Camp in a former hotel, where they were allowed to visit the shops, go for walks in the country, and play tennis and had excellent food. After a fortnight of this luxury they were abruptly dispatched to our camp to enjoy themselves under the pleasant regime of our salubrious resort! A most bitter pill for them to swallow especially after their earlier horrific capture.
I was to become very friendly with young Graham who was only just a year younger than myself, and we became good pals doing everything together, including being repeatedly punished by the Japs. For the last two years of our imprisonment I was to share a room with him as well as the Greek Captain..
On the 8th December we had a really severe hoare frost which made all the trees white, and then this was followed next day by the first proper snow of the winter when we had a foot on the ground and about two foot in drifts. Luckily at this point the radiators were turned on to warm the building . We boys, all went into the garden and played snowballs and made some snow men. In the garden were two large persimmon trees which had dropped all their leaves, just leaving the golden fruit on the trees which against the white background of the snow, was an extremely pretty sight ,like a Chinese painting. As mentioned above, my friend the old Japanese wrinkled faced gardener who was a very kind and gentle character, like most old peasants the world over, would let me help myself to the fruits which only in December with the cold weather had ripened sufficiently to be edible. Prior to that they were so astringent that ones mouth was immediately dried up. There were two trees, one with a hard crisp rounded apple like fruit, the other was pointed and when ripe was very soft and squelchy inside. Both were different and it was hard to decide which was preferable.
The snow quickly melted but a fortnight later we had more snow of about four inches thick, and very heavy frosts, so bad in fact that ice in the water butts were over four inches thick, and even in the bathroom indoors, hot water from the previous night had frozen by the morning. For the record, the low temperatures that we encountered during the three years that we spent in Fukushima were the coldest ever noted with January and February 1943 averaging below freezing for the whole of the two months.
To give an example of the hardy nature of some of the guards, there were about three or four of them that in the middle of this bitter winter weather with snow deep on the ground, at night in the dark, would just don a pair of shorts with no covering, not even a vest on the upper part of their body, and go for a run two or three times round the camp. They would come in and then go straight to the camp bathroom, to have a normal Japanese bath. This consisted of having a small wooden bucket to throw hot water over oneself. Then soap was applied and one rubbed oneself down with a flannel, and later rinsed the suds off with more douches from the small bucket. Finally when clean all would get into a large communal wooden oblong straight sided tub, about 6 ft x 4ft and about 4 ft high where they would all sit together for a long while relaxing in the hot water. Our baths were done in a similar manner about once a fortnight, but with not much time for the soaking.