He was an Australian boy with Salvation Army parents in China during the 1930s. As the fighting escalated he was evacuated to Hong Kong and has happy memories of playing ball as a child near his home in Prince Edward Road. He then returned to the mainland and went to school in Shanghai.

'I have many happy recollections of the Cathedral School for Boys in Shanghai. We played cricket and rugger and did all the things young boys do. My brother and I sang in the cathedral choir.' Mr Begley was school pals with J. G. Ballard, author of Empire of the Sun, who was later sent to Lunghwa camp, Shanghai.

War was looming. And with it came immense suffering. Mr Begley was blessed - he and his family survived. Yet he was robbed of his youth, parted from his parents while they were in Stanley internment camp - for more than a year neither children nor parents knew if the others were alive.

Mr Begley's parents ran soup kitchens and nursed on the mainland in the 1930s and in Hong Kong from 1941.

They had left their children on the mainland and as the situation became increasingly dangerous decided to move them back to Australia on a ship.

'Because of the outbreak of war, the cable was never delivered,' Mr Begley says.

A few weeks later his parents heard that the ship had been torpedoed and for more than a year did not know the fate of their children.

While his mother and father were in Stanley, Mr Begley was cared for with his sister and brother by an Australian couple in Beijing.

Movement was restricted, but relatively few foreigners had been imprisoned as yet, though the children had to wear red armbands as enemy aliens.

His parents, Keith and Edith Begley, learned through a visit to Stanley by the Swiss International Red Cross that their children were alive and asked that they be reunited at a place convenient to the Japanese. They were sent back to Shanghai in early 1943.

That the Japanese should have reunited the family is staggering, considering there were many couples in Hong Kong with one partner in Shamshuipo camp, the other in Stanley, who spent years apart, if they survived at all.

The children were brought back down from Beijing and the family had an emotional reunion.

'So we had a short period of freedom, but my dad knew for certain that we would be put into another camp before long.' The notice of internment came in March, 1943, and the family was moved in a group of 600 to Yanchow on the Grand Canal.

'When we went into the camp, because of the preparation we were able to take in quite a lot with us. But, of course, we were growing boys - I mean I was 13 when I went in, almost 16 when I came out, so I was always growing out of my clothes.

'Boys also tend to get hungry and there was never enough food.

'So you think food, you steal food when you can. Our diet comprised mainly of rice and a few turnips, sometimes a few bits of pork floating around.

'My mother often moved food off her plate on to ours,' says Mr Begley, his voice cracking. 'But we survived it. There were certain atrocities, though nothing compared with the Burma railroad. But they were hard times.' Mr Begley was interned during prime years for his education, so has no school certificate. But education was kept up in the camp.

'It happened that the headmaster from the Cathedral School in Shanghai was also interned. So he set up a school. We didn't have all our teachers, but engineers and doctors volunteered to teach. So we had a fairly broad education.

'We very quickly ran out of books but the Japanese did supply toilet paper, so the toilet paper was used for its first purpose of study, and then later for a second purpose.' Mr Begley lived with his family and eight other people in one room, hanging blankets round the iron beds for privacy.

'My sister was 16. For a teenaged girl in that environment it was extremely dangerous with Japanese guards looking for opportunities. The young women were under constant threat but the blokes in our camp protected them pretty well.' All prisoners had to parade every morning in the camp and number off in Japanese.

'So I can count and swear in Japanese quite fluently. In the winter we used to have to shovel the snow off the ground and stand there, sometimes for a couple of hours, until the Japanese were satisfied that no one had escaped overnight.

'The Japanese psyche didn't take kindly to any man who surrendered. He didn't deserve to live. It was all part of the samurai tradition. It was an honourable thing to die for the Emperor, so the Japanese would rather die in battle than surrender. And so they despised anyone who was taken prisoner.' The prisoners tried to keep life as normal as possible. People were allocated jobs and Mr Begley often made the bread.

'We were given flour but had no yeast, so we used washing soda, which turned the bread green. I would knead it in these huge, rough pottery bowls that cut your fingers, so people ended up with extra meat in their bread.' They were allowed to hold religious services. Some of the prisoners were pastors and missionaries and a choir was formed. Mr Begley's mother organised a Christmas play.

'And then one Christmas morning, it was 1944, I'll never forget it, it had been snowing, cold and we could hear Christmas carols.

'There were two Jewish lads - the Nissim brothers - one played a trumpet, the other a clarinet, and they were going round playing Christians Awake! and Hark! The Herald Angels Sing.' Although the prisoners wanted to survive, danger was a part of their everyday lives and they took risks. Mr Begley once broke into the Japanese military's supplies and stole sake for the male prisoners. He was caught and sentenced to 12 days' hard labour.

'And that didn't impress my father as a Salvation Army missionary officer. He was not amused. But I was a teenager, you know. I got off very, very lightly. But I think even the Japanese officers realised we were only schoolkids.' Some Japanese officers did show humanity. One boy lay ill in hospital and was visited by an officer, who had a son the same age.

'When the boy died, the officer attended his funeral, leaving his sword at the front of the chapel. He then stood at the grave and saluted.' After the war finished, it took two weeks for the news to reach the prison camp. The American military organised food drops, but the prisoners were still being guarded by the Japanese.

'They arranged food drops from American bombers. We had survived the war, we were nearly killed by food barrels as they dropped down, ostensibly attached to parachutes.

'Many broke away from their parachutes and came hurtling down, splattering pork and beans everywhere and stewed peaches. But it was food and we were glad to see it. We were all pretty skinny and scrawny by the time we came out.' Some of the Japanese had been worse than others.

'There was a Captain Tanaka, and what the men weren't going to do to him at the end of the war.

'Some of the men wanted to tear him apart, to get back at Tanaka for what he had done to us.' But when the war was over, and when the surrender was accepted by a British paratroop officer and the Japanese laid down their swords in a pile in front of him at the entrance to the camp, it all seemed a bit unreal and there seemed little point in taking vengeance, Mr Begley says.

So, 54 years on, is it possible to forgive the suffering of those years? 'I'm a professing Christian and one is supposed to forgive. And I guess I have forgiven. In our teaching about the Almighty, God forgives and forgets. In my heart I have forgiven but I haven't forgotten.'