Love & war

On June 7, Rae Shaw settled back into bed at her home in Nottingham, England, with her morning cup of tea and the new iPad her teenage grandson had helped her to buy. She tapped a few keys and inadvertently threw open a window on a secret chapter in her family's past.

"I'd been out the night before and there had been this discussion about googling people," says the 72-year-old widow. "My daughter-in-law asked me, 'Have you ever googled yourself?' So I thought I'd find out if there was any record of me from my time in Hong Kong."

Shaw grew up in the city after her civil servant father had been held in the Stanley internment camp through much of the second world war.

"I put in 'Rae Marjorie Jones Hong Kong' and up popped this list, and at the top of it were the words 'R.E. Jones Wartime diary'. I froze. And everything that has happened since has been so emotional and exciting and wonderful."

What Shaw had stumbled across was a digital version of the wartime diary kept by her father, Raymond Eric Jones, from December 1940 until October 1945. During that period, Shaw's mother, Marjorie, lived as an evacuee in her native Australia. She had been married for less than a year when, pregnant with Rae, she had fled as the Japanese closed in on Hong Kong.

Jones, a prisons officer, remained in Hong Kong and, from 1942 to 1945, was held in Stanley camp, home to some 2,800 mostly British and Commonwealth citizens who suffered 3½ years of hunger, boredom and occasional brutality from their Japanese guards.

Throughout his captivity, Jones risked his life by sleeping with a Union flag sewn into his mattress. Then, after the Allies retook Hong Kong, he achieved a moment of fleeting fame when he hoisted the flag over the camp to mark the colony's liberation.