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In late June the expected baby arrived, but was born with a cleft palate and lip.

To the limited surgical means available in Weihsien Camp Hospital this presented a serious problem. Fortunately, the inmates included Dr Harold Louks, an American surgeon who had practised `plastic’ surgery at Peking’s Yenching University Hospital, which was where he had been captured. There was also Dr Grice, our British GP and surgeon from Tianjin. Dr Grice lived in the next room to ours in Block 42, and after the birth came to me and said, `There is a little baby girl who has just been born and is very sick and cannot eat and I would like some of your toy soldiers to make her better.’ I looked at my precious toys and asked wistfully if it mattered if the doctor took ones which had had their head or arms broken off, and was relieved to find that Dr Grice was quite happy with the broken ones as he was going to melt them anyway.

The broken lead toy soldiers were duly taken to the camp hospital where they were melted and moulded to form an artificial palate and sewn into the roof of the baby’s mouth.

Susan Dobson made a full recovery and I caught up with her as recently as 2005, when I learnt that from Weihsien she had gone to London and had a more conventional palate sewn in her mouth, in a well-known children’s hospital.

Meanwhile, on 29th June 1943, there had been a death in the hospital, a Dutch priest who had been admitted to hospital, almost as soon as he arrived in Weihsien, with typhoid.

He was not very old, in his sixties, I was told, but that still seemed ancient to me.

The funeral was held a couple of days after the death. The whole camp attended the funeral or watched it. After the service in the Church, the coffin was carried out by six priests all of about the same height. The procession started with all the RC priests in their vestments, the nuns in their habits and all the Anglican and Protestant clergy in either vestments or best suits, as the internees of all denominations then filed in after the principal mourners. In the end there was probably a total of 800 in the procession, headed by five RC Bishops, an Abbot, an Anglican Bishop and the senior American Presbyterian Preacher, all singing suitable hymns to the tunes of the Salvation Army Band.

This was reinforced with three or four priests in soutanes blowing trumpets or trombones, as well as Jonesy Jones, Wayne Adams and Pineapple Alama, the three dance band musicians whose tour of the Far East had been rudely shortened when the war broke out. I was very much a spectator to start with, but then I saw Susie Grice, our neighbour, walking and joined the procession myself.

Very impressive, to a nine-year-old. But, I thought, `Why does it take a tragedy to get them all together?’

I knew that some of the participants would not pass the time of day, let alone a religious ceremony, with each other in different circumstances. The procession ended at the graveyard, which was in the south-east corner of the Japanese area, somewhere we would not, under normal circumstances, be allowed to enter, but on this occasion the guards stood back, saluted the coffin and held the gates open for the mourners.

After the burial proper, I thought this was an ideal time to investigate the layout of this prohibited area of camp, so I took my time making my way back.

The reconnaissance was later to prove useful. Then in July the Japanese, who disliked gatherings of adults and children, stopped our lessons, fearing they were in preparation for some kind of organised disturbance. I was very happy to go back to running wild throughout the camp, now I knew my way around and was a wiser boy after two months self-education.

But the adults soon got weary of mobs of uncontrolled children and petitioned ...

[excerpts]

There were three cows grazing in the graveyard in the Japanese area of camp. Pathetic beasts, which were milked for the babies and the hospital patients. Roger had a cupful on most days; I eyed it once and it had been so watered down that the milk took on a bluish tinge. I decided I was not missing very much.

[excerpt]

We saw a lot of new activity around the walls by workmen, supervised by the guards.

When they finished one could see from the top of the hospital building that the barbed wire stretched along the top of the wall was now electrified, and there were five separate electrified barbed wire fences, including coiled barbed wire, in the 400 or so metres around the camp.

Shortly after, one of the Chinese black-market tradesmen was electrocuted and his body was left on the wire for several weeks in sight of all.

Then Ted McClaren reported that the Commandant said that two bags of sugar and two bottles of brandy had been found in his pockets.

Ted also reported that the Commandant had complained that internees were not being respectful enough to the guards, and through that being disrespectful to the Emperor of Japan. Internees were to be instructed on the point. Ted put up a notice, which strangely enough met with the Commandant’s approval.

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I asked Dad one day, ‘Why have they moved everybody Dad?’ He replied ‘Ronald, from the windows at the top of the hospital you could see the village to the north-east, and the Japanese suspected that candles or lights were being used to signal.

By putting the younger children in those rooms they think the Chefoo teachers will control the children and that form of communication will stop.’

My response was ‘There are other ways of getting messages through, I believe?’

Dad’s silence in response to this question was confirmation enough that my discoveries were correct.

[excerpt]

The batsman hit a possible home run, the runner on 2nd base ran past 3rd base and his knee collided with my head.

I was knocked out for a moment, staggered up and ran off to my room. I was still pretty shaken so climbed into bed.

An hour later Mum woke me, and as I turned over she discovered that I was bleeding from my ear. She felt that Dr Grice was needed and went and collected him from his hut.

Dr Grice took one look at me and diagnosed a fracture of the skull. He then said to Mum, ‘Margot, I would have liked to have X-rayed his skull, but the machine is broken and I’m hoping that Eggers will bring the replacement parts when he comes next month. But by that time the bone will have healed.

I will take him off to hospital now. He will need to be “in” for three weeks.’

The camp had no stretchers, so I was carried across the camp on a door by two or three men.

Dr Grice then said I had to sleep on my back on wooden boards for the next three weeks. It did not start out very well. At first I could not sleep then, after two or three hours, sleep took over.

Then the next part of the drama. Mrs Warmsley the Matron woke me up, I suppose about dawn, and shoved something into my mouth, I was used to eating and I just crunched my jaws, there was a splintering of glass. I spat it out, but Mrs Warmsley was really upset as they apparently only had a couple of thermometers.

Then she realised that I had swallowed the mercury.

The next thing was the bed was surrounded by virtually all the medical staff, scratching their heads. The consensus was they had no medical equipment available that would help and nature would have to be left to run its course.

The days and weeks passed by in hospital; the food was better than No. 1 Kitchen but not as good as when Mum enhanced it by adding her home-grown extra vegetables.

Other than a slightly sore head, I was fit, but any attempt at sitting up, let alone at getting out of bed, brought an instant rebuke from the duty nurse or sister. I had upset Matron and that seemed to put me in purdah. But I could lift my head to peer round at my fellow patients.

There were no such things as curtains to put round the beds and I was intrigued at the old man in the next bed. He had a woman doctor, Dr Gault, who used to come in twice a day with what looked about two-foot length of clear tubing and stick it down his penis and then at the other end get a small bowl of urine.

The moans that the man gave out were painful to hear. To my mind it was a form of torture, and I was never voluntarily going to let anyone do that to me.

About ten days after I was admitted to hospital, Stanley Nordmo, a sixteen-year-old Chefoo schoolboy, came down from his dormitory on the upper floor. I did not know him but he introduced himself and asked after my head.

He had come to apologise because it was his knee that had done the damage. I learnt that he had been blind in one eye from birth and had misjudged the distance between us.

I thanked him, but in my own mind felt sorry, as he had a permanent handicap, while my sore head would be on the mend within a couple of weeks.

When I was discharged, I got back to my own hut to find that I had missed a lot of rain, although I had heard it in hospital; some more mail had arrived and also the latest edition of the Peking Chronicle.

Towards the end of June, starting with all the medical staff, there was an outbreak of diarrhoea of epidemic proportions. At the same time, the weather broke and there was a day of heavy rain, a real downpour.

So many were sick that roll call took a couple of hours.

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One day in mid-October, I came across Suzanne Twyford-Thomas on Main Street, full of the news that her father, who was a cook, had met with rather a nasty accident in his kitchen.

He’d been trying to push the small amount of meat available through the mincer when part of his finger went through the machine. With great presence of mind Mr Twyford-Thomas, with someone holding a piece of paper with his finger on it, walked from No. 2 Kitchen to the hospital, where Dr Grice sewed it back on. I thought it interesting, but it did not affect me as Mum got our stews from No. 1 Kitchen.

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The Swiss representatives Mr Joerg and Mr Eggers went round the camp, and spoke to the vegetable workers in the hospital kitchen.

They walked into the Sewing Room to find a Japanese guard behind the door with his trousers off, getting them sewn.

Then one of the camp inmates came in to have his shorts repaired. Miss Clements, who had been a nurse at the Kailan Mines hospital, shouted out:

‘Do not take your shorts off, there is one man behind the door already with his off!’

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However, in early December, a Japanese guard went up to Mrs Howard-Smith, a nurse, and slapped her face when she was not lining up to his satisfaction outside the hospital.

Ted McClaren reported it to the Commandant.

King Kong was livid and upset, and said that if he was reported again he, King Kong, would have to commit harikari and it would be on McClaren’s conscience.

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Eric Liddell suddenly collapsed, unconscious, and as some rushed off to find a doctor, I went across to Block 23, as I knew that there was a stack of doors in the basement, and a couple of us grabbed one and by the time we got back most of the doctors in the camp were there.

Eric Liddell was put on the door and carried to the hospital. I went back to our block and told Mum and Dad what had happened. The incident occurred midafternoon, and by the evening we heard that he had died of a brain tumour and haemorrhage.

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Real drama occurred on 3rd March 1945. My birthday had passed off as a really tame affair and I was trying to go to sleep when a lot of pistol firing was heard coming from the sports field. I looked out to see what was happening, and saw two guards dressed in white ju-jitsu clothes tearing down Rocky Road towards the Japanese quarters.

I was woken up just after midnight by more shouting and lots of shots. I wanted to go and see what was happening but was told to stay in bed. Next morning I went to look for someone who could tell me what all the firing in the night had been about. I met up with Brian whose hut was across Main Street from the Guard House.

Apparently the guards had been having a ju-jitsu competition outside the Guard House and one of the contestants accused another of cheating. One then chased another to the sports field where the firing of Mausers started up.

Then the two, thought to be Bushinde and King Kong, disappeared to the Japanese Club for more beer. They came across another guard, whose nickname was Soapy Sam, and chased him in their ju-jitsu pyjamas back to the Guard House.

Meanwhile the rest of the guards were having a riot in the sports field, shooting in the air to try and quieten things down.

Soapy Sam then ran back to near Block 50 to try and hide.

King Kong, despite being a Sergeant, emerged but events proved he had no control.

Suddenly, with no more beer to drink, the guards went off and the incident fizzled out.

After discussing the drama of the night before, Brian and I then went off to see if we could find any ammunition. There were lots of empty cartridge cases lying about. Then in the far corner I could see my young brother Roger holding a Mauser machine pistol, pointing at another four-year-old boy, trying to pull the trigger, saying ‘Bang, bang, you’re dead’.

The trigger was fortunately too stiff for his little fingers. I was able to disarm him and gave the gun to Ted McClaren, who had arrived by then.

He unclipped the magazine and took the gun to the Commandant.

Where the Mauser’s wooden holster was I had no idea: they usually came with a big wooden holster that doubled as a butt, converting the weapon to a shoulder gun, and one usually saw it with its leather carrying straps.

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I and a dozen of us were fooling around on Main Street during the first week of August 1945, enjoying a bit of shelter from the sun under the avenue of acacias, as over the last week the weather had been unbearably hot.

Some of the older inmates joined us.

A nineteen-year-old Greek called Aliosa Martinellis swaggered into the group, intent on climbing a 60-foot acacia tree. When he was nearly halfway up we shouted, ‘Don’t go any higher as the branches could snap.’ He totally ignored us and kept climbing; then, suddenly, I heard a very loud crack, a yell and then a loud thump not far from my feet.

Peter went to check, and shouted to Brian:
‘Go and get a doctor.’

Meanwhile all Martinellis’ clothes were slowly turning red with his blood. A door was acquired to serve as a stretcher. The number of onlookers was growing, for the overall noise had attracted a lot of people.

The women started shrieking, and half a dozen men slid their hands under the body and lifted it six inches while the door was slid under. Dr Grice arrived and escorted the ‘stretcher’ to the hospital.

The Committee descended on us boys, but for once we were defended by the ladies, who confirmed that we had been trying to warn the boy, shouting ‘Do not climb the acacia’ ... ‘Don’t go any higher.’

The fickleness of North China acacias, particularly after a very hot spell, had been drummed into me from the age of six at least, and in the interests of self-preservation I had always heeded those warnings.

When I got back to the hut for lunch I was not hungry, an unheard-of occurrence, and Mum thought I was sickening, but when I told her what had happened she understood and did not press me. Granny then came in to share the news; all I remembered from the accident itself was something that sounded like a bag of rice falling down ten feet away.

Martinellis never recovered consciousness and he died that evening of awful internal injuries.

[excerpt]

Mrs Lawless died of typhoid on 8th August, and as the graveyard was now full the burial the next day had to take place outside the walls, hence only a handful of people could attend.

Watanabe was nowhere to be seen. He was tracked down and Ted McClaren tried to speak to him, but Watanabe just ran away, pursued by a few dozen inmates. They lost him when he fled through the front gates, knowing that the internees could not follow there. Watanabe was unpopular with the prisoners, but if he were behaving like that then surely there must be something to hide.

What was it?

Speculation grew wilder and wilder. I kept remembering Grandpa’s predictions and wondered if we would all be killed before we could be freed from the camp.

On 14th August we had a special roll call on the sports field, and I eyed the machine guns in the towers. They traversed over our heads but nothing fired.

The next day there were more rumours that the Emperor of Japan had made a proclamation. Mum heard from Mrs Grice that Dr Vio had told her husband that the Emperor had given a broadcast, ‘For the first time in 2,600 years Japan had to seek peace from four countries.’ Was it really true?

Nobody knew.

The guards were conspicuous by their absence, but the answer was not long in coming.

[further reading]
http://www.weihsien-paintings.org/books/NoSoapLessSchool/book(pages)WEB.pdf

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