earthquake. Everyone rushed into the corridors and the Captain and Interpreter came around to calm everyone down. There were innumerable small quakes every few weeks but about once a year we would get one that was really quite frightening, but the Japanese were accustomed to the unstable nature of their ground and were not over anxious. Also our building, built on a steel frame had the natural flexibility to withstand the usual shocks that were a normal occurrence in that unstable part of the world.
In September I started work with one of the missionaries an elderly plump woman with a hair bun who started to school me by starting a diary which has been invaluable in writing this account. She was a kind lady who amazed me by saying that Darwin’s Theory of Evolution were the teachings of the devil, and against the Bible. It was my first experience of meeting someone whose idea of history was dominated by faith rather than reason. At home both Father and Mother were supremely rational. Father in particular, because my Grandad had fallen on hard times, and had never been to a proper school, had been forced to pick up his education from extensive reading and from his time as an officer in the Army in the first world war. Mother too was very much an intellectual rationalist influenced a lot by the “Bloomsbury set” of which she was an avid fan.
Although I was as an eleven year old on a very strict regime in a very harsh prison camp there were some compensations which I seized from the moment we were allowed out into the grounds after the first five days. The Camp was surrounded by an extensive garden of a few acres in size. To the front were some ornamental trees etc, but the other two sides were occupied by a large vegetable garden tended by an old wrinkle faced, deep lined Japanese peasant gardener. I became very friendly with him and he was kind and dignified in return, and would give me things to eat that he had grown. I watched intently as he daily ladled out with a scoop on the end of a long pole the night soil from the cess pit from the lavatories. This was laboriously placed into two long wooden buckets that when full would be joined by a yoke that he placed across the shoulders behind his neck, On reaching the vegetable garden the mixture would again be spooned out in a long line on the edge of growing carrots, leeks etc. It was the traditional way of maintaining fertility and supposedly a reason why the Japanese suffered from worms particularly as their vegetables tended to be eaten raw! First I was amazed at the strange exotic fauna around. Almost the first day walking around I noticed an emerald green frog clinging to the branch of a small fruit tree. At first because of its brightness and translucency I thought it was glass and had been left by the nuns. I went to touch it, and suddenly what I thought was an inanimate object leapt onto another branch showering my hand with urine at the same time. Then there were the large shiny green caterpillars with a long tail and circles over their legs which feasted on the fennel. Later they made shiny silvery cocoons out of which came the glorious yellow and orange swallowtail butterflies or huge hawk moths. Then there would appear as from nowhere enormous praying – mantis insects about 4 or 5 inches long. They were huge green winged and veined like a leaf, with tiny large eyed triangular heads, with vicious claws and would often attack and eat each other. Sometimes one would chew off another’s head, whilst the headless one was still attacking and digging his claws into his adversary! In the trees there was the incessant song of the many cicadas.…All these things and many more I came to notice. So although my freedom was curtailed, I had one commodity in abundance that few children in this modern affluent world regretfully now have, and that was time. Time to think, time to day dream, of the heaven of my home at Luckyland Estate, in the blue hills of Uva in Ceylon, of trips into aromatic scented Australian
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