How Hong Kong POW Barbara Anslow killed time in Stanley internment camp

We first came to Hong Kong in 1927, when I was eight years old. My father was an electrical engineer in the naval dockyard. We stayed for only two years, but he was reassigned to Hong Kong in 1938, so I returned with my parents and two sisters.

After cold England, I liked everything about Hong Kong, except for the cockroaches and mosquitoes. We employed a cook amah, a wash amah and a junior makee-learn – so we three girls no longer had to take turns to do the chores. For much of the year we would go swimming at Repulse Bay. If it was too hot to walk to the shops, a rickshaw ride cost only 10 cents.

Even working in an office in Hong Kong was different to England, where we had never been allowed to chat or take a personal phone call. Outside of work, the South China Morning Post occasionally published one or another of my poems – but they never paid me!

EVACUATION AND RETURN We were told one Friday afternoon in 1940 that women and children would be evacuated on the Monday. Although, as government stenographers, my elder sister and I held exempted occupations, as did my mother, an auxiliary nurse, my father insisted the four of us women leave Hong Kong for our own safety. We were sent to the Philippines, supposedly en route to Australia. But while we were staying on a sugar plantation – like some super country club, with tennis courts, bowling alley and swimming pool – enjoying ourselves, news reached us that my father had died suddenly.

By the time we returned to Hong Kong, Dad had already been buried, and we had been booked on a ship to England. There was the turmoil of the Battle of Britain at home, so we made a case to stay and work in Hong Kong. We were jittery all through November. There was all the news of the Japanese in and out of talks with the USA. I used to try to enjoy each weekend as though it were our last … There was nothing you could do to prepare.