The Japanese occupation of Hong Kong was violently miserable – so much so that it became a focus of controversy even inside the Japanese army. The colony degenerated into anarchy. In some respects, one of the best places to be was in Stanley Internment Camp – though that was a deeply relative benefit. The camp was a former school with barracks buildings around it, and it was home to two thousand internees during the war. Soldiers were held in the military prison at Sham Shui Po, and had an even harder time of it. The big problem was lack of food. The internees’ diet consisted almost entirely of rice, often in the form of congee or rice gruel. Many of them died; many others had their health broken and never recovered. Jack was one of them. The death rate among civilian internees of the Japanese in South-East Asia was 13,000 out of 110,000. A number at least equal to that never recovered their health and died shortly after the war.
Lannie’s diary of the war is mainly about food. Internees were not supposed to keep records of any kind. Although the camp was in theory self-governing – run by the British – the Japanese, especially the military police or Kempetai, were notoriously heavy-handed captors. So Lannie had to be careful. Just how careful became apparent when a group of prisoners associated with the British Army Aid Group were arrested by the Kempetai. The BAAG was an undercover organisation dedicated to maintaining contact between the internment camps and the outside world. It passed information back and forth and out into China; its mission was to smuggle news and supplies in and out of the camps, and to develop and maintain escape routes into the parts of China the Japanese did not control; it had a particular brief to help Allied airmen who’d been shot down. In October 1943, the Kempetai arrested thirteen members of the BAAG, who had been betrayed by an informer. The men were tortured for information and then were beheaded on Stanley beach, in sight of the internees. The fact that Lannie’s diary makes no mention of these events shows how conscious she was of the risks, because the leader of the men caught and tortured, John Fraser, was one of her and Jack’s closest friends. A Scottish lawyer and the Assistant Attorney General of Hong Kong, he was a patient of Jack’s who had become a family friend; his death was the worst moment of the Lanchesters’ time in internment. This was something for which Lannie never forgave the Japanese. The war itself she saw as one of those things that happen between nations, not something for which to blame individual soldiers. But she felt that the Japanese treated prisoners as less than fully human. That attitude reached a nadir, for Lannie, with Fraser’s torture and decapitation. To the end of her life she would have no Japanese-made object in her house.
But Lannie’s diary was about food not only for reasons of self-censorship. Food, or the lack of it, rapidly became the only thing anyone in the camp ever thought about. The diet was monotonous, rice and water; any extras were due to occasional gifts allowed by the Japanese, from Chinese well-wishers or from one of only three Red Cross deliveries to reach the camp in the entire war. (One batch of parcels, sent from Britain in November 1942, arrived in March 1945.) The internees depended on luck and the actions of others, and if the Japanese decided to let them starve, they would all rapidly die. Often the only thing with any flavour or texture would be the burnt rice stuck to the bottom of the cooking pots. Lannie tried to get hold of this whenever she could. She developed a taste for burnt rice that she never lost, and she’d always ask for it scraped off the bottom of the pan when she was staying with us.
A few things in the diary are not about food. Many of them note the one-year anniversaries of her last months of freedom – especially walks and trips to Lantao. ‘A year ago today since Tai Mo Shan’ – the highest mountain in Hong Kong; Lannie must have walked up it. ‘What a contrast.’ ‘Climbed Shatin Gap a year ago alone. L climbed Lantao Peak one year ago.’ Leslie Holmes climbed Lantao Peak on the same day Lannie climbed Shatin Gap. A lover’s pact? I’ll climb this mountain while you climb that one and we’ll think about each other on the way up. I wonder if they looked towards each other as they stood on their respective summits.
The only mention of Bill in the diary is when somebody came into Jack and Lannie’s room in the amah’s – maid’s – quarters and stole Bill’s watch. It was returned three months later, without explanation, by a Catholic priest, Father Murphy. The thief must have been overcome with remorse and handed it over in confession. Thieving was a very high-order crime in camp, as it is in all closed communities.
Happy memories are a problem for prisoners. They need them as a source of consolation and strength, but at the same time it’s important not to let thoughts of the past become a source of gloom – as Dante wrote, there can be no greater misery than to remember a time of happiness when you are in despair. In these circumstances, the combination of depression and malnutrition can quickly kill. And hope is a problem too – perhaps even more of one. Prisoners need to think that they will one day be free; but if the hopes become too specific and too short term, they are easily crushed. That crushing can swiftly turn to fatal depression. So prisoners learn to be very, very careful with their hopes – they ration them, nurture them, fuss over them, deny their existence, even to themselves. Hope becomes a hypersensitive plant or private religion.
Part of what made the internment so difficult, at Stanley and elsewhere, was that no one knew how long it was going to last. In that sense it was worse than being in prison. A prisoner serves a specific sentence, and comes up for parole at a specific date. POWs and internees didn’t have that privilege: they had to wait, open-endedly, as the days stretched into months and then years. Once they had been in jail for a couple of years they knew they could be there for any length of time: certainly years more, perhaps decades more. An amphibious assault on Japan, fighting all the way up the chain of islands, would cost millions of lives and would take years. And at the same time they could be repatriated at any moment; all that was needed was for the British government to cut a deal, just like the ones the Canadians had. So there was no hope, and yet there was imminent hope, hope so close you could touch it – the kind of hope that can kill.
Under these circumstances, the best advice is some of the simplest. At the end of The Anatomy of Melancholy, his multi-hundred-page examination of all the different aspects of his subject (and the least-read great book in the English language), Robert Burton gives a single clear piece of advice: ‘Be busy.’ It is good advice, and it is advice the inmates of Stanley Camp took. First there were all the practical things to do, the self-organising business of running the crowded quarters. Jack had his dentistry, though he had almost no medicine; a photograph of him, taken by the Japanese for propaganda purposes, shows him at work in clean clothes in his surgery. He did some other odd jobs – Lannie’s diary mentions his running the boiler while she supervised the washing – until he found an important niche: making lye. The main source in the camp was ash: Lannie would gather ash from the cooking fires, and Jack would make it into lye, which was the closest approximation they could have to soap. Lye-making is the thing for which Jack was mainly remembered afterwards by other internees from Stanley. (More so than the dentistry, whose usefulness was limited by the absence of medicines and tools.) I can’t begin to say how much I admire my grandparents for the way they behaved in these hard times.
There was another thing Lannie did to keep busy. In the last days of fighting before the surrender, the British began to collate records and documents about war crimes that had (in their view) been committed by the Japanese. John Fraser, in his capacity as Assistant Attorney General, had some of the paperwork with him when he went into the camp, hidden in his personal belongings. He didn’t think he would be able to keep it secret indefinitely, so he asked my grandmother to hide it for him. Lannie was able to do that because the Japanese always searched the camp in the same order, so there was notice between their first arrival in the camp and the time they reached the laundry where she worked; she managed to hide the papers inside sheets that had been folded over the clothes lines. In this way Lannie kept the documents sa
fe for the duration of the war.
Lannie thought about Billy all the time. His two letters were a temporary comfort, but they made her long for more and more detailed – perhaps, more believable – news. The most useful and consoling letter she received during all these years came from Dook, and arrived on 27 July 1944, about a year after it was sent.
Mrs D Lanchester
British P.O.W.
Room 12 Block 5
Stanley Internment Camp
HONG KONG
CHINA
from Mrs Frank
Thornthwaite
Larra
DERRINALLUM
VICTORIA
AUSTRALIA
31st July 1943
[note in pencil: received
July 27 44]
Dear Mrs Lanchester,
I am hoping that this letter will get to you to give you news of Bill. He is very well and has just spent the day with me and, as it is his birthday, I hope it has been a happy one. He has spent most of his holidays with Mrs Street, whose son is also at the Grammar School and they have become friends. The Streets are cousins of mine.
Bill has done very well at school, passed his leaving and, at the end of this year, is doing honours. I am anxious to help him to go up to the University for a year as he is very keen to do this, but was uncertain what to take up. He thinks that he would like to do either a Law or an Arts course.
This morning we went up to interview Mr Medley, who is the Chancellor, an Englishman and a personal friend of mine. I felt that a talk to him would be a great help to Bill, as he is a most understanding person and could give him much good advice. They got on very well together and he advised Bill to go up for a year and to do either Arts or Law and try for a scholarship to one of the residential colleges. If he cannot get this I will help him with his living expenses and fees.
It will be a great pleasure to me to be able to do this as I have no family of my own and I think that your son is a grand boy and has shown such pluck and determination. Do not worry about him as I am sure he will get on. Everyone likes him. Physically he has grown a lot in this last year and looks the picture of health.
I do hope that it will not be long before you are reunited, but anyway Bill will not be required for any other work for another two years.
With best wishes,
Yours sincerely,
Mrs Frank Thornthwaite
That letter, with its concrete news and clear signs that Bill had found good friends in Australia, was a great comfort. But Lannie was thinking about children in another way, too, because her diary repeats at regular intervals the phrase ‘things due’ with, usually a day or so later, the phrase ‘things occurred’. It took me a while to work this out, until I saw the regularity of the intervals at which ‘things occurred’. That’s right: Lannie was recording her periods, which means she was worried about having a baby – which in turn means that she and Jack continued to have sex while in prison, there in the sweltering amah’s quarters. Good for them. There’s nothing like making your own entertainment. ‘Hope this does not portend an addition,’ she says, on one of her two missed periods throughout the two years of the diary. A baby would have been a disaster, and the ‘thank God’ when her next period does come is the only expression of relief or happiness at any point during the five years of war.
So the days passed. When the Canadians were released for repatriation, on 23 September 1943, there were rumours that the same might happen to the British: that they would be exchanged for Japanese citizens held in Australia. These rumours gave rise to the most dangerous varieties of hope. But they didn’t come true, for a reason that camp inmates sometimes darkly speculated about: because the British government wanted a British POW presence in Hong Kong at the end of the war, to facilitate reclaiming the colony for the British Empire. This was something my grandmother spoke about as a black rumour, and, like not a few black rumours, it is now a matter of historical record, thanks in part to Phillip Snow’s book The Fall of Hong Kong. The Japanese would have been willing to negotiate a deal over repatriating the internees, who after all were of no use to them. It was the British who wanted them there. The suffering of the prisoners and internees was all so that the flag would be promptly raised once more over the colony at the end of the war. In a way, I’m glad my grandparents never lived to find that out.
When the end of the war came, the British reclaimed the colony with a brisk lack of fuss. The news of the surrender came through on 17 August 1945; there had already been rumours about a ‘big bomb’ dropped on Japan.
A parachutist appeared – as recorded in Lannie’s diary – on 29 August and the British flag was raised over Stanley the next day. It was all over. Lannie copied out a poem written by one of the internees. (Rather a good poem, it seems to me. Why did everybody back then write so well?)
‘A Farewell to Stanley’ by C. K. Norman
A farewell to Stanley – it’s over
Of internees there’s not a sign
They’ve left for Newhaven and Dover
For Hull and Newcastle on Tyne.
No tales where the rumours once started,
The kitchen’s devoid of its queues
The strategists have all departed
With the lies which they peddled as news.
No more of the lectures on drama
On beavers and badgers and boats
On ‘Backwards through Kent on a llama’
and ‘How to raise pedigree goats’.
No more do we carry sea water
And rations are things of the past
Farewell to the Indian quarter
For internment’s over at last.
The liberation of Stanley
On 7 October the aircraft carrier HMS Singer – ‘lend lease from America’ according to Lannie’s note on the back of a postcard of the ship – set sail for Manila and then Sydney. ‘Very pleasant trip – everybody exceedingly kind,’ says her diary.* Jack and Lannie were sent to a Red Cross camp sixty miles west of the city, in the direction of the Blue Mountains, and there they waited while the Red Cross got in touch with Bill. They waited two weeks and then heard that they would be sent on to Melbourne, where Bill would meet them. He had been given three weeks’ leave from the army. While waiting for him they received a letter from Edna Street, the mother of Bill’s friend Tony, who had done so much for their son.
HMS Singer
Eildon
Lismore
Victoria
26 October
My dear Mrs Lanchester,
I feel you won’t even feel you have time to read this, you will all be so excited to be together again. But I do want to tell you how terribly glad and thankful we all are to know you are safe and well, and not only safe and well, but actually here. There is so much to say, that it would be quite impossible to begin to say any of it in this little ‘welcome back’ letter, but it takes you so many good wishes, it should be over weight a dozen times.
D’you think Bill looks well? He has been such a complete brick, all through these difficult years – you’d be terribly proud of him if you knew, or rather you will be terribly proud of him when you do, as he is not very likely to mention it himself. I keep thinking of the excitement he must be feeling, really going to be seeing you both on Saturday. We shall meet each other soon, I hope – after your holiday at Barwon Heads, which I am sure you will enjoy.
Give my love to Bill,
Yours very sincerely,
Edna Street
A kind, warm letter. There is no way of knowing from its tone, or anything else about it, that Edna’s husband G. A. Street had been killed in a plane crash two months before. Of all the different kinds of reticence that feature in this story, this seems to me the most admirable. The Lanchesters were going through the greatest happiness, and the greatest relief, of their lives. Edna Street’s great grief would be intrusive if she let it show; it would be a form of impoliteness, of gatecrashing; so she kept it to herself. She was abl
e to separate their joy from her pain, and even to feel some of that joy, at one of the worst times of her own life. In this story there is reticence as shyness, as self-protection, self-concealment, and avoidance of pain; but we should not forget that some forms of reticence can come close to being a kind of heroism.
So on 23 October 1945 Lannie and Jack arrived at Melbourne, where a few days later they were met by their son, whom they had last seen as a thirteen-year-old schoolboy, and who was now a nineteen-year-old private in the Australian army. Bill’s reunion with Lannie and Jack must have been one of the happiest moments of all their lives.
* Not quite everybody. The literary critic Sir Frank Kermode, who was on a ship carrying former internees to Australia, was shocked at how snobbish they seemed, and at how some of the women complained about having to mix with the people they had forcibly associated with in camp. He thought they made too much of a fuss about how hard a time they had had.
4
When Jack and Lannie arrived in England in March 1946, there was a letter waiting for them.
The boat home
Buckingham Palace
September 1945
The Queen and I bid you a very warm welcome home.
Through all the great trials and sufferings which you have undergone at the hands of the Japanese, you and your comrades have been constantly in our thoughts. We know from the accounts we have already received how heavy those sufferings have been. We know also that these things have been endured by you with the highest courage.
Family Romance Page 18