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I attended an Indian school for European girls. Then I became a (religious) sister and trained as a teacher. In 1936, I was sent to Burma. In 1940, the war broke out in Burma, and the Japanese invaded. They rushed up the country in no time, but before they did that, we closed our school.

I was sent up to the centre of Burma; to Mandalay where we had a big leper colony, but the superior didn’t want to keep me there because I was English. They were all French in that community and they thought that I would be captured, so they sent me to a little village further North. That was for protection. It was a lovely Catholic village with a lovely Catholic church. The village had been founded by the Portuguese. They had been fighting in Burma in the 19th century, and they had been made prisoners, and they were put into this place where there was very bad bog land, but as they were prisoners they were left alone, so they began to build a church. They built a small church first of all, then it grew into a beautiful church, and I was sent there. I was very happy because there was this big church and a convent there also, so I was kept there for some time.

Then the war began to escalate and then the Japanese took me away from there. They had left me there for a while, because although I was British, I wasn’t a threat to them, but when the British started to come up from the North of Burma and the South of Burma, they decided to take anybody who was British as prisoners, so they trotted me further down.

I slept that night in a village. The villagers had to feed us but they had little to give us. The villagers were good to us because before the war, our sisters used to go on missionary tours and looked after them and gave them medicines and so on, and so they recognised us as their missionary sisters, so they gave us something to eat and we were very grateful. And then the Japanese took us again in big lorries. We were chained together. They wouldn’t even let us go to the toilet. We had to go with this fellow with us!

This on the way to Mandalay. The British were coming from the North and from the South. Mandalay’s in the middle of the country, so they put us into a fort, built by the British years before, when Britain was conquering Burma. The fort was very strong, and they put us in there for a time. But later, they took us out. We had a big convent in Mandalay, a leper colony. The bishop went to the Japanese commander and said ‘you are holding some of our sisters but we have a convent here and they won’t run away if you let us take them there’, so the Japanese commander allowed us to go. That was good of them, but they were under the Geneva Convention and they had to treat us properly. So they took us to Mandalay convent. The nuns were told they mustn’t come out to greet us, so they were all at the windows of the convent, looking down and waving. And then the Japanese just handed us over to the superior, and so I stayed in the convent for a time.

And then just a few months afterwards the British returned and started bombing Mandalay. The Japanese had given us leaflets saying ‘the British dogs have left us to rule the country’, and then the British dropped leaflets which said ‘the dogs are coming back barking’.

Anyhow, on the way to Mandalay, we had come to the big river. We travelled all night but stopped by the river at dawn. We got off the lorry and they put us onto bamboo rafts. .I was terrified of those rafts, but bamboo doesn’t sink.

There were 14 of us. There were 12 sisters and two priests on that raft and they were towing us across the river to the other bank and the British planes were swooping down and one pilot waved to us. We knew they were British because during the war, we got used to the sound of aeroplanes.

We were all in our habits. The habits came in useful. We had our black veils on and our white habits. And then we crossed the river and we had to walk about 3 or 4 miles to Mandalay We had to march two by two, all along the wood, and we were passing messages down.

We had a convent in the hills also, and they had brought down our sisters and a priest. He was a cripple, so they put him in a bullock-cart, and that poor man really suffered, He was jogged along in that bullock-cart and died about a week or so afterwards; he couldn’t take it. He was not very old, it was terrible, but anyhow we went on with this bullock-cart along the road, and then we crossed the river. There were about 20 or so of us by then, all dressed in white. All the sisters from the hills were dressed in grey. So we all joined together and we were told to march two by two

Anyhow, in the end we were put first of all in a house in the civil lines, but they couldn’t feed us of course, so we had to go and beg for food. The Superior went down and she went to the village around there and she asked for food. The Burmese people were very generous.

They decided to take us to a convent founded by or mother convent because they couldn’t feed us.The Sisters had cleaned and disinfected the houses in the leper colony. The Colombian priests who were all prisoners, were brought from the hills and put in the leper’s houses. They were all young priests and every night they used to sing Irish songs. The sisters were mostly French .We were there for 3 weeks. The bombing in Mandalay then started. In the end, the Bishop decided we should go to kabide. By this time, the British had arrived and we put up the British flag but it stuck halfway. It was half-mast! The commander asked ‘why is the British flag half-mast? We said ‘because it got stuck!’ so he sent a soldier up to the convent roof to put it right. It was a huge camp with priests on one side and sisters on the other.

During the Battle of Mandalay, we listened to a radio, which we kept in the basement. When the British arrived, we put a Union Jack on the roof. The convent was in the middle of the battle but was not bombed. A priest was at the side of the altar when a bomb exploded near him. A Colombian priest had to finish mass as the priest had had his leg blown off. Father Murphy was his name. He was flown to India but he lost a lot of blood and died. The British were hiding in the woods. We were caught in cross fire. The priest sent word to the commander to stop fighting so they could evacuate the sisters. Five sisters stayed to look after the convent. We had to cross paddy fields. One sister lost her shoes in the paddy fields. We got into lorries. That was when they drove us 10 miles from Mandaly to the village of karbide near a river. The British had put up tents for us. During the war, we always had to keep a bundle containing our night-dresses and personal things we needed. It was always ready so we took it with us.

We kept a goose and we had a crowd of orphaned children with us and they looked after the goose. One day a Japanese fellow came along. Now geese don’t like strangers so it flew at him. It caught him by the pants, shook him and tore his pants. He then took his pants off and we had to mend them while the children held goose so he couldn’t get at it. We kept it and fed it hoping to eat it on victory day but it was taken away. The river used to flood. One day in the floodwater a piglet appeared. The children kept the piglet and fed it but a woman reclaimed it. By this time there were Spanish, German and French sisters.

The BIA, the Burmese army, was a riffraff army which went around stealing. The soldiers lined us up with machine guns in front of the convent to shoot us. . They took the keys of the convent and stole all our possessions and loaded them onto bullock carts. They lined us up ready to shoot us but a priest said don’t shoot them, they look after your children. They beat us but we resisted and we kicked them in the right places! When I saw a Tommy at the end of the war, I gave him a kiss.

Sister Laurine hawkins.FMM

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