[Excerpts]

[...]

The internees already there were crowding the walls, the gates, and the alleys to welcome us.

Pity, interest, curiosity, and perhaps a little disgust at the thought of more mouths to feed were all evident on their faces. Their clothes looked rumpled and torn, covered with dust and dirt, but there were women and children as well as men. We kids were excited at the prospect of more space to run around in after being cramped for so long in the three houses in Chefoo. The housing committee found space for us in the education building. We had to make do with what bedding we had, as our mattresses did not arrive for another two weeks. We unpacked and settled down on the floor. Apprehension and excitement kept me awake for some time.

Next morning, we explored our new environment. High walls surrounded the camp, with guard towers at each strategic corner, and high voltage wires, mounted on insulators, warning us against any attempt to escape. There also were searchlights and guard dogs, and we wisely respected the security that surrounded us.

[excerpt]

When children look on a human death, they instinctively know the terrible difference between this and that of a favorite pet. Some children would have wanted to get out of the morgue as soon as possible. I wanted to stay. I carefully touched the hem of the nun’s habit as an act of reaching out to the mystery, to the unknown, though I did not know where it would lead. Here was a mystery, and I was on the shore of a vast unknown ocean. Little did I know that—twelve months in the future and thirteen hundred miles away—my own mother’s body would lie like this, with my dad watching over her, his life torn apart in grief.

Theo and I left in silence, not saying a word. We had ventured out of our depth.

[excerpt]

Camp life revolved around food and fuel, food to keep us going and fuel to keep us warm.

Both were the cause of much turmoil and anguish, and lack of them the cause of much suffering. The food in the camp was prepared, cooked, and distributed in two kitchens. We children went to Kitchen #1 which fed up to a thousand prisoners. The staple and generally unappetizing diet was a coarse, peasant grain called kaoliang. There was kaoliang soup, kaoliang porridge, kaoliang stew, and kaoliang curry, and not much else.

The meat we had was from horses or mules, and so tough it needed a lot of cooking. Because there was no refrigeration, meat had to be cooked as soon as possible, and, of course, there was never enough to go around, particularly for us growing boys. Since ten pounds of meat would have to feed a thousand internees, the cooks would make it into a thin but at least slightly meaty stew.

Such things as milk, eggs, and sugar were considered luxuries and kept for expectant mothers or the very ill. Near the end of the war, food became harder and harder to get, strongly tempting the workers who handled it to steal.

When you are putting the ten pounds of meat into the huge cooking pot for your thousand impersonal campers while your own, close family is starving, it would be easy to cut off a half pound slice and slip it into a pocket. This raised the whole question of personal morality in a situation where everything of value was scarce.

[excerpt]

We were desperately short of green vegetables, and there was an attempt to grow a vegetable garden at the back of the camp. But space was so limited that it did not amount to much.

To help our bones grow, so ran the theory, we children were required to eat a daily teaspoon of powdered egg shells to make up for the milk we were not getting. How we loathed the flat, dry, choking taste. We never found out where the shells came from as we did not see many eggs in our diet. Fruit was nonexistent. Norman Cliff, a close friend of my brother Robin, was invited to play chess with one of the Japanese officers. As they played, in the relatively luxurious Officers’ Quarters, the officer handed him an apple, an inch and a half across. Norman devoured it, small though it was. It was the only fruit he had tasted during his years in the camp. He was also suffering from amoebic dysentery and backaches, attributed to the lack of hygiene and hard labor at the camp.

Six months before the end of the war, yeast became unobtainable, so the bakery was unable to produce bread. Considering how important it was to our limited diet, this meant we were near the starvation point. Day after day, the diary of my youngest sister, Elizabeth, read: Still no bread. Red Cross parcels came in the nick of time and helped us survive.

[excerpt]

When the problem of a growing infestation of rats in the camp became serious toward the end of the war, the commandant organized a rat-catching competition. This was taken up very seriously by us boys. The irony was that though we were the captives and the Japanese the captors, we were being asked to take their role in the rat kingdom! There would be prizes for the teams that caught the three largest rats by April 1.

My best friend, Jimmy, and I took much delight in modifying an old defunct trap we had found on the scrap heap and getting it to work with a powerful spring action. This was my first engineering project. Then we had to decide where to put it in order to catch our prize. This turned out to be more complicated than we had at first thought, as various rat-catching teams were staking out areas for their exclusive use.

Quite how this worked I cannot remember, but I know we did not have a good location, so stealthily and late at night when all were asleep, we placed our trap in a dark attic area which my brother Rupert and his team had claimed for their own. So far, we had caught nothing, and the April 1 date was getting very close. Next morning I was groping for the trap on my hands and knees in the filth and darkness. Suddenly I felt the stiff pelt of a dead rat. Instead of being repelled, I called out in delight and dragged the stiffening carcass into the daylight by its tail. We had caught a monster, eighteen inches from nose to tail!

The teams brought their trophy rats to the commandant’s office for measurement and final judging. The big question was, Would ours earn a prize? Rupert’s team complained that we had been in their area, but they were fortunately overruled since the trap itself was ours.

We received second prize, which, once again, was a can of beans. To the two of us, in our state of perpetual hunger, the reward was highly prized and eagerly devoured. Questions remain: What happened to the trap? Did we catch any more rats? I retain only the glorious memory of winning the prize.

[further reading]
http://www.weihsien-paintings.org/JohnHoyte/JHoyte(web).pdf

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