Some months later, as food became poorer in camp, andMother Bernardine’s health became worse, a great concessionwas made for her: Mother Bemardine was permitted byColonel Suga to leave the prison camp and return to herKuching convent, there to live with the Chinese Sisters, inthe hope that better food would strengthen her.
It was a remarkable concession for a military man to make,and a tribute to the light in which Mother Bemardine wasregarded in camp by all — as almost a saint. When she leftsome said good-bye, others restrained themselves from speak-ing, simply from the feeling that she was so frail, so nearly outof this world, that even an extra good-bye would waft herover. No one expected ever to see her again.
But we were wrong. On the Feast of the Assumption, Colo-nel Suga himself, in his motor car, brought her back. She cele-brated her feast with her Sisters, they sang and laughed andprayed —and again she said good-bye. And Colonel Sugatook her home.
In time, Dorie Adams assumed complete responsibility forexplaining us and our actions to the Japanese, and vice versa.Poor Dorie! What a horrible job! But she, I believe, felt sym-pathy for both of us, and equally annoyance with bothof us. She was a great humanitarian. I believe she was theonly woman in camp whom all the Japanese respected. Shewas tireless, selfless, fearless, and was ruled completely by herown conscience. I could look at her and know that imprison-ment had strengthened her fiber without hardening her heart.
The other woman who dealt officially with the Japs was
Dr. Gibson, our camp doctor. She was taken prisoner onChristmas Day, 1942. She had been appointed by the Japaneseto act as camp doctor, and was permitted at intervals to havecontact with Dr. Yamamoto, the Japanese medical officer incharge of prison camps, and to ask him for drugs, which hedid not produce.
Here for the first time I met Bonita and Barbara, whobrought me friendship and help.
Bonita was the wife of the West Coast Resident, the onewho didn’t get shot when the Japanese launches carried himin their leading prow to Sandakan. Bonita was tall, blond,beautiful, and racy, country gentleman style. She had blueeyes and a skin like a baby, and we called her “the WonderChild.” She could be lovely and charming and gracious. Shehad a clear-thinking, quick, critical mind which made herexciting company, but made it hard for her to be patient withbumbling ideas or people.
She was an ardent garbage collector throughout campyears, and a marvelous cook. Somehow she wangled scrapsaway from pigs, poultry, and Japs; grew a few greens andleeks herself; raised a few giant African snails; and then tossedthem all together over an open fire with a culinarious hand,and out came a meal.
Night after night, after dark, after the children were asleep,Bonita would come to me quietly, speak my name, then passa bowl of glorified garbage inside my net and whisper, “Here,eat it yourself! It won’t keep!” She came late at night afterdark so that George would not be awake, hungry, to looklongingly at it; so that I would succumb to my hunger andeat it myself. The garbage was her food and her strength, andshe shared it.
Barbara was the widow of a government man who died ofillness when the Japanese were occupying Jesselton. Barbarawas tall, and looked like Gertrude Lawrence, as everybody
remarked. She was the only one in camp that nobody eversaid anything mean about. She was never touched by thegreed, bitterness, sharpness, that many of us felt. She couldalways smile, respond politely, and be kind. “Get Barbara todo it” was a motto.
Here in camp we all picked bare the bones of nationalism,and gnawed ragged the phrases, “All Englishmen are . . .All Dutchmen . . .” and so on. Here, when hungry, empty,and tired, we retreated into thoughtless, witless, and truthless,but comforting, generahties about each other and the mean-ness of each other’s race. The British are dumb and stupid.The Dutch are greedy and ruthless. The Chinese are brutaland stolid. The Americans are crude and selfish. The Japa-nese are worst of all.
In camp we had two Chinese women, each the antithesisof the other; four Americans — Marjorie, Mary Dixon, Betty,and me — with only one common quality, American slang; we
had ten Eurasian Dutch, and four Javanese Dutch, whose onlycommon quality seemed to be that they could put up with thelife we were leading better than most of us. We had threesecular European Dutchwomen and three Dutch children, asdifferent as dark and light, except for the Dutch songs theysang. The two groups of Dutch and English nuns weremore alike, because of common ideals and way of living,than either group was like its own secular nationals. Thebulk of the secular community, one hundred and seventyBritish women, had ceased long ago to seem to me British, orEnglish, or anything except individuals, with perhaps onething in common, less freedom of expression than we fourAmericans had.
The children were British, Dutch, two Qunese, two Bor-neo aborigines, one half-American, George, and in rimetwo Javanese, Mitey and Kusha. These aU had more in com-mon with each other than they had with their parents, forall children have their youth, the loveliest, most endearing,most coveted quality which any beiug has — the one thing weare all born with in common, which we all must lose, andwhich as it goes from us leaves in its place something perhapsworth while, perhaps to be admired, but never so lovely asyouth.
In due time, our men were also moved from Berhala toKuching, where they were placed in the civilian men’s camp,which was in sight of our camp. The morning they came wewere informed, through Mother Bernardine, that they wereabout to arrive in Kuching, and we were ordered not to gonear the front of our camp for fear of seeing them.
An hour later we heard lorries arriving. We were orderedto continue work as usual, and stay behind the barrack out ofsight. By noon several women ^regarded the order, andpeeked around the end of the Sisters’ barrack. Husbands couldbe seen in the distance, unloading the lorries. By 3 p.m. some-
body saw Harry in the distance, and passed the word alongto me.
At 6 P.M. I saw him myself standing behind the barbedwire in the men’s camp. Thank God, I thought.
If we met by accident, while on working parties on the road,we were not allowed to speak to or look at each other. Atthis first camp in Kuching we used to look at our husbandsacross the distance, through barbed wire. The Japanese com-manded us not to do so, they said it annoyed them. Tempta-tion was too great. So the Japanese moved our camp a half-mile further down the road, to where we couldn’t see ourhusbands.
In time I discovered that our women’s camp was the healthi-est of aU the camps and the best-treated. And after more timeI learned that all we had to complain of was semistarvation,weakness, occasional blows, and hard work. Hard work didnot hurt us, as long as we could stand on our feet on the foodto which the Japanese in time reduced us — five tablespoons ofrice per day, and greens — and do it. But we scarcely could.
Our death rate was never spectacular. Being women wehoarded our strength, eked out that one kilogram of energy,and lingered on. We could probably have lain on the flatof our backs and just continued to exist for some time. Butwe mothers could not spend much time on the flat of ourbacks.
Once a month, sex got in our way. Having been limitedby the Japs to one suitcase each, we couldn’t bring in muchsanitary goods, and by the end of the first year, rags andcloths were at a premium, and absorbent cotton precious.By the end of the second year we requested the Japanese tosupply towels for menstruation. The Japanese instituted apersonal poll of camp needs, as a result of which they sup-plied one towel for every three persons. Lieutenant Nekata,who was in charge of us then, acted as expert on such mat-
ters, took measurements, dictated the specifications, require-ments, and so on; and they were very poor towels. By theend of the third year, nature solved our problems, and mostwomen ceased to menstruate as a result of malnutrition.
I use the term “prisoner” and “prison” camp, instead of“internee” and “internment,” because throughout the Nip-ponese conducted the camp on Berhala Island, and all thecamps in Kuching, including the civilian ones, under theprisoner-of-war rules.
When we first realized that we wer
e prisoners and ourcamp a prison, instead of internees with civilian rights, wethought we would point this out to the Nipponese. We men-tioned international law. The matter was discussed very deli-cately with Colonel Suga. Colonel Suga agreed with us thatthere was such a thing as international law. He was it.
We had hated each other on Berhala, but in Kuching webegan a new life, and were all glad of the chance to do so.Here with a larger group of people, many of them Sisters,or strangers to us, we forgot old grudges. We had more out-door space to exercise in, the camp life was better organized,and the guards did not overrun our sleeping quarters. In timewe gained a pseudo-privacy, because we ceased to see eachother when we looked at each other. Nudity and public ex-posure lost their novelty and passed unnoticed. And welearned to leave each other alone. On Berhala Island we hadlet ourselves go; in Kuching we learned the need for restraintof word and deed, if not of thought.
A common enemy did not bind us together, hunger anddanger did not do so, persecution did not, our sex did not.One thing only bound us to comparative peace: the lesson thatlife was hideous if we surrendered to our hatreds; more livableonly when we tried to be decent.
Greatest and most intolerable enemy of all was the despairof hope deferred. From the day of internment to the day of
liberation, we fed on false rumors. Throughout three and ahalf years our release was always three to six months ahead— or tomorrow. Perhaps we could not have lived withoutthese false hopes, but we lived miserably with them.
In camp we had aU of the sins. Some were greedy. I haveseen a woman stand in the kitchen and fry five smuggled eggsfor herself at one time, while hungry prison mates stood nearwith saliva almost dripping from their mouths. Some peopleate in corners, stufeig themselves secretly, while othersstarved. There was one thing I learned then: no meal onearth was worth losing self-respect for.
This smuggling business sounds lavish but it wasn’t —except in comparison to starvation. Fifty per cent of thetime we were 50 per cent underfed, lived on rations only, andwere desperately hungry. So hungry we could not sleep atnight, and thought only of food by day. Then we would getan egg or a teaspoon of sugar or a taste of coconut oil, theresults of smuggling, and it seemed hke luxury. But what weate even in a heyday of smuggling was still way below bodyneeds. Everyone lost weight.
For a while the Japanese weighed us every month, accord-ing to Red Cross regulations, they said. Then they found uslosmg weight so rapidly that they added several kilos witheach weight entry. When we still continued to lose weight,they discontinued weighing us. Some women lost as much asone hundred pounds during imprisonment, but they had beenheavy to begin with. I was always thin, and only lost aboutthirty pounds. My husband, who is six feet tall, weighed onlyeighty pounds just before release.
The amount of contraband one person could obtain waslimited. A mother smuggled for two, but could seldom getmore than enough for one. In two and a half years of im-prisonment in Kuching I ate five eggs, but I got a lot forGeorge. Sometimes I was so hungry that I had literally tokeep my eyes ofi his food when he was eating. But that extra
food and my hidden haliveroil and calcium tablets are thereasons why he is well today. The fact that oux children livedthrough captivity was not due to the Japanese rations.
The children were different from the adults; they were al-ways generous with each other, sharing any delicacy, if theirmothers would let them. Their greatest joy in having wasgiving.
W^e mothers, knowing the value of extra food, and thestruggle we had to get it, felt that each child should eat hisown. But confronted with the generosity of children, in con-trast to adult greed, we hesitated to discourage them. In theend the children won; in every case they shared.
^ We saw in ourselves the toll of the struggle for self-preserva-tion, but in our children we saw the generosity of naturewhen removed from the threat of fear. Psychologically wehad always tried to take the rap for them, we did the fearingand fighting. They did not see ahead as we did, that an eggtoday meant life tomorrow. But we saw also that an egg sharedwith another child today meant life in our children of thequahties which made them lovely.
One day I had two eggs that Colonel Suga had given me.I hard-boiled them in the community soup caldron, thenwaited eagerly to show them to George at noon.
George saw them; excitement and joy came to his face.“Hey, chdrens! George having egg! Chilrens! Egg! Egg!”
“Sssh! George, we haven’t enough for the others, so don’tmake them feel badly. Here, dear, sit down.”
“Who gave. Mum? Who gave?”
“Colonel Suga gave them to me for you.”
“Oh, isn’t he kind! Say Mum, can I give one to Eddie? CanI, Mum? Can I?”
George needed the eggs. Eddie needed the eggs. I neededthe eggs. But there was that impulse in George which I couldnot discomrage.
“All right, George. Give one to Eddie. Tell him to come
114 Three Came Home
here and eat it with you.” I hoped that the gain to his moralnature would offset the loss to his constitution.
Eddie came. Eddie and George sat together over their eggsin conspiratorial glee. Over those tiny Borneo eggs bent twoheads, one soft, blond, silky head, one black, black one. Twosmall dirty faces glow and grin, while four dirty hands pickeggshell off eggs, flick eggshell at each other and at me, twowide-open mouths are just about to be crammed full of hard-boiled egg, when suddenly Eddie remembers, and shouts,“Oh, save some for Edith!” (Ehs sister.)
I, firmly then (this thing has gone far enough): “No, Ed-die, not this time. You eat all that egg yourself. Next timewe’ll give the egg to Edith.”
And so at last two wide-open mouths are crammed full ofone egg each. Oh joy! Oh glee! Oh Happiness beyond thepower of eggs to bring to the rest of us — and yet these twowere eager to share that happiness, and the rest of us werenot.
Here in Kuching we got in the Japanese military spotlight,and were visited frequently by majors, colonels, and generals.I found it was much like the zoo, and I was Exhibit A:“Author in captivity, with young. Note unusual height, lackof breadth, length of hands. Bites occasionally. Beware. Maybe fed bananas and biscuits.”
I was called to the office at noontime one day by Suga, andpresented to Lieutenant Colonel Maeda, a medium-sized,austere-faced Japanese, his unnamed aide, and his nuhtaryinterpreter. Lieutenant Nekata of our camp was also present.I had George with me to establish proper maternal at-mosphere, and in hope of biscuits or bananas. George and Iwere both given chairs, and I a cigarette.
Maeda first asked me my age, which occasioned the laugh-ter which ages always do with the Japanese — I hope some-time to find out why. Then:
Imprisoned Sisters 115
Maeda: “How do you like life as internee?”
I: “I do not like it.”
Maeda; What do you tlunk about war?”
I: I think that I want it to finish, so I can go home to myhusband with my child.”
Maeda: W^ar cannot finish until British are completelybeaten! They will be beaten. You know that, do you? Do youthink the British will be beaten?”
I: “I know nothing at all about the war. We have no news.I have been interned over a year. We have no papers ormagazines. You should tell Ttte about the war.”
Maeda: “Before the war the British always talk about hu-manity. They say they are humane people! All other people,no. Always talk humanity! All that stuff. Now, they are nothumane people! They act like Japanese people would nevernot do — Japanese people very humane! Only humane people.Very humane —act very humane and good. Now Britishpeople see. British not good! All talk!” These sentimentsare reiterated by all. Throughout, Maeda and Nekata aregesticulating for emphasis, and the interpreter is translating.
I continue silent, and gaze vacantly out of window. Maedaand Nekata now look proudly, chaUengingly to me, for an-swer. I remain silent, and smiling.
Interpreter: “Do you understand, Mrs. Keith?”
I: “I understand. I am listening.”
>
They wait hopefully for a further answer which I do notgive. After a time of silence and tooth-sucking on their part,Maeda speaks again.
“Do you think the camp life is difficult?”
I: “Yes. I am not lazy, I have always worked, but I am usedto working with my head, not my hands. Also we do nothave enough food.”
Maeda: “All Japanese internees all over world made to workvery much harder than here! All Japanese very little food.This camp very easy — not hard!”
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Three Came Home
I: “I do not complain. I understand that in wartime life ishard. It is hard for soldiers, for men, for women and chil-dren too. No one is happy in war. I do not like it — but I donot complain.”
Nods of (for the first time) approval, acquiescence, fromaU.
Maeda: “What is most difficult here?”
I: “Beside the fact that we are hungry, the most difficultthing is to have no contact with my husband, and for him thathe cannot see his child. For me, it is not so bad, because I havemy child.”
Maeda: “That is so. I understand. But it must be so.”
Then Interpreter says Maeda has visited my house inSandakan, and has read my book. Officer looks at his watch.Nekata signifies that interview is ended.
I arise and bow. Officers remain seated, nodding heads andsaying, “Haaah! Haaaaaah!” George and I exit —without abanana.
Working My Way
The day that we were dumped out of the lorry into Kuchingprison camp in the rain, the first thing that caught my eye wasthe fact that many of the women were comfortably coveredwith British soldiers’ waterproof rain capes, and the more supe-rior ladies sported elegantly cut officers’ capes. This fact ap-pealed to me instantly, as I had been wearing a bath towel onrainy days. I had a tweed coat, but I knew if I once got it wetI could not get it dry until the weather changed.
I asked the ^^Old Girls” how one acquired these miraculousgarments, wondering if perhaps here in Kuching, whereColonel Suga had promised us the internees were all happy,there was some open market for exchanging goods. But I wastold that this must all be done secretly by the route knownas Over the Fence —via the civilian men’s camp, and themen’s vegetable garden. As the men’s camp adjoined thesoldiers’ camps, the men were able to make contacts with thesoldiers, who, I learned, would sell almost anything in orderto get money to buy tobacco.
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