In addition to dysentery, they had influenza, they hadworms, they had impetigo, they had malaria, and always theyhad colds. We didn’t have medicines unless we smuggled,traded, or stole them.
After a few months in camp I developed beriberi, a dis-ease of imdemourishment and vitamin deficiency. My legsand face swelled. By evening my legs were so numb that Icould not stand on them. The doctor said I must eat all thegreen stuff I could get hold of. From then on throughout camplife I collected greens, ferns, weeds of any sort, and boiledthem and ate them. Now I no longer eat spinach.
My husband also developed beriberi. The Japanese guardgave him some vitamin tablets. Harry asked the guard to takethem to me instead, and he did so. In a few months I wasbetter. Then I developed boils. Then I got over those. ThenI got malaria, and never got over it. However, I gained per-fect confidence in myself. I knew that if I practised longenough I could live on air, with a pinch of salt. But the timecame when I didn’t have the salt.
Because our compound was very small, we were permittedto have a walk on the beach every day under guard, if theguard saw it that way. Sometimes good guards would allowus an hour in the morning, and another hour at 6 p.m. That wasescape from heU into heaven. I believed then that walk was theonly thing that kept me sane. In the end I learned that it isn’t
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the outward circumstances which determine what one canendure, but something in oneself which either breaks, or staysintact, under strain. It isn’t the difference in strain, it’s the dif-ference in tensile strength of people.
One night when I was walking on the beach the old Malayfisherman, Saleh, who lived on the end of the wharf, whis-pered to me that he had something for me; to wait for himbehind the latrines that night. The back of our compound wasnear the island spring, from which Saleh drew his water. Ourlatrine was at the end of the compound, near the path whichSaleh followed to the spring. I waited behind the latrine in thedark, and when Saleh came by he stopped and pushed a pack-age through the barbed wire to me.
There were eggs in that package. That was the first time Ihad ever smuggled. The eggs were sent to us by an Asiaticwho had been in my husband’s service, and with them camea message saying that more food would be smuggled to us, andalso, in time, money. Those eggs were more than eggs; theywere a pledge of confidence kept, between Oriental and Oc-cidental.
Very soon others began to wait behind the lats in the dark.Those who didn’t wait there watched those who did; mistakeswere made in smuggled goods, and stuff got hi-jacked. Civilwar started.
We had a camp meeting. By this time, summer 1942, we hadforty women and thirteen children in camp, as more peoplehad arrived from another part of Borneo. The women whowere not engaged in smuggling said we were endangeringthe safety of the camp by our activities. We smugglers saidthat getting more food was vital for our children and worthtaking a chance for. The anti-smugglers thought that we werepaying money for the food, and said that it wasn’t fair, as somehad money and others didn’t. We said we had no money; thefood was being sent in as gifts by Asiatics. They answered thatthey did not beheve this; that there wasn’t an Asiatic in Sanda-
kan who would do anything for a European, now that wewere helpless.
We said that if our friends had already accepted the dangerof smuggling food to us, we were going to take the risk of get-ting it into camp.
We took a camp vote as to whether or not we should smug-gle. Only three besides myself voted in favor of smuggling,the other thirty-six said it was too dangerous; they might getslapped, beaten up, shot. The meeting broke up when wesmugglers said that we intended to continue doing so regard-less of rules.
Three weeks later almost every woman in camp was hang-ing around the latrines with a hungry look, and an open handthrust through the barbed wire. From then until release came,we smuggled. We came, in time, to live on the food and excite-ment of smuggling.
Saleh lived in a little broken-down shack plastered on theend of the wharf. Every time we went for a walk we keptour eyes on Saleh’s house for signs of him or his family. Ifthey had anything for us they would signal to us. Then wewould dawdle on the edge of the wharf, or lean against hisshack until he or his wife or children slipped us the contra-band, sometimes passing it through the window into our hands.
After getting it we had to conceal it hastily under ourclothes. The test was when we passed the guardhouse on theway home. Sometimes the guard caught us, took the goodsaway, and punished us; but more often they were half-asleepand didn’t bother us.
Some smuggling deals were surprisingly simple. Maureen,mother of David and Derek, had a perambulator with her incamp, taken from Sandakan the day we were imprisoned.She had wheeled Derek and David to the launch in the peram-bulator, and refused to take them out. The officer, recognizingthe same quality in Maureen which kept the rest of us fromarguing with her, had let her bring the pram.
The pram proved a perfect vehicle for smuggling. One day
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the pram, plus the babies, was loaned to the men’s camp,wheeled to the beach by a man; there smuggled eggs were col-lected from a hiding place and concealed in it; the pram, ba-bies, and eggs were returned to the mother in our camp underthe guard’s nose. The eggs were later distributed amongst aUthe children.
Much of the time we could not smuggle. Somebody wouldget caught, or a guard would be picked up with our goodson him, and we could not do business for months. Then wewere very hungry and depressed and quarrelsome, then therewas nothing to live for. Then suddenly business would open,and as soon as one person received contraband, everybodywanted it.
The men started a bootleg provision service. A few youngmen sneaked out regularly at night by way of an unused la-trine outlet, went over the hill to the Lepers’ Settlement, andgot peanuts, sugar, dried fish, eggs from them. These they soldor traded in the camps. The hungrier we got the less we wor-ried over the fact that these things came through the lepers.
When we had been taken from Sandakan into prison campwe were searched, and all money was confiscated. But thepeople who were brought into Berhala camp from other placeson the East Coast did not have their money taken, nor didthose interned on the West Coast of Borneo. When we startedto do big business in contraband deals money made the differ-ence between being himgry or less hungry.
Then we sold our things inside camp to those who had cash,and sent an S O S for money to Asiatic friends outside, viathe Sailor W^ho Came Down on a Cloud, our “contact.”The Asiatics in Sandakan were living on tiny salaries underJapanese surveillance, but they constantly sent money andfood to us even at great risk to themselves, and many of them,we learned later, paid with their lives for the food whichsaved ours.
There were three Roman Catholic Sisters from the Sanda-kan Convent imprisoned with us on Berhala. They wereMother Rose, Sister Frances Mary, and Sister dims. Theyhad one small comer in the loft of the barrack. Here they hadan altar, a crucifix hanging, and a Madonna and Child whichthey decorated with fresh red hibiscus flowers, picked outsidethe barbed wire with permission of the guard. Here our chil-dren were always made welcome in sight of the Madonna andChild; fussy babies and weary mothers found rest and com-fort there, and the nearest to peace that existed in prisoncamp was here in the gentle care of the Sisters, at the foot ofthe Cross.
On the Fourth of July, 1942, which was also my birthday, Icelebrated my first prison-camp party. Penelope, Gwen, andMarjorie North, all Englishwomen; Shihping Cho, Chinese;and Marjorie CoUey, Betty Weber, and I, Americans, wereguests of the management. We saved our nighttime ration ofrice and sweet potato, and added contraband fish, pineapple,and sausage. We poured the last of the oil out of our lamps,and used it to fry with, dumped all the food into Cho’s panand fried it over an open fire which we built in the compoundin the evening.
The guard saw our fire and told us to put it out. We mis-understood him, indeed we did, but so poHtely that he liked it.He sent for Mr. Yang from the men’s camp, to interpret forus. M
r. Yang — who was interned as a member of the Re-public of China Consulate — spoke Japanese. Mr. Yang saidthe guard said to put out the fire. We misunderstood him, too.We gave Mr. Yang and the guard some smuggled cigarettes.By then the food was cooked, so then we understood that theguard wanted the fire put out, and we put it out.
We ate well. Then we lit the three altar candles that MotherRose and the Sisters had given us for a present, and stuck themin the ground. The Sisters came out and sang “God BlessAmerica” with us in the warm darkness, in thin, sweet so-
pranos, and told us that they said Hail Marys and Ave Mariasfor America every night.
We drank a toast, in coconut milk from a smuggled coco-nut: “To America and her Day of Independence, celebratedthis year by British and Americans together.”
In the first months on Berhala I told myself I could notlive without my husband. Two Agaiust the World had beenour motto. Then we found ourselves imprisoned separately.
The men could occasionally dally at the women’s gate asthey went by, if the guard was kind, and exchange words withtheir wives. During one of these hasty confabs, Harry and Iagreed to try meeting secretly at night in the vacant compoundbetween our camps. Another couple was already doing so, andsaid it was quite simple. We arranged to meet at ten o’clock,and designated a coconut tree, halfway between the twocamps, as meeting place.
I put George to bed before dark, and crawled into themosquito net with him while he went to sleep. I had alreadywarned Violet, who was my neighbor on one side, of what Iwas going to do, so that if George should awaken and callshe would go to him. I pulled on my dark blue slacks, to makeme less visible in the dark. I lay in my net until the guard hadbeen changed, then waited for him to come in and make hisrounds. When he had gone outside the compound again, Icrept out of the net and out of the barrack. By crawling underthe barrack I arrived at the far side of the house, listened tohear if the guard was near, then emerged from under thebarrack, and ran to the wall.
Here there was a depression under the wooden fence inone place, as the fence was built on uneven ground. I hadto lie on my back with my head turned sideways to getthrough, as the hole was so shallow that my head wouldn’tgo through it longwise. Like getting bom, it was easy afteryou got the head out; but the head had to emerge first in order
to see if the guard was in sight on the other side. After thehead found safety, bust and bottom followed; these wouldjust come through; only the thin ones could use this exit. Half-way through I thought how undignified it would be to getcaught like that, pinned down by the fence, incapable of hur-rying either forward or backward.
I emerged ten yards from the sentry box. There was longgrass on this side of the compound and I had been told tocrawl through it. I knew there were snakes there, and thethought of them made me stand up and run for the tree, in-stead of crawling.
I got to the tree, and it was very dark and had started torain.
In a moment I thought I heard someone creeping throughthe grass. I whispered “Harry!” I was sure it was someonecreeping. I whispered again, in what seemed to me a veryloud whisper. Whoever it was disregarded me and went whiz-zing past in the dark. If only I knew it was Harry, I wouldwhisper louder. But it couldn’t be Harry, or he would answer!The unknown creeper vanished from sound.
I lay in the dark and it rained a bit and time went by and Ifelt miserable. What could have happened?
Then there was a terrific rustling, and grasses waved toright and left, and somebody else went creeping past. StiU Iwaited. There was a third whizzing sound, and again I whis-pered, and again no answer.
I lay still thinking of every miserable thing which couldhave happened, and how that whole compound seemed to befull of people, not Harry, and nobody daring to speak andsay who. Just as I had decided to go home, somebody bumpedinto me. It was Marjorie coming to meet George. We laytogether and waited. Soon George and Harry turned up to-gether, crashing along like twin tractors through the heavygrass.
Harry wanted to know where I had been. I said. Where had
68 Three Came Home
he been? It turned out that the first noise I heard had beenHarry whizzing by. He had not heard me whisper, but withhis customary speed and decision had dashed past my tree,to a second one further on, which he thought was the desig-nated one. Not finding me, he had circled the compoundspeedily, and crashed by me again, then had given me up andgone back into camp. There he met George, who was on hisway to meet Marjorie, and Harry had decided to try oncemore.
We met Hke this every few nights, with the arrangementthat if it rained heavily we wouldn’t come. If it rained afterwe got there we would sneak into the unused barrack and sitthere together, with the sentry patrolling near by. If con-ditions inside our separate compounds proved to be unsuit-able, if the guard was too wary, we would stand at the gateand call across some supposedly cryptic utterance such as “Nosoap!” or “Not tonight.” By the time the guard had chasedus inside, the signal had been given.
Lying there in the dark and the cool, close together andalone, we would promise each other that the war would beover soon, that the news was good, that we would love eachother forever and ever, and at least for that moment we wouldbe happy.
Soon it became an open secret that a few of us were meetingour husbands outside of camp. Some of the women attemptedto stop us, suggesting that it was a most lascivious businessthat we could not live for these few months "without a man.This interpretation of the meetings came to me as a shock.That anyone should see only one reason for meeting a manclandestinely in the dark was a revelation to me.
Henrietta, a natural-bom Teacher’s Pet, with a distortedsense of responsibility for others, and an idea that the HonorSpirit held good in camp, reported the fact of our nightlyexits to the Japanese, who were already suspicious. She didnot, however, tell who. She liked to be the center of anything,even trouble, so she pointed out to the visiting Japanese offi-
Strange 'Nursery 69
cers various places in the barbed wire where strands had obvi-ously been unwoven and separated so bodies could pushthrough, and other apparent emergency exits which we wereusing. These wires were then rewoven, and the holes closed,and so on. But nobody took seriously that small depression un-der the wall . . . which we continued to use.
These women were right in so far as what we were doingwas too dangerous. When George and I were finally movedto Kucliing, although it seemed like the end of the world tome at the time, I felt later that it probably saved our lives byremoving the possibility of illegitimate meetings with Harry.But one can only deal with life as it seems at the time, andlife on Berhala Island seemed unbearable to me in the first daysof captivity, unless I could meet my husband. We were s^looking at the war on a short-term basis.
How we women hated each other there on Berhala! Enmi-ties were deeper than ever again. We had no experience ofcommunity living, we knew ^ about each other, and we stiUhad energy with which to hate. The hardships and pangsof captivity were fresh to us, the humiliations were new,and the physical tasks were muscularly almost impossible.And we didn’t mind what we said in those early days. Oneof the Ladies of Sandakan said to me, "I hate your guts, Ag-nes, and I’m going to tell you so. Although I’d like to be niceto you, just to keep out of that damned book of yours.”
The few people whom I knew weU before imprisonment,and really hke^ I continued to like to the end. But thepersons to whom I had been indifferent before, on BerhalaIsland I came to hate. And they, I observed, felt the sametoward me: I was shocked to learn the things they had beenthinking of me, perhaps throughout the years. We horrifiedourselves with the strength of our antipathies. What criti-cism I make here of others holds good also of myself; wewere not nice people. There was much excuse for us, and Ican excuse others more readily than myself.
Malaria
It was in the fall of 1942 that Colonel Suga had paid his firstvisit to Berhala Island, and talked with me about writing.Shortly after this, in November, when George was two and ahalf years old, he had hi
s first attack of malaria, and I had areturn of the disease. We were probably bitten by the samemosquito, as we were taken sick at the same hour of the sameday, and by night both had temperatures of almost 105degrees.
The second night of iUness we reached 105 degrees again,and George was delirious. I was lying by him and feeling veryin myself, when I felt him stiffen: I screamed, someone nearby struck a match, and we saw he was having a convulsion.I forced his mouth open and got his tongue from between histeeth, and saw it was bleeding. One of the women ran to theguardhouse to beg the guard’s lamp. The guard came backwith her, took a look at George and his bloody mouth, andthen ran to the men’s camp to get Dr. Stemfeld.
Dr. Sternfeld was an elderly Austrian refugee Jew, said tohave been a famous Viennese obstetrician, with gentle and ele-gant foreign ways which prepared us to believe anything. Hehad come out to Borneo from England to assist Dr. Stookes,who was in private practice in Sandakan, and later he hadgone to work for the North Borneo Trading Company as com-pany doctor. He was accepted in Sandakan, and treated with-
out prejudice, but not taken to people’s hearts. We who meethim in the future, we who for three and a half years knew hiswork in captivity, will, I hope, give him the warmth we didnot give before.
In Berhala we had no doctor in the women’s camp, and nocontact with any Japanese medical officer. The guard accepteda great responsibility in bringing Dr. Stemfeld over from themen’s camp to us. The doctor verified our temperatures, andsaid that he could do little without quinine, if it was malaria,and could do even less, if it wasn’t malaria, with that high tem-perature. He said we must give George hot and cold spongebaths, and he told me to lie down again, which I wanted badlyto do, as I was feeling very ill. But I knew that as long as Icould stay on my feet, I must try to help George. The guardlet the women go to the cook shed and start fires to heat water.Then he brought Harry over from the men’s camp.
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