body is tough and with friendship can survive sickness and starvation. My boy’s life depended on me and his only chance of health and growth and his whole future attitude to life and his character revolved on me. It was a great responsibility for me all alone. On the evening of our first day of Peace I sat down and tried to write. I wanted inspired spectacular words. Words to express to the world just what freedom meant but I could not find them. I wanted some way of expressing to others what had happened to us that day. I wanted to shout and tell them all what it was like to be a captive in Japan, and now what it was like to be once again free. Just what it meant to go through an ordeal like that for over three years, and to walk in the nightmare company of death with sadistic gaolers in the melancholy of imprisonment in a far away land. I finally left the story to be told by more able pens than mine. On the 11th September at 1 ½ hours notice we were told to get ready to leave. I packed our bags, put on that frock that I had saved for 3 ½ years and amidst tears gave a silent prayer and thanks to that Unseen Force, or Power for Goodness, or God call it what you will, Who had watched over us miraculously all these years. We departed still thinking it was yet another dream. To have remained undefeated in spirit amid all the circumstances of defeat is a man’s most signal triumph, and my son and I had done it together, and we had both finally got through! A great many of us now in the aftermath may be a little surly, a little indolent, sometimes strangely irritable. But we are beings who fought for our pride, and saved it whole; a little bit of Britain in our minds, in a long unchronicled private war. A war in which no decorations can ever be given, but to have come out of it with the whole spirit intact is the highest honour one could ever wish to achieve, far more so even than mere survival. It was our spirit that in the end , even procured for us the deepest respect of the Japanese themselves. I came away from that camp with nothing more than a greater tolerance and understanding of human nature, a greater sense of values, and a greater love for ordinary everyday people in their triumph over adversity.” The train slowly rumbled through hilly green country northwards through Miyagi and Iwanuma towards Sendai. We passed through picturesque valleys, across paddy fields now starting to turn gold with the ripening heads of rice, and through lush orchards and the green wooded hills all around, until at about 4.30 in the afternoon we arrived at the Northern port of Shiogama just north of Sendai. This was a complete and utter ruin with hardly a building left standing following the shelling offshore from the American Task Force two months before. We disembarked at the ruins of the station and were led by the first Americans that we had seen towards the seashore. Here there was a hive of activity with Seabees laying down steel road cladding and jeeps all rushing to and fro The beach was full of small landing craft with door ramps open unloading supplies. We strode across the beach in a daze, I carrying our few possessions in Mother’s kitbag on my shoulder, then walked up the ramp of the LCT (landing craft tank) and shortly afterwards we were under way and moved to a large USS Hospital Ship anchored in mid harbour. This we now boarded and were led down companion ways into its labyrinthine interior to be suddenly forced to strip and all the clothes that we were wearing, were taken off us to be incinerated. We were sprayed naked, deloused, given a good hot shower, after which we followed naked in line to receive a whole quota of standard GI new army uniform. Now smartly dressed in GI pale khaki we were led on to the mess, and had the most sumptuous dinner, our first cooked meal away from the camp, served by sailors with the whole range American accents and humour from Bronx to Southern Drawl. Not long after exhausted, we turned in for an early night in our bunks where we quietly

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