by Hill, David
It’s 1942, and the tiny farming town of Featherston is about to receive hundreds of Japanese soldiers into its prisoner-of-war camp.
Ewen, whose dad is a guard there, can’t stop wondering about the enemy just down the road. Some say the captives are evil and cruel and should be treated harshly — or shot. But when Ewen and his friends ride out to the camp to peep through the barbed wire, the POWs just seem like … well, people.
Then a new group from a captured warship arrives and the mood in the camp darkens. As tension builds between guards and inmates the boys are told to stay away. But on 25 February 1943, Ewen and his friends are there at the moment the storm breaks — and terrible, unforgettable events unfold before their eyes.
Contents
October 1942
November 1942
December 1942
January 1943
February 1943
Historical Note
Glossary
Read More
David Hill is an award-winning writer who lives in New Plymouth. His novels, stories and plays for young adults have been published in eight countries.
ALSO BY DAVID HILL
The Deadly Sky
Brave Company
My Brother’s War
Coming Back
No Safe Harbour
See Ya, Simon
For dear Beth, and fifty years
October 1942
SATURDAY, 24 OCTOBER Dad’s just put some chunks of wood in the kitchen stove, so the house will be warm in the morning. Even though spring’s here, it can be cold in Featherston.
‘Make sure the blackout curtains are drawn tight,’ he told Mum and me.
Then, before I got into bed, I wrote this first bit in my journal.
SUNDAY, 25 OCTOBER Our teacher, Mr White, says we should try to write in our journal every day, but it doesn’t matter if we miss some, and it doesn’t matter how much or how little we write. I think I’ll write little; it sounds boring to me.
‘Use any sort of book,’ Mr White told us. ‘A notebook, an old exercise book, anything.’ Books and paper are hard to get since the war started.
My journal looks pretty flash, though Dad says I could be arrested for having it. He’s joking … I think. It’s from the prisoner-of-war camp where he’s a guard, and has NEW ZEALAND ARMY printed on the front. My friend Barry got an old Railways logbook from his dad. I wonder what snobby Susan Proctor will have?
Mr White says we’re living at a special time in a special place, and someday we’ll feel glad we recorded it. He talks like that a lot. He’s the oldest man teacher at school. The young ones have mostly left to join the army or navy or air force.
I know it’s a special time. The war has been going for three years now, and we’re going to win!
It’s not just the British Empire fighting the Nazis. America is on our side, too, after Japan attacked their warships at Pearl Harbor last year. Then the Japs came sweeping down through the jungle and captured Singapore. They sank British battleships and took thousands of prisoners. They got as far as New Guinea, and have bombed places in Australia. But the Americans have destroyed lots of their navy in big sea battles. The Japs are being pushed back, and the Nazis are losing battles in Russia.
So, yeah, we’re going to win.
I said so today when I went around to see Barry and his little brother, Clarry. Barry and Clarry: it always makes me laugh. ‘We’ll b-beat the N-Nips,’ Barry agreed.
Clarry can walk quite a few steps now. He’s good with his crutches, and the metal braces on his legs help hold them firm. But he still gets tired quickly.
He has polio. It stops your muscles from working properly. He had a headache and a stiff neck after dinner one night, and when he tried to get up the next morning, he fell on the floor and couldn’t stand. Mum says that when Mrs Morris saw him and guessed what had happened, you could hear her scream from our place.
That was five months ago, just a few days before Clarry’s tenth birthday. He was put straight into hospital in Wellington, and Mrs Morris caught the train to see him every day. She can travel for free because Mr Morris is an engine-driver. Travelling is hard now petrol is rationed, and she kept telling Mum how lucky they were.
Lucky? Clarry was in a hospital bed for three months. He spent the first fortnight in an isolation ward; his parents and Barry could only look at him through a window. They didn’t know if he would live or die.
The polio damaged Clarry’s legs. Some kids who get it — it’s mostly kids — get it in their chests as well, and they can’t breathe properly. They have to be put in this big round metal tank called an iron lung that does their breathing for them. They lie there on their backs, with only their heads sticking out.
I had a nightmare soon after Clarry was rushed to hospital. I was in an iron lung, but it wasn’t working, and I started suffocating. I woke up screaming. Barry said he’d had bad dreams like that, too. His stammering is worse since Clarry got sick.
Clarry had to stay in bed until his legs stopped hurting. Then they moved him to Masterton Hospital. He’s been back home for a fortnight now, and he’s slowly getting better. Nobody knows what causes polio, or if he’ll get it again. Some kids in iron lungs die because … well, because they spew up, and choke to death on it.
Today, Barry and I were telling him how the American troops in New Zealand are training to invade the Pacific islands that the Japs occupy. (It’s supposed to be a secret, but everyone knows.) Also how the POW camp just outside town where Dad’s a guard is starting to fill up with captured Japs. Clarry went, ‘Hey, can we go and look at it, Ewen?’
How? There’s no way he can ride a bike.
Crikey, this is heaps — and I was only going to write a little in this journal!
One other thing. We told Clarry that heaps of Japs are surrendering. They aren’t.
MONDAY, 26 OCTOBER We came back into Room Six after morning playtime. I’m a milk monitor this week, and I’d just stacked the empty bottles in the milk-stand.
Mr White told our Standard Five: ‘Take out your journals, please.’ So I got out my army notebook. Barry got out his Railways logbook. Susan Proctor had a brand-new exercise book; must be easy when your father’s a rich sheep-farmer. She thinks she’s best at everything. Some kids hadn’t been able to find anything, but Mr White had some old paper for them.
‘You can begin by inscribing your name and address,’ he said. Inscribing: I’ve sure learned some snazzy words from Mr White.
I thought for a second, then on the inside of the front cover, I printed:
Ewen MacKenzie
20 Waite Street
Featherston
Wairarapa
New Zealand
Southern Hemisphere
Earth
The Solar System
The Milky Way Galaxy
The Universe
A bit childish for a twelve-year-old, I suppose. But if I read it again, like Mr White says, in maybe thirty years, it’ll be 1972 and people might be living on Mars or Venus. So I’d better put my full address.
Mr White was just starting to say ‘Now, you could write—’ when a whistle blew down the corridor, and we heard Miss Mutter calling ‘Air raid! Enemy air raid!’
It was only a practice — the fire-station siren would start up if it was a real raid. But nobody argues with Miss Mutter. I reckon even Mr White is nervous of her, even though he fought in the Great War. He just sighed, and said, ‘Kits from your desks, please.’
We opened our desks, took out the cloth bags with the rubber square, metal name-tags and cotton wool inside. ‘Proceed to the shelter,’ Mr White said.
In the corridor, Miss Mutter kept calling ‘Air raid! Emergency!’ She pronounced it ‘Emerchenshy’, because she doesn’t have a
ny teeth, and never wears dentures. Nobody laughs at her, though: if the Japs knew Miss Mutter, they’d be too scared to attack New Zealand.
‘Acrosh the grash!’ she ordered. So we all filed across the rugby field and into the trenches that the Home Guard dug about eighteen months ago, when people were worried that the Japs might advance all the way down to New Zealand. We hung the name-tags around our necks, and held the rubber square in one hand. You’re supposed to bite on the rubber if bombs explode nearby; it helps against the blast, somehow. A couple of kids accidentally swallowed theirs at the first practices we had, so now we just hold them.
In our other hand, we held the bag with its cotton wool. You stick the wool in your ears to protect against being deafened, but the one time we actually did this Terry O’Donaghue and Anzac Patu reckoned they hadn’t heard anyone tell them to go back to class. Miss Mutter went out and chased them across the grass, whacking at their legs with her blackboard ruler. Boy, did they run!
TUESDAY, 27 OCTOBER ‘Usually, I’ll let you choose what to put in your journals,’ Mr White announced this morning, ‘but today, I’d like you to write about what you hope will happen by this time next year. Commence now.’
I didn’t know what to put at first. Then I saw Barry writing, and suddenly my pencil was moving across the paper. I hope Clarry gets better. I hope we destroy the Japs and the Nazis. I hope the war ends soon, and nobody else we know is killed or wounded.
Dad was on late duty at the POW camp, so I brought in wood for the kitchen stove. Mum was cutting up two old sheets and sewing them together to make one decent sheet. I heard her foot pumping away on the old treadle sewing machine after I went to bed.
Might see if Barry wants to ride out to the camp sometime.
WEDNESDAY, 28 OCTOBER Handwriting practice at school, practising how to make the bottoms of our ‘b’s and the tops of our ‘p’s sit on the same level. Miss Mutter used to whack us on the knuckles with her ruler if we didn’t write neatly.
I meant to put on yesterday’s list that I’d like Mum and Dad to have a car. Dad has to bike to the camp in all weather.
Went over to the Morrises’ after school. Clarry is doing lessons by correspondence. He’s pretty tired; he has to wear his heavy leg braces in bed, to help keep his legs straight. Some kids with polio end up with twisted legs or arms. So he needs the braces, but they make it hard to sleep.
The BBC News on the wireless says a Jap cruiser has been sunk by American planes, and a lot of their sailors captured. Wonder if they’ll end up in Dad’s camp?
THURSDAY, 29 OCTOBER Nothing.
FRIDAY, 30 OCTOBER Mr and Mrs Morris came to our place to play cards. Mr Morris says there’s more barbed wire being put up on the Palliser Bay beaches. The Japs aren’t advancing like they used to, but I once heard Dad telling Mum how if there was an invasion they might land at Palliser Bay before attacking Wellington. The bay is just over twenty miles away, so they could reach Featherston in an hour!
They’d have to fight the Home Guard first — all the men who are too old or not fit enough to be in the army. The Home Guard only have old-fashioned rifles left over from the Great War. ‘It’d be a massacre,’ Dad told Mum. Mrs Connell in the women’s dress shop reckons she’d kill herself before she let the Japanese capture her.
Barry and Clarry came with their parents. We played Snakes and Ladders in my room. Clarry cheats! If he lands on a snake, he knocks the board with his leg so that his counter jumps, and says his leg braces made him twitch.
When they left, the Morrises all stood outside our house for a few minutes until their eyes got used to the dark. They live only a hundred yards away, but everything is blacked out at night in case enemy planes come. The streetlights are all off, and everyone has blackout curtains.
Featherston is just a little farming town, but tonight, with everything dark and knowing that there are hundreds of Japs outside town, kept in by barbed wire, it felt different. If the Jap Army comes, people say they’ll try to seize the railway. The line over the Rimutaka Ranges has explosives hidden in places so that the tracks can be blown up.
SATURDAY, 31 OCTOBER Like Mr White said, there are special things about Featherston just now. The blackout and rationing and the air-raid trenches at school and in the Domain. The scrap metal being stored behind the town hall to make bayonets or parts of ships. The POW camp — the first one for Japanese prisoners in the whole British Empire.
I guess the most special thing is that men from our little town are getting killed or wounded. Everyone is frightened it’ll happen to somebody they know. Buster Wilson, who used to drive the butcher’s van, died after a battle in the Egyptian desert. A bloke out towards Martinborough was killed when his bomber crashed in France. And there’s Dad, of course, but I’ll talk about him later.
Since it’s Saturday, we had an egg each for breakfast. The Morrises keep chooks in their backyard, and give us some eggs. Dad has turned our whole front and back section into a vegetable garden, because so many things are hard to get in the shops.
After breakfast, Barry and I rode out to the POW camp. Clarry was practising walking up and down the two back steps into their house; must be hard when you can’t bend your legs. His teeth were clenched, and you could see it hurt.
‘We’ll g-give him a d-double out there as soon as he c-can m-make it,’ Barry went.
We rode carefully. It is almost impossible to get new tyres and tubes. My back tyre has about ten puncture patches on it.
A chugging sound, and a cloud of black smoke came around a corner. A car with a big metal drum on the back appeared. ‘Must be using charcoal for fuel,’ I said.
Barry grinned. ‘Or chicken p-poo.’
People try everything now that petrol is rationed. The car spluttered past.
Another car. A bigger one, moving smoothly. A hand waved. Susan Proctor: I pretended not to notice her. Mr Proctor is allowed extra petrol, since he’s a farmer. People say he’s a good bloke. Pity his daughter’s such a snob.
Sheep watched us from paddocks. The Tararua Ranges rose all green and blue. Hard to believe there’s a war on.
Ten more minutes, and we saw the high barbed-wire fences ahead. There are more huts than the last time I came out. A lot has changed already, even though the place has been open only a month.
It used to be a training camp, in the Great War and in this war. Suddenly, the New Zealand Army heard that four hundred Japanese prisoners were arriving, and there had to be a place for them!
Those first four hundred were mainly workers who had been building airfields on islands the Japs had taken and that the Americans have won back. Dad says there were architects and engineers and even teachers among them. They’ve been no trouble. But things could be different when captured Jap troops start to arrive.
We were twenty yards from the front gates when we stopped. A line of men in dark-blue uniforms was coming out, shovels and hoes over their shoulders. Half a dozen guards in khaki walked beside them, carrying rifles. I saw something metal glint on one rifle. A bayonet!
The prisoners headed towards us. Barry and I stood still. It was the first time I’d seen a Jap close up. They were carrying those big heavy shovels. What if …
But they just kept walking. One stumbled; a guard grabbed his elbow, went ‘Watch your step, Tojo.’ The prisoner bowed, then moved on. ‘D-Did you see that?’ Barry whispered.
They were all sizes. Some wore glasses. They had old army lemon-squeezer hats, dyed dark blue like their uniforms. A few glanced over at Barry and me. Maybe they hadn’t seen enemy boys before. (I’m an enemy?) One quite oldish bloke started to smile at us, then looked at the ground instead.
Another guard lifted a hand. It was Dad’s friend Bruce. He’s an office worker from Palmerston North, but he’s got bad asthma so couldn’t enlist. ‘Hello, Ewen. Your Dad’s with another bunch, putting up a shower block.’
Several prisoners were watching us now. Suddenly Barry said, ‘G-G’day.’ The Japs looked uncertain, t
hen a couple murmured something, and one half-bowed to him.
‘Alright, you kids. Get going, eh?’ It was another guard, one I didn’t recognise. He snapped a command to the prisoners, and they began moving towards a newly dug stretch of earth, with shovels and hoes in hand. A garden, I suppose.
‘Kids,’ grumbled Barry as we rode on. ‘Who d-does he think he is?’
Behind the barbed wire, more figures in blue carried timber or sheets of corrugated iron. Two were shaking blankets; one was sweeping a path. They looked like ordinary people — until you saw the khaki figures with rifles and bayonets, and the tall wooden tower beside the front gates, inside which two more guards stood and a metal barrel gleamed. A machine-gun?
We watched for a while, but nothing else happened, so we started back towards home. The bunch of prisoners were working on the dug ground, while their guards stood watching and smoking.
‘You see that N-Nip b-bow to me?’ Barry asked.
‘Yeah,’ I went. ‘Amazing, eh?’ Actually, I was wishing I’d been the one who’d said ‘G’day’. Barry is quicker at that sort of thing than I am.
When the Japs declared war, people said they were all useless fighters, little shrimps who wore glasses. Then when they started invading and capturing places, there were stories about how they tortured or killed prisoners, and used civilians for slaves. The ones we had seen didn’t look like that. But they weren’t soldiers, of course.
Dad says I shouldn’t believe half the rumours about Japs or Germans. ‘Some Jap soldiers have bayoneted civilians, or worked prisoners to death building railways. But there are ugly people in all armies, son.’
Dad was in the war for nearly two years. He trained in Egypt and was with the New Zealand forces when they were rushed to Greece, to try to stop the Germans. Our side was out-numbered, and had to retreat through the mountains, with Nazi planes bombing and machine-gunning them. A chunk of shrapnel hit Dad in one elbow. He came back on a hospital ship, and his left arm is still partly crippled. So now he’s a camp guard and, because he was a carpenter, he’s in charge of putting up buildings there.