[excerpts]

...

Clandestine Scouts

Well, now, one Sunday in springtime Father Palmers and I were sitting on a seat by the central alley. The Protestant service had just finished and we were chatting with some others from the kitchen and the bakery. Cockburn and MacChesney Clark, both old British teachers, were, like us, regretting the lack of educational activity for the young. All four of us were former scouts and it seemed to us to be a good idea to use scouting methods to bring into being something educational despite the limitations of our imprisonment. We decided to think about it and to ask the opinions of others. Ideas were exchanged, and the contacts developed quickly.

We shouldn’t try to recruit everyone. Let us begin at the beginning! First we needed to establish a nucleus of scouting life, a patrol seven or eight strong. Junior Chan, a 14 year-old Chinese Canadian Catholic, could make a good patrol leader; Zandy, a Eurasian; the de Zutter brothers, who were Belgians aged 12 and 14; and finally three or four British lads. There was a good mixture of Catholics and Protestants, with one orthodox element for good measure. It was decided that Cockburn should be in charge; the rest of us would be assistants.

We have to invent everything and cannot mention scouting as such. The motto is to be “all for one and one for all”. The badges - a fleur de lys on a clover leaf – are to be embroidered by mothers and sisters. The necktie is a white handkerchief dyed in blue ink.

Everything else falls into place thanks to scouting skills, and all goes well. When we were liberated, we even managed to get ourselves photographed by friends from outside the camp.

[excerpt] ...

Escaping … from Boredom

But the winters were long and tedious. What do you do in the evenings when you are bored when you are deprived of liberty? Clearly, there was no radio, still less television. That is why a few of us set up a sort of youth club which met three times a week after the evening meal. You could learn to play card games, to hold forth, and even to dance. It was an excellent safety valve to help young people to avoid descending to more suspect leisure pursuits. Not many people knew that that Father Palmers and I were behind the establishing of a series of evening classes, which were very popular, though they did not appeal to everyone. During the final winter, it proved essential to fill every evening …

[further reading]
http://www.weihsien-paintings.org/NormanCliff/Books/Courtyard/p-Frontcover.htm

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