Joyce Storey tells Diane Parkes how three gruelling years as a wartime prisoner haunted her for decades after.
It is a grainy small photograph of a group of girls dressed in their guide uniforms and neatly lined up for the camera. But what is not immediately obvious from the photograph is that it was taken in a Japanese concentration camp.
These girls were among 3,000 British children who had been living in Asia when Japan overran the continent and joined the fighting of the Second World War.
Rounded up and imprisoned in camps run by the Japanese, the youngsters suffered from hunger, cold and disease. Many were hundreds or even thousands of miles away from their parents, dependent on their friends and the adults around them.
In the years when they should have been carefree children they were forced to survive under harsh conditions and constant guard.
Released after the Japanese surrender in August 1945, many of these children were changed irrevocably by their experiences and would go on to carry the scars throughout their adult lives.
Seated on the back row of the picture, second from left, is Joyce Kerry (now Storey). Then a teenager Joyce spent nearly three years, when she was 12-15, interned by the Japanese.
Joyce is now 80 and living in Hollywood, Birmingham, and while many of the memories have faded, others remain as vivid as ever.
Joyce was a boarder at Chefoo School in the city of Chefoo, now Yantai, in north eastern China when life changed dramatically.
“Our school had huge grounds in its own compound with a girls’ school, a boys’ school, a prep and a san where you went for recuperation,” she recalls. “The Japanese took us out of there and they took us to Temple Hill on the other side of the city. It was a long walk and they put us in a compound there. This was November 1942.
“We were the girls’ school and there were a few other odd bods who must have found it really strange being with us. There were two Trappist monks, one was really friendly and he put his autograph in my autograph book.”
In the summer of 1943 the pupils were moved again, taking a two-day journey by steamer and train, this time to a more permanent construction – Weihsien camp in what is now Shandung province, northern China.
Joyce was to spend the next two years of her life there.
“There were more than 1,500 people there, all civilians, and it was more like a village than the previous camp,” she recalls.
“The Japanese had a policy of letting the internees organise themselves so it was very disciplined. Jobs were apportioned out so there were people responsible for cooking or other jobs. The Japanese were not fighting in that area but it was a bit like that film, Empire of the Sun, because you would see the planes going over.”
Joyce’s teachers soon established order and began lessons again. Also a pupil at Chefoo was Joyce’s brother Brian, who was two years younger, and although the boys’ and girls’ schools were kept separate, the siblings made sure they maintained close contact.
“In the camp we were known as ‘best brother and sister’ because we had such a good relationship.”
But daily life was hard.
“One of the problems was clothes,” recalls Joyce. “We were all growing and although clothes could be passed down they would only last so long. We made clothes out of tablecloths and out of curtains.
“And when I couldn’t wear my shoes any more I went around barefoot. That was all right in the summer but the winter was cold. I remember just walking through puddles and thinking how cold my feet were. This was northern China and it could get very cold in winter and we had barely any heat.”
Rations were also a problem.
“We used to eat all kinds of porridge. We had millet porridge and I quite liked that but they also made porridge out of gaoliang, a kind of grain they have there and that was awful. For lunch the cooks would just use whatever they had and make a stew. But there were things we really had to go without such as eggs and milk.”
The adults were concerned that the children were lacking in calcium so took to saving any egg shells which could be ground up and served to the youngsters in a drink.
“That was horrible, it was just gritty. You would try coughing on it to blow it away,” says Joyce. “But it must have worked. I think I was lucky because I didn’t have an enormous appetite so I could manage.”
Not that internees were never poorly.
“I had hepatitis when I was there so they took me off and made sure I had a proper diet to make sure I was well again. When we were in the first camp a lot of people got mumps. I had always wanted to be a nurse and that was my first experience of nursing, running around looking after them all.”
Although many of the children had been boarding students and were used to living away from home, the lack of contact with their families was hard.
Joyce’s parents Arthur and Margaret escaped internment as they were working as missionaries in Szechwan province in western China, a part of the country which was not occupied. They were only able to maintain sporadic contact with Brian and Joyce through letters and returned to the UK to await the release of their children.
“Letters did not get through very often,” says Joyce.
“Brian and I had an eight month gap when we didn’t hear from our parents. And one letter from them took a year to come through. They had actually come back to Britain and we didn’t even know that.”
In August 1945 the Japanese surrendered and the dismantling of the camps began. Joyce kept a diary of those times and she recalls the first landing of American troops.
“An aeroplane came over the camp, it circled round and round to see if it would be shot at but because nothing happened some parachutes dropped.”
But it was to be December before Joyce and Brian would be reunited with their family, including little sister Trish, now 70, and baby brother Mike, now 68, in Rayleigh in Sussex. The Chefoo pupils were initially taken by train to the seaport of Tsingtao before sailing to Hong Kong. From there they embarked on the SS Arawa back to England.
“We got back just before Christmas,” recalls Joyce. “And then in January we started at our new schools in Southend-on-Sea.”
Joyce initially found it difficult to adapt to being back in the UK. Her schooling had suffered in the camps so she was put down a year and, severely short-sighted, she had broken her glasses on the return journey and was waiting for a new pair.
“Not having the right clothes, not being able to see, not knowing anyone did make it difficult,” she says.
And those years in Wiehsien stayed locked up inside her.
“In those days you didn’t talk about things,” she said. “You just contained the situation and conformed. You put it away.”
Even with her beloved brother, now 78, the events of the 1940s were never mentioned.
“We didn’t talk about it when we were growing up – which is something I regret now.”
Joyce trained to be a nurse, progressing to midwifery and then becoming a health visitor. In 1964 she moved to Birmingham, initially living in Small Heath where her father the Rev Arthur Sidney Kerry was minister at Bordesley Green Baptist Church. She married Arthur, who worked for British Leyland and as a woodwork instructor with Birmingham City Mission, before both retired.
Throughout this time Joyce tended to keep quiet about her childhood in the camps. But in the 1990s the group ABCIFER, Association for British Civilian Internees in the Far East Region, drew people’s attention to the former camp inmates.
“I was a member of the Chefoo School Association so they found my details through that. They were looking for compensation for the internees.
“When I received the information from ABCIFER I just broke down. I sat here and bawled. It just opened the floodgates.”
ABCIFER has created a book, British Civilians Interned by the Japanese in World War Two, which is kept at St Michael’s Church in Cornhill in London. Within those pages are the names of both Brian and Joyce Kerry.
A commemoration service at the church in 2009 gave Joyce the chance to meet other people who had lived through the ordeal.
“It was just a very small part of my life in a war that I hadn’t talked about,” she says. “But I think it affected me for a long time. Because I was a boarder before the camps I had been separated from my parents since I was 8 until I was 15.
“When I came back I had spent nearly three years in the two camps. That meant that I really struggled with things in daily life, things like social graces. I had never learned how to deal with these things. There were situations which I found hard to handle into my twenties and thirties.”
Joyce is now much more comfortable telling her story although she admits there are limits. She was recently interviewed for a new book Stolen Childhoods by Nicola Tyrer which tells the stories of many children interned by the Japanese during the war.
“I read my bits but I haven’t been able to bring myself to read the rest yet,” admits Joyce. “I think it might be too difficult, too upsetting.”
* Stolen Childhoods by Nicola Tyrer is published by Orion for £20
