Diary Bridget of a Jones trapped in hell
She was a young woman captured as a POW in the Far East. Now her resilience and undimmed spirit is revealed in the . . .
ON NOVEMBER 12, 1941, 23- year-old Barbara redwood wrote in her diary: ‘ I’m a bit afraid that Christmas won’t come.’ During the tense, anxiety-ridden days before the Japanese attacked Hong Kong in December that year, a sense of doom had settled across the British colony and the ex-pats living there.
Barbara could sense tension building as Hong Kong’s isolated civilian population readied themselves for war, and yet she and her friends carried on as normal with youthful pluckiness.
afternoon tea at the Peninsula Hotel with her boyfriend, arthur, and a dance at the royal Navy’s China Fleet Club. a shopping trip to buy shoes. a visit to the cinema with her mother. She was playing tennis with friends the day before the Japanese army launched their savage attack on December 8.
a keen diarist since her teenage years, Barbara recorded the minutiae of everyday life in the colony, a habit which was to prove a lifeline during the chaos and bloodshed that followed.
She recorded the epic 18- day battle during which Hong Kong ‘Britishers’ valiantly struggled to defend themselves before the colony fell to the Japanese on Christmas Day and continued with her hand-written record when she, along with thousands of others on the island, were sent to prisoner of war camps.
By the end of her four years in captivity, Barbara was writing on wafer-thin toilet paper, but keeping this daily journal had become a way of keeping sane during one of the most barbaric episodes of World War II.
and now, more than 75 years on, on the eve of Barbara’s 100th birthday, this extraordinary record is being published for the first time, giving a unique insight into the untold horrors suffered by women during this rarely examined episode of World War II.
‘I hope they provide a useful record for future generations,’ says Barbara — now Barbara anslow, a mother-of-five, grandmother and great-grandmother living in Kirby-le-Soken, North East Essex.
She will celebrate her 100th birthday in December.
Her years as a POW shaped the decades which followed, not least because it was in captivity that she first crossed paths with her late husband, Frank anslow, although romance didn’t blossom until they met again in peacetime.
While her written record reveals the courage of women in the face of war-time brutality, it also gives a glimpse of their sometimes very ordinary preoccupations in camp — romantic intrigues, the desire to make themselves look pretty and fashionable.
‘It was a complete reversal of circumstances for many after what had been a pampered life,’ she says now. ‘ On the whole, people coped very well. We had a common enemy which united us. Some just gave up. But when you have women and children around, you have to cope. It brought out the best in some people.’
BARBARA, a government secretary, was summoned to work at the air raid Precautions department at 6.30am on the day the Japanese invaded, and arrived as enemy planes began dropping their bombs.
‘Hardly worth writing a diary because I can’t visualise us ever getting out of this,’ she wrote later that day. ‘But I want to try, and believe in a future.’
With the bulk of British troops committed to the war raging in Europe and North africa, Winston Churchill had privately warned there was ‘ not the slightest chance’ of defending Hong Kong against the Japanese.
Publicly, though, he urged those living there to hold out for as long as possible. Many of those who fought were volunteers, a veritable ‘Dad’s army’ of 2,000 men of all ages and professions — bank clerks, teachers, civil servants and magistrates — who knew the island like the back of their hand and were determined to fight.
‘ Unless a miracle happens, we’re going to be shelled to bits,’ wrote Barbara.
She’d first arrived in Hong Kong with her parents and two sisters in 1927 when her father, a Naval electrical engineer, received a two-year posting to the dockyard there. They returned to the colony for a second posting in 1938 just as Europe was about to be plunged into war.
Barbara, her mother and sisters were all evacuated to australia but en route, while their ship was in Manila, they received news that her father William, 47, had died of a heart attack and made the fateful decision to turn back.
after the Japanese victory, Barbara was interned with her mother and sisters at a POW camp in Stanley, a coastal village on the south of Hong Kong, where a jail and officers quarters were used for accommodation.
Home for the next four years for the redwood family was a room in a four-bedroom flat shared by 23 people and infested with cockroaches and bed bugs.
Barbara shared a camp bed with her mother Mabel, a volunteer nurse who had witnessed one of the worst atrocities of the battle. She’d watched helplessly as Japanese soldiers entered the make-shift hospital at the Jockey Club and, one by one, took away young British nurses to be raped and beaten at gunpoint.
Over the next three-and-a-half years, Barbara recorded life at the camp which revolved around twice daily roll calls, meal times and an 8pm curfew imposed by their Japanese captors.
While paper was a scarce commodity, the redwood family’s loyal Chinese ‘amah’ house maid brought Barbara’s 1941 diary to her just before she was imprisoned.
‘ My 1941 diary was mostly empty because I’d been dumped by a man earlier in the year and I hadn’t felt like writing in it,’ says Barbara today. ‘So I had all that space and I wrote in tiny writing to make the paper last.’
Not surprisingly, the subject of food looms large in those pages. The meagre supplies Barbara’s family, and other internees, had been able to take into camp did not last long.
‘When Kelloggs and Oxo run out I shall just have to eat rice,’ she wrote in January 1942.
In February, the redwoods ‘succumbed to the temptation of the tin of sausages Mum brought from our flat’ and, a few days later: ‘ Depressing news. We ate our tin of pineapple.’
SUPPLIES became increasingly irregular and Barbara took it in turns with her sisters to queue up for the communal meals served each day at 11am and 5pm — usually watery fish stew, melon soup and tiny quantities of rice or occasional slices of bread.
‘I’m dying to go back to England and feel so glad I have been selfindulgent last year — boxes of crystallised ginger, many milk shakes at repulse Bay and the Dairy Farm, peanuts and potato crisps, and went to hundreds of films before the Japs attacked.’
When their weevil-infested flour rations ran out, the POWs used grinders to make flour with rice.
Barbara and her mother managed to plant sweet potatoes and spinach on land next to the flat.
They also took advantage of the thriving black market operated by their guards, trading cigarette rations for food and, as they became increasingly desperate to eat and their energy waned, more personal items such as a fountain pen and her father’s watch.
Some days were clearly better than others, especially when red Cross parcels arrived containing
tinned sugar, beef steak pudding, creamed rice and soap.
‘Took bread up to room,’ she wrote in February 1942. ‘I had one slice, Mum and Olive shared the other; then cocoa, one fig and one apple ring. Had a fruit drop from Mrs K; a piece of chocolate from Olive.’
But two months later, in April: ‘Less to eat than ever: cooking dreadful; more kitchen squabbles. Everyone fed up and starving.’
It wasn’t long before sickness swept through the camp. Diarrhoea, dysentery, beri-beri and TB were frequent occurrences. So too were eye problems. Barbara suffered from recurring eye styes and many eyelid infections.
And yet against this backcloth of deprivation, the women took pains over their appearances, keeping themselves clean with cold strip washes when water supplies allowed it, or dips in the sea.
The few items of clothing they were able to take into the camp soon became shabby and worn. Barbara and her sisters fashioned sun tops from old flour sacks and Barbara still has a bikini top made by her sister from two scouts’ scarves. Some women cut worn dresses in half to make a skirt and cropped top. Others made garments from dyed mosquito nets.
‘There are a few women to whom the food queue is apparently the outing of the day,’ wrote Barbara in her diary, ‘ for they still arrive dressed in their best; one elderly lady never appears without a black felt hat belonging to a past decade.’
Other entries reveal the lengths to which the women went to keep up appearances.
‘Mrs G borrowed a razor and we all shaved under our arms,’ she wrote in June 1942. ‘Wonderful after all this time.’
NOT surprisingly, there was romance too — old-fashioned courting between couples which led to engagements, the formal reading of marriage banns and, when their Japanese captors agreed to it, weddings.
Her diary also records the occasional baby born out of wedlock and adopted by married women.
‘There were plenty of relationships between men and women,’ says Barbara today. ‘ It was particularly difficult. You had lots of lonely men whose wives had been evacuated to Australia. And women whose men were in military camps.’
Barbara’s own pre-war boyfriend, Sgt Arthur Alsey, was an ‘ unserious’ affair, she says, although she knitted mittens for him from an unravelled jumper when the Japanese agreed to let women send Christmas packages to the prisoners of war camp at Sham Shui Po.
As years went by in captivity Barbara despaired of ever marrying. ‘They were our prime years,’ she says now. ‘We felt as if our lives were on hold. On my 25th birthday, my younger sister’s boyfriend in camp said: “Poor old Barbara. Quarter of a century!” I felt as if my life was passing me by.’
In one charmingly girlish entry, she records how she found a pink dress to wear to a doctors’ party in camp but decided not to go at the last minute. ‘I heard there would be dancing and was certain I would be one of the unchosen so hadn’t the courage to go,’ she wrote on December 29,1942, adding later: ‘I don’t really regret not going — except for the food.’
What is most striking of all, however, is the extent to which life carried on as normal and how their Japanese captors largely left them to their own devices. School lessons and nativity plays were organised for the 200 children there, as were church services.
There were plays, quizzes, music recitals, gramophone evenings and choir practices. Raffles offered meagre prizes such as a single egg or a campembroidered cushion cover.
Bridge clubs and a Pacifist Society were set up along with French and German classes. There were lectures on subjects as varied as ‘Elephant hunting in Ceylon’ and ‘Glimpses into surgical history’.
Barbara worked as a shorthand typist at the camp office set up by internees to keep records. As an aspiring writer, much of her time was devoted to penning stories and plays — many of which were performed in camp.
Amid the daily bustle of camp life, her diary is punctuated by a poignant record of births and deaths which, by 1945, were an almost daily occurrence.
In all, 121 internees at Camp Stanley died, mostly due to illness. There were accidents, too. A toddler drowned after wandering into the sea. And 14 men and women were killed when the camp was accidentally bombed by U.S. naval planes.
Another seven men were executed after being found with a radio set and Barbara recalls the fear they felt when warned by the Japanese that ‘ any religious or communal gatherings to express sympathy with those executed will not be tolerated’.
‘We really were frightened,’ she says. ‘We had absolutely no power at all. We were afraid that if the Allies tried to attack Hong Kong that we might be massacred at the end.’
Rumours of Japanese defeat circulated for weeks before the camp was liberated in August 1945.
‘Is it really true or is it just another of those dreams which have haunted and tortured us for three-and-a-half years?’ she wrote on buff-coloured Chinese toilet paper, having run out of diary space. That document is now kept at the Imperial War Museum in London.
After the war, she and her family were repatriated to the UK but Barbara returned in 1946 to work for the Hong Kong government. She and Arthur did not resume their relationship.
She found herself working alongside Frank Anslow, who had also been at Stanley Camp, and friendship blossomed into romance. They were married for 55 years until his death in 2003.
‘The fact that we had both gone through the same experience really strengthened our marriage,’ she says.
‘We were so lucky to have so many wonderful years together.’
SHE visited Hong Kong ten years ago to mark her 90th birthday and read a commemorative poem on Horse Guards Parade in London during events to mark the 70th anniversary of VJ Day.
Her diaries have now been published as a book called Tin Hats And Rice after extracts she posted on an internet page about Stanley Camp were spotted by a publisher.
On the cover of the book is a black-and-white photograph of Barbara and two male colleagues, taken just a few hours before the British surrendered to the Japanese on Christmas Day 1941.
She is wearing a tin hat and smiling, apparently unaware of the extraordinary twist her life was about to take.
Tin Hats And Rice: A Diary Of Life As A Hong Kong Prisoner Of War by Barbara Anslow is published by Blacksmith Books and is available on Amazon.