The Ient Family: Family History

Nothing to read

Anyway, life went on. With the best will in the world, this is like trying to describe the sunset to a blind man, not that you’re blind, but trying to explain to you what the sheer boredom of the thing was. I mean, you get up, as I say, 5 o’clock every morning, you went to work and you came back, you went to work and you went to bed by 9 o’clock. There was two books in the camp and one pack of cards and by the time we’d finished with the cards they were circular not square; they had been worn that much! Nothing to read. But we used to pinch [steal] a newspaper from time to time. For example, there was this old Jap civilian guard, he had three men under him, three prisoners, and he used to always leave his newspaper at lunchtime, and when he came back it had gone. And he knew fine well where it had gone. We brought the paper back to the camp.

Now some of these lads from Hong Kong[i] spoke Japanese. There was one little lad from Hong Kong who I spoke to one day saying ‘What the hell are you doing here?’ His mother was Japanese and his father was a German and he was fighting for the Brits in Hong Kong! He used to do the interpretation. There was the Japanese 'newspaper' they gave us to start with. It was in English. Of course, when the war was going well it was all full of the Japanese victories and all the rest of it. But they stopped those newspapers after 1942. Anyway, we had our stolen Japanese newspaper and translator. It has a lot of propaganda in it, but we could get some sense out of it.

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