existed as a free woman and had come to expect freedom as a matter of course, and it was not until I had lost it that I really understood its value. Freedom means this to me: The right to be with, to love and to touch my husband and children; the right to look about me without fear of seeing people struck or beaten or punished; the right to hear a man’s footsteps and know that it is not a guard. The right to work for oneself and one’s people. The possession of a door and a key with which to lock it. Moments of silence, and a place to weep and be private with no one else to see you. The freedom of my eyes to admire the face of this earth, the mountains, trees, the fields, the sea, without barbed wire and a high wall stretched across my vision. The strength to walk with the wind in my face and no sentry to stop me. The ability to look at the new moon without seeing it as a symbol of passing time, and saying to myself ‘how many more times must it rise on my captivity?’ These are things that make the freedom which I hope never to give up again. Knowing the utter desolation that was to face one, day after day, week after week, month after month as our captivity continued and one felt one’s moral courage weakening or ebbing away. Then one’s optimism would be faltering knowing the virtual dissolution of body and soul, which with certain conditions of living even more than dying bring about, and the constant ordeal to keep alive and not to give in because your own child’s life depended on it. Now that one is back amongst free people again, you feel a wide gap between yourself and them. It is an emotional gap due to the life that one has lived, and the things that one has seen, and the thoughts that one has thought. The remedy is not pills though, because it is only people who have been through a similar experience who fully understand you, as they are on the same side of the gap with you. They alone may help you cross it one day to help you join the rest of the world as it moves on. Each individual in the camp had a floor space of 6ft x 4ftin which to sleep, eat, live, or die without privacy and quietness. The Mothers with children were the hardest hit of all with the constant strain of lack of food and hunger, and the worry of how long the meagre rations would continue to be doled out to us. There were fourteen mothers in all, and we washed, shouted, hated, fought, laughed and wept together, and without exception all helped each other. Life was grim and we lived not far above the level of animals who feed, fight for, nurture, and love and protect their young. I use the terms Prisoner and Prison Camp instead of Internment because that is how the Japs conducted their war rules. At irregular intervals, usually if someone had been “naughty” by breaking one of the 150 odd rules, we would be summoned together and lectured and told that we had insulted “His Majesty the Emperor”, who was practically regarded as a living presence with us. We would be reminded again of our status and told the rules for conduct of Prisoners of War. A guard was always right, and a prisoner always wrong, and so we were always victims of his inferiority complex which took the form of imaginary slights, and so in consequence we were often deliberately accused and punished for things that we never did. It was humiliating to be ruled, bullied, by ignorant uncouth, uneducated peasant boys all under 25 who would make obscene remarks and gestures or shout and brandish their swords on the least provocation. In our women’s camp all we had to complain of was starvation, weakness, occasional blows, constant regimentation, and work with no strength at all carried out on a ration of 15ozs of daily bread and the loneliness of one’s soul away from one’s family. However no women could have been kinder if one was sick, if one was being punished, or if your ration was cut. Not even your nearest and dearest could have given you the sympathy or done more than they did for you in those dark days of adversity. Because what one gives spiritually or materially in captivity, is worth ten times more than in the normal everyday world. But the human

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