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‘The Royal Navy came up the road and into camp, there was truck after truck after truck. It was so overwhelming’
Bill Macauley with the book Stolen Childhoods
Bill Macauley enjoyed a privileged childhood growing up in Hong Kong.
His father worked for the Chinese Maritime Customs. Bill and his older brother Jim went to boarding school in Kowloon.
Bill had just made it into the first eleven cricket team and in his spare time he could either be found practising in the nets or at the cinema with his brother.
Bill was 15 on December 8, 1941 – the day after the attack on Pearl Harbour – when aircraft began dropping bombs on Hong Kong airport, which was no more than two miles from his school.
As a prefect, he had been in the middle of a dormitory inspection. The day boys had been sent home to their families the day before so Bill rounded up the seven other boarders as well as the only remaining staff, a young American teacher and a middle-aged British matron, and took them down to the air raid shelter with a packed suitcase each.
The next day, with air raids still going on overhead, a naval officer turned up at the school. He asked the six older boys if they would like to become dispatch corps messengers. If so, they were to report for duty the following day wearing their khaki Scout uniforms.
Their job was to deliver messages to the families of service personnel telling them to assemble on the waterfront the following day ready to board boats for Hong Kong island.
After a harrowing journey under fire from the Japanese, they made it to the island.
Bill rounded up his charges from his boarding school and they went to find shelter where they could, spending the first night in an office block.
From December 13 to 21 Bill continued to run messages for the Air Raid Precaution service.
On Christmas Day came the news the Allies had surrendered. Separated from his family and still responsible for the younger boys from his school, Bill was forced to go out foraging for food.
Then on January 4, the Japanese announced all enemy nationals were to report the next day at a former British barracks.
Carrying a suitcase packed with as much food as he could carry, Bill arrived at the barracks where they were separated into groups of 50 to 100 and marched off to three down-market hotels, formerly Chinese-run brothels.
There, they were left to fend for themselves.
“It was dog eat dog,” says Bill, now 85.
“The Japanese used to allow food in each morning and we would grab what we could.”
Each person would receive a one-inch thick piece of bread a day, basic rations of porridge and a little fish.
It was over-crowded, but Bill made sure to look out for Matron and her Scottie dog Missie.
Three weeks later, on January 26, they were told to be ready to leave the next morning.
They were marched through the streets and loaded on to boats which would take them to Stanley Internment Camp, the concentration camp that would be Bill’s home for the next three-and-a-half years.
Stanley Camp was a series of brick buildings that were former prison warden quarters. There were hundreds of bodies lying where they had fallen three weeks after the battle and everything was in short supply, from beds and clothing to cooking equipment and cleaning supplies.
In total 2,400 people were held there, yet it was a lonely place for Bill.
“No family wanted to take in a teenager on his own,” he said. “They didn’t want to take on the responsibility of an extra child and have another hungry mouth to share their rations with.”
Bill slept where he could, sometimes finding space with his schoolmate Bobby Parker, other times on his own.
Despite the torturous conditions, Bill continued with his education, being tutored by teachers and university lecturers who were among the internees.
They used whatever scraps of paper they could lay their hands on, including labels from food tins, and Bill fashioned a Qwerty keyboard out of pieces of wood and learned typing and short-hand, skills that proved invaluable when he joined the RAF after the war.
He said: “I sat my O levels in Stanley in 1942 but unfortunately for me they never kept records until 1943.”
Bill got a job in the camp kitchen, helping to prepare the rice and sweet potato the internees lived on for 44 months.
He earned five cents a day, half a cigarette and – most importantly – an extra bowl of rice.
But he was still malnourished and his health suffered as a result. He had repeated bouts of malaria and twice needed operations to treat septic sores on his legs and feet as he had long outgrown his shoes and went barefoot.
In 1943 Stanley Camp, technically in civilian hands, came under military control and all meat and fish rations ceased. Hunger became all consuming during the latter years.
Hopes of home rose in December 1943 when the Canadians were repatriated, but the Brits would remain there until after VJ Day in 1945.
He said: “Everyone thinks VJ Day was August 15 but for us it was August 16.
“We had an order to go down to the distribution point and they gave us American toilet rolls, one per head.
“No way would the Japanese have given us American toilet rolls before. We got a wheelbarrow and piled it up.”
However, it wasn’t until two weeks after the Japanese surrender that Bill saw the thrilling sight that convinced him he really would soon be free.
From the roof of his building he saw the Royal Navy heading for the island.
Bill said: “They came up the road into camp and there was truck after truck after truck. It was so overwhelming.”
There were no scenes of celebration as one might expect but they did raise the Union flag over the camp. One officer who was standing next to Bill noticed he was barefoot. After asking him discreetly what size shoe he wore, he returned the following day with a brand new pair of officer’s boots and socks.
Sadly Matron, who Bill had remained close to throughout their time at Stanley, died of beriberi caused by a deficiency of vitamin B1 days before the camp was liberated.
It was on September 11, 1945, that Bill began his journey home to England, finally destined to be reunited with his family.
During his time in Stanley Camp, four Red Cross letters had made it through to him from his family with the news they had been repatriated in November 1942.
He thought his parents and siblings were safe. But on the ship home word reached him that his father had died in 1943 and his beloved brother Jim was missing in action. The day he arrived back at his family home in Belfast, a telegraph arrived confirming Jim was dead.
His crew had been shot down over Hungary.
Returning to normal life was hard. His mother had last seen him as a 15-year-old schoolboy. Now he was 19 and a different person.
Bill said: “The family had got a Government leaflet on the mantelpiece about how to cope with returning prisoners. It warned about odd behaviour, disturbed sleep patterns. I put it on the fire.
“We’d had lectures on board ship about what to expect when we got home. We ere expressly told ‘Don’t tell your folks how bad it was. It will only upset them. England has had a rough time too. Concentrate on getting on with your life’.”
Bill joined the Royal Air Force in 1946 and he ended up serving for 23 years as a nurse.
But for years after the end of the war, he struggled to cope and a psychiatrist he worked alongside unofficially diagnosed him with Far East Prisoner of War syndrome.
It was while serving in the RAF that he met his wife Cathy, also a nurse, who came from Rothwell, and the couple moved to Kettering where Bill went on to work for more than 20 years at Kettering General Hospital’s accident and emergency department before retiring.
The couple have two children and have now been married for 53 years.
Bill Macauley’s story is featured in a new book about the children interned by the Japanese during the Second World War called Stolen Childhoods by Nicola Tyrer.
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