[Excerpts] ...

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Two members of the group came to Kitchen 1 for supper that night. We drew out specialities from our store which we had been using sparingly for our six hundred strong clientele and cooked for these heroes a special meal to celebrate their arrival from the skies. But quietly and politely the food was left uneaten.

What to us seemed a treat, to them was unpalatable.

[excerpt]

Realising how little of the events of the previous four years we knew, the Americans organised “Reorientation Classes” for us in Kitchen II, to bring us up to date with recent world events. An officer sketched the initial retreat of the American forces following Pearl Harbor, the turn of the tide in mid-1942, and the steady north-westerly retreat of the Japanese, culminating in the dropping of atomic bombs on Japan itself. Our vocabulary too was pitifully out of date. The American officer carefully explained the meaning of certain terms to a class of eager learners ? G.I., D-Day, Jeeps, B24, Mulberry Harbour, Kamikazes and so on.

Chinese officials came to the camp with cordial greetings and cartloads of gifts of food from mayors of nearby villages. I took turns on duty at the gate to help control comings and goings, and thus maintain law and order. Up the path towards the entrance came Chinese Church dignitaries, pastors, Salvation Army officers to visit their respective leaders in the camp. I asked them how the Chinese Church had been faring during the war years of ch’ih ku (eating bitterness). Church attendances had dropped, they told me, “rice Christians” had fallen away, but a new quality of membership and leadership had emerged from the fires of trial and persecution.

[excerpt]

Then planes came regularly from the east. They dropped parachutes loaded with food, clothing and medicines. I stood one morning in front of the guardroom, and looked at the sky, which was full of blue, green and red parachutes floating down on to the fields in front of me. It was a moving sight, and with a lump in my throat I sent up a little prayer of thanksgiving to my God. The years of bread porridge, bread pudding and bread-what-have-you were now over.

The guards in the room to my right had no further authority over us. Manna was coming down from heaven.

[excerpt]

Not only did I take turns guarding the gate. I was also part of a team charged with supervising the arrival of the parcels from the skies and ensuring that they arrived intact at the church for subsequent distribution. As soon as the sound of plane engines could be heard, one of us went up the tower of Block 23 and rang the bell to summon those on duty (the same bell which had been rung on that fateful midnight soon after V.E. Day). We then went into the fields, recorded the parcels as they landed, and later proved that all had reached the church safely.

The sudden cessation of fighting in the Pacific had meant that thousands of boxes of surplus supplies, suddenly no longer needed for American troops, could now be redirected to needy civilian camps in Weihsien and Shanghai.

But the dropping of the parcels of food and medicine and clothes was not an unmixed blessing. Having been hastily loaded on to the planes, they did not all float down softly. Many of the parachutes did not open fully, with the result that the boxes hurtled down, bouncing ten feet high, with tins and bottles scattered and broken around them. Tomato soup and vitamin pills lay in the mud around the large shattered boxes.

[excerpt]

But to our dismay we discovered that on several occasions after the plane had waved goodbye and closed its underside it reopened its belly and dropped a few more parcels not previously noticed. Boxes were raining down. Should I run for shelter and perhaps into the falling boxes, or stand still and pray? I held my breath. They landed all round me a few yards away, bouncing into the air again before lying dented or broken. An American officer standing beside me, shaken and out of breath, remarked that he had faced more hazards that morning in the Weihsien fields than in the earlier fighting in South-East Asia! From then on we kept on the safe side of tall trees, and going into the fields again only when the planes had gone.

[excerpt]

The more devout internees gave vent to their happiness in services of thanksgiving at the church in various traditions of Christian worship ? Catholic, Anglican and Free Church. The Edwardian-style church, which had served at various times as school, prison and distribution centre, was now (as it had often been during the darker years of internment) the focal point of worship and heartfelt praise to the Lord.

[excerpt]

I was now twenty, and my sisters eighteen and sixteen. We had not seen Father since July 1940, five years previously, and then only briefly, and Mother since a year before that. I got down one day to writing a long letter home (I use the word “home” as the place where my parents had been for two years. I had never set foot in Africa.) But it was not easy. For so long we had been limited to twenty-five words on Red Cross forms, and a formidable list of forbidden subjects. Here I was with a writing pad in front of me, and no restrictions on length or subject matter. With a strange feeling of guilt I wrote eight long pages, describing particularly the closing weeks of internment and our deliverance. Other adjustments also had to be made ? eating food unrestricted by rationing; walking in the fields outside the gate unaccompanied by armed little yellow men; wearing shoes and socks after running around barefoot ... These were but a few of the milestones to be passed before I was to become once again a normal human being in a wide open world.
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[excerpt]

We went up Berea Road some distance before stopping at the little white church, built on a slope and overlooking the main highway to Pietermaritzburg. There were scarcely a dozen in the congregation, including the five of us. Father ascended the pulpit. The prayer and longings of many years had come to their moment of fulfilment. In his sermons he had often expressed his conviction that one day his children would be released and join him in Durban, though the paucity of news of us and the fluctuations of the war had sometimes made his hope seem unlikely to be realised.

[further reading] ...
http://www.weihsien-paintings.org/NormanCliff/Books/Courtyard/eDocPrintPro-BOOK-Courtyard-01-WEB-(pages).pdf

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