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Betty Barr has special memories of her childhood in Shanghai.

It was there that she was held, along with 1,800 other foreign civilians, in a Japanese internment camp during World War II.

She and her family were taken to the Shanghai Middle School - later known as the Lunghwa Civilian Assembly Centre - on what was then the outskirts of the city in April 1943. They stayed until after the Japanese surrendered in August 1945.

'I came here when I was 10 years old. I was 12 when I left,' she said as she took a stroll around the grounds on a quiet Sunday morning.

The Japanese rounded up many British residents and placed them in the Lunghwa camp while many Americans were confined in another camp in Shanghai's Chapei district. Others were held elsewhere in the city.

Ms Barr's father was a missionary sent to China from Britain by the London Missionary Society, an inter-denominational group. Her mother was a YWCA secretary from Dallas, Texas.

Ms Barr, who returned to Shanghai in 1984, now lives there with husband George Wang. Both are English teachers, and they are writing a book about their childhoods in Shanghai from the perspectives of a relatively privileged foreign household and a poor Chinese family like her husband's.

The Lunghwa camp where Ms Barr, her brother and parents were taken was made famous by J. G. Ballard in his novel Empire of the Sun,  later brought to the big screen by Steven Spielberg.

'We were told to assemble at the Columbia Country Club where a convoy of 10 red buses took us to Lunghwa,' she said. There were two cars each - for the Japanese and Swiss consuls general.

'Two long strips of paper sealed the door to our house on Bubbling Well Road,' she said referring to what is now known as Nanjing Road West in the heart of Shanghai. The paper marked it as the home of a detainee.

While they were told to bring only four parcels per person, the family managed to bring extra by bending the rules a bit. 'They [the Japanese] didn't specify what size,' she said. 'We used the iron frame of a bed and the mattress and piled on top of it a folding table, folding chairs, mosquito netting and all kinds of household goods. Then the Chinese packers sewed rattan over it.' That was one 'parcel'.

Lunghwa was a civilian detention centre and not at all like the death camps the Japanese ran for prisoners of war captured in Asia.

And it was a far cry from the brutal treatment dealt to Chinese civilians in Nanjing where 200,000 or more people were massacred as the army entered the city.

'The camp commandant was very humane,' she said. 'He had been to the UK and he liked the British.'

And for a child at least, memories of the camp were not entirely painful.

'We had a good school and in the summers I looked after the goats. For the adults, there were lots of bridge parties, lectures and concerts,' she said.

Sometimes, there also were beatings by the Japanese or Korean camp guards.

'When someone tried to escape they would take it out on those of us who were still there,' she said.

Inmates would occasionally try to flee to the interior where they hoped to reach the anti-Japanese forces. She recalls the guards tying a man to the goal posts on the camp soccer field and beating him after one attempted escape.

'Everyone ran over to see, and there was a bit of a riot.'

There were roll calls in the morning, the evening and sometimes in the middle of the night, she said. 'I saw someone beaten because he was a bit slow at roll call.'

Some of the inmates had hidden away radios so the camp had access to a little news from the outside. But she recalls her mother felt particularly cut off from the rest of the world. 'Very few letters were allowed,' she said. 'And you could only write 25 words.'

Her father worked in the kitchen while her mother took a job in the camp labour bureau. 'My father couldn't boil an egg but he became the [kitchen] manager,' she said.

The labour bureau was where job assignments were made for the camp.

'Cleaning vegetables - peeling potatoes - these were the worst jobs,' she said. Some of the detainees were taipans and their families, and would have had plenty of servants for these chores before the war.

The block where Ms Barr lived had a four-seat bathroom for 110 women. 'It had flush toilets but little water.'

Detainees had to queue for drinking water, and thermos bottles to keep tea warm were highly valued.

Food was brought in from the city and detainees also grew vegetables to supplement their diet. But conditions worsened as the war turned against Japan. There was malnutrition and in some instances death.

When the war was finally over, there were still reasons to stay in the camp for a while.

'Some American soldiers came to the camp to liberate us officially. But we were advised to stay in the camp because the city wasn't safe.'

Ms Barr eventually boarded a ship that took her to the United States for a year before she returned to post-war Shanghai for high school. Before long, life was disrupted once more.

'I was taking my chemistry exam when I saw People's Liberation Army soldiers entering Shanghai,' she said.

She still visits the camp with others wanting a glimpse of the past.

'Some of them have unhappy memories . . . I just find it interesting.'



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