大象传媒

My grandfather has been a civil engineer and in order to increase the family income applied to Gardinees in Hong-Kong for an appointment. It was a wonderful family life for years but at the start of the Second World War, they found that when Hong-Kong fell to the Japanese invasion they were rounded up and all the family ended up in separate prisoner of war camps, and did not know if any of the others had survived until the end. During that time my father was under very harsh conditions and in order to survive they asked the guards if one of the prisoners could go outside the grounds and collect some of the tomatoes from a plant that they had spotted growing where the sewage water flowed. Fortunately they were granted permission and came back with the fruit. Some had to be kept back so that they could grow some for their meagre prison diet. He said it literally helped them to survive. After the war their was a Russian artist who had a series of pen and ink sketched which he formatted into a book, and the front was a picture of the island of Hong-Kong with an impressed convex line of barbed wire running across the face. The pictures themselves showed the scant conditions of prison life and how the prisoners eventually adopted the native dress 鈥渢hong鈥� type as clothes turned to rags. A prison hospital was organised and operations were carried out under very primitive condition and anything of real use was scrounged from the cooks. They tried to live an orderly life to give themselves purpose and meaning.

Although my Grandmother had great religious faith, when someone once remarked that perhaps it was that faith which had pulled her through the camp, she replied that it was more like sheer dedication and hard work to create something of order out of the chaos, despair and degradation that could so easily have evolved.

The family of 4 children and their parents all survived and after the war went to the far corners of the globe.

My uncle had been in Singapore and had seen his family out of the last ship to Australia. He himself had stayed behind because he was in charge of a cold storage plant and never thought that the peninsula would fall to the Japs. He was rounded up and sent to a POW camp. Survival was grim and he hardly ever talked about his experiences. We were never allowed to leave anything on the plate as he once reminded us that he once had to have a sheet of newspaper over his eyes so he couldn鈥檛 see what he was eating. He also mentioned that any belts the prisoners had were taken away so they couldn鈥檛 hang themselves in the night. A lasting impression was that when the war was over he bought a small holding and wanted to grow things for the family so they would never be hungry. Neither would he ever buy anything foreign, but it had to be British.

This story was submitted to the 鈥淧eoples War Site by Rod Aldwinckle of the CSV Action Desk on behalf of Eve Robertson and has been added to the site with her permission. The author fully understands the terms and conditions of the site

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