The Ient Family: Family History

Life in the Camp

Red Cross parcels came from time to time and we had a bit of a ‘divvy’ of the contents. This is how we kept sort of body and soul together, plus the stuff that we were stealing down at the dockyard, barley or rice or whatever was worth stealing. We also stole tools: hammers, scissors and saws and all sorts of things, like razors. As I’ve tried to explain, it was sheer boredom we were suffering from. If you commit a crime [in this country], for the most part the judge says, right, three years. As our friend from Yorkshire knows, you get time off for good behaviour, don’t you? [Laughter.] But here in a prisoner of war camp, you don’t know what’s going on in the outside world, there’s no communication except for the bits of information we’re getting from a Japanese newspaper, which was full of propaganda. I had only two letters all the time I was in Japan. We were allowed to send a card when we were first caught in Java, a postcard, and it had five sentences on it and you had to cross out two which weren’t applicable – ‘I am happy.' ‘I am working for pay.' ‘The Japanese are very kind to me.’ So you just crossed out a load. It took exactly a year for my mother to get that card – from the end of 1941, for the card to get back to England via India and so on via Switzerland.

It was sheer boredom and monotony. I mean, you’re working, you’re working hard, especially the six of us [here he is referring to the ‘big lads’]. Of course, some had easy jobs.


NEXT

---