[excerpts] ...

Christmas 1944 was celebrated with meagre rations and few festivities, except singing which could not be rationed. During that year there had been periods when flour was our only stock-in-trade, and the menu had shown little variation from bread, bread porridge, bread pudding and bread-anything-else. There had been brighter periods when the slate outside Kitchen I had read “millet porridge, black tea, bread” for breakfast, “stew, black tea and bread” for lunch, and “soup, black tea and bread” for supper.

Supplies were now lower than they had ever been, and spirits were following the same graph. The temperature too was unbearably low.

Snow and frost were everywhere, with little coal dust from which to make our briquettes to burn in our stoves.

“Can God furnish a table in the wilderness?” asked the psalmist of old.

One snowy day in January 1945, when I was working in greasy overalls over a kua (cauldron) in Kitchen I, a tall American nicknamed Skipper came running in and said, “Have a look at what’s coming in at the front gate!”

A moment later we were standing on Main Road, witnessing an unbelievable sight. Donkeys and carts were filing in slowly up the hill towards the church (the usual venue for such emergencies). Fifteen hundred boxes marked “American Red Cross” were unloaded.

There were 1500 internees in Weihsien Camp one big box each! There was wild excitement at the prospect of having some good nutritious food and the possibility of enjoying delicacies we had not tasted for years. Since our arrival in “Courtyard of the Happy Way” we had not tasted fruit, milk, sugar or butter.

But most excitement and surprises in this war period seemed inevitably to have their anticlimaxes, and this was no exception. Soon afterwards a notice appeared on the camp notice boards announcing curtly that the distribution of parcels had been cancelled, as consideration was being given as to whether the donors intended them to go solely to the two hundred Americans in Weihsien.

Two weeks of arguing and dissension among the American community followed, the majority of them being adamant that the boxes should be shared with all. A few families, in spite of their missionary status, spoke loudly about the “morality” of ensuring that the parcels were given to those for whom they were intended.

Meanwhile the local Japanese authorities, perplexed at civilised Westerners haggling in this manner, consulted their headquarters for instructions on how to distribute the boxes. The decision from Tokyo was a wise and equitable one-one parcel for every internee. Soon a fresh date was fixed for the distribution of the parcels. We queued up at the church and then each struggled to his digs with a heavy cardboard box, three feet by one foot by one-and-a-half feet. Sitting at our beds, we eagerly ripped the boxes open.

In each were four small sections, each with powdered milk, cigarettes, tinned butter, spam, cheese, concentrated chocolate, sugar, coffee, jam, salmon and raisins.

Tea could now be drunk with milk and sugar. Bread, our staple, diet, could now be eaten with butter and cheese or jam. Cigarettes could be traded with smokers for further items of food. The long list of items lent themselves to all kinds of recipes and combinations.

If these welcome supplies were used to supplement the official camp rations from the kitchen, and used in careful instalments, we could enjoy nutritious and tasty meals for at least four months to come.

Social calls became popular. At roll-call, we made dates to visit each other to try the latest menus and recipes. The White Elephant swung into action again, and as we cooked over the hot cauldrons in Kitchen 1 we would overhear the latest exchange rates for Red Cross food: one packet of cigarettes could be bartered for two bars of chocolate, two tins of spam for one of coffee, and so on, according to the law of supply and demand.

The arrival of these supplies definitely saved the day for our community. Scrounging and quarrelling about rations and perquisites subsided as every family worked out its own method of spreading the food over as long a time as possible. Physical hunger and exhaustion were less acute, and with this the general morale was clearly lifted.

During 1945 we became more and more convinced that the war was turning in our favour in Europe and in our own theatre of fighting in the Far East.

Whispers in the camp indicated that Hummel and Tipton, who had escaped eight months previously, were about a hundred miles away in one of the many pockets of resistance against the Japanese, and that from there they were in touch by radio with Allied leaders in Chungking.

Chinese cesspool coolies, who entered the front gate of the camp daily, were carefully searched by the Japanese guards who frequently hit them with their fists or with the butts of their rifles. One of these coolies came to the camp with news direct from Hummel and Tipton. The guards would search him carefully from head to foot, as with the others, and allow him through. Walking down Main Road towards a cesspool with his buckets over his shoulders, he would spit onto a dump of ashes a message in waterproof paper.

An internee waiting nearby would discreetly take the paper to the man involved in this operation.

From this source word soon got around Weihsien that the Allies were on the initiative in Europe; that Britain and America had invaded France and were pushing the Nazis eastward while the Russian army was rolling southward and westward.

A subsequent instalment of news told of V.E. Day. The Germans had surrendered to Eisenhower and Montgomery. This welcome news had little direct effect on our daily lives, except for one incident which happened soon afterwards.

#

[further reading] ...
copy/paste this URL into your Internet browser
http://weihsien-paintings.org/NormanCliff/Books/Courtyard/p-Frontcover.htm

#