The Ient Family: Family History

The Side of Pork Incident!

There was one famous – well, I should say infamous – morning, when we got on board this ocean-going liner, the Île-de-France. The Japanese had picked it up, probably in Indochina.

By the way, as you know, my nickname is ‘Chick’ Henderson, which I got in the war. I was called this after the wartime singer Chick Henderson. I was sort of unofficial interpreter, the Jap would say 'Chick, bla bla bla' – saying what they wanted done. Well, with a few words and a few gestures here and there, we would find out what they want. So we got to work. In the Île-de-France, there was a great big fridge. We opened the door. You wouldn’t believe it; there’s a half a pig hanging there. How the hell do you get half a pig back to their camp?

Laughter.

Well, we had had no meat in the camp. So, I said I’m going to nick this pig. We got it into a basket and took it down to the toilets. Not toilets like what we have. These are Japanese toilets. You squat, you know.

So I got this pig and I tore it, cut it into four pieces and got mine strapped on. I said to the big lad with me, he was about 6’ 2”, 'You take the knuckle end as you are a big lad.', and to another, I said, 'You take the end bits.' Then the fourth lad went in to get his – you’ll never believe it, but someone had gone in there and stolen it! We never found the fourth portion from that day to this. Thieves! Unbelievable! [Chick said jokingly.]

Laughter.

This happened about 7 o’clock in the morning. However, the actual task that day was to move great piles of coal there to here. [Demonstrating.] So we had to carry these lumps of raw meat around all day whilst we were working at shovelling the coal. The funniest sight I saw was Chris with the knuckle of pig hanging round his neck while he was shovelling coal. Every time he shovelled the coal over, the knuckle end of the pig came out of his bag his him in the face! This went on from 7 o’clock in the morning til 6 o’clock at night! Of course ,the pig had been frozen and by God it was cold. I thought I’d done myself a mischief, because by getting so hot it had all started to melt and all the liquid and water was running down my front. Dear God, it was uncomfortable. Anyway, we did get back to camp. We thought – what do you do with this? If you started to cook it, the smell’s going to permeate the whole building and we would be found out.

We had received a Red Cross parcel. This rarely happened. In Japan, I got three and a half parcels in three and a half years. I got one a year, and even that I had to share. The Japs held onto them and would not release the parcels and the letters and the clothing that people were sending to us. Tokyo was full of food stuffs which was going rotten; the Japs wouldn’t just deliver that to us.

We had at three different Red Cross parcels – there was the American Red Cross parcel, the Canadian and the Brits. The Canadian one was very good, and in the American one there was a tin of dried milk. It was called klim, which is milk spelt backwards. So with an empty klim tin we had to boil down half a pig. In a tin this size! [Demonstrating.] You can think how long it took us to render the fat down to get this to the point where we can eat it.

And of course all the lads were sitting there with their tongues hanging out; the smell of bacon was all the way through the camp. It must have been a bit disconcerting. By this time, there was 100 extra prisoners arrived from Hong Kong, so now there is 200. But to share with them we would have had to take the meat to the cook house. If we did this, the Japs would find out and they would say 'Where’s the pork come from?' So we couldn’t do that. So we had to go through all this pork and eat it ourselves as long as it lasted; and it lasted a long, long time!  That was the pork incident.


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