What’s going on?” I saw the Japanese stand up and he took something off, above the fireplace. We had a big Buddha and we had lots and lots of little Chinese carvings. Remember my Dad’s father was an auctioneer so we had some beautiful stuff that my Dad inherited and every time that he left, he questioned my Dad for two weeks,

every day, every time he left he souvenired something. He would point to an a nice little Japanese doll in a glass box, “I like that,” he would say, “can I have it?” How can you say no, he would take it anyway, so my Dad said, “Yes, be my guest.” So we lost, well my parents did, a lost a lot of very beautiful and Chinese and Japanese antiques. Every time

he left he took one.

All morning, not a full day, half a day. Anything from two hours to half a day and we had to all disappear out of the room during that.

It grew back but it grew back with a wave and I couldn’t get over and neither could my friends and my parents and it wasn’t as wavy as it later became. I still used to have to put the end in rags. In those days no curlers or anything,

just strips of rags and anywhere special my mother used to put rags on them. And talking about curling hair with rags, I do remember one weekend I had to go to a very special birthday party while I was at school at the convent, and my hair was curled by rags. Monday morning I showed up with still a couple of curls and the nuns took me into the bathroom with a comb and the water tap, “that’s

vanity, not allowed”, they straightened it all again. That was before I had curly hair, no you weren’t allowed that. That was vanity and it was a sin. But anyway it just grew that way and when it was about so short it was lovely, it actually curled and the curl is still there. I still don’t have to spend money

on perms or anything, only on hair cuts.

Drawing dresses for my paper dolls, Blondie, that was my favourite paper doll. It was in newspaper, like comic strips in those days, they were all

in newspaper, just like today, so it was very light. And I’d just draw dresses for Blondie and that and also, as young as I was, designing clothes. I just would design. I’d look at my mother’s dress and think, “Now I’ll just put that down on paper,” and maybe it needed a tuck here or a bow here or a frill there and just do

that on paper. Reading, I read the Reader’s Digest. My Dad subscribed to it and reading and funny thing I still played with my doll, which was always with me and reading a lot. I would say reading, listening to the radio, which didn’t tell us much after we were put under house arrest, just the local news, which was nothing.

I mean Germany was still fighting Britain but no details, nothing. Nothing about what was going to happen to people like us, so my day consisted of that. I even used to go into the kitchen and watch the cook cook. The servants were still with us and watch him cook and “let me have a go at this” and “let me have a go at that.”

Something I never learnt and I learnt the hard way in Australia that water had to be boiled to make a cup of tea. I never knew that and I learnt the hard way with my first job here in Australia, the tea lady said, the lady in charge of the typing group said, “Alright Joyce, you’re new here, you have a turn. It’s your turn to make the tea next week. Don’t forget, your turn,” and I go there and I kept feeling the water,

“oh it’s hot enough,” just pour it in and when they poured it out and all these tea leaves came out and the lady said, “What did you do?” I said, “Well I made tea,” and she said “Come with me. Have you made tea before?” And I said, “No,” and she taught me. It was so embarrassing at my age. I was nineteen, twenty and I should know how to make tea. I didn’t know water had to be boiled. I’d never had to do it. Even after we’d arrived here

I didn’t have to do it, my mother made the tea but she drank coffee, so I took up coffee and we just did away with tea, so I never had to make it.

How did it work? Well you’d get up in the morning, get dressed. For me

I was going nowhere but my mother had to shop. Sometimes she would go with the cook or the amah or my Dad would drive her. They each had their own little car but not me. I never went with her after that. They were in a hurry, just to shop and most times she took either the cook or the amah with her to help carry the things to the car. And as for me, I don’t remember going anywhere.

A little walk up and down in front of our house on the road but, “Put your armband on, don’t forget to put your armband on.” So the day, I passed the day as I told you reading a lot. I used to thoroughly enjoy The Girl’s Own Annual but no more newspaper deliveries or anything like that, just amuse yourselves.

He went to work every day. His job was only to photograph every Japanese Navy ship that came into the harbour and they seemed to be there all the time, not only during summer months but because China was now under the Japanese, the ships were still coming and coming, so that was what he was doing. But of course

once we were under house arrest that all ceased, he couldn’t. No more work, he couldn’t go to work. Everything ceased, no more entertaining, no more mah-jong, no more dinner parties, no more cocktail parties, no more sport. He used to be a weekend horse rider, he used to work in the movies, a movie house behind the projectors as a side thing and so we used to get into the movies free. Everything ceased,

all our social activities and sport ceased, nothing. You wake up, tomorrow’s another day but it’s the same as yesterday and today’s going to be the same as tomorrow.

I don’t know what happened. We always seemed to have money there to buy food. I don’t know.

I know my family had shares in the electricity company and the waterworks, the Shanghai Waterworks, Shanghai Electricity Department and they had shares and my Dad was very well paid and I mean we were very well off. I mean all our table cutlery was sterling silver and the crockery was all the best and lots of crystal and cut glass was always on the table,

so he must have been well off. I wanted for nothing. I didn’t get pocket money, though, that was something because we did nothing. We didn’t do any work, we had servants to do that and to be able to afford five servants, I don’t know how much money they got. They bought their own food and I remember they used to pinch the rice. We bought rice by the bags full. My mother used to scold the servants, “You’ve been pinching rice,

now I’m paying you enough to go and buy your own rice.” But nothing, there was nothing to look forward to because you didn’t know what was going to happen. I had no more friends coming to visit me from school, we were under house arrest and that was it, nothing and that went on for months, months, a few months

before we were put into a camp.

Well they must have done something and the only thing that I can assume the Company, because he was British he couldn’t go to work but the Company consisted of a lot of Portuguese people and Chinese staff and they were not under house arrest or anything. They were

alright, the Portuguese at that time and as far as I know the Chinese ran the Company so maybe my father used to drop in on the way to the markets and collect his salary because the business was still going but my Dad was no longer manager. The next fellow took over, which would have to be a Chinese man because if he was British or American, he’d be arrested too.

So I think that is what he did because as you say you needed money.

Yes, we kept them right to the end and while we were interned later, they were still in the house, although I think the coolie and the boy they left because we were not able to pay them but the cook and the

Amah stayed on because we had servants’ quarters, they lived there. Now what they did during the day I personally don’t know and I doubt if my parents knew because they had to be paid, and we couldn’t pay them and we didn’t need money while we were in that first camp because everything was provided by the Japs, so no more servants.

No, nothing, nothing. No home schooling, we lived from day to day hoping tomorrow’s another day, maybe something, some crisis will happen and something will happen for us to get out of this situation and it did eventually come but it wasn’t the one we were hoping

for.

That stayed, it was gone at the end of the war when we came home it was gone. I don’t know who took it down or where it went. I know we had Japanese officers living in our house while we were interned, maybe they took it down because it said “enemy”. They wouldn’t leave it on there.

Well they just came and told us, “You are now under our control,” I suppose. How was it enforced? They just told you.

Where could you run? There was Japanese soldiers everywhere. You couldn’t run

away and the Chinese knew you. The Chinese knew you were Westerners so there was nowhere to run. You just couldn’t do it. I understand now it is very difficult for people who haven’t actually lived in China, as I was born and educated and lived there, it’s hard for them to understand because

they compare, they think our life was the same as theirs. I’m just using you as an example. You probably think now, the question you asked me, why couldn’t I run away? This is a big country, this is a big city, the illegals can run away and disappear in the crowd, you can’t do that in China, you just can’t do that. It’s a completely different lifestyle.

Everything about it is different. If I suddenly or my whole family decided, “Let’s run away,” where do you run? And if you run you’ll be carrying bags with clothing or whatever but where do you go? If you drive yourself to the nearest railway station where do you go? You only go to another part of China who will say, “Hey, you people, where do you come from? And where’s your passport? British passport,

you should be under arrest, so we’ll arrest you in this part.” It’s different altogether. Here, maybe some people ran away, I don’t know because I believe there were people interned in Australia, Japanese people, but where would they go if they ran? Maybe they can disappear in the crowd. I don’t know because it’s a bigger country, a bigger city.

I never saw any, we didn’t have any guards, not under house arrest. Later in the camps, yes, but not under house arrest, not guards, but everybody obeyed the rules because we were told there could be problems if you get caught in the streets after twelve noon, you could be arrested and God know what would happen to you. And you were frightened to take your arm band off in case somebody recognised you and dobbed you in because there were many Germans

living there and suddenly the Germans were our enemies. In fact when we were taken into camp they suggested to the Japanese to shave our heads and put us all into striped clothing. That we found out later. My mother’s brother who was Russian, he was not interned and he told us all this. He said, “All these German friends, you think they were your friends?” He said, “This is what

happened.”

No, no, no, never, no. No, not at all, you stay with your parents. Parents were strict in those days, you young people are lucky. You’ve got your freedom.

In those days you’re not an adult until you turned twenty one and you’re still a child, as a child of ten, twelve, fourteen, fifteen, you’re still a child and children must be seen and not heard and you did what your parents advised. Your parents know best and when you finished school and you get your own job, you’re on your own, but until

then, “While you’re still under this roof and at school, you do as we tell you” and everybody seemed to obey this rule. It’s a different lifestyle and as I said you’re lucky you weren’t born in my era.

Well at that time I didn’t even think of the future, but we talked a lot more with my parents

and my father always wanted me to be an interpreter because I could speak all those languages fluently. He said, “One day when you grow up, if all things end well, you could be working for the Consulate, you could be working in some very high up job. You could even travel the world as an interpreter.” And I thought, “Yeah, that wouldn’t be

a bad job at all,” and I kept that in mind. And many years later, many years later, after we came to Australia and I went to Singapore to work I think I got my job with the Special Branch Police Department, Singapore Police Department, because at that time I could still speak Chinese. So it did help me out a little bit.

We still fought, no change. No, we still fought, brothers and sisters. We always fought but now we are the best of friends. I think people adapt to situations, children and adults alike. We stopped fighting quite a lot once we were in the camp. You adapt, you realise something’s happening. You’re not sure

what’s happening and you don’t know what you’re futures going to be or what’s going to happen. You just adapt. We hardly fought in camp.

Oh, my brother used to come and whip me with a bit of a twig and I used to say “stop it” and then he was friendly with the little boy next door and he gave the little boy next door a twig and I was jumping around because they were both whacking me on the legs.

And then he would come and tear up my Blondie and Dagwood dolls, paper dolls, silly little things like that. Just silly little things, just the same as children fight today, “Oh that was the last bit of,” whatever, biscuit or something. “I was going to have it.” “Oh you’ve got two, you’ve got two pieces, I’ve only got one.” Exactly the same, children are the same all over the world.

So we still fought but I do in hindsight, well looking back now, we stopped fighting once we, I think all the kids had to grow up overnight once we were put in the concentration camp. We couldn’t really be children anymore.

I would

have liked to liked to have gone back to school, see my friends. My Italian friend, Lietcha, she was the only one that still used to come to the house and just wave to me through the window, that was during house arrest. She never came indoors. No, never came indoors and her parents, I remember my parents sneaking a lot of their silver,

cut glass, into Lietcha’s place and they hid it for us, saved a lot of our stuff by putting it in their attic in their home. They were Italians and they were not arrested and my Mum and Dad used to take stuff over, silver spoons, pieces of cutlery, all wrapped up in a bag. Head straight

for Leitcha’s place with, this is under house arrest, and drop it off and pretend we were going to visit in case anyone saw us and saw them, rather, and they saved a lot of stuff for us, lots of stuff. I’ve still got a lot of my parents’ stuff there that they saved for us.

Who?

No, no, nothing, you just lived, just nine to five out for a walk here and there and then back, nine to twelve rather, and nothing. Nobody came to check us or anything, until much later. One day they came and said, “We are going to put you into a Civil Assembly Centre,

so pack your bags.” “Where is the Civil Assembly Centre?” In the hotel right behind us, a big hotel, so lucky for us we didn’t have far to travel. We could just step over the, this wall and we’d be in there.

Everything was

left and packed, we took a little suitcase I think it must have been. I can’t remember whether they were cardboard boxes, yeah, suitcases, yeah little suitcases of stuff with us. Clothing, see with the Japs they don’t tell you how long you’re going to be there. They don’t tell you if eventually you will go back to your home. They tell you nothing. “You’re being interned, just pack a

bag, take some clothes. Don’t worry about food, don’t worry about beds or furniture because the hotel will have all that.” So there were two hundred of us, all taken by truck. We were lucky, a short journey but others had to come from another suburb, another residential, a little bit further, maybe twenty minute drive and we all ended up in this big hotel and shown to our rooms.

They did keep families together and the servants were still there. This hotel was owned by an elderly English couple and the hotel was usually empty during the winter months and this is in December, January, oh might have been, well she couldn’t have the hotel. People couldn’t come to the hotel anymore. That was closed down to

tourists and we were still lucky. She still kept the servants, the owner, the elderly owners and we were there for many months. I can’t recall, I think maybe four months or so. Yeah, maybe four, five months, I’m not sure.

Yes, the back of the hotel was a tennis court. We would walk

to the tennis court and look over the chicken wire, it had and just glance over the back, the backyard, which was very small. It showed the door to the kitchen, it showed the servant’s quarters and the servant’s toilets and a big room where we always kept coal, coal and wood for the stoves and we just looked back.

Sometimes the amah or her husband the cook would come and wave and my mother would say, “How is everything?” “Don’t worry, Missy, don’t worry, you come home soon.”

Well the day we had to go into the first camp, I didn’t pack. My parents packed everything. I didn’t have to pack. I wouldn’t know what to take anyway. I don’t remember packing.

Maybe I did, maybe I didn’t. I have no recollection of packing that day. All I can recollect is an open truck and my Dad helping me up into the truck and my brother pushed us all in and then my mother and we climbed in and we just had to go round the corner, round the block and that was the main entrance to the hotel. We all got out, picked up your suitcase and was shown bedrooms and then

watched everyone else arrive, a total of two hundred men, women and children.

Well it was, for me I saw some people I recognised. Yeah, some of my mother’s mah-jong friends were there too because one was a Belgian.

The conversation everyday consisted of, “What’s going to happen next? What are they going to do with us? Maybe they’re collecting us all together. Maybe they’re going to shoot us, they’re going to, what are they going to do?” But nobody knew but that was the main conversation everywhere you went and it was in that camp that I saw and realised how cruel the Japanese could be, that first camp.

The hotel.

The hotel was our first camp, it was in fact a camp which the Japanese called Civil Assembly Centre because we were in there for a few months.

After the first few days at breakfast, remember there were two

hundred of us, men, women and children and babies, and pregnant women. They called everybody out to the front yard. They plucked a little Chinese beggar boy, about so high. I would say he might have been about nine years old, eight, nine years old and they plucked him out of the street, put a dog collar around his neck with a chain, chained him to a tree, stuffed his mouth with orange peel and started to

practise the Japanese game of Kendo, which involves a long bamboo rod, just like a javelin and you aim for the target, which was the little boy’s mouth with the orange peel and that is something that I have taken with me. I’ll take that to my grave, that scene. The little boy was there on his knees, the tears were rolling down his cheeks. You could see all the sweat and drops and

even dripping onto his clothes and he had a dark padded Chinese gown on for warmth and you could see the tears dropping there and you could see a dark spot where the tears dropped and it was so pathetic. And I couldn’t realise, I couldn’t get over how can you do to this child? And they said “Now if you people all here misbehave you get the same treatment”.

And that was such a sorry sight, we couldn’t get over what was happening to us. Even as a young child I couldn’t get over it, “What are they doing? What is this?” And then on another day, also at mealtime, I don’t remember, breakfast, lunch or dinner, they got one of the Chinese servants in and bought in a kettle of hot, boiling water. They put it, they made him pick up a dining room chair like this (demonstrates),

by the legs, hold it above his head and they put this kettle of hot, boiling water on the chair and he stood where everybody having the meal could see him, up against the wall and we all knew if he moved the water would overflow and scald his arm and scald him. And, “Everybody eyes right. If you misbehave

you get the same treatment.” That was another occasion. And then on yet another occasion one of our young Armenian friends, Armic Baliance was his name, he was only in his very early thirties, he was married, he had a little girl and he could speak fluent Japanese.

I don’t know where he learnt his Japanese. He went to, I think part time Japanese school and picked up fluent Japanese and they wanted him to spy for them and he wouldn’t. He said, “No, I’m your prisoner.” Two Armenian families, the only two in Tsingtao, they had bakery and cake shops and they were interned with us. “Okay you come for questioning with us.” They took him

away in the morning, they bought him back and I’m pretty sure it was about four o’clock or half past four in the afternoon, covered in blood, bruised, terribly beaten. He later said they beat him with bamboo rods and they just jumped him there, through the gate. His wife and his elderly parents were in tears and I remember her rushing up to my mother “Vera, Vera, quick help me. Have you got any pillows because I

just can’t put him on a mattress. He is sore everywhere.” So my mother grabbed pillows from our room and gave them to her and went into her room and placed all these pillows to ease the pain. They did that to him. He received about three more beatings later in the other camp. He only died two years ago but they had since

divorced because he went mental and he was being looked after by his elderly parents at that time. They were late eighties, close to ninety but he died two years ago because I spoke with his wife on the phone from San Francisco, but yet these guards were not military guards. Had it been military guards, oh,

these atrocities would have been horrific. These were Consulate guards. They did not have military training, Consular guards, so everybody says, “Aren’t you lucky they were Consular guards.” They weren’t trained to do these other terrible atrocities as the military were. So that’s life went on in that camp, that’s it. We held a Christmas play incidentally because we spent

our first Christmas in that camp under the Japanese and there were nuns interned with us as well and we had what they called a Passion Play and I took a part and in my book there is a photograph of the play, the Christmas play with Mary and Joseph and Jesus and all the angels, only we didn’t have wings. Nobody had wings so were wingless angels but it was fun.

They had to do something to cheer each other up.

Ildeless Hydro, it was green, a nice green, like my pillows, a nice green colour. An elderly couple, the Rawsons.

It was square, square, everything was square, like that, two floors

and just a square building and many windows, just rooms. I don’t think it had flats, they were just rooms, rooms. Families had connecting doors and that was it. It was like a motel I would say but it was a hotel because it was two stories high. No escalators or lifts, you just walk. Dining room downstairs, tennis courts and because it was close to the

beach there were two hotels and then we had this other hotel run by the French lady, Madame Derage, which was white, all painted white, and that hotel is still there. In 1987 when we went with Bob to visit our house, that hotel was still there but the green one is gone, behind our house.

Just an ordinary large bedroom, I would say it was a

family room. One double bed, two single beds, just like an ordinary hotel room here. No luxuries, not as luxurious as today, it was just a plain room. I think all the old hotels had rooms like that, just the bare essentials, with some rooms had an ensuite but in our case, where we were, we had to share a bathroom with a whole row of rooms and

just knock on the door and if nobody was in you’d go in. And as far as anybody had to go out to the toilet at night and if you can’t wait everybody had a guzunda, one of these little pots, pee pots we used to call them. Have you ever seen them? Yeah, everyone had an enamel one in their room. I don’t know, it was just the done thing, especially

when you’re sharing and you can’t wait so at least you can relieve yourself and then go and get rid of it.

Very well I think. As I said people adapt. Nobody was in tears crying or hysterical. There

used to be little gatherings in between meals, meal time, talking, “What are they going to do next? How many days have we been here now? How many weeks have we been here?” And then it went into months, “How many months have we been here? What are they going to do with us? What about the news?” I must say they allowed outside friends to come in and bring us food if we wanted and I remember a Russian family who owned

a cotton mill in Tsingtao. I was friendly with the daughter and she, together with her mother, used to bring Russian food, Russian meat pies, like a shepherd’s pie and we were allowed to bring it in and that was wonderful having something different. I don’t remember what the meals were like, I just can’t remember that. I’ve tried very hard many times.

Breakfast I can remember, same as we all had, bacon, eggs, porridge, whatever, it was just like living in a hotel but you couldn’t leave the hotel.

In the bed, in the room, all in one room, one room. I didn’t have my own room anymore, just in one room, just in one family room.

Yes, yes, there was

a double bed and two single beds and a little chair, a cane sort, sort of cane furniture, a settee, a small little cane settee. I don’t remember radios. Television wasn’t invented, in Tsingtao anyway, in any of those years. I don’t remember a radio and there were no portable little radios, weren’t invented yet but we had no news.

And I remember when the visitors that we were allowed, we were allowed to speak thorough the fence with them, the front fence and, “What’s going on?” “Oh not much, a lot of Japanese walking around everywhere.” “What’s going to happen to us? Any news?” “Don’t know, can’t you find out?” “Nobody’s talking, nobody dares talk.” I suppose everybody was frightened of being put in the slammer with us. “When are we coming out?” “Don’t know,

no news.” And then my uncle said, “You know what’s happening? The Germans want you people to be put into striped suits, striped pyjamas and all your heads shaved.” “Oh my God, oh,” but it never eventuated.

What time is it?

Oh yes, I’ve got a buck tooth as you can see right now and my mother took me to this Russian dentist and arranged for me to have braces. In those days you had to produce your own gold, so she gave him this piece of gold and he said he’d melt it down and put them on, which he did but

when the war broke out I couldn’t see him anymore because we were incarcerated and we went to another dentist to try and get them off and mother said “gold” and he said, “These are not gold, they are brass and just as well you’re having them off because the brass is going green and then you’ll have real problems.”

After the war when we went back to Tsingtao Mother went looking for this dentist, but he’d shot through. And that’s why I still have a buck tooth.

You’re right.

Armic, yes, I told you also in the second camp he had more beatings. After the war, many years after, Bob and I were in San Francisco and we got all sorts of stories about him. He sneaked a radio into the camp, the second camp and he hid it under the

altar in the Weifang Church hall and during services, unbeknown to anybody, there he was underneath the altar listening to what little news he could get. I don’t know whether the Japs ever found out, probably not, so there was a radio in the camp, but we didn’t know, nobody knew. Also Armic’s, also, yes his wife, they had

a little son born in camp as well and she was saying that while she was in hospital in labour they had beaten him up, still because he wouldn’t spy, and bought him into the labour room for her to see while she was in labour having her son. That is cruel. She said she’ll never forgive them and very cruel. Also

interesting little story, getting away from him, his daughter who was maybe two or three years old at the time grew up to be Rudolph Nureyev’s, what do you call the will people? Executives of his will and for people that don’t know and many people don’t know, he left eighty eight zero million US dollars to go towards ballet,

to be distributed amongst different countries and I know that she because she said, “I have to find an Australian ballerina called Lucette Olgers who was the last one to dance with him, he wanted her to distribute the money and I don’t even know where to start.” So Bob said, “Leave it to me,” and after many phone calls and all sorts of things, letters and everything, we found her. She was teaching in Perth, I think it was,

and she rang, I spoke to her and I told her, “There’s money coming to you to go towards ballet.” She seemed very thrilled. The next thing I heard was, not through this little girl Janette, who’s grown up now, but through a mutual friend, “Oh yes, they met in Paris,” and I don’t know how much money was handed over. I don’t know anymore than that.

Everybody spoke to everybody else. We suddenly all became one big family or one little village sort of thing, big family. We discussed politics or what was going to happen to us or “What did you think of breakfast?” Or “What did you think of lunch?” Or “What’s going to happen to us next?” Everybody spoke to everybody else.

There was no school at that time. The school had not been set up at that time because everything, we were unsure of everything, we didn’t have the facilities or anything. We were unsure of how long we were there, but we stuck up a lot of new friends. Most of them were missionary people stationed in China that we did not know before and suddenly all these people, people from all walks of life were all thrown in together,

two hundred of us and we made we made some good friends. A lot of them have since died.

From this first camp? Not really, not really, no. I can’t think of anybody, not really. They were all business people, business tycoons, school teachers, no.

Oh dear, that’s a big question. I never questioned, I never even thought to count. Out of two hundred people there would be maybe fifty, maybe, maybe less, maybe seventy five, fifty, quite a lot of little children, maybe even less. I don’t know really, it would be just a pop guess and I don’t really know,

don’t know. Because there were lots of really little children and babies that you hardly saw and I never ever took any notice, to be quite honest. I didn’t take any notice.

I have since found out that they became friendly

with some of the little school girls and boys that were in camp. In fact in one case one of the young boys, who I keep in touch with through the internet, he said when he was there he remembered one of the guards taking the bayonet of his gun, taking the bullets out and gave the little boy the gun to play soldiers with and this little boy would shoot at him and he would pretend to die. So some of them

became very friendly with them, but I was never involved with any of them except my father had one business friend, Japanese business friend in Tsingtao before the war and after we got into Weifang, the second camp, suddenly a new commander in charge appeared and who was it? My father’s, this Japanese business associate, which was a shock to us and a shock to him. The

next day he came over with a watermelon and eggs and this started happening regularly for two weeks and my father said, “Please stop, you’re putting me in a very embarrassing situation. I’m here as a prisoner and I have to be like the others,” so the watermelon and the eggs ceased. But that was a real shock. We did not for one moment think that Mr Korinagi had anything to do with the army or whatever.

I think he was army.

Just a reminder. One day my parents were out, at that time my father’s sister came from Shanghai and stayed

with us about twelve months and during that time one time when my parents were out, she was very up in fashion. Everything had to be up to date in fashion, she said, “Your Shirley Temple curls are out of date.” She took a pair of scissors and went to work and when my parents came back I had a fringe, I had a bob with a fringe and my mother nearly died. She didn’t speak to Gracie for many months because of that, many months for doing that.

Because I had long hair and they used to curl my hair with rags, like Shirley Temple curls, so I remember that so well.

Of the time?

Oh a pair of short shorts with a top, like a bra and that was in the, oh before the war. Always one piece swimming suits, it was many

years later that the two piece came in. My father one time, I remember him in a one piece swimming suit and then in just the shorts, but they were long shorts and they were all made of wool at that time, nothing fancy. But I do remember my mother was a big woman and she looked terrible in shorts and tops and she looked terrible in a bathing costume but I never said

anything to her, never ever. She was quite fat and I didn’t like the way she used to wear this pair of longish shorts and one of these tops, plain cotton tops that you tie at the back and you tie at the back here and didn’t suit here but that was the fashion and she kept up with the fashions.

No, no rules at all. In China in those days

no rules, nothing. You do what you want. I remember a lot of bathing huts and little cubicles, four posts and straw mats around the four posts. People could go in there and change and the little wooden huts, you had to buy them and own them but we didn’t have one, so we had to use the little straw cubicles. We didn’t need one because we lived so near and we used to get changed at home

and go home and change again.

No, we weren’t allowed out of the hotel premises.

No, oh wait a minute. In the very, very far distance, yes, yes, nowhere close. It was always in walking distance but because of the little summer holiday homes you had to look over the roofs.

While we were in the first camp, it just stood there, with everything intact because the servants were still living on the premises, but later it was emptied. The bathtub was out on the front lawn because the Japanese officers were living there and they used the bathtub to water the horses and it was a mess.

Well suddenly we were all called into listen and an announcement was made by the commander of that camp, “You’ll all have one hour to go home and get ready to be picked up. We’re taking you elsewhere.” “Where are we going?” “Never mind, you are going away. You bring your beds,

and your blankets and a little bit of clothing and one hour.” So home we went, one hour, Mother panicked. We go into our lounge room, where to start. We don’t where we were going or for how long. They would not tell us and she put four sheets, our lounge room floor was a little bit bigger than this and four sheets and told us all,

even my little brother, nine years old, “Just put in what you want.” So the first thing I put in was Topsy and then where ever that album is over there, my own photograph album and my autograph album, those were the three main things. I don’t know what made me do it but I thought, “Oh photograph album, my friends are in that album, and autograph , yeah.” So I put them in the sheet

and then I just chucked in a few pieces of underwear and dresses and an overcoat.

Topsy?

It’s a chocolate coloured doll with three pigtails and one on top and one on either side and originally she had a dress,

a proper little red and white check dress with a large white bib style collar, all frilled and when that eventually wore out my mother made her a top, a little yellow jacket and green check pants and that’s Topsy. She’s about how many inches? Twelve, fifteen, sixteen inches I suppose,

I don’t know, I’ve never measured.

She was, I loved dolls. I had a great collection, all sizes, baby dolls, adult dolls, Shirley Temple dolls, all kinds of dolls and my dog Sally as well.

My mother, the first thing she wanted to take with her was her

jewellery and Father said, “No, no, you’ve got too much of it, too good stuff.” This was one of them and this ring was another one and this gold chain I have on was another one plus many other pieces of jewellery. And Dad said, “No, you’ll get it confiscated,” and he thought for a moment and bright idea, he pulled out

a little wooden board in our built in cupboards, we had built in wardrobes in each bedroom, and he put all her jewellery in a pillowslip and stuffed it as far back as he could and then just nailed it back and put a bit of old newspaper, that was already there on the floor and forgot about it and just left it there. My mother was devastated but he said, “Look it’s better this way.

Just take some, wear a few cheaper rings, which she did, so she only took a few things. I had a watch that I took with me that my Grandmother gave me when I was ten, that and another little ring, which I wore into camp but that was all.

Then I remembered seeing my parents putting, “will I take this? Will I take that?

Will I take this?” And my brother, “Mum, what will I take?” And my mother organised my brother’s sheet, okay, tied it up, “That’s your’s? What are you taking Joyce?” “Oh this, that.” “Oh you’re alright.” “Mum, Dad, where are we going?” “I don’t know, I told you we don’t know, they didn’t tell us.” Take overcoats they told us, that’s all, so we knew it was somewhere cold, so overcoats, blankets, two fold up single beds and one double bed. Within an hour

the Japanese came in two trucks, one for us to climb into and another one for the furniture and away they took us to the railway station. We were put on a train and we, I think were put into steerage. Now I know what steerage is when people used to talk about steerage, I really had no idea, but I certainly do know. No seats, little cubicles

with tatami mats, straw mats and there we had to sit with what we could carry, except for our furniture, which was loaded on elsewhere and away we went. And everybody’s talking on the train, “Where are we going? Where do you think we’re going?” We had no idea. About two and a half hours later we arrived at a place called Weishien. It is now called Weifang. The new regime

changed a lot of the names, so it’s called Weifang, but I’ll keep referring to it as Weishien. We were piled back onto trucks, one for everybody’s furniture, two hundred people, another one for the people climbing into trucks and I remember a very bumpy ride. They were dirt roads but they still had rocks and what not in them, so it was a very bumpy ride. So we came, all we could see in the distance

that we were heading for was this large brick wall and then they drove us to the main entrance which would take us on the other side of the wall. This we were later told used to be a missionary training centre. It had not been used for many, many years, and the last people that did use it were Chinese bandits and they had wrecked the place. The toilets that had flush, they were

two, there were about two toilets with flush, that was not working. It was broken, it was a mess. There was rubble everywhere. Wooden furniture all broken, it was terrible. You’d walk into the rooms here and there, cobwebs and spiders everywhere, so they each, inside that area were little compounds, which also had little walls around each compound. Inside each compound

were about, one, two, three, four, five, six, six or seven single rooms with a double wooden door. They had like a black iron ring handle, not doors like this and they looked to me like stables, but when you opened the door it is a room with a tiny little window. So we

looked for the largest one because there were four of us. The couples were in the little rooms and our block, which is Block Two was the only two storey accommodation apart from the classrooms which were later turned into dormitories for the single ones. But when we arrived they said, “Right this is where the two hundred of you can pick your own rooms, don’t even

look at the other rooms.” So we did, walked into this room, Mum and Dad said, “Yeah, we can all fit into this room.” It was smaller than this room, three beds. We all had to go and look for a broom, an old broom or a mop or something, which we all found. My Dad found a three legged chair, he found a bit of wood and somehow or other, I don’t know how, managed to put a piece of wood, somehow, I don’t know and give the chair

another leg. He found an old rickety table which he said, “It will do, but be careful, don’t bump into it, it will fall to pieces.” And then I found this old little, well it was a little, what do you call it? Like it’s not a big wardrobe, but these little ones, hanging space only. I don’t know what you call it, lowboy? Lowboy maybe, I don’t know, I haven’t got one at home but anyway it had two doors. It was only about so high, two doors, you open up and there’s a rail and

you can hang your clothes. Of course we didn’t have any hangers or anything so we just folded everything and just kept piling and all our clothes were stored in there. I forgot to pack blankets for myself, so during the winter months to come, everybody piled their overcoats over me and that’s how I. I used to get up in the cold winter morning and start dressing

from the top, with the blankets still covering here and quickly get dressed on the top and then quickly push the blankets or whatever off and get my slacks or whatever on. But anyway we found this little bits and pieces of furniture. We set up a clothesline from the back of one room, which was all brick and we found a few nails which had already been there, luckily and together with the other families in our little compound

we all set up a clothesline which we used. And from then on the men got together and said, “Well what do we do about food?” Anyway they went and asked to meet the commandant of the camp and he gave all the men, all adults instructions about what was going to happen about food. We were shown the kitchen, the dining room but everything

had cobwebs on it, cobwebs, spiders, cockroaches crawling around, rats, mice, it was horrible. So we, our group being the first group, had the brunt of cleaning up. We asked them for brooms and they seemed, the Japs seemed to produce a few brooms and we all went to work, men, women and children and tidied the place up. And from then on we told them,

the two Armenian families were bakers before, cake shop and bakers and, “Oh well, your supplies will be coming very soon.” The supplies arrived, they consisted of potatoes, Chinese turnips, onions and carrots, all in big bags bought in by truck, flour. I think that was the next day. I’ve forgotten how we managed the first day. I really can not remember but

the next day I saw these trucks arrive with all the food and we all rubbed our hands, “Food, food,” but the Japs would not allow us to take it. They waited until it started to go rancid, all the vegetables, the potatoes started leaking out of the bag and then said, “Yeah, you can take it now.” So the women got to work and cut off all the bad parts and what was left wasn’t very much but it was food. Anyway

as the months rolled on and so on and so forth my Dad his job was in the kitchen and he used to stir the watery stew in this big Chinese cauldron they had and one day over the years we were there, a pigeon flew in the window and landed in this huge cauldron of hot, bubbling watery stew. Well the other members

in the kitchen panicked but my father said, “Leave it to me”, got the pigeon out, he feathered it, washed it in water, no running water by the way, all water had to be carted from the well, all water, and sometimes it was a long distance to walk to get water. Washed it, it was already half cooked in the stew and my brother had it. He explained everything, he said, “Now this is for Eddie, he’s still not well. He’s just getting over TB and that’s a

little bit of nourishment.” He was too old to qualify for a little cup of milk a day and an egg a day and too old. That was given to really little children, so Pop, as we called my Dad, many, many times I heard him say, “You remember Eddie, that pigeon saved your life, the pigeon that flew in the window saved your life,”

and I still mention that to my brother when we see him. He lives not very far from me now and I often mention it. He said, “Yeah the pigeon.” I remember Dad saying, “remember that pigeon saved your life.” And that was it.

Alright, alright, now you know the first lot of shops you must have passed in Blenheim Road down there, the first lot of shops, right here within walking distance, well we and that includes me, had to walk from here up to there with a bucket, fill the bucket up at the well, bring the bucket home to

do your washing and there was no washing machines, just a washing board and a tin tub and I have a sketch, that I sketched myself of our little home and I called it in inverted commas “with the tin bucket and the scrubbing board” up against it and it the middle of this little compound there seemed to be a little stone, not brick, stone, stone table and luckily

we could lift up that tin, put it on the table and did our washing like that and not many people had that little stone table and they had to get down on their knees or crouch down and do their washing. There was nowhere to put it. The rooms were too small and you can’t do washing in the room and that’s how we carted water. But for drinking water you had to go and fill your tin cups or little saucepans from the kitchen, because

water still had to be boiled and you’d get hot boiling water and you’d just wait for it to cool down to drink. No ice or anything like that.

They within the next twelve months, there were people from many other parts of China, Beijing, Tientsin, and

all the smaller towns, Chifu, Pataho, I could go on and on, Shingwontau, coal mining places, all Japanese enemies arrived. We watched them arrive, we were on this side of the gate but when the main opened we could see them climbing out of their trucks and walking towards us. Nothing, we waved to them and “welcome, welcome,

welcome,” what else could they say? Within a year and a half I would say there were two thousand of us, from all over China, men, women and children. Amongst them were about five hundred nuns and priests, Catholic nuns and priests. There were, oh dear, school teachers, artists,

professors, historians, mathematical professors, alcoholics, prostitutes, con men, people from every walk of life you can think of. Lawyers, judges, all interned with us, as well as members of other clergy, Church of England, Protestant and a couple who were Holy Rollers. Have you heard of Holy Rollers?

No? Holy Rollers, part of their religion is to lay on the floor and roll and chant. They just call themselves Holy Rollers and how I found out about them, they were a Dutch couple called Shlagers, and in our compound their room window looked onto our little compound and I could hear them chanting and as

kids, “What’s that?” And then it was all explained to me and my brother and the other kids in our little compound but that’s a religion and they don’t laugh and all that but they literally roll on the ground and chant prayers. I remember when the priests arrived they had long hair, long beards, long black gowns and they looked a mess. I think they

looked scruffy, outright scruffy but within two weeks the hair was cut. We even had barbers, we had a boot maker, a carpenter, all enemies of the Japanese and their hair was cut, their beards were shaven off, they had donated civilian clothing given to them and they were the most handsome young men I have ever seen and

so were all the other single girls all thought, “Well look at them,” young teenager, good looking men. They were all very young, young, strong men so they were given the heavier loads of work as in pumping the water from the well. This particular well had to be kept pumped twenty four hours a day, so

they were working in shifts and they did all that. The nuns had to take off, they had frames, I don’t know what they call it. Maybe you might call it a quaff, I don’t remember, I think you call it a quaff. It’s a little hard frame and then the veil sits over it and then they pin the sides. Well you’re in a camp now and you have to do the work like anybody else, so they did away with that and just tied their little

veil, pinned it at the back and folded up their sleeves and away they went, peeling vegetables. There were so many of them that were nuns, in fact my mathematics teacher, she incidentally was my maths teacher in my second school. I went to another school later, before camp, and Sister Heltrudis, being an American, she came into camp too.

And those who were teachers had to set up school and their were lay teachers as well as nuns and priests and I went, somehow or another got myself involved with the Peking American School where a couple of my old teachers were teaching because they were American and the Peking American, and I was with them.

And there were no classrooms because all the classrooms were turned into single men’s and women’s dormitories, so our classes were held, on rainy days inside the church and in the dining room but when lunch time came we had to vacate them for lunch. In the summer months our classes were held outdoors, under trees, anywhere,

anywhere that was suitable and there were many little groups of schools, because many people who were interned a lot of their teachers came too because their teachers were British and American and Australian. And they said, “Well we’ll set up schools,” because there were so many school age children and you’ve got to give them something to do, so they all went to their own little group. I went to my little group as well and whoever didn’t have a group well, “Come and join us,” or “join

them”, whoever, there were three or four little groups of children belonging to Tientsin Grammar School, Chifu School, Tsingtao School and all that and that’s the best they could do and I mean you can’t, it was difficult because we had to share books and we didn’t have proper copy books or anything like that.(TAPE STOPS)

The school teachers for some reason, maybe it was this one hour thing as I say, people bring the strangest things, I think they must have bought all the books because there was nothing provided, nothing. There was nothing there when we arrived and we had, they bought their English books, mathematic books, history books, even ancient history. The artists bought their easels and all their paints and all the paper, because they too were not

told for how long we would be interned, so they bought it all with them. And that’s how we, and sharing books and what we used to write with was sheets of paper that somebody bought into camp. Must have been one of the school teachers, I don’t know, there was so many good teachers and my Dad said to me, “You study hard, because you will never ever get such a group

of highly trained teachers.” They were trained at universities in London, in America, in Canada, even from Australia, doctors, lawyers, everything. They were the most highly qualified that were working in China in those days and so I took his advice and learnt what I could. I took up drawing, pencil drawing, painting. I took up

shorthand. There was one shorthand, two shorthand teachers. One was a young missionary boy, about nineteen and he taught me for a while, then there was an older woman and she taught me for a while and she even bought blank certificates, so I got a great shorthand certificate for sixty words a minute. And of course I achieved my high school certificate which was the Peking American High School and the principal of that

high school was an American lady who was in camp with us so she signed the certificate, but what I missed looking back now, I never had a ceremony and people in those days had a big ceremony when you finished your high school. They used to wear these hats with a tassel and a black gown, and I missed out on all that. I missed out actually on all my adolescent years and pretty clothes and going out and all that, that was

missed. But all the young girls had boyfriends. I had a boyfriend, sure and we all had many boyfriends and we asked the Japanese if we could hold dances every Saturday evening because there were many musicians. They were, what kind of Americans? They came from America, they were young, coloured men and they were great musicians, plus a couple of English boys

from Shanghai and Tientsin and they formed a band. We also had a great Salvation Army band. We had dancing teachers there, Scottish dancing, Irish dancing, Russian dancing, everything and I joined in everything. I wanted to try everything, which I did, so I can say there was a time when this was to me an adventure. I forgot this was a camp and we were always hungry, but forget the hunger, this is an

adventure, this is happening to me. I’m learning all these things that I have never seen before, so I think in a way we were fortunate to have consulate guards because I don’t think the military would have allowed all that.

Well once everyone arrived in camp there was two thousand of us and we went on with our lives. We had schools set up as I told you, food and etcetera and etcetera and suddenly a group of Americans disappeared.

Where had they gone? They were exchanged. America arranged to give the Japs two Japanese prisoners of theirs in exchange for one American of their own, so the Americans gave two Japanese and got one of their own back and there was a whole group of them that just suddenly, “Goodbye, goodbye.” “Where are you going?” They just vanished, they just weren’t in camp anymore and it was as a child, you don’t

notice that but people were talking and I started listening and I found out that yes, they had been exchanged and evacuated back to the US. But also while everybody was there, one day American Red Cross food parcels arrived and the Japs said, “Well there are two thousand people here

and only one thousand American food parcels, and it was from the Americans,” so he said “To be fair we will give everybody a little bit, you have to share amongst two thousand.” Well there were a couple of American families that had quite a number of children who objected to that and they said, “No, these are our parcels.” Everybody was hungry and when you’re hungry I mean the

mind goes a little bit, when you’re over hungry. “No,” they said, “we don’t want to share, if the other countries want to send parcels they can send parcels.” But our committee said it wasn’t fair, it just wasn’t fair. One kid might be chewing chewing gum or something and the other one is staring, so there was a big committee meeting with the commandant and

in the end the commandant said, “We’ve got to be fair about this, those food parcels, everybody is going to share.” Well some of these families kicked up a hell of a fuss but we all got a little bit of everything and my prized possession out of those food parcels was not food, little tins of maybe butter or cheese or a little tin of jam or something like that, but

Chicklett’s Chewing Gum. I had not tasted chewing gum of any sort for so long and when I had this little packet, about so big, of sugar coated Chicklett’s. I used to chew and chew one and save it and I would stick it on the side of my bed to save it for tomorrow, because I never knew when I’d get another packet, and that I remember so clearly, sticking it on but in the

process of sticking it I had to make sure it didn’t stick onto a bed bug because we had bed bugs and I remember kicking them myself, looking for them and kicking them, but that chewing gum story I remember. It was so, I didn’t go for the food, oh Chicklett’s, I remember that so well, so well.

They had a rat catching competition.

All the young men, lots of young single men decided there would be a gift of a dozen eggs, or was it two dozen? Might have been two dozen, might have been two dozen eggs smuggled in by Father Scanlon. This is the second camp I am talking about and the young fellow that caught the most rats, he wanted his eggs and he said, “I’m going to cook them for myself,”

but every one was bad, every one, so he missed out. But when this rat catching competition came about you should see all the novelty rat traps, all home made, all funny looking things made out of bits of wire and tin and everything. It was amazing, what do they call it, invention is the mother of necessity or

something like that, and talking about while we are on the food subject, also before I forget to tell you this, in the young men’s dormitory, one of the young men climbed into the attic and he found an attic and he climbed in and he said, “Guess what, I’ve found an old wringer up here.” Now the rumours went

around, “Oh yes, he found an old wringer, what are we going to do with old wringer? It’s no good to us.” Oh the baker had a bright idea, “Bring it to me”. He took it into the baker’s shop, he made a big lump of dough, rolled it out, to fit the wringer, put it through the wringer and we had spaghetti from then on. Big sheets of dough used to come out but they were all had to be hand cut into spaghetti but we had spaghetti, which was wonderful. And the first time that that

happened we had a little blackboard in the dining room to see what today, the food was the same every day but with different fancy names and this time it had “spaghetti, something, something,” I don’t remember and we all thought, “Spaghetti? Spaghetti?” And sure enough it was the same stew but it had many bits of noodles in it and then that was thanks to that old wringer and then I think I might have already

mentioned the pharmacist and the yeast out of sweet potato, so we had fresh bread, but everything was still ladled out in small portions. What you would do is you have to queue up, my father was one of them, they bring large saucepans, boilers, very large ones and all this stew cooked in the cauldron was ladled into this large boiler. Two men had to lift it onto the dining room

big serving table, you queue up and you get served one small baked bin tin ladle and two slices of bread and glob of peanut butter, that was your lunch, that was the lunch. No in between snacks, there was nothing. You just had to wait for the next meal and it was very hard for people with young children who were hungry all the time, very hard. Have I told you about the breakfast?

Sorghum? I didn’t tell you? Breakfast we had sorghum or bread porridge, what they called bread porridge. Extra bread they had over it would be turned into porridge by boiling it with water and a tiny bit of brown sugar. I don’t know where they got the brown sugar but maybe, I don’t know, but maybe the Japs issued that for cooking only. There was only a tiny bit, just for a taste and all this bread was boiled up and turned into a sloppy porridge,

but two slices of bread. Another time we had something new on the menu, sorghum for breakfast and everybody looked at the menu, “Sorghum?” Sorghum cereal and sorghum in Tsingtao used to feed the chickens, tiny little red seeds and also used to make brooms and this sorghum was boiled and boiled and it swelled up and it was very

rubbery to chew and I do remember the first time that I had to chew this. I said to my mother, “I can’t swallow it, it’s all rubbery.” She said, “Well you’d better swallow it, otherwise you go hungry,” so you’re over there, trying to swallow a teaspoon of sorghum cereal, but you swallowed it, otherwise you’d go hungry. And when you get hungry you get stomach cramps, so I’ve been hungry and so that’s why, I don’t know, I hate seeing food wasted.

I don’t like wasting food to this day. If I have anything left over the little dog gets it. If there is any stale bread or something I break it up and give it to the birds. That’s why I’ve got the bird perch and I give it to them.

The evening meal would be stew again, watery stew with no meat. We never got meat in the evening. The few pieces of meat that we did get for a very

short time was during lunch time and the pieces were about the size of my thumbnail and you’d be lucky to get one piece but the Japs did bring in meat but that only lasted for a very short time and after a while there was no meat until the commandant’s horse dropped dead and then he said, “My horse is dead, get it away,” and the committee found out about it and

said, “Can we have it to eat?” “Yeah, you can have it but you can’t have it yet. When we’re ready to give it to you we’ll give it to you,” so they waited until the maggots got into it and then they said, “You can come and get your horse”. Well as you can imagine there’s a horse, the head has to be, this sounds horrible but it did happen, the horse’s head had to be cut right off, the legs and tail

cut off, it had to be skinned and maggots had to be dug out, that was the main job. My Dad came in that morning and said, “You’re going to get meat today but be careful of the maggots,” and we all looked forward to some meat, which was horse meat. It was very dark red in colour, slightly sweet in taste but we had maggots and we just

spooned it off with a soup spoon, chucked it out but it was meat for the first time in months, and months and months and that was the first and last time that we actually had a piece of meat. We never had meat anymore after that, it was just watery stew, that’s all. The few vegetables that were edible after the women peeled off and cut off all the rotten, and rotten, I mean rotten, it was

all soggy, so you had to cut half a potato off and throw it away and the same with the onions which were all soft and slimy, so by the time you were left with what is still stewable, you only get a small ladleful full and everybody ate as fast as they could to go back and be the first in the queue to get seconds. If you were lucky you might get another half ladle of whatever was going or another one slice of bread

that was leftover, but first come, first served. And I must also tell the ladies that did the vegetable peeling, there was one, my mother’s best friend before camp. First and foremost she bought in, in that rushed one hour, people bring the strangest things, she said to my mother, “I bought all this tinned food, tinned fruit, tinned meat, tinned salmon, tinned everything, because I didn’t know where we were going and

I’m not going to be hungry.” And she always had manicured nails and never did a stroke of work and actually that was my friend Stanley’s mother, who I pointed out in that birthday party picture. She said to my mother, “If I give you a tin of something, can you do my vegetables for me?” She didn’t want to damage her fingernails, so my mother did it, so for a little while we had a share in a small

tin of salmon or Delmont, it was all American Delmonty stuff, tinned food and that was great until her tin food ran out and, “What do I do now?” And mother said, “Sit down next to me and I’ll show you how to peel a potato and an onion,” which she had to do. And have I told you about the lady who bought all her perfume? Alright, in that rush again, as I said people bring strange things, she loved perfume, collected all the expensive brands of perfume

of the time. In those days you had to decant your own perfume. They all came in boxes about that size and then you buy pretty bottles and put it into that and she bought all her big bottles with her. Her husband was a retired doctor, and he became an alcoholic before the war. What happened to her perfume? He drank it all, all her perfume went. He drank all her perfume.

There were many alcoholics there, men and women and one lady collected all the wood shavings from the carpenter shop, soaked it in water for a couple of days or more, until it started to ferment, bubbles started to form and the water gets bubbly, rancid, whatever you called it and she drank it. She eventually died, she was warned, the doctors told her, “You will die if you

keep drinking this.” She did die. We had about nine deaths in the camp. Nobody died of starvation, they just died of other little different things. As I told you Eric Liddell who was in our camp, he was an Olympic runner in the late 1920’s and he died of a brain tumour. There was a movie made about his life called Chariots of Fire and he died of a brain tumour. People died of various different

things. There was not much the hospital could do. We were very short of medication of any sort. I had a very badly infected foot. All my toes the skin started to peel off and the red flesh was showing and I had to go to the camp hospital and the doctors were all internees, not Japanese enemy doctors, all internees that had set up this hospital and he said, “I’ve got nothing, the best I can give you is

Condy’s Crystals. Soak your foot every day in Condy’s Crystals. Sit there, do your homework if you have too but with one foot in that little basin,” and it fixed me up, it cured it. It took about six weeks I think. I know it was a long time and my foot from here down, my whole foot was dark brown from soaking because Condy’s Crystals turns things brown. It’s a beautiful maroon colour to start with but if you soak

anything in it it goes brown and those are the crystals that we had to soak our fruit and vegetables in before eating. So these doctors were working under very difficult conditions because of medication. There were a few women who were in the hospital who were in there permanently because they, I don’t know, I think some of them were mental, might have been mental. There was also at one time a rumour that

Amelia Erhardt was in our camp but that never came to anything because she was one of the most photographed women in the world, at that time, and everybody would have recognised her. But we did in fact have a woman who seemed to know all about aeroplanes, so rumours went around that she was in camp but it turned out it wasn’t. After the war there was a lot of investigation about it

and it turned out it was not her. Some of the inmates after the war claimed they saw letters written from her to her husband, from her to her mother, saying, “All is well here, see you soon, we will be liberated soon,” but it turned out to be fakes or certainly not her, so that story is wiped out but I’ve got that in the book for what it’s worth.

Dripping, dripping and he used to bring home dripping and we could put it on our bread,

because a blob of peanut butter did not go very far and we used to smother ours in pinched dripping. But my mother’s friend, when she had to do vegetables, she used to stuff carrots and potatoes under her shirt or blouse and she got caught one day, so her name went up on the blackboard for everyone to see, just to embarrass her but that didn’t only happen to her, there was a lot of pilfering going on. People were hungry, people were hungry and there was nothing

nourishing, no milk, no eggs, no butter, no sugar, black tea, coffee was ersatz [substitute] coffee. I don’t know what it was made of, it wasn’t real coffee, pretend coffee, artificial coffee, Ersatz coffee. I must tell you a very interesting story later when I come to the liberation part, about Ersatz coffee, remind me later.

Oh that was punishment enough, for your name to be displayed up on the blackboard, pilfering. Also we were allowed to build a little mud stove in the corner of our rooms because the winters were so cold and there was no heating, so the Japs allowed us to get a little pile of dirt, go and build yourself a mud stove, which all the families did and

they gave us coal dust to make coal balls out of it. You mix the dust with water, again which had to be carted from there to here and in our compound and I remember helping my family, each family did their own, coal dust mixed with water. You used your bare hands, turned them into balls and this is my little plot near my front door and you put your own coal balls in the front to dry in the sun and you

left it out. Well people steal coal balls because other people were to lazy to make their own so after a while we had to bring them all in at night and then put them out again during the day but that’s what we burnt in our room in the winter months, it was so cold. But that only came afterwards. To start with it was pretty cold in the winter mornings.

Yes.

Number Two Compound, a compound is, now just to give you an example. Pretend my outside front fence, now inside the fence there is this house then there was another house there which was used to be the dormitory for the missionary, this house here

was the dining room here and whatever else there was. Also there were little compounds, for example, an open area with a wall like this and inside this room were little, little rooms, many little rooms, about six little rooms where the students used to live. It just fitted a little table and a bed because they were students. They weren’t going to be there for years and years and years, just

enough to live there temporarily. That was the compound with a little brick wall and you were allowed to come and go as long as you don’t leave the perimeter of the whole area and that was what we called the compound. Now each compound had it’s own little toilet, dunny, with a tin can which had to emptied quite often by a Chinese coolie and

seeing there was no news coming in about the outside world and nobody had radios, except that one I think I mentioned, that was hidden in the church, that nobody knew about except a small group of Catholic priests because they could understand Chinese, and it was all in Chinese and so the Chinese coolie had a prearranged, all by the Catholic priest because they spoke and read Chinese as well.

They would come in to empty the tin cans and in the way in they would blow their nostril, blow the other nostril and out would come a little piece of silk material, sometimes with Chinese writing or a little piece of paper with Chinese writing and that news was all about the Chinese communists who were coming in, trying to swallow most of Chiang Kai Shek’s area.

And we knew that if they came in, well there would be pandemonium, what with the Japanese, we were under them, the Communists us being Westerners, they would have slaughtered us, so we were getting news as to how close they were getting and all that. And everybody, rumours were going round that we were all going to be killed. There was a pit outside the wall, the main wall, that had electric wire around it

and they dug little pits all around there. Well, when the war was over they were going to shoot us because the Japs were given orders no prisoners to be taken alive and even if you don’t kill them, just bury them in those pits. So from then on, that was about the last year that we were in camp, all sorts of rumours popped up. Another rumour was that they were preparing gas chambers in Shanghai,

and we were all going to be shipped off to Shanghai and all we could take was one suitcase and that, I don’t know, maybe it would have happened, had it not been for the atomic bomb. To be quite honest the atomic bomb saved my life and two thousand others.

In that compound, there was a couple, in the room up against the wall there was a couple with a young baby, there was an elderly couple and then there was a grandma and her granddaughter in another room, then there was a larger room, this was Tisha I was talking about, her name was Latitia Thomas. She and her grandmother in one room and then there was her mother

and her stepfather and two littlies in another room alongside and then there was another English couple with three young children, twin boys and a little girl and then there was ourselves and the only partition between this family with the twin boys was a large glass sliding door that you can see through, so we hung a sheet on our side and they hung a

sheet on their side and then above us was the only two storey family room which the Desuters, a Belgian family lived in above us.

There were none, there were none and

particularly women’s hygiene. Women get their periods, what do you use? Nothing was issued. One small cake of soap about this size for a month to wash yourselves and your clothes and luckily there were four of us, so my mother made it last. But women’s hygiene, nothing, so you used old sheets, old towels and you had to wash them out and reuse them.

Hang them? That was another problem, a big problem for my mother and me, so my Dad got a piece of wire that he found and in the back of this little wardrobe that I found, this lowboy, he managed to find two nails. He hammered one in this side, one in this, like this is the back, this is the front and this is a window. He hammered a nail on there and there and put this wire, attached it to the two nails and

so we just hung our rags on that to dry. You couldn’t hang them out on the line to dry as everybody would know what was going on and that’s what my girlfriend Tisha in the same compound did as well. It was not easy.

There were always sheets and towels, anything,

old dresses. My mother had an old skirt, a cotton skirt, she cut that all up. You just had to fold them up, it was hard, it was very hard, no privacy, no privacy, yet there were babies born in camp, a few little babies born. A few hanky pankies on too with the married people but I don’t know how they managed because lights out at ten p.m. and that’s what,

most people you ask, “What did you miss?” First and foremost was three square meals a day, and secondly is the freedom, freedom to be able to do what you wanted to do, freedom of everything. Freedom of speech and just to be free to come and go and just to be sort of melt away with the rest of the crowd in the street, which

you couldn’t do and ask I say, as for me, my whole of my adolescence years I missed.

I had a boyfriend, I had a boyfriend and he was very good. At least he was someone I could talk too. I showed him my photograph album that I bought with me and that was it.

He was in the band when we were allowed to have dances every Saturday night but dances must finish about ten o’clock because lights out at ten. Everybody must be in their rooms, no candles, nothing. That was when all the black marketeering was taking place. Yeah, so we’d just go for walks after dinner at night, before ten o’clock, if it wasn’t a Saturday night with the dances.

And if it was summer it would stay lighter for longer and they would have baseball games or cricket games. Somebody bought or found a cricket set and baseball set or whatever and we held those games and walking, running. Eric Ladell started a race with all the young boys, “Come on, we’ll all have a race.” They laughed at him because he was a man of forty and they were all young fellows of nine and ten years old and they laughed at him but he beat them. They didn’t know he was an

Olympic champion, champion of the world. So there were things to do and as I said you took advantage of the dancing lessons, Scottish dancing, ordinary dancing, Irish dancing. I took part in all of them so I was kept pretty busy, pretty busy and sometimes I’d get home from those lessons just in time for the lights out at ten o’clock and I would

have to put on my nightie or pyjamas, whatever it was, in the dark. But all the black marketeering was done in the dark, in the dark, yeah by Father Scanlon, who taught my father but he got caught. I think I told you about that already, about his chanting and all that.

No, the soldiers always kept their swords and their guns, their pistols. They had a pistol I think, yeah, pretty sure, because they used to count us with a pistol and they had a sword, clank, clank, clank and then they carried guns, proper guns with the bayonet as well. They were patrolling at night and

the guards at the gate, they had that.

Head counts every morning at seven a.m. You stand outside your room door. We were also given when we arrived in camp a little piece of cotton material to pin on your clothing with a number. I’ve forgotten what my number is. I think I

might have it somewhere written in the album, with a number that you had to pin on every morning. They would count you with a revolver, in Japanese and okay, finished, roll call finished and these guards would always be accompanied by one of the committee, the top committee member who was an Englishman, a top businessman. He would come

with the guards to make sure everything was alright. But there were many, many headcounts in the middle of the night. You’d be dragged out of bed, men, women and children, young babies. The only people they left were those that were in the hospital. Everybody else, “Out, out, out, headcount, headcount.” Out we would go into this large, we called it the ball field which

is similar to a soccer or football field, very large one and you all have to line up in order of your compound number and they put the search lights on and the machine guns they made sure they were trained on us and each time everybody thought, “Well, here we go,” but it never happened. And they would just come and count you with a gun and then after about an hour we’d think

“Thankfully that’s over,” but no, “We made a mistake, somebody’s missing,” so start all over again. This is in the middle of the night, at one or two or three in the morning, and then it became more frequent when two men escaped. But yeah, we were counted quite often during the night and I remember seeing people kissing each other goodbye because they thought, “this is going to be the end,”

but nothing really happened.

Outside your front door, in your bedroom door, where your room was, outside. It’s just like I’m living in this house and someone wants to count me I have to stand outside my front door, just stand straight and he’d come and count you.

With a gun, I remember the gun pointing at me and people said it was loaded. I never heard it click, I never saw it click but people have heard it. My parents said, “Be careful of that gun, don’t move, otherwise they’ll shoot.”

There were times when we were scared particularly, I did not like

that search light. It blinded you. It was a huge light and they were on top of the pill box, the little pill box up there. You can imagine the search light is like this, even brighter and this is at night time and looking down and we were all down here, lined up being counted and they were up in the corner with machine guns there and naturally you think, “Well they are going to machine gun us now.” But we were lucky because they

were consulate guards. They make friends with a lot of the young school boys and even today I have young friends, I mean friends who were young at that time and they said, “Oh we used to play with the guards, play soldiers with the guards even.”

After a while I think you become blasé about it, “Another count, if we die, we die.” There was a time, I think just one time when I was being counted and I thought, “Gee, I don’t want to die yet. I’m only a teenager, a young teenager, I’m not ready to die. There’s so many things I want to do, so many places

I want to travel to,” and that was as I was becoming an adolescent and maybe sixteen years old and thinking, “What’s going to happen to me? I haven’t even lived.” But that was the only one time and it haunted me for the next day or two and then it went away. You just, as I said people adapt and when you adapt to something it becomes routine. You don’t stop to think anymore about it.

You have too, you can’t be all the time thinking, “Oh dear, what can I do?” It was like a little village, with hard work. After having five servants you had to cart your own water, wash your own dishes, when you finished your tea take them back to the dining room where there was a large pan with hot water. Just rinse

them out, nothing to dry them with, just take them back to your room. It was harder for the parents I think, because as children we weren’t told very much what was going on. The parents probably knew a lot more and they were worried, with little children, so I felt very sorry for a lot of the parents.

People smiled but I will tell you what, there was a lot of grey hairs after a while and lipstick started to run out, nail polish ran out, hair dye ran out and I felt sorry for those women too. And the shower, I told you what the showers were like?

They met, as far as was told to me, they used to meet once a week with the commandant to tell them we need more food, we need this, we need that and

the commandant, “Yes, I will see to this, that and the other,” but nothing ever happened. The food never changed. In fact it became less and less to eat.

Business men, the head of the committee, I can’t remember his name but I think he was a Tientsin, Tianjin you would know it, business man and

another one was a doctor and I don’t know the names of the others. They were all top businessmen in China, heads of big businesses. My father was not on the committee, he was in the kitchen.

Well I only ever saw him occasionally, I can’t even put a face to him now.

Kirinagi who was my father’s business associate pre-war was at one time our commandant as well and the fact that he offered us, well bought us watermelon and eggs made me think, just my personal opinion, he might have been a kind man. He was a family man, so maybe he did feel a little bit kindly or sorry,

because he said to my Dad, “Mr Cook, what are you doing here?” And my father said, “And what are you doing here?” And that was it.

King Kong, King Kong was a big, fat Japanese guard and then there was Sergeant Boshindi. Boshindi in Chinese means “no can do”.

Every time you asked him something “Boshindi”, so he was called Sergeant Boshindi. King Kong was the big one who was the big, tough guy, so we called him King Kong. I can’t remember any of the others, can’t remember. There would have been others but I can’t remember.

Youmada.

He was,

I’m not sure but I think my father said he was a Korean and a very, very bad man. And I remember my father going up to him after the liberation with a finger like that and saying, “You are going to be a war criminal, you will be charged.” And he was a cruel man, but I don’t know what he did but my father

must have known something I didn’t know for him to say that.

They were working, they all volunteered to work in the hospital. Because there was a hospital already there, because it being a school, a missionary school, all the doctors said, “Do we have a hospital here?” “Yes, we have a hospital here, this is a hospital.” “Alright I will be

a doctor, I will work in the hospital,” so that was easy. The nurses, even some nuns who knew nursing became hospital staff and all the doctors, of which there were quite a few, were working in the hospital.

I don’t know, I was never in the hospital as such. I just went there and said, “What can you give

me for my toes?” And he said, “Here, these Condy’s Crystals.” My brother split his lip and he went into the hospital and had his lip repaired but apart from that I have never been in the actual hospital, so to say, in the rooms or anything. But I know there were people in there that I never knew, never knew them, don’t even know what they look like,

who were there permanently.

Diarrhoea and dysentery, they were the most common, diarrhoea and dysentery and of course everybody suffered from hunger.

Not good, not good. The toilets were blocked so there was no chain toilets.

In fact at the age of fourteen I was given my first job and that was cleaning out toilets which were Chinese toilets. I was handed a bucket of hot boiling water, a toilet brush and a bottle of Lysol, which in those days was the disinfectant that was being used. And my job was to clean out the toilets and because there were no flushes I had to keep going to the boiler room, which was next to the showers and filling that big bucket up, carting it to the

toilet and splashing it out and pouring Lysol, so that was our toilets. Do you want to know about the showers or later?

A trench, a Chinese toilet is just a trench and you just squat, it was in a little cubicle of some sort and that was a trench, a hole in the ground, a trench, not literally a deep hole

but one of those and you just put one foot there, one foot there and squat and do your business and there’s nothing to flush it and I had to, not only me but all, another girl called Christian Schattam. I knew her very well. She was another one that was given that job and that was the job from then on in camp,

cleaning out toilets and the few, very few trenches which were, had concrete, lined with concrete and flushed, that was broken, the whole cistern was gone, so that too had to be flushed out with a bucket of water.

I don’t know where it went. The Lysol was a disinfectant, a very strong disinfectant.

I don’t really remember where it all went. I just remember slushing it here, but I didn’t look to the other side to see where it all ended up in a cess pool because there was a little Belgian priest who had a misshapen back with a little hump and he fell in it one night and he was shouting for help and the Jap guards had to pull him out, so that’s how I know there is a cess pool there. And

I would say when I slushed it out it all ran down into a pipe of some sort into the cess pool.

I don’t know.

I don’t know, the Condy’s Crystals that I knew of was used to wash the vegetables and fix up skin irritations, that’s all.

I don’t know how else.

The showers was one large room about the length of from here to our front door, narrow. A table, a long wooden table in the middle, a row of showers down one end, a row of showers on the other side, narrow and no cubicles, you just strip and wash yourself.

You put your towel and your clothes on this table, you strip naked and just wash yourself. Everybody, it was all women, and as fast as you can, we waited for that day once a month. Later it became more frequent but to start with for a long time it was once a month and there was one funny little lady called Miss Pungs, I remember her well. She was from Tsingtao too. She would never strip. She would try and wash herself with a satin petticoat on.

I don’t know how she managed but I, together with my friend, Yvonne, we used to deliberately drop the cake of soap and bend down to pick it up, if she was near us and try to see what she had that we didn’t have and we never did found out. Beautiful apricot coloured satin petticoat, with V neck, you see them hanging in

lingerie shops, with a thin strap here and she never took it off.

The children had to be kept busy at all times so Eric Ladell was in charge of sport. He was in charge of the sports room, the sports gear, which

was always locked and we had cricket, baseball, no tennis, cricket, baseball, running races, I think that’s about all as far as sport. Sport was just cricket and baseball and sometimes some of the Japanese, not

only the guards but the staff, Jap soldiers used to play against the prisoners and some of them didn’t have a clue but the inmates taught them and they played against each other. They were friendly in that way but you can’t trust them, you never know when they will turn, because they are cruel people.

Entertainment for the adults, my

mother took her mah-jong set with her because that was her top game and she found a lot of other ladies in camp who could play mah-jong, so they used to hold it in each others rooms and have mah-jong games before dinner, straight after lunch or something like that. After all the vegetables were peeled and lunch was over there was a gap until the next meal, so they used to play their mah-jong during that time, just

short games. One lady bought her sewing machine in, actually it was the lady whose husband was beaten up and whose daughter later became the executor of Rudolph Nureyev’s will.

The Armenian couple, she bought a sewing machine and she used to make all her own clothes and thankfully she did because she made some clothes for me out of my mother’s old frocks. She

cut them down to fit me and much later when we were liberated we all scrounged for the silk coloured parachutes that came down and she made me a lovely red outfit, skirt and blouse to match.

Very difficult. Nothing new, nothing new, exchange, what they call the white elephant exchange, they called it the white elephant. If you’ve grown out of your clothes and it was still wearable

take it there, leave it there and pick out something that will fit you. For my school graduation they had all of us graduating at the same time, up on a stage and they said, “Come up on here with white shoes and white dress, sorry we can’t give you the cap, the graduation cap and cape and all the ceremony and all that and we’ll just present you with the certificate.” I didn’t have a white dress.

I didn’t have a decent pair of white shoes, so I had to borrow those.

Christmas, Easter, that’s about all.

Not much, not much, I don’t think I ever saw a Christmas tree but there must have been one because

there were children and you had to have a Christmas tree for children, but I don’t remember one. Maybe I was old enough not to go looking for one. Oh they had little gatherings at Christmas time and a little party for all the littlies, which I never went to, so I presume maybe somebody had a tree that they bought in and decorated with coloured material or something. And I remember my mother was very good with her fingers and

there were ladies there asking her to make little dolls, stuffed with straw and the lady, this particular lady wanted them for Christmas presents so my mother cut out a pattern and she made these little stuff dolls from remnants of material, old dresses, old sheets, old pieces of felt, whatever was worn out they gave here and she used my

friends sewing machine or she did a lot by hand and she made these little dolls and it was great and in return they would give her a cake of soap, donate a cake of soap that their family would give away, something like that. And some of them as I said bought tin goods and my mother got an extra tin good, a tin of fruit or something. I lost my

watch that my grandmother gave me when I was ten years old, in exchange for some eggs for my brother, that went black market and did I tell you, well you ask me, ask me a few more questions.

Yes, crafts you could learn crafts, there was one

little lady who was very good at craft but I wasn’t particularly interested but one Christmas a friend of mine, Tisha Medcraft was her name, I still keep in touch, she lives in England, she’s my age, she made me a beautiful pair of yellow mittens out of felt. I don’t where she got if from but she hand sewed it and she had J in the top of one mitten and C on the other, Joyce Cook, and

I thought “how sweet” and I reminded her of that when I met up with her a few years ago in London.

Oh dear, I’ve told you about the spaghetti? I’ve told you about the sweet potato.

Just sweet potato, one of the inmates was a pharmacist before he was interned, a young man, and we were getting fresh bread but it always tasted stale because there was no yeast, it was just flour and dough and baked and maybe like an Australian damper but there was no milk, so you can imagine flour, water, maybe they put a little bit of the dripping that the Japs

gave us and it never rose. And so this young man, sweet potatoes, we had a lot of sweet potatoes that they grew just over the wall and I don’t know what made him think of it but he discovered a way to turn that into yeast and from then on we had beautiful bread, rising up.

Well that was a big problem, big problem. Children grow as you know so quickly, so shoes were exchanged. In the summer months most of the children went without shoes for as long as possible. My mother I remember couldn’t find a pair of shoes to exchange for my brother and he wore his shoes out so quickly, so she decided with remnants of material collected from I don’t know whom, but

she collected all sorts of pieces of canvas and pieces of felt and etcetera and etcetera and made like a sandal for him. He wore it out in one day and I saw here stitching it with her fingers and she thought it would be tough enough for him to wear but he was very hard on shoes. Summer months he had to go without and winter time, well she must have exchanged

one or two times as he grew up and found some to suit him.

Yes, yes, yes, Father Schneider, he’s written in my album, just a little poetry, which is quite sweet, “if in years to come you get a little lonely,” or something lonesome, lonely I think the word, I could be wrong, “think of Weishan’s one and only shoe shop.”

He was the only one and later we found there was another little man, an Englishman, who was a carpenter and he made wooden shoes with bits of canvas, with a wooden sole and he would put canvas straps and a couple of the young girls were wearing them. I don’t know how they got them. I wanted

a pair but my mother said, “We can’t afford it,” so whether it was money or exchange. Money didn’t really mean much to us in camp. You couldn’t buy anything.

I was never in there, I was never in there but he bought all his shoe making gear with him because he thought, he was a priest, Catholic priest, but in his spare time he obviously made

shoes or sandals at least. That was what the priests usually wear in the summer months and he bought a lot of strips of leather and all his metal gear and all the equipment because all this equipment, the artists equipment, the carpenters equipment and the shoemakers, they all cost money. These people all spent a lot of money in taking up that trade and when they come to they don’t know where they’re going,

“I’m not going to leave that here,” so they bought it all with them luckily, luckily.

Absolutely and with a lot of the other people who came from other parts of China I don’t know how long many of them were given. Some others were given an hour but I don’t know, but others might have had more time, I don’t know.

Well the black market, when Father Scanlon appeared on the scene and after being given permission to speak by six bishops who were.

Haven’t I? He was a monk. He was amongst those who came into camp. He was from Warrnambool in Victoria and he was in either his late thirties or early forties at the time.

Very rosy cheeks, I do have photographs of him as a younger man and then as a hundred year old. He came into camp. They are a very strict order. They are not allowed to speak and they live on bread and water. This is what I was told. How true it is I don’t know and he had to get permission to speak from six bishops. And as it so happened there were at least six bishops in camp, so and they were British, English, American, Belgian,

French and all that and, “Sure, you can speak. You’re in different circumstances now.” So they gave him permission to speak and after that you couldn’t shut him up. He hadn’t spoken for so long and all of a sudden he’s surrounded by all these lay people and it was an eye-opener for him because he joined the strictest order a Catholic priest can join and when he found out food was so scarce and

particularly with so many little children who were getting diarrhoea, little children, from being fed just stews and rotten vegetables and all that and he decided, he thought up an idea and he took bricks out from the bottom of the wall, just enough and made a little hole, just enough to bring in eggs, milk, sugar and I don’t know what else and

I just know those three items and Chinese wine, bigar, for the alcoholics, rather than see them drink wood shavings, he even bought that for them to keep them alive. And he taught my father how to do it as well so my father started bringing in bigar also, because people were killing themselves, they were going to kill themselves by drinking all that rubbish like perfume and wood shavings. So

he used to smuggle this in, he did it all at night and after ten o’clock lights out that’s when he would don his long black gown, black hat, put dirt on his face and he’d sneak out, go between the pill boxes, between the guards, where the lights shone that way so he would get up against the wall there. He didn’t think they could see him and

one night he was caught and he had six dozen eggs that had just come through. So when the guard, you can hear them with their boots and their swords clang clanging and you know there is a guard coming, so he quickly squatted and spread his black gown over the eggs and the Japanese guard saw him after lights out, “Oh, oh what are you doing here?” In Chinese, and he said, “Duzi tong,” and that means “sore tummy,”

well everybody, most people suffered from diarrhoea or dysentery, so they believed him and they just left him alone to finish his business. When he was gone he picked up all the eggs and stuffed it here and there and took them away and another time he was caught good and proper and they confiscated everything that he had bought in and they put him into solitary confinement, which was a breeze for him because they are in solitary confinement, part of their order.

But they put him in a room right next door to the commandant’s bedroom and they left him there for a few days and then suddenly he started chanting his offers. Priests have to say their offers every day. They can say it just silently to themselves. They know it by heart and Father Scanlon used to sleep during the day and

chant as loud as he could at night, so he kept the commandant awake every night. After a few days the commandant told the guard to tell him to shut up and he said, “I can’t, it’s against my religion.” “Can’t you sleep at night and chant during the day?” “No, it’s against my religion.” They believed him. The Japanese are a little bit suspicious about religion in those days anyway, I don’t know about them now. They had to let him go and keep on chanting and in the end the commandant couldn’t get any sleep and he told the guards

“Release him back to the other side,” which they did. So the rumour came around that Father Scanlon was coming back to our side, the Salvation Army bought their bugles and cymbals and drums and everything and we all, including myself, waited for him to come back to our side of the wall and not to the commandant’s quarters and we all welcomed him like that. What happened the next night?

The sugar, the eggs, and the milk started flowing in again and that’s Father Scanlon.

Well there were, see the Chinese were great ones for making money. All the Chinese hawkers and farmers, it was all farmland and the villages and they knew we were in there and they knew we

needed food and how they knew I don’t know but maybe we’ll just surmise that, I don’t know, so I think through the Chinese toilet, pan cleaners, the coolies that used to come and do the pans I think the priest, Father Scanlon, maybe some others, I don’t, know but I know Father Scanlon, he sent messages out

through the dunny man. We called him the “honey pot man” and arranged through him, “Can you arrange for some food to come in? We have a lot of little children here. We need eggs, we need milk, we need sugar and butter.” Those were the four main things and that did happen. The next time he comes he goes (demonstrates) like that and (demonstrates) on the other side and out comes the note, “Yes, at so and so time we will be at the appointed time,” and that’s how they arranged and

the people, the Chinese on the other side had to be very careful because this wall was electrified and sometimes we heard them being electrocuted and we heard the screaming and my mother said, “Oh the boy man, he’s being electrocuted.” They had to be very careful not to be electrocuted. They took big chances themselves. That’s why I mentioned them in my book also.

My father had a hole in the wall. Our front door was about from that front door and the wall was about here, here. Our front door was there and the wall was here and my Dad used to walk across and he too, Father Scanlon told him how to make a little hole at the bottom,

because the electric wire was at the top but we later found out that the Japs later on put electric wire close to the ground on the outside as well and that’s how later the Chinese became electrocuted. He made a hole in the wall and after lights out he used to go there at a prearranged, I don’t how my Dad arranged it, maybe he had it arranged but I don’t know but there again his hand

went through. He had to hand my watch over first and in he bought a little container full of eggs and we cooked it on our stove that we had made out of mud so my brother had eggs and that’s how he did it. He also bought in bottles of bigar and one night he nearly got caught. The man who was supposed to,

my father’s offsider was the man upstairs, the Belgian man, Mr Desuter, he was supposed to keep an eye out for the guards who used to walk round and round the camp, in and out of all the compounds and all that after ten o’clock and they arranged for Mr Desuter to say “Goodnight, I’m going to bed now,” or he’d start to whistle. And this particular night my father was just bringing in a bottle of bigar when he heard steps running ups the

steps to the room and my father looked back and there was Mr Desuter. He got so frightened, he heard the guards coming, he forgot to say goodnight, forgot to whistle and clambered up in a hurry and my father immediately thought something had gone wrong. Then he heard the sword clang, clang, so Dad picked up the couple of bigars, ran straight into our room, stuck them on the table and jumped into bed fully clothed and forgot about it.

Luckily and how luckily the guard never knocked on our door and said, “Let me inspect your room.” The next morning we woke up and my mother said, “What are those two bottles of bigar,” Chinese white wine, “doing there?” And father nearly passed out, “Oh my God, I should have bought them into bed with me.” And another thing I thought, talking about beds, this is by the way, to keep my feet warm, our feet warm, we

had bricks that we used to warm up on the stove in the room in the winter and then wrap them in a towel and put them under the sheets to warm and there was no irons, to iron clothing so we used to fold everything like a skirt, shorts, shirt, fold it very neatly and stick it under your mattress and that was the best way to keep things neat, neatly folded. Nowhere to hang, no iron.

Two escapes, I don’t know the full detail, only all I know is about for twelve months it was planned. It took twelve months of planning and they were going to escape because there was a rumour going around that we

were forgotten. People didn’t know our camp existed because we weren’t receiving food parcels. The American’s seemed to know and they were dropping, only that one time, food parcels. British and Australians got nothing, as far as I know. Well the British certainly didn’t get any parcels so they decided to escape and just go and tell somebody about conditions in the camp because after a

few years we all gave up hope of ever getting out alive and the guards were fed up themselves. It went on for so long, three and a half years, they were getting fed up and food was getting worse and less and less, so they decided to escape but it had to be planned very carefully and they did the planning with a particular Catholic priest called Father Diega.

He spoke and wrote Chinese fluently. He knew he had people on the other side of the wall that used to sneak messages in for him and he did most of the arranging. First of all they had to study when the guards at the pill box would be, the light, the big light, he used to shine it around like that. They had to work out how many minutes or seconds before the light

moves this way or that way, perfect timing and the moon had to be right, no full moon. So when the time came and they planned all this for about twelve months then they donned black clothing, long clothing, these two, an American and a British. I have their pictures, newspaper cuttings in my album also, the Sydney Morning Herald as a matter of fact reported

on one of them and I couldn’t believe what I was reading so many years after, here in Australia. They escaped over the fence with about that much (demonstrates) before touching the electrified wire. They had everything measured and planned right down to a tee and they did get over the wall. There was a donkey to be ready for them to jump on with a Chinese guide and away they went. And the next

day at morning call these two were missing, bachelors, missing from the roll call. “Oh one’s on duty in the kitchen,” said the, they had to make a head man in the bachelors and in the single ladies dormitory to go through all the accounting and they said, “One’s in the toilet, he’s got diarrhoea but he’s alright.” So they believed them the first time. The next

day they were missing again and the Japs started to be suspicious so the head of the committee of the camp decided we’d better go and tell the commandant there were two men missing, otherwise big trouble. They said “We don’t know what happened. We woke up this morning and these two men are gone.” “Where did they go?” “We don’t know nothing about it,” but course they knew.

And that’s when they tightened up and that’s when the counting, night counts became more frequent. They stopped supplies for a while until we finished all our food and by the time we were getting to the last bits of food, well we were very hungry and they were a lot more strict. But these men escaped and they were supposed to go to Chongqing. I don’t think they quite made

it. They didn’t make it all as a matter of fact was what I was told but they made it into Nationalist China. They avoided the Communists that were getting closer and closer and the Nationalist Chinese there helped them get messages out to the US about a camp, a forgotten camp full of civilians. So they

had, the Americans had to form seven Liberators in a hurry and they consisted of a Japanese American as an interpreter and a Chinese American as well, plus the others.

Seven parachutists.

There were deaths in the camp.

I remember the deaths of one or two priests, might have been two priests died there. I don’t know what they died of. I went to their funerals and I went to Liddell’s. There was one young man, he was only twenty. He was climbing up a tree to cut down branches for firewood and he fell to his death. And I was watching, we were all watching him cutting branches down and then bang, oh so he’s another one that died.

There were births, yeah, births, deaths, marriages, affairs, everything. The birth, this Armenian fellow, he had his son in camp. And she was put in a bed in the hospital where she had a little boy. He incidentally later died

of a motorbike crash in San Francisco.

Well not long after these two men escaped, they had trouble escaping because some of the Chinese were going to give them up to the Chinese Communists and so they,

and they were their guides that turned on them, so they had to escape from their own guides and keep moving until they found some other people, Chinese who befriended them so they had a hard time escaping, but they made it anyway. One day supplies came in and they were all sorts of new medicines that the doctors had never heard of, came in little packets addressed

to the hospital, but the labels of these bottles and jars were not there and we were all blaming the Japanese for it because the doctors wanted to use them immediately. It was oh, imagine the thrill they got, new medication and they started analysing some of the stuff, to try and find out what they were. But later

what was sneaked in where messages from the two escapees, who had sent the medication saying, “We deliberately took the labels off because we didn’t want the Japanese to know about these new drugs that we are sending you for the inmates, but these are the labels. This label with instructions belongs to bottle number

one, that label belongs to,” so we realised, I have since found out that’s what happened, but for a while we were all blaming the Japs for taking the labels off but it was done deliberately by those two men.

Yes, yes, because we got back smuggled in,

instructions on how to use all this medication, “This is a new one, sulphur nialamide,” or whatever it was in those days and, “the yellow powder is sulphur nialamide,” or something else is something else, “and here is the instructions on how to use number one jar and bottle.” Yes that was successful and of course the doctors were thrilled, they had a bit more medicine to work with, yes that was good and, “Don’t worry

we’ll try and get you out of there.”

I think that was a one off. I never heard of any more, I never heard of anymore because that was towards the end, towards the end, the last few months before the war was over, but never at any time, to my knowledge,

did anyone know about the atomic bomb. We weren’t even aware of the gas chambers in Europe, nothing, nothing. Didn’t know what the latest pop music was or the fashions people were wearing, nothing.

Oh yes, my brother had, we had a pet pigeon first and foremost. It decided to nest on a little awning, a wooden awning that we had above our door. I don’t know what it was there for but it was just a little awning and a little pigeon decided to nest there. And then my brother found a little blue coloured

bird and I think he had it for a while. What happened to it I don’t remember. There was a little Dutch lady, Mrs Van Dittmar was her name, she was allowed to bring her little white fluffy dog, about that size, she was alone and that dog was her only companion. She was in her late fifties I would say and the Japs allowed her to bring it in. I have since found

out that there were chickens smuggled in as well, live chickens. I don’t know the story but these people called Twiffet-Thomas, the family, I don’t know the story that they told the Japs about how they came to acquire these chickens but they had live chickens and they were pet chickens, how I don’t know but they were their pets. The commandant had a pet goat.

The goat escaped one day into our side of the camp and it was lost, in and out of all the compounds, and it was a funny sight to see all these women chasing the goat, trying to squeeze a little bit of milk for their tea. By the time it reached our compound, Mother was there all ready and I don’t think she got very much, just a few drops but that was a very funny sight.

One poor little goat, that’s how desperate they were.

He was there for a long time, long time and then another pigeon came. I don’t remember baby pigeons, but there must have been because they were there for a long time.

No, no, no, my brother was more interested. Whether he remembers or not, I’ve never asked him. I must ask him one of these days but I remember crumbs, Dad used to throw little crumbs up there to them.

They belonged to the Triffet-Thomas family. They had two daughters and they were on the other end of the compound, the compound on the other side to us. We were on this compound here, our kitchen was Number One kitchen and they were on the other side with Number Two, Three kitchen. I don’t know how they kept them.

I have asked Leo, the father, who has since passed on, “How did you manage to keep these chickens?” “Oh”, he said “we spoke to the guards and said they just came in, we don’t know who bought them in or what,” but they were smuggled in, and the guards said, “Okay, if you’re happy with them, you can have them.” So they were pets and one of the young daughters became very attached to that chicken.

You’re not that hungry that you’d eat your pet chickens, you couldn’t, you couldn’t, no. I had never been without pets. We always had pets at home and I missed a dog and as hungry as I might have been at times, I couldn’t eat

my dog. Some people you hear, in other countries, they’re that hungry they kill their own pets, but I don’t think I could do that. I don’t know what became of those two chickens that that family kept and some people seemed to acquire seeds, whether it was through the guards. Maybe the kids that made friends with the guards acquired a

little vegetable seeds and they dug little vegetable patches and planted these seeds and I have heard stories of some of the guards coming and helping these young kids to make a vegetable patch. It didn’t happen to us but it did happen to some of the others, young kid, mostly Chifu kids. See the whole of Chifu was a boarding school for children, mostly missionary parents who worked in inland missions and there were no proper schools so

they sent them to Chifu to boarding school and when the war broke out all the kids and their teachers were interned because they were American, Canadian and British. So the whole group of children, some of those children would not have seen their parents for five years. They had to live with their teachers in camp and the teachers were still sort of looking over them, looking after them.

I don’t know. Oh yeah, a lot of people milked the goat but we were the last compound it got into so there wasn’t much milk, only a few drops but the first person that milked it would have got a whole tin full or glass full, I would say and the commandant didn’t even miss the goat at that time, it took a

while before they discovered or realised it was missing. Funny, funny sights.

No problem, no problem. There was one church building and in that one church building every

service had their turn in the church on Sundays.

Right near the front gate, it was right along the front gate. It was, to us it wasn’t far at all. Like here maybe to the next corner up, maybe a little bit further, the first corner where the bucket, where we had to go for water, up to the shops over

there, over there, not far at all to the front gate, our compound. But the church, everyone got on so well. In fact there was a little Church of England priest, a young man who used to do his knitting and he’d get a seat in the back of the church and he would attend every service and he’d always be knitting a scarf. And I asked him one day, “You’re not Catholic, why do you attend the Catholic?”

He said, “I attend them all.” No problem, he sat through all of them with his, must have been a pretty long scarf when he finished with it. There was no problems. In that church hall we had plays, concerts, we had some beautiful singers and I was even in the plays, sitting on the piano. We had a big piano there as well. That was there in the church when we arrived and

I was in a play where I was sitting on a piano with my friend and we sang duets and all that and we had to have concerts and things like that. Every Christmas we had big choirs and Christmas carols with a mixture, mixed religions. Religion was no problem to anybody in camp. See you’re all together. There’s such a mixture of religions, such a mixture of

people, as I said from all walks of life, different religions but everybody got on. There was no problem, no problem. That’s why I can’t understand the world today that there’s so much problem.

The priests, Catholic priests conducted their services, the Church of England priest conducted their own, Salvation Army had their own little service, the Jewish people had their own little service. There’s no problem

and if you want to sit through it, you sit through it, through all the services, like that little Church of England priest.

Oh well I attended every Sunday because I was amongst all the Catholic nuns and priests and at that time my parents, my father was a churchgoer but later on he retired also, like me but as a child we were taught that we had to go to church every Sunday.

And in camp I was even in the church choir.

One of the nuns, one of the nuns and then at Christmas time we had a big choir, all religions, anybody who wants to be in the choir, be in the choir and the guards used to stand out there and come inside and listen.

Oh gosh,

all the Christmas songs. What are the Christmas songs? I don’t even know them now. Whatever children used to sing at Christmas time, Jingle Bells and things like that but in the church we sang The Messiah, what is it? I’ve forgotten it, there’s one very famous one. Not The Messiah is it? No, I’ve forgotten anyhow. It’s so long. These days I only set foot in the church

for marriages, deaths and births.

Oh anybody, anybody, all the Catholic people would come in and attend that service, it was all part of the service, all the Catholic people who were churchgoers, they would all come, the nuns, the priests, except those that were on duty and were not able too, like the hospital

staff, the kitchen staff and the person who was pumping the well, because it had to be manned twenty four hours a day.

I think I used to say my prayers every night, that’s about all.

As I mentioned earlier, as a young child I felt I was forced to go to church because it was my religion but I used to sit there and look at all the pretty hats that the women used to have to wear but I was in all the holy days of obligation parades and all that where I had to carry a banner and march through the street and in the cathedral and all that. I took part in everything like that but I don’t think

I ever took it very seriously as some people do, but that’s just me.

No, I just wasn’t a churchgoer. Did I mention going to confession in school? When

we had to go to confession every Saturday, incidentally our school we had classes on Saturday mornings, five and a half days of school and confession was during school hours for that half day and I had no sins to tell. I didn’t think I had done anything wrong so I used to say to my girlfriend, “You lend me some of your sins and next time when you haven’t got any, I’ll lend you some of mine, but I don’t know what to say today.”

And you go in and you don’t know what to say because you know you haven’t done anything wrong. That was just me, I was thinking, “What is a sin? Not saying your prayers?” I let the priest ask me, “Did you say your prayers this morning? Did you say your prayers at night?” I did tell a lie and say “yes” or say “no” and then “ten hail Mary’s or the whole rosary.” But I

couldn’t, I as a child did not consider that I was doing anything wrong. It wasn’t a sin if you didn’t say your prayers or you told a lie./ “Do you tell lies?” And I thought, “Yeah, everybody tells lies,” as a child but to me it was a little white lie, whatever it might be, so I didn’t consider myself a bad person, shall we say. I loved animals, I loved mixing with people. I tried not to do bad things to anybody.

Sure I fought, I was naughty, I answered my parents back and my last slap across the face was saying, “Oh Mum will you shut up,” and Pop came and gave me a big one, I had finger marks there. That was the last time but I never considered myself bad enough to go and tell somebody else what wrong I did. How would he feel if I asked him, “You tell me your sins?” He wouldn’t tell me his sins, of course not.

So I felt, “Why should I tell him what I don’t even consider a sin,” but that’s just me so now I’m just a retired Catholic.

English, all English, everybody spoke English. It was the main language, everybody, the Russians. There were a lot of Russian women married to British men. In China if a Russian person or any nationality person marries a Britisher she automatically takes up the nationality of the man she marries, so there were lots and lots of Russian ladies married to British and American

men and they naturally automatically become American or British or whatever. It’s quite a different system over there than today. I could never, ever get a Chinese passport even though I was born and educated there, I could never live there. They wouldn’t allow me to because I’m considered a foreigner.

Not very many of them spoke very good English. The commandant did speak English a little bit. Most of them spoke Chinese and we all communicated in Chinese, if you were speaking to the guards. I don’t think I spoke very often to the guards. I had nothing to say to them. I would just nod to them in passing, that’s all but a lot of the little boys, young

boys sort of, they befriended the boys or the boys befriended them, I don’t know but they used to communicate in Chinese. In talking about that my cousin who could only speak Russian and Chinese, his father was my mother’s brother, he could not speak English. They spoke Russian at home in Tsingtao. My brother, who was the same age, could not speak Russian,

so they used to talk Chinese to each other, which is so strange. Now, of course, they live in America, my cousin and his wife live in the States and we visited them a couple of times and they spoke about that as kids. He said, “I couldn’t speak English. Your brother and you, your brother and you,” well I could speak Russian but my brother couldn’t and they used to have conversations in Chinese. He’s retired now, he’s

a submarine, retired submarine commander but that was just by the way.

He was in the band. He was from Shanghai. Brian Clark was his name and he was in the band, so when they started these Saturday night dancing I used to just

have to sit for a while and I only used to dance with his friends, his good friends and occasionally he would put his guitar down and dance with me but that’s what I missed, dancing and I couldn’t dance with him, he was part of the band but on occasions he would just put the guitar down and let the others play on without him and we’d have a dance.

But he was somebody I could talk to. I was fifteen, sixteen. He was about twenty, very, very nice English boy. His mother was interned in Shanghai and he was interned in Tsingtao. He died of cancer a few years ago in Canada.

At the time I did, like all young teenagers, they were madly in love. I was

also madly in love with this priest who, American priest and when he, I was sick in bed at one time and he pinched, stole, a little pansy from the commandant’s flower garden and bought it to me and oh I thought it was so romantic. “I hope you get better soon,” and he gave me this pansy. It is in my souvenir album on the first page

that squashed pansy. Like all other teenagers, somebody you take a fancy too and immediately you think you’re in love with them but no, and we broke up anyway just before the war ended because after liberation, after the war ended, after liberation when the Yanks came and we still continued these dances, well

some of the soldiers that camp into camp after we were liberated they joined in the dancing as well. And some of them could play the drums and whatever else, musical instruments and I danced with them and my boyfriend got jealous and he never spoke to me again, he never saw me again. But when he was dying of cancer his brother wrote to me here and Bob my husband would remember this and his brother said, “Write

him a cheery note because you were the last person he speaks of all the time and he never married.” So I said to Bob, “What do I do?” And Bob said, “Write him a cheery letter,” which I did but he was the only boyfriend I had in camp, just the one person, yeah. You could talk to him. Others I used to dance with them

and watch them play baseball and all that sort of thing but I just had the one steady boyfriend and then when we broke up he started taking another girl out and I got jealous and tried to get him back but he wouldn’t come back.

It was, it was. Everybody helped each other.

I don’t know, I don’t know. As I said the adults didn’t talk about any strife.

There was some married men there without their wives. They had sent their families, before the war they had said, “I’ve got to finish business here, you go and I’ll join you,” and then the war broke out and they were interned with us and they were having affairs with other married people without their partners being in camp. There were affairs yes. One lady even had a little baby there. She wasn’t married but he was and he

was a good friend of my fathers too from Shanghai, but no, I don’t think.

Well at that time, yes. In fact there was one, two couples. The wife of one man and the husband of another woman were seeing each other secretly. I heard about it but I didn’t say

anything to anyone. I heard about it from my friend and then much, much later after the war it came out and I was talking to a friend of mine who now lives in England and she was telling me about this affair. She said, “You heard about that?” And I said, “Yes, I did,” and she said, “Yes, it’s true.”

It was horrid, it just wasn’t done, it just wasn’t done but people just didn’t care. They were in a confined area and I don’t know how they managed to get pregnant but they did. It was a confined area. Everybody knew what was happening to the other person.

Well there must have been if babies were born but just where I don’t know. It’s alright for the married couples but where the single couples were I have no idea, I don’t know, especially with lights out after ten, but somebody was sneaking in, from one dormitory to the other.

I don’t know, I was asleep,

so was my brother so I don’t know. Something that never ever entered my mind but thinking back now I don’t know how they managed and especially with the people next door to us with this glass partition and every time you’d stamp your feet and walk too hard on the floor that glass partition would rattle a bit.

That I don’t know where they found somewhere to produce babies, I don’t know because the single men were all in bachelor rooms.

Well there were rumours about Shanghai, about being gassed in Shanghai. There were rumours we were all going to be shot and that’s something the adults were frightened of. We

had no news coming in about the atomic bomb or anything and then one day we heard a plane in the distance. I can’t recall the date. I’ve got it written down but I can’t recall the date at the moment and we looked up in the sky and we saw this silver speck coming closer and closer and closer and we didn’t know if it was enemy planes. My Dad said, “Maybe bombs are going to drop,”

and as it came closer and lower I noticed it was so low that I felt at the time that if I reached out I might be able to touch it, it was so low and then I looked again and it had big writing on the side of it, “The Armed Angel” in huge writing on the side. And there seemed to be a glass coloured bottom in the front and somebody was waving, waving and I thought, “What is all this?” And my father

said “Quick Vera,” my mother, “Eddie, come out, something big is happening, we don’t know what. A plane is going to drop food for us or something.” And in the distance it went so low, a very loud noise and it zoomed past and went higher up and went over the camp wall onto the fields and everybody rushed to the front gate. There was pandemonium,

people running as fast as they could. The next thing we see the belly open, the coloured parachutes fall out. The parachutes were bright red, bright yellow, bright green and white. They came out and they opened out and at the bottom of each parachute were what looked in the distance looked like big circular drums and my father said, “Maybe someone’s dropping food,”

but then he said, “Oh my God, look, they’re men, their legs are moving.” Oh well, and everybody started shouting and women and children were screaming and shouting and, “What’s happening?” “They’re men, they’re men,” and we all rushed past the guards. I was a little bit hesitant. I thought, “No, I’m frightened of those guards, I won’t go.” I didn’t rush past the guards. I was still staying in the camp but a lot of the younger

people rushed past, went onto the fields where these parachutists landed and they landed with a revolver all ready to shoot, for action, in case the guards attacked them. But the guards themselves were surprised, they just stood there and did nothing. These men landed and the internees rushed out and they said,

“Well we’re here to liberate you. We understand you’ve been here a long time.” “Oh, the war’s over?” They said, “It’s been over for seven days,” and we didn’t know about it and later we found out we were going to be shot and thrown into the trenches that were dug around the wall. Outside the wall there were trenches and we were going to be shot and thrown in and there were pamphlets

issued to the Japanese to dispose of all POWs [Prisoners of War], dead or alive, and for the officers to swap clothes, to change clothes so that the enemy would not, the enemy as in British or American, would not know what rank they were, to pull all their badges off. But anyway, these seven liberators consisted of one Chinese interpreter, one Japanese interpreter, one Chinese man, Eddie Wong and one Japanese American interpreter,

Tad Nagaki, who is still alive and I sent him a Christmas card this year. He’s in his late eighties, poor fellow, he’s the only one left out of his family of four. His wife’s dead, his children are dead but he still lives on his farm in the States. I think it was him, he’d never been in a parachute. This little group was made up. They were called Duck Mission. They were made up in a big hurry

when they found out there were a whole camp of two thousand, well by know it wasn’t quite two thousand because x amount of numbers of Americans were repatriated, so it was less people but we incidentally have some Italians bought in towards the last few months of camp. I don’t know what they did wrong to be bought into camp, I don’t know but anyway these, Tad Nagaki, he’d never

been in a parachute before and he was frightened to jump out, so they just pushed him out and he had to do and they said, “Now don’t forget to let your parachute off,” and bang, they pushed him out. And in my album I’ve got a copy of a little drawing that James Hannon, who was one of the parachutists, did for me and gave me a copy of it, each one in their order of jump and he also said

when he sent me that photo of the parachutes dropping food later, dropping food into our camp and he sent me also that little drawing of each one in that order of jump, and he also said in his letter that Tad Nagaki was so frightened that they had to push him out. He was too frightened to jump. And when they landed and realised that they were not going to be attacked the inmates carried them in on their shoulders after

they cut their parachutes. They were put on the shoulders of all the inmates and they carried them in and called them “our heroes” and all that and the Japanese one said, “Let me down,” and he went up to one of the Japanese guards and slapped him on the shoulder and said, “Now what do you think of your Nagasaki?” And I heard that, I’d never heard of Nagasaki, and that apparently, the bomb. Maybe our guards hadn’t heard of the atom bomb, I don’t know.

No idea, they were all very cool, calm and collected and didn’t put up a fight or anything. Maybe they didn’t know the war was over and then after that the Japanese commandant laid down his sword. He surrendered to Major Stieger, who was the officer in charge of the parachute group and from then on we were free. We could

have from then on as many showers as we wanted to, food we were told would be coming within the next few hours and the planes flew over and I’ve got photographs of the planes flying over with the drums full of food, but they were all army issue, food and clothing and we were issued with new clothing, army clothing. The reason being they did not expect men, women and children civilians. They

expected to be rescuing a military, Japanese military prisoners of war so they were quite surprised to see us. In the next few days more troops came in by truck. Food was being dropped by parachute, just on the other side of the field and sometimes they missed the target, where to drop, so the Chinese scrambled and got a lot of the food.

And one day a little Chinese boy was bought in to see the doctor in our camp, he was so sick. He had eaten shoe polish. He thought it was something to eat and the doctors fixed him up and he was sick. They didn’t know what all this food was. Another kid got killed, he wasn’t killed but I think it broke his foot or something because it landed right on his foot. They missed the target sometimes but

anyway getting away from that we had plenty of food. The first time we were issued with all this tinned food, army issue food, cheese, butter, baked beans, Spam, chocolates, oh gosh everything, tinned milk, everything, even little can openers, army issue can openers and which I still have at home and use. We opened,

my mother said, “All of you, pick what you want to eat and we’ll open it.” The table was full and we were going to have a feast but our stomachs had shrunk and we could not eat it all. And then.

And then a few days later the whole camp was woken up, about seven thirty in the morning with this loud burst of music. What the Yanks had done, they had put loud speakers on most of the tree trunks on the whole camp and they set up micro, what do you call them? Loud speakers on all of them

and every morning from then on they played Oh What A Beautiful Morning so that we could wake up to that tune and that was in was it Oklahoma, it was in some movie, I forget the movie. Every time I hear that piece of music, you know that song? Alright, Oh What A Beautiful Morning, every time I hear that on the radio, TV, whatever, my brain automatically goes back to those days. It was wonderful to wake up to that

music. It reminds me, takes me way back to camp again and so the Yanks had to find out who belonged to what city, had to make arrangements to send us all back to our home cities, which was difficult because the Chinese communists were advancing and they had threatened to blow up the railway stations.

So they quickly arranged as quick as they could to send groups of people before they advanced any further, arranged with the Japanese as well as the Chinese for us to be taken to the railway, be put on trains to go back home. The liberation was in August and we didn’t get home until the end of September and after most of the people

were sent home by train the communists did get to the railway station and blew it up, so the last few remaining had to be flown out of camp. We arranged in Tsingtao, we were taken straight.

We were free to walk out of the gate, in and out of the gate but there was nothing to see, nowhere to go, nothing, sweet potato plants and

a few sorghum plants, so nothing, we just had a lot more food. We had our usual dances on Saturday night until midnight. We could keep our lights on until as long as we wanted too. We could have as many showers as we wanted too, nothing. We still had to cart our own water but I must tell you this. The first day that they liberated our camp they were invited for breakfast

into the dining room and my friend Natasha Petersen was I think honoured, she was asked by the kitchen staff, “Would you serve them some refreshments?” As in tea and coffee, they gave them a coffee. So sure, she goes and gives them a cup of coffee, Ersatz Coffee, which is imitation coffee. I don’t even know what it was made of and as she turned around to walk away

this young parachutists said, “Excuse me Ma’am, may I have some cream and sugar please?” She turned around and she looked at him, “Cream and sugar, what’s that?” She said, “Do you realise you’re in a concentration camp? We haven’t had cream and sugar for the last three years.” He was so embarrassed, so embarrassed, poor fellow. That really happened.

Seven that parachuted in, the initial seven. After that I don’t remember any parachuting but truck loads came in of US military and I remember one evening after the dances, after a dance, one of the soldiers, the young men, said, “Can I walk you back to your room?” And I said, “Yeah, sure,” and, “a kiss and a cuddle?” And I said,

“Yeah, sure,” and he says, “Wait a minute, wait a minute,” and he takes out a tube of lipstick and he said, “Put the lipstick on and then kiss me so I can go and show all my friends that I’ve been kissed.” Which I did, no problems, but I wasn’t even wearing any makeup then and lipstick, I thought, “Sure, I’ll have a go at this.” He even had a little mirror for putting lipstick on and then we had a kiss and a cuddle and he never wiped it off.

I said, “Wipe it off,” and he said, “No way”. He said, “I’m going to show my friends.”

I don’t know, they just disappeared. I have no idea, never saw them again, never ever saw the commandant. The only person I remember my father seeing was this Japanese Yumada, that my Dad went up to him and I think Dad said later he thought he was Korean and

shook his finger at him like this and said, “You are a war criminal and you will be tried as a war criminal,” but I don’t know, we just never saw any more Japs and then we were put on a train back to Tsingtao, straight to the Edgewater Mansions, which was the hotel in pre-war years, big hotel right on the water and

we were taken into the dining room, white linen tablecloths, silverware, servants serving us and we had a big, beautiful meal. It was a roast beef with Yorkshire pudding, and peas and carrots and gravy and oh my goodness, what a feast.

Great, great, great, freedom, you miss that, you miss freedom. You do miss

freedom but things happen in this world where people have to give up their freedom for a little while and there’s nothing you can do about it. Freedom, freedom of speech, just to do what other teenagers did. Maybe if we had more food, if food was provided, clothes were provided, we’d be happier.

Like the refugees here, they’re lucky in a way, they have food provided, they never go hungry, toys are given to the children, clothing is given to them, they can have hot showers. We missed all those little things that a child, a teenager, or even a younger child has every day and suddenly you’re free. Gosh, no more roll calls, no more arm bands, no more being dragged out of bed at

night and you can have a good night’s sleep without worrying, “Oh maybe they’re coming to get us out again.”

I still couldn’t get my own room, because our house was not liveable. The Japanese officers were living in it so we had to first board with a French family diagonally across from our house. They were not

interned, a good friend and his elderly father were living in that house and they put us up there and we were all in the one room. My mother and I, I think, were in the little small room and my father and my brother slept on the front verandah, so I still had no privacy.

No, but from time to time I did, my mind went back to camp days. Always wondering “What happened to so and so? What happened to so and so?” I made some good friends there, some very good friends. My Tsingtao friends all came back but I made a lot of friends from other parts of China also and what happened to them? A lot of them went to Canada, the US, England,

but my home was in China.

It hadn’t changed, it hadn’t changed, everything was the same. The shops were still there. Peter Hansoff was not there anymore, the German shop that sold all the imported men’s suits and ties. Don’t know what happened to them. My dentist was not there any more.

But nothing had changed actually. A few of the little coffee shops had closed down, don’t know what happened to them but otherwise to me it was the same. The big market was still there, the Japanese market, the toy shop we used to go to was still there and that’s all. The only thing changed was full of American marines, 6th Division Marines and the

American Red Cross set up a little drop in centre at the International Club that my parents belonged too, they turned it into a drop in centre and I got my first job there. They said, “Can you type?” And I said “No, I can’t type.” “Why not?” I said, “I’ve been locked up for three and a half years, I never learnt to type.” But as it turned out later, my mother befriended a

little American marine, Nathan Greenberg, he taught me how to type on my father’s little portable typewriter but I didn’t have to use it at the drop in centre. They gave me a job in their gramophone record section. No tapes in those days, just round gramophone records and I had to just check them off if they wanted for instance different pop songs. I can’t even

think of them now, pop songs and I had to go through a little card to see which cupboard Number Two or drawer Number One and hand it to them and they would play it in front of me so I got to know all the music, all the music I’d missed out on. And then they also held beauty contests, they all put their girlfriend’s pictures, they all carried their girlfriend’s photos and they were pinned up on the board and then we would vote for the most beautiful girl. Then blind dates they had with the staff

members including me, so I had a few blind dates. One time, which I remember, the first blind date I ever had, remember I was seventeen but I was very naïve and they got me up on stage with a screen here, the guy was here, I was on this side. He was to ask me questions and I was to answer the questions. After a few minutes I thought, “This is ridiculous, I’m sitting here answering questions, wasting time.”

and I thought, “Look, what do you want from me? You’ve asked me so many questions,” and the house nearly fell down. There was whistles, there was stamping on the floor, because I was on a stage with all these other “drop in” marines, army, air force and navy, all watching this blind date session and I said the wrong thing, “What do you want from me?” Which was a stupid thing to say, I realised not

then because when it was all over, I did go on a blind date with him, just to a restaurant. I had a very good friend, General Clements, who was in charge of this 6th Marine Division, General Shepherd was in charge, but Clements was another general. This guy was his chauffeur and he was a good friend of ours. We had a lot of friends, lonely, young, American servicemen, from seventeen up and then older married men. My mother made them all welcome.

She cooked for them, we got the cook back as well. She made them somewhere they could sit. Even though I was working they used to come and just sit there and talk to her and talk to my Dad and all that and I said, “What did I say wrong?” And he just put his arms around me and said, “You are so sweet, but don’t say that again.” And that was something I learnt the hard way, it was so embarrassing.

Oh I had dive through a window once at a dance. A young marine ensign asked me out to a dance and I mean he was English and he had been at the house, my mother looked after him, very hospitable, “Do you want to go to a dance? I’ll pick you up,” picked me up in his jeep, and, “Oh come in for a drink?” And I said, “Yes, alright.”

I went into his room for a drink and I don’t know what he gave me. It looked like orange juice or Coke but that’s not the story I’m getting at, you might be thinking. Suddenly he started chasing me around the room and I actually got frightened and I said, “I want to go home,” and he said, “Oh no, you’re not going home yet.” And I said, “I’ve got to go home, look at the time.” So I pushed his window open and I dived out and luckily

my uncle at that time and my auntie were living just a block away and I ran, this was after midnight, I ran to their place and told them the story and I never went out with that guy again. I even remember his name, but anyway that was another lesson, lesson number two.

Well we finally, we lived after the French people,

we moved to my uncle and auntie’s private home and we stayed with them until our house was done up because our house was emptied of furniture. They sent all our furniture to Japan. Everything that we left went off to Japan. The bathtub was on the front lawn. The Japanese horses used to drink out of it, the garden was just a shambles,

so the house had to be made liveable again, so we stayed with my uncle and auntie. And my auntie, one day while my auntie, my mother and I were the only three women at home, the men went out I don’t know where, and it was getting dark and she went to turn on the front verandah light and the bulb had gone. The only bulb she had was a little red light, so she put that in. The next thing every few minutes servicemen knocking on the

door and I didn’t know, I was very naïve and my auntie she didn’t know and I don’t know what she said to them or they said to her and she started to swear in Russian about these people knocking on your door and I said, “What did they want?” And she said, “I don’t know, I don’t know, but I told them wrong house, wrong house, go away.” My Dad came home and she told my Dad and her husband and my little brother the story and my Dad said, “Oh my God,

do you know what a red light means?” A house of ill repute, well we had a good laugh but at the time my aunt was really angry and she said, “What are they all calling in here for?” And that’s how naïve we were.

That’s the first thing we looked for when we went to look at our house, to see if it was liveable. It was the first thing my mother said, “The jewels, please, please,” and they were there, everything was there. The

Japs were not smart enough to look for anything but they were still there thankfully.

Furniture, furniture, there was no furniture, we had to scrounge. Our furniture was gone, forget about it and the United Nations Relief and Rehab Association came and they said,

“People who have lost all their furniture there’s a big warehouse,” we called them go-downs in those days, “go in there and see if you can find any of your furniture. If you can’t just take what you need.” We never found anything. Oh we found one thing, that table there I think, that was the one, that Chinese card table but we never found anything else. So my father just scrounged a wardrobe here, a lounge suite here,

and so on and so forth, which was sad. So we got established. There was no counsellors in those days, you just had to pick up where you left off and my father went to the office and he was back in his old position. My brother went back to school but there was no schools there anymore apart from the servicemen’s schools, because a lot of the American servicemen who were stationed there

after the war, they bought their families out and they had to set up schools for their children, so my brother went to the Tsingtao American School. They had a reunion two years ago in the States, my brother’s school and he met up with a lot of them that went to school. And he had to go back to school but I was at that time, as I said, working for the Red Cross. They folded up after a while, so I had to get another job and I got a job with the Naval US Port

Facilities and they supplied an apartment and my boss was a young lieutenant, Gordon Johnson, who I worked for. He became my boyfriend and he used to keep his girlfriend’s picture on a filing cabinet just behind his chair at the desk and as I walked in for work, I was his secretary, he would turn the photo back to front, so I couldn’t sit there taking

notes in shorthand and looking at his girlfriend behind his shoulder and he turned the photo around. Anyway he later became known as “Gordon After Five”. Because he became my boyfriend I couldn’t call him Gordon at business hours, so he was just “Mr Johnson, no Mr Johnson, yes Mr Johnson, what would you like now Mr Johnson?” But after five it was Gordon and when we came to Australia, eventually came to Australia I stayed

for four years and then I went to work in Singapore for seven years and one day in a big department store I heard this big yawn and I thought, “What a rude man,” and I turned around and it was him. He was working for the American Government and he was sent out there for something or other to do with America. I couldn’t believe it.

We

knew that, we knew that. We spoke about it at home and I was old enough by then to realise what was happening and my mother was very nervous and the Australian man that was attached to the United Nations and he did not want to stay in the allotted hotel. He said to his people who arranged accommodation for him,

“Try and arrange accommodation with a local family, I would like to see how they live in China.” He had never been to China before and that was Arthur Lowndes and so we took him in. He was a delightful man and he helped us a lot in Tsingtao and suggested we come to Australia. He said, “Look, you’re going to get kicked out by the Communists, even though you were born and educated here, they want all Westerners out.” Doesn’t matter that my father has Chinese blood in him, I have got, it

doesn’t work that way in China, you’ve got to be Chinese to be allowed to be Chinese, you’ve got to be Chinese. So he said, “Go to Australia, it’s so far away from the rest of the world, you will never, ever have any trouble any more.” So we took his advise and he gave me a beautiful reference for a job and he also gave my Dad a reference but unfortunately my Dad was too old to employ in an office, so from a manager who was

working in a produce store and ended up in the stevedoring company, just as a tally clerk, unfortunately.

By ship, the Nellow, a ship, we went by cargo ship first from Tsingtao, oh it was rough and I was sick almost all the way. It was a cargo ship and it did a few stops along the way and one of them was Rabaul and

we got to Hong Kong eventually and from Hong Kong we changed onto the Nellow, the ship the Nellow and came out here and I had never seen a whale before and I was dying to see whales because I had heard of New South Wales and I associated Wales with whales. I remember we were on deck

and the purser was talking to me and I said, “When am I going to see whales?” And he said, “Another few minutes and I’ll point them out to you,” and another few minutes passed, and he said, “There they are, we’re getting closer and closer, there are the whales.” And I’m looking and looking and I said, “I can’t see them,” and he said, “Come on, we’re getting closer, you should be able to see them as we get closer.” I said, “They don’t look like whales to me.” He said, “No, because they’re New South ones.” And I didn’t get it and I said, “What do you mean?”

He said “New South Wales, that’s where we’re headed for, Sydney.” And I was so naïve.

Camp, I was like a country bumpkin, I’ve never seen so many people. I’d never seen so many big buildings. The AWA building at North Sydney, I had never seen a building that tall. Is it still there by the way? Does anybody know?

It’s in the city, right, not in North Sydney, in the city and oh I was like a country bumpkin, it was so tall but now it’s one of the smallest buildings in the city, but at that time I was a country bumpkin. Because two storey houses, maybe three at the most in Tsingtao and they were all square and it was amazing, but we were all in awe of the food, the shops, the meat on display, the fruit,

the milkshakes. I’d never tasted milkshakes, I’d never tasted milk with so much cream, it was like paradise, paradise, but there again my mother, my brother and I, we came here first. My father said, “I’ll join you later if you like the place. If you don’t want to settle there, you come back and we’ll try elsewhere.” We liked it and it was wonderful to be free, and so before we even had a chance to make

up our minds, my Mum in particular, we received a telegram from my Dad to say, “Stay put, I’m coming.” He caught the last boat or ship out of Tsingtao, the Communists came in and he would have been kicked out anyway. And when your home is in a place like that you’ve never known any other home, you’ve never been out of China, where do you go? That is your home.

They tell all the other Westerners, “go home”, England, Canada, America, our home was there, so once again everything we built up, all the furniture, the bits and pieces, dinner sets had to be left but my mother did write to him and say, “Don’t forget all the silver cutlery and the cut glass and all that,” including that table, and he wrapped that in a Chinese rug, so it was only slightly damaged.

But with the cutlery he bought back nine antique silver knives but my mother said, “Where’s the rest of it?” “Oh, did it come in a set?” She said, “Of course, this is the set we used to use,” and I’ve only got nine knives, beautiful old 1830 something knives.

We knew we would never be able to go back.

It wasn’t a good feeling. My mother wasn’t happy. She always I think had visions of eventually going back one day but because she had left a house, a home, a home, which still belonged to us. We had shares in the water works and the electricity department in Shanghai, left all that, had to leave all that and everything

was taken away and it was very tragic for my parents. I missed my friends in China, who were still there at the time but they eventually left too. I couldn’t make friends here, I found it very difficult. The pronunciation was a little bit different to mine. I think the Australians in those days had a slightly more twang and I couldn’t understand

exactly what they were saying. My mother even she had to get a job and at eleven o’clock everybody said, “We’re going to get our pie,” and my mother kept working and working and they said, “Come on Vera, don’t you want your pie?” And she said, “No thanks, I bought some sandwiches.” What they meant was their pay, money, so they said, “Your pay, your pay,” and she realised. So just little things like that was hard

to experience, it was a hard experience because she had a slight accent. You were queuing up, in those days you had dockets, you had to queue up for cigarettes, she was a heavy smoker, queue up for sugar, queue up for butter and all that, and she and I would join the queue and as soon as we started speaking they would recognise she was a foreigner. “What are you doing here? Why don’t you go back to your country?” Australia in

1947 was not ready for new people, they just weren’t ready. Now quite different but in those days, they did not make people like us, we were called “refos” because we were in a camp. We were considered refugees, we were not made very welcome. Now it’s a different matter and because of that mother never adjusted. Father adjusted wonderfully

and I found it difficult to make friends because I had finished my school years. My brother made many friends because he went back school, high school, and I found it terribly difficult so I said, “I’m getting out of here.” I worked and saved for four years and I knew I couldn’t go back to China, so the next best thing was Singapore. So my girlfriend and I, she was interned in Shanghai, we went to Singapore together.

Over here, no. If he did he certainly didn’t tell us about it. Oh there was one incident in a Chinese restaurant, that’s right, there was and we were all there. Bob was there too, yes. I think we were engaged at the time and we went into this Chinese restaurant and

the waiter after speaking, “How do you like the food?” To my father, “You speak Chinese?” “Yes.” “You speak Cantonese?” “Yes.” “You Chinese?” And before my father could say anything, my mother, “No, he’s not Chinese.” And I thought, “Why did she say that? Why did she say that?” And then one day she said something to me about it and I said, “Why did you say it?” She said, “You must never be too familiar with them otherwise

they treat you as equals.” So my mother was racist, you see. I didn’t know that. She said, “Oh no, you mustn’t say yes I am Chinese or anything,” and I thought, I remembered all that and Bob was there and he remembers that too. And you can see he’s got Chinese blood in him, we all, my brother looks just like my father and even I, I know I’ve got Chinese eyes and all that but

Mum would never admit that and she did another very foolish thing, I think. I had beautiful photographs of my grandfather, who was half Chinese, she tore them all up. A photograph of my father sitting in front in a soccer team, with his arms folded like this, right in the front with the soccer ball and the rest of the team, who was the Chinese Emperor’s team, she tore those photos up. Anything that looked Asian she tore

up, which was so sad. I think she went a bit strange. She did go a bit strange I think.

I was British because Australia was British. Australian passports only came in within the last few years but when we first came here, all you people would have been British, so I came in on a British passport. I was considered one of the Australians.

We were all British and it was only years after that Australia decided to issue their own passports.

1987.

I felt like a tourist. Tsingtao was no more. The little city that it was, it was a big city and Bob was with me and

he said, “I thought Tsingtao was a small, little city?” And I said, “It was, I’m lost, I don’t know where I am.” However the pier is still there, many of the old buildings are still there but nothing is maintained in China. They just don’t care, they just let things fall to pieces and it was sad to see our house and it needed good patchwork.

No, never saw anybody,

no.

Self dependence, God helps those that helps themselves. You have to help yourself.

You can’t depend on other people to pull you out of a rut, you’ve just got to keep going and if you fail, you try again, that’s all. In Tsingtao my parents could have done with counselling but no, they had no counselling. The British Government paid the people that were civilian internees ten thousand pounds compensation. I never got it because neither my parents nor grandparents were born in England. They were all

born in China, so I grumbled to myself about it but I thought, “What the heck, I’m not going to get it, it’s not fair.” I didn’t think it was fair just because I went through everything everybody else did but because they could prove that they had ancestors born in Britain, Ireland, Scotland, whatever, I couldn’t prove that, so I got nothing but I’m still hoping, maybe one day. I’ve written letters to

them and filled in forms and everything and I thought the fact that my great grandfather was even given a citation from Queen Victoria for his work during the Chinese rebellion, the Chinese rebels and he had to get permission to accept it, from Queen Victoria, didn’t make any difference. And that he was in the British Army as a General, General Cook. His funeral was in all the Chinese papers. He

had such a big funeral, didn’t help.

That pill box, that damn pill box and the wire around the wall, which incidentally once the Americans liberated us, the wire was cut and the machine guns were taken away, the search light was taken away but

when we went back in 1987 to the camp, which was then turned into a big hospital, what do you call these little things that the electric wire goes through, shiny things? I don’t know, I won’t ask Bob.

Insulators were still there and I thought, “Whoa, they haven’t taken those away,” but when somebody mentions you were in camp, the first thing I see in front of me is the damn

pill box, with the light and the machine gun and the wire.

No, no, no. If you are a worrier, that sort of worrier, I’m a worrier sure but not that sort of worrier and if you’re feeling sorry for yourself all the time, sure maybe you have dreams but don’t know, I got over it. My brother, who was younger,

he got over it. People are able to adapt to whatever situation they are put in. The only situation you cannot adapt to is when you are driven by force like some of the Catholic priests who were in our camp and they went back to their missions and then the Communists were so cruel to them. They wanted religion wiped out and these two priests they tied their thumbs together, they tied their toes together,

threw them into the pig pen. They were in that pig pen fighting for food with the pigs and they died in that pen. They were so cruel, the Communists, but otherwise you adapt and you just have to say, “God helps those who help themselves,” and you’ve just got to get up and try again.

I don’t like war, I feel

sorry for everybody that’s involved in it. Rightly or wrongly I feel sorry for them all because so many innocent people get hurt in a war and if it can be avoided at all, try and avoid it, but I think a lot of countries are a little bit greedy. My attitude is, “Here’s your country, you stay there.” You just can’t come and take over like,

“I want that”, like the Japs did, “I want China, I’m going to take over.” Germany wanted Poland or whatever, “I’m going to take some of it,” you can’t do that, it’s not right, live and let live. And another lesson I learnt in camp, do not waste food, never ever. I’ve been hungry, I know what it was like and the people, the children in particular waste so much food these days.

There will always be hard time and remember, anything can happen to anyone at anytime unexpectedly, so be prepared for the worst and expect and be prepared but expect that anything can happen, good or bad.

Thank you for having me. Thank you so much for having me. Nice to meet you both.