The Ient Family: Family History

Working in the Dockyard

Anyway, moving on, after a year or so things were going a little bit bad for the Japanese and the Japanese guards were taken away from us and we had civilian guards put over the prisoners. We still had the Jap soldiers at the camp – there was 3, 4, about 5 of them, including the commandant. The soldiers marched us down to the dockyard every day and then they passed us over to the Japanese civilians. After a year, things were getting a bit easier. We weren’t getting knocked about quite as much because the Jap guards had gone. The civilian guards had done their time in the army, so they had a militaristic approach to everything, but it was better.

The six of us became known as the ‘Genki boys’. Well, the word genki in Japanese means if somebody meets you in the street says 'Hello, how are you?', you might reply 'I’m great, I’m fit, I’m top of the bill, I’m champion.' In Japanese this means genki. Genki means, you’re good, you’re fit and you’re well, you’re healthy. So we became known as the ‘genki boys.’  We were relatively healthy because we were the only ones who were getting on board these ocean-going ships, and of course the first place we made for was the galley. In the camp, hunger overtakes you. All of us were starving – hungry day in, day out. We got a bowl of rice at 6 o’clock in the morning, just an ordinary bowl, chopped off at the top, you couldn’t get anymore no matter what. They was a pinch of salt on the top. We used to get a day off every three weeks, and that was to clean up the camp! So on our day off they gave us long bamboo rakes and we waded out into the sea, up to our chests, and then raked in the seaweed, got it on shore. We chopped it up very fine, and that was our breakfast for the next three weeks! So it was seaweed soup and rice for your breakfast. Sometimes we got it for lunch. But the big treat was when we got carrot tops or turnip tops or whatever, from rubbish, was going; but no meat, no eggs, no fish, no sugar, nothing like that at all, just the rice and very, very weak soup, whatever they might give us. Consequently, we were permanently hungry. I mean rice, as you know, is a top carbohydrate, with some salt it gives you energy, quick energy. You can work like a slave for about two or three hours until you’ve worked it off. By 10 o’clock in the morning, comes you’re starving of hunger with pains in the stomach. To alleviate this we drank gallons and gallons of water just to fill the stomach.

So we had a bloke working in the machine shop, so for a consideration, which was X number of bowls of rice, we asked him to make us three skeleton keys each; small, medium and large. So he made these 18 skeleton keys for us, three each. By the way, everything was under a padlock in Japan. Now you give me a padlock, don’t put it in front of me, I couldn’t open it, but you give it me behind my back I can do it! So with these skeleton keys we were able to open the padlocks. They used to spring open! So, we were able to get into the stores.

Now prior to this if you saw some food, you ate it. It didn’t matter; if it looked like food you ate it.

I remember we were going down to the dockyard one morning from the camp; there were about 50 or 60 in the working party. It got passed back that there were onions by the side of the road. So as you marched by you grabbed these onions, ate them and go rid of what was left. The next morning they couldn’t get a working party out except one man, only one man on his feet! The guard couldn’t understand this at all, and couldn’t decide what we’d eaten; everybody had eaten the same, but only one man was fit. Anyway, it turned out he hadn’t eaten his onion. He still had it – it wasn’t an onion it was a bloody daffodil bulb, and we’d scoffed the lot!

Laughter.

So we got these skeleton keys and we were doing rather well by virtue of stealth. Mind you, we took chances; make no bones about it, and when I think back now I get horrified at the risks we took. Well, of course you couldn’t carry the stuff or put it in your pocket. So here is what we did ... we were on board this ship one day, and there were some life jackets there. Life jackets were filled with kapok, which I think is Dutch cotton. We threw the cotton away and we kept the material, got it back to the camp. Then we took the wool thread from the blanket we had and we made a bag.

Chick then showed an example he had made: This is not the original, by the way, I made this specially for this morning! The straps of a bag like this went over the head. The bag part hung down below the waist inside your trousers. [Demonstrating.] It had a flap lid. We were all skinny by this time, so if you walked like in a stooped way [demonstrating] the bag would not be noticed by the guard. This is, of course, how we got the stuff back to the camp. We were searched time and time again but the Japs never touched the front of us, they went down the sides. I bet they’d have been a bit embarrassed if they’d gone round the front way to see what they didn’t have!

Laughter.

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