Children of the Camps

by Mark Felton

  The colonial lifestyles of the children of empire did not prepare them for the coming storm of war, or for the long period of internment that most of them had to look forward to. Neil Begley, a young boy in Shanghai in 1941, recalled his Chinese nanny, or ‘amah’, who cared for him. In common with many of the children who were later interned, Begley had a closer relationship with local Chinese people than with his parents:

  My amah smelled like a Chinese, they all smelled the same, not like we ‘Foreigners’ and, colour apart, I thought that smell was what made them different from us. Taking a nipple in my lips I would suck her warm milk while she ran her fingers through my hair crooning haunting Chinese lullabies. She spoke only Chinese so I was more comfortable with Mandarin that I was with English and quite at home in the servants quarters … My mother would have been horrified if she’d seen me.2

  Many Western children developed such bonds with native servants, often because their own parents were too busy with careers or the social whirl of colonial life, to pay much attention to them. ‘We children loved to spend time with our cook in the kitchen, squatting next to her on the floor, watching her crush and grind the “bumbu” of chillies, coriander, cumin and other spices,’ recalled Jan Ruff, a young Dutch girl in Java in 1941. ‘She let us take turns at turning the handle of the mincer and fanning the open charcoal stove. In Imah’s domain we licked saucepans and scooped our fingers into her delicious dishes …’3. Ernest Hillen, a young Dutch boy in the Netherlands East Indies, recalled Manang, the family gardener, who ‘smelled of different kinds of smoke. He never hurried and I liked being near him: it was restful … His large flat feet had spaces between the toes because he didn’t have to wear shoes. I felt the bottom of those feet and they were hard and covered with deep, dry, criss-crossed cuts, which he said didn’t hurt. I wanted feet like that, his shiny brown skin, and I tried to walk bowlegged like him.’4

  Soon after arriving back in Shanghai from leave in England, Rachel Bosebury’s parents realized that the situation was turning bad for foreigners in the city. This was during the last few weeks before the Japanese bombed Pearl Harbor. ‘I remember them saying that the Japanese were bloodthirsty people,’ recalled Rachel Bosebury. ‘I know I heard stories of babies being thrown up in the air and caught on Japanese bayonets.’ Such talk terrified young children, and Rachel and her siblings had little understanding of what was about to change in their stable home life. ‘When they were talking I had an imagination. You know, when little children hear the word “bloodthirsty”, you think they drink blood. So I used to be terribly afraid that they would see me and at night we’d cover ourselves up with our blankets and wouldn’t even let a bit of hair show out because we didn’t want them to be drinking our blood.’ The term ‘Japanese’ conjured up a ubiquitous bogeyman that haunted the dreams of adults and children alike in Shanghai. ‘Kids hear things, but when you’re little, you think of it a lot differently, and you get pretty scared,’ said Bosebury.5 The fears Western children harboured after overhearing their parents’ conversations were not to prove entirely unfounded, for the war about to be unleashed across Asia was to be marked from the very beginning by acts of almost diabolical barbarity and sadism, changing the world’s opinion of Japan forever.

  British teenager Heather Burch had returned to Shanghai in 1939, after attending private school in England since the age of eleven. Her father was the chairman of the Shanghai Water Works, where Rachel Bosebury’s father also worked as a supervisor. However, there the similarity ended, the Burch family formed part of the British expatriate community’s governing class. By 1941 rumours were abounding of Japanese intentions towards the International Settlement. ‘It was obvious the situation was getting worse,’ recalled Burch. ‘People began leaving for Australia and Canada, but few for England.’ Going ‘back home’ was not a very attractive proposition, involving a long sea voyage through waters infested by aggressive German U-boats, and entering a country under constant aerial attack from the Luftwaffe and suffering from severe food shortages and rationing. Most people who left Shanghai for England were young single men intent on enlisting and doing their duty. ‘In late 1941 my father was told off-therecord by the British Consul that he should leave as quickly as possible. He booked passage for us, but the earliest available was in mid-December.’ The Burches had left their escape until it was too late. When the Japanese occupied the Settlement ‘we found ourselves trapped.’6

  Ella Clark was sixteen when the Japanese took over the Settlement, and studying at a local business college. Her father worked for the Chinese Customs Service, and her family lived close to the famous Bund. Early on the morning of 8 December 1941, foreign residents who lived close enough to the Huangpu River were rudely awakened by the sound of gunfire. Japanese troops, supported by light tanks, had begun marching into the International Settlement, and there was nothing effective to stop them. The British-led Shanghai Volunteer Corps (SVC), a part-time militia composed of expatriate men from a dozen different nationalities organized into several infantry companies and cavalry troops, was told to stand down and surrender its weapons. They were a surrounded force and if they had tried to resist would have been quickly overwhelmed by the superior enemy numbers and firepower. The SVC commanders realized that fighting in the densely populated city would have led to thousands of civilian casualties to no avail. Although it opted not to resist, its members were nonetheless imprisoned as military prisoners-of-war by the Japanese, depriving hundreds of families of husbands and fathers.

  The only regular military forces in the city were a pair of slightly antiquated Yangtze River gunboats tied up on the Huangpu. The USS Wake was taken over by the Japanese without the Americans firing a shot, but the din that awakened the city’s foreign residents to danger was the desperate resistance being put up by one lone British gunboat, HMS Peterel. Aboard the Peterel, the morning watch had stared across the misty river at the bustling city, nursing cups of tea in tin mugs, discerning the first stirrings of a new threat to this quiet and satisfactory morning rhythm. A Chinese laundry boy went about his work unobtrusively as the rest of the small crew of twenty slumbered below. A Japanese gunboat moved in the distance, and a curl of smoke rose from the funnel of the huge Imperial Navy cruiser Idzumo, whose guns had been ominously pointing towards the Settlement since early that morning. Japanese soldiers could be seen milling about by the river north of the Bund. Lieutenant Stephen Polkinghorn, the ship’s New Zealand skipper, was below when the telephone that had been set up as a direct link with the British Consulate suddenly rang. Since the fall of the Chinese capital of Nanking in 1937, the Consulate had become the temporary British Embassy in China. The voice at the other end was terse and to the point: ‘The Japanese have bombed Pearl Harbor in Hawaii, and Britain is consequently at war with Japan!’ Polkinghorn was not surprised. ‘You can expect a visit from the Japanese at any time,’ continued the measured tones of the diplomat. ‘Obviously there is nothing you can do with the forces at your disposal. I would suggest that you strike your colours.’ Replacing the handset on its cradle after further discussions, Polkinghorn rubbed his chin reflectively for a moment, carefully considering his options. His vessel represented the last regular British armed forces in Shanghai, and naval honour dictated that he could not surrender his ship without some gesture of defiance. Elsewhere in the city, locally recruited agents of Churchill’s Special Operations Executive (SOE) had already been activated for nearly a year, and should have formed another arm of British resistance in the city. These brave but amateur spies would be swept into Kempeitai prisons within a few weeks.

  Lieutenant Polkinghorn did not have long to wait before one of his men called his attention to a small launch coming towards the Peterel from the Japanese side. Polkinghorn issued the fateful command ‘All hands to battle stations!’, and his men manned their two remaining Lewis machine guns, the ship’s main armament having unwisely been mothballed some time before. A small group of Japanese army officers, samurai swords at
their sides, climbed the gangplank and stiffly saluted. Polkinghorn listened impatiently to their interpreter as the Japanese ordered the New Zealander to immediately surrender his ship to them or face dire and, it was hinted, terminal consequences. Polkinghorn drew himself up to his full height, stuck out his chin and hissed ‘Get off my bloody ship!’ The astonished Japanese officers blinked several times behind their wire-framed spectacles and then turned on their heels and silently filed back into their launch, dumbfounded at the young officer’s suicidal boldness.

  Grim-faced, Polkinghorn’s two dozen ratings took cover behind sandbags piled in the ship’s gangways, the men manning the machine guns staring intently at the grey bulk of the Idzumo as a klaxon sounded out from across the water and the booming report of the cruiser’s massive guns echoed across a city that was just coming to life, rattling windows throughout the Settlement. Children and their parents sat up in bed with a start all over the Settlement, confused by the sudden noise. The little ones called for their amahs or their mothers, while fathers hastily dressed and tried to take stock of what was happening. In the apartments fronting onto the Bund, parents shouted at inquisitive children to stay away from the windows as the loudest pyrotechnic display they had ever heard seemed to shake the buildings to their foundations. Those fathers who were veterans of the trenches of France and Flanders felt a familiar curl of fear wind through their guts at the sound of artillery fire.

  Lieutenant Polkinghorn cupped his hands to his mouth and yelled ‘Open fire!’ through the din of falling shells. The chattering of the machine guns, as they threw long lines of bullets at the monolithic structure of the Japanese cruiser and the gunboat was drowned out by the boom and whoosh of giant naval shells that threw up massive geysers of dirty river water all around the tiny British ship. Amid the flying steel, Polkinghorn bravely directed their fire, his face and uniform streaked with cordite smoke stains and damp with spray, reflexively ducking every time another shell screamed in. The inevitable happened. With a blinding flash and a deafening concussion the Peterel was struck, the ship heaving over hard against her cables, flames shooting into the air. Within minutes the whole superstructure was on fire. Bodies littered the blood-soaked deck, and the cacophony of battle intermingled with the high-pitched screaming of the wounded and the copper-stench of blood. The Peterel lurched again as another shell found its mark, and the ship began to take on a startling list. ‘Abandon ship, abandon ship!’ yelled Polkinghorn as the vessel threatened to capsize at any moment. Men plunged into the brown river, casting away their tin helmets as they dove in. Polkinghorn wrenched off a pair of binoculars and dived in after his men.7

  Ella Clark heard and saw the destruction of the Peterel from her parents’ riverside apartment. A way of life abruptly ended, as the British warship slid beneath the surface of the river, its cold waters extinguishing the hungry orange blaze with a great hiss of steam. ‘We had a wonderful lifestyle before the war,’ Clark recalled. ‘We never had to go shopping or carrying. Our drinking water came in great big bottles on a stand, and when we were finished we just phoned for another. We had an amah who would look after us while my mother went out to meet her friends.’ The solid middle-class childhood enjoyed by Clark was common to most of the British children who were later interned. Another woman remembered, ‘We weren’t as bad as some children, who would ring for their amah to pass them a book from a cupboard right beside them. But my mother, who was born in Malaya, wouldn’t have known how to boil a kettle.’8

  Living an even more privileged lifestyle was the young James Ballard, later to become world famous as the novelist J.G. Ballard. His father was Chairman of the China Printing and Finishing Company in Shanghai. Ballard was twelve years old when he was sent to an internment camp with his parents and younger sister, and had previously lived in a mansion equipped with nine servants. Being uprooted from such a privileged life and thrown into a camp became the defining experience of Ballard’s life, and not an entirely negative one – something commented upon by several other former child internees of the Japanese. ‘I remember those years as a time of high interest and activity,’ he later recalled.9

  Valerie Tulloch was a seven-year-old Scot living in the International Settlement when her older brother Ian dragged her out on the street to watch the Japanese victory parade through the city, the day after HMS Peterel was sunk. The young boy was fascinated, as young boys often are, by the uniforms, guns and swords, perhaps not realizing the seriousness of the ceremony that he and his little sister witnessed. It was the effective end of a ‘foreign’ Shanghai that had been in existence since 1842, when the first hardy British traders and merchant adventurers had moved up the China coast from Canton, intent on creating a trading enclave along the muddy banks of the Huangpu River. ‘I don’t remember being frightened,’ said Valerie Tulloch after witnessing the display of Japanese military might. ‘Most children are very resilient; they feel safe so long as their parents are around to protect them.’10

  For Allied civilians still in the International Settlement, their lives began to change quite quickly following the Japanese takeover. Chinese servants were soon dismissed, and access to foreign bank accounts severely limited by order of the Japanese as a way of intentionally reducing the foreigners’ living standards to the level of the lowest class of Chinese river coolie. Rachel Bosebury’s father was forced to continue working at the Shanghai Water Works under Japanese supervision, as he had been classed as an ‘essential worker’, one of hundreds of foreigners who kept their posts but not their authority, to keep the city running while the Japanese consolidated their control. In fact, so many British remained in place running everything from the Water Works to the electricity stations, and even the local police force and prison, that questions were raised in London. The word ‘collaboration’ was noted in reports on more than one occasion, the bureaucrats in Whitehall failing to fully understand the duress under which the Britons worked for the Japanese.

  The apartment building where the Bosebury family was living was commandeered by the Japanese, and the family moved into a much less salubrious apartment block in a poorer section of the Settlement. Bosebury’s father received no wages from his continued employment by the Japanese, only subsistence. Rachel, who had learned the local Shanghainese dialect, proved a boon to her mother during the hard times before the family was interned. ‘When we didn’t have hot water my mum would send me into the Chinese settlement, and I knew who to ask. They’d follow me home with water in wooden buckets to pour in our tub.’11

  Some resistance against the Japanese was mounted by Chinese Nationalist guerrillas. In small groups they instituted an assassination policy against the Japanese garrison. Norman Douglas Shaw was an eleven-year-old British schoolboy when the Japanese occupied the International Settlement. He remembered the guerrilla attacks. ‘Many Japanese soldiers and their officers were assassinated by the Chinese underground,’ Shaw recalled. ‘So at the end of every street there was a barbed wire barricade ready to close off any street to stop assassins escaping, but very few got caught.’12 For the first few months under Japanese rule some semblance of normality continued. Children still attended school. ‘So many sentries were being shot that they had to put steel plates and sandbags around the sentry boxes,’ recalled Shaw. ‘Many times on the way to school, they would close off the streets because of some shooting, so we were happy not to be able to go to school that day!’13

  Rachel Bosebury recalled that it was soon abundantly clear from her parent’s conversations that the Japanese were waging a race war against Western people. If you were white, it became apparent that you were slated for internment at some point in the near future. Parents and children were suddenly very aware of their skin colour, and of their much diminished status in the city. They had been transformed from masters to an oppressed under-class virtually overnight. ‘I’m dark, I’m olive complected, and when I go out in the sun I get dark, and my younger sister’s like that too,’ recalled Bosebury. ‘We’d hear
the broadcast about how the Japanese were rounding up all the white people. My little sister said, “Well, Mummy, aren’t you glad we’re brown?”’14

  While Rachel Bosebury, Norman Douglas Shaw and thousands of other children tried to adjust to life under the Japanese in Shanghai, in many other places British and Allied children were to suffer through fierce fighting as the Japanese conquered Malaya, Hong Kong, Singapore and Burma. Shanghai had been taken virtually without a shot being fired, but Britain’s other Asian territories were fiercely contested, showing great resistance to the invaders, and inevitably children ended up as victims of the fighting. It was not long before some children began to realize that the Japanese posed a serious threat to their lives. ‘The first I knew about the war was when we were told the Japanese were coming through the jungle on bicycles and a local gardener had been found with his throat cut,’ recalled Catherine Munnoch, whose father was serving with the Argyll and Sutherland Highlanders in Malaya.15 For other children, the arrival of the war in their lives was slightly more subtle. ‘As 1942 approached I became aware of the increasing tension,’ wrote Roger Eagle, a toddler when the Japanese assaulted Malaya. His father was also in the army, a captain in the Royal Engineers. ‘At school we practised getting into slit trenches for air-raids and had to kneel on the rough coconut matting, very painful.’16Eagle was struck by the change that came over his parents. ‘At home my father kept a rifle in the dining room and wore a pistol at his waist. I remember the frequent earnest discussions, and the packing of bags including tins of food.’17