[Excerpt]

[...]

Then great excitement came to the camp on 5th June 1944, which quite put everything else out of the minds of inmates.

Rome had fallen to the Allies, and the Japanese openly allowed the information to circulate.

Rumours of an invasion in France were also rife, but nobody knew anything definite. The Peking Chronicle grudgingly admitted the fall of Rome. Then, suddenly, the camp’s morale was lifted with excitement as definite news arrived of `D-Day’ on the Normandy Beaches.

The Committee, in secret session, had decided that the interests of the camp would be better served by having ‘representatives’ at the Headquarters of the local guerrilla leader, General Wang.

Quietly, one night, two internees, Lawrence Tipton, an Englishman who used to work in British American Tobacco, and Art Hummel, who was an American Missionary from Beijing, escaped over the wall and negotiated the barbed wire safely.

Ted McClaren gave them a few hours and then reported the ‘escape’ to the Commandant, which safeguarded his and the Committee’s position, because he knew that the Japanese would exonerate the Committee from implication in the escape, reasoning that they would not report something they themselves planned.

The escapers and other single or unaccompanied men had been housed in dormitories on the top two floors of the hospital.

When their escape was discovered there was a hue and cry amongst the guard. The Head of Japanese security was replaced and within five days the younger children of the Chefoo School and their teachers were ousted from their dormitories in Blocks 23 and 24 and re-housed at the top of the hospital; the whole move to be completed in under three hours.

The men who had originally been in the hospital block were temporarily housed in the Church whilst they were being interrogated. When they were released on 21th June they found that their effects had been relocated to the former Chefoo School dormitories.

Whilst all this shouting was going on, I, along with most of my age group, curbed our more clandestine activities; discretion seemed the order of the day.

I asked Dad one day,
‘Why have they moved everybody Dad?’

He replied ‘Ronald, from the windows at the top of the hospital you could see the village to the north-east, and the Japanese suspected that candles or lights were being used to signal.

By putting the younger children in those rooms they think the Chefoo teachers will control the children and that form of communication will stop.’

My response was ‘There are other ways of getting messages through, I believe?’ Dad’s silence in response to this question was confirmation enough that my discoveries were correct.

[further reading]
http://www.weihsien-paintings.org/books/NoSoapLessSchool/book(pages)WEB.pdf

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