Return to previous page	Listen to interview
Wilma Young Transcript of interview by Ina Bertrand 4th December 2000, Tape 3
Wilma Young interviewed, 4th December 2000, Tape 3. And can I ask you next about food in that camp? Yes, the Japanese provided the food. We had rice - they gave us enough rice so that we could have about half a cup a … eh … or perhaps a little bit more … Do you mean half a cup of dry rice or half a cup after it had been cooked? I mean dry rice. So that would fluff up into about a cup and a half? Yes, it would. Well in the morning we … the small ration we got we made into a porridge with a lot of water and a lot of stirring. We made it into what we called booboo, which was a kind of rice porridge for lunch. Now, that is now one of the treatments for diarrhoea in some of the disadvantaged countries, so in fact that may have been helping you with the dysentery. Yes, well the people with very bad dysentery just had that type of food all the time, but the rest of us … ate boiled rice in grains, about half a cup for midday I suppose and then about another half a cup at night. Was this polished rice or brown rice? Well, mostly polished, occasionally it was brown rice and if we got brown rice that was wonderful because our beriberi immediately showed signs of improvement with the brown rice, unpolished, but we mostly got polished rice. But it was also rice that was the sweepings of the go-downs. The rice wasn’t clean, we had to stop and pick out the broken glass and rat droppings and all that sort of thing. It wasn’t like the beautiful packets of rice that we buy at the supermarket. So eh … What would you put with the rice? With the rice, we didn’t have salt and we didn’t have sugar and eh the Japanese would bring in occasionally a few vegetables. Kankong, which is a type of spinach and grows profusely in Indonesia, they brought that in. Occasionally there would be a pretty bad cucumber and em .. some towgai occasionally, that is bean shoots and em there might be a brinjal now and then. But very … very little in the way of vegetables, and meat - very, very seldom. They would throw a piece of meat down on the ground, on the road, put their foot on it and carve it up with their bayonet and that was all the meat we got which, by the time it was sorted out between everybody, didn’t … didn’t end up by being very much for anybody, so … but we were always starving. At one stage the Japanese let a Chinese merchant come in with his cart, with his yak and a cart, with a bit of extra food, but that had to be bought and if you didn’t have any money, you couldn’t buy it. So having been shipwrecked we actually didn’t have any money. We had lost all our possessions. Did the civilians have money with them? The people that weren't shipwrecked, yes, most of them had money. So this hadn’t been taken off them by the Japanese? No, no, the Dutch and Indonesians who had been interned and lived there, they had their goods and their clothes and they had money as well, which made life a bit easier for them. Eh … but, to earn a bit of money there were all sorts of things done. Some of the nurses used to perhaps look after children for some of the other ladies, and eh … or perhaps do a bit of washing for them. But as far as … if you did nursing duties, you know, you were never paid for that. Em … somehow or other you did nursing duties without any pay at all and em … eh … well. What sort of jobs did you personally do, for payment? No, I didn’t go in for jobs for payment because I took the view that I would conserve my energy and live on the Japanese rations, rather than trying to eh work, eh and em use up more energy than I could replace with what I bought with the money. That was in that camp, that was what I thought. Were there many like you, who thought that way? Oh, I think there were quite a few, yes, that thought that way, but there were some that got a bit of money. I think eh … we arranged to get a loan eh of some money from one of the Dutch women, with the promise of paying back when we got home. So we had access to a little bit for a little while, but em … not very much, so em … yes. In that camp there was a Dutch hospital in Palembang that was still operating, so if anybody was very sick, the Japanese would allow them to go to the hospital. They would send an ambulance in to take them to the hospital, so we always had somebody from the camp going in and out of the hospital and em … that way … eh … some of the women could make contact with their husbands with notes and things. How far away was the men’s camp? Oh well, it wasn’t that far away, but we had no contact with them, not even within sight of them and eh … Just keep going the men were not allowed to talk to their wives and … nor the wives to have any contact with their husbands, so eh … but eh … So how were notes passed to and fro and how would you find the paper to write notes on? Oh well, there was a bit of paper about, not much, but a little bit and the notes were smuggled in and out. I know one of the nurses went to come home from the hospital. She had been searched by the guards and she was in a state of collapse by the time she got to us. And she had had notes she had on her dress that she had and she’d … the hem of her dress, she had sewn notes in all around the hem of her dress and of course they hadn’t been found but she would have been in trouble if they had been. They were smuggled in and out. However, after a bit there was trouble and the Mother Superior of the nuns was locked up, the Dutch doctor and the Indonesian doctor were beheaded and the nuns that were working in the hospital - eh the hospital was shut down - and they were brought into our camp and they spent the rest of the war in the camp with us. Do you know what the trouble was that caused this? Oh, it was something to do with … it was something to do with … there was an uprising in one of the islands nearby END OF SIDE A, TAPE 2 SIDE B, TAPE 2 Just can't bring to mind the name of the island, and they said that this trouble was being stirred up, you know, by people from our camp and eh … so they … from the hospital … and eh, so anyway, it was all shut down. So the nuns came into the hospital and they brought as much with them as they could in the way of medicines and things, and from then on in our camp area we had always put aside part of the hospital, which these nuns looked after and called a hospital and we used to help them there, whenever it was necessary. Well now, in that camp, just one day they came and em just … we never had any notice, just "Get onto these trucks and, you know, we are taking you somewhere else". And they took us over to what had been the men’s camp. It was a camp that the men had built and had occupied, but they had been moved from Sumatra back to Banka and we were to go into their camp. But they were unaware that the women were going to move into their camp and of course it had been left in a terrible mess. So, we had to set to and clean that up. Now this was a camp consisting of eh huts with eh … eh atap, sort of a palm leaf roof and sides. It was very flimsy, but it did keep the weather off you, as long as the roof didn’t leak and we had wooden platforms that we slept on, and we had 24 inches each, measured off, 24 inches, that is all the space we had and there was … there was a path up the middle and there’s wooden platforms on each side and eh … there was a … another hut with a concrete floor that we used … and of course a gutter which was used as a toilet and the rest of it, we used to pour water over ourselves to have a wash. We got the water out of a well. It was a muddy well, but we got our water out of it and the British lived on one side, the Dutch lived on the opposite side and the guard house and the hospital were at one end and the kitchen for cooking was at the other end. The middle was mud actually, when it was wet, it was just plain dirt and the well was in the middle of that square of land. There was another building there which was just a square eh … little building with open sides, a roof that we called a pindopa … eh … and eh … that is where we had our concert when that music for em … that Miss Dryburgh wrote from memory and that choir that was created in that camp. that is where we had that, out in that pindopa. Were you part of the choir? Look, if you could hear me sing you would know that I was never part of any choir. I can't raise a note I am afraid. So can you describe the choir, because of course it became very famous after Paradise Road was made. Yes, well Miss Dryburgh was a missionary and she could write music from memory and she wrote all this music and made no mistakes and then Nora Chambers put it into parts for different parts and eh … then there was a choir of about 30 women who hummed … because we didn’t know the words of these things and eh … she hummed … they all hummed in these different parts and created this marvellous music. Largo - and I can't remember the names of them now. Em … oh yes, I know all the names, but just can't recall them. But they were … it is magnificent music and em … And they performed this just for the camp? They performed it for us in the camp. The first eh time it was performed the Japanese tried to stop it because they didn’t like us all congregating together. It looked as though we were stirring up trouble, but Nora Chambers just ignored them and started the choir off singing and the Japs stayed to listen and they always came from then on to listen to the music. They were very fond, apparently, of music and em … yes, that was something that everybody in the camp just felt different when that was being sung. It was uplifting and eh … took our minds and our thoughts out of prison camp and was a wonderful occasion. How often did that happen? Oh, it only happened about half a dozen times because half the women in the choir died and its eh … so that had to come to an end, unfortunately. And Miss Dryburgh herself died before we got out of prison camp. Although Nora Chambers survived. But in that camp, in that men’s camp, eh … the … it was in that camp that the … no it wasn’t … it was in another camp … no, in that camp, I was a rice cook there. We used to cook in little groups, but the Japanese em … came along one day and demolished all our little groups and said we had to cook in em … the Dutch cooked for themselves, and the British had to cook for themselves and so … em … they asked for strong women and so we went out and we picked up these huge iron quaalies - like big woks, like that one over there, and em … we em … balanced them on some bricks, we had no mortar or anything, we balanced them on bricks that we found and then we had a call for rice cooks, so I volunteered and my colleagues set up an said what did I know about cooking rice. And I said, "Well I don’t know anything really." They thought it was a very dubious thing for me to be doing, however, I became a rice cook with another lady called Lilias Beeston, an English woman and em … we used to get up at 4 o’clock in the morning and cook this … two huge quaalies or … of rice, eh … like porridge, make it into porridge, which meant you had to stir it without stopping, otherwise it caught on the bottom and if you caught it, then of course people lost a bit of their ration and that couldn’t happen. So em … and then we had to cook another lot for lunch and another lot for the evening meal, but we just cooked ordinary … we managed to cook it so that it was just ordinary cooked rice - it was quite an art actually to cook for about 300 people. Where did the water come from? Out of the well, muddy water. So how did you cope with that? Did you have time to let the water stand, or did you just used it muddy? We just used it, we didn’t have time to let it stand and just used it. At that stage they made us dig up the centre of our camp and plant epikayou, which is tapioca roots, and we had to cart water to water that. There was a drought over there, that was 1943, eh … so we used to cart all these buckets of water, nice fresh water and put it on the plants, but you couldn’t eh … if you were caught substituting it, there would be trouble. We had to use the water out of the well for cooking, for rice. So, we used to cook the rice and em … Mamie McIntosh, a Scottish woman, she was in charge of our cooking squad, and she cooked the vegetables. That was her job - she and somebody else em cooked up the few vegetables we got and they were dished out to youNow, we were in that camp for quite a while, eh .. 8 months or so I think. We had a few deaths in that camp. Valda Godly, eh … an English woman eh … with whom we were very friendly and we looked after her as much as we could, but she died and eh … Vivian and I had to sit up all night with the body eh … to make sure the rats didn’t get it … because that is the trouble with eh … we had rats and things to contend with. Did anybody ever consider eating the rats? Oh yes, if you could catch them, you could eat them, yes. Did you do that? No, I didn’t. I don’t fancy rat, but in another camp we ate skunk and other things that are unnamable. Goodness knows, I wasn’t cooking then and I don’t know really what they put in the food there, but we ate it anyhow. But em … yes. Conditions were getting steadily worse and the health of the people were getting steadily worse too weren't they, over this time? Yes, things were very bad at that stage, yes. We had what entertainment we could. There was a Dutch lady, Rita Venning, Rita used to do the dances, the beautiful … Ballet? Yes, dances that eh … some of those native people do, they are lovely. The hula? Not the hula, no. Em … you know how the Indonesians dance. Oh, the traditional dancing of Indonesia and Thailand and places like that? Yes, that sort of dancing. And she was marvellous at it. She had a little boy, William, he was only a baby. William, he used to run around the camp, he never wore clothes of course and he was a lovely little chap. I never found out what happened to him, but he … he was only, oh you know, about, might have been a year old then. Of course he grew, but em … yes, that was em … yes, that camp. They moved us from that camp back to Banka. They took us over in 3 batches. So many went in first and we had to load the ship before we went with em rice and things that we had to take with us and take all our stuff. It was a pretty grim trip and em … when we got there it was late at night and there was nothing to eat and they said that we could go ashore or we could stay on the ship, but the men on Banka had prepared some food, you know, if we went ashore we could have that. Anyhow, Betty Jeffrey and Vivian and one or two others, we decided we would go ashore. Most people wanted to stay on the ship. So, we got into a little thing like a barrel and they shut the lid. It was pitch dark and we were standing in what smelt like kerosene and it was bobbing around in the water and well, it just seemed as though our end had come, absolutely terrible. But we got to the shore and they opened it up and we tried to clamber out, we did clamber out. Well I have never in my life thought I would be so pleased to see anybody, but I just fell on top of a Jap guard with my arms around his neck, you know, and to get help to get out of this barrel that we were in, but we went to this camp. Well the Japanese officer, when he called us together and made a speech, had told us that we were going to this beautiful camp with no light and no water, well he was quite right. There was no light and no water. It was quite a nice camp, it was just a new camp that the men had built and em … instead of 24 inches we had about 30 inches each .. ..of sleeping space you mean? Um, sleeping space, but eh … water had to be … you had to go down to a creek and cart water and em … light was just em … eh little tins with a bit of palm oil in them and eh … a piece of rag through a piece of tin across the top and that was our light. So we were … well anyway, we settled down into that camp and a lot more people joined us then, there at that camp. People from the other side of Sumatra I think came into that camp. Em … now, before we were moved to that camp we were given injections which they said were for cholera, but we never knew for sure what they were for and the em … we set up the hospital there, the Dutch nuns set their hospital up and eh … we helped them in there. We were the first batch that went over. There was another batch came over and we cooked for them and they were right, and then the third batch came over and we cooked for them and the Japanese said they had misbehaved, and I don’t know what they had done, but they were not allowed to eat when they got there. So, eh … we had all the food cooked, so Viv and I, said well we might as well keep guard over the food, otherwise it would have been pinched of course and so they had it next morning. But you know, it was dreadful, all these women and children hungry and thirsty and we weren't allowed to feed them. But the Japanese officer, one of the women in the camp, she was an Indonesian girl, beautiful looking girl from Borneo I think she was, well she persuaded the Jap officer to increase our rice ration. Well that was all very well, but it meant we ran out of rice a bit sooner than we would otherwise have done, so we were a bit short of rice in the end. It was all very well to have a bit given to us, but then the ration was never increased, so we had to make do. Well, the toilets in that camp were cement pits, that was all right. But there was no outlets for them. So, it didn’t take very long before these half dozen pits eh … were overflowing. So … eh … we had to have a squad of people to empty them out and eh … eh … to do that, everybody in the camp was going to have to put in a little bit of money, if they had it and this … these 6 women that were going to do the baling out, were to be paid, you know, 5 cents a day or something like that. And eh … so I volunteered for that. I didn’t have any money, so I thought I would volunteer for that and em … if you volunteered you had to provide your own eh … emergency fill-in person if you were sick. So I came back. Eh Viv and Jean Ashton and myself slept under a mosquito net which had been given to me in Irenelaan by one of the men from the men’s camp, had sent me over this brand new mosquito net eh which was a wonderful gift to get, and so we had got a bit of material and sewn it in the top and put the top in the side and the three of us spent the whole of the war sleeping under this mosquito net, which of course was like luxury really, without the mosquitos. So I came back, I got on this squad and I said to Viv and Jean, you know, you will have to be my emergency. Anyway, there was a great uproar, they were not going to be in it and anyhow I wasn’t going on it and anyway, I was going on it so, that was all right. I went down with malaria so Viv and I, lying there side by side, not talking, and eh she was determined she wasn’t going to do it for me. Anyway, came 4 o’clock and she crawled out and went and did my stint on emptying out these pits. We had to … we had a kerosene tin and half a coconut shell and was … half a coconut shell was supposed to be on a piece of stick but we had no nails anyway and in any case, it wouldn’t stay on the stick, so you would bale it out with your hand, half a coconut shell into this kerosene tin eh … and then it had a piece of bamboo on it and you would put it on a pole and two of you slung it between you and took it out into the jungle. Well you did that until you got the level down and then you would go to the kitchen and see if you could get a bit of hot water for them and have a wash and then go on duty in the hospital. So you had to do that every day and eh … The smell would become ingrained in your skin I would think. Oh well, you didn’t get that much on you, but anyway, no you had a wash, although we didn’t have any soap, that was the trouble. But it ended up that I was permanently on the squad, so was Viv and so was Jean. We all became permanents on that squad and we did that all the time we were in that camp. Well now in that camp our deaths really started in earnest. We had had some deaths, but on Banka there was some kind of fever and it … it looked like cerebral malaria, but I wouldn’t know for sure that it was, but eh … Sister Raymont, Lieutenant Raymont she was, she got sick in the afternoon and she was dead in the morning and that was the first one of our nurses that had died. Of course we were terribly cut up about it and we gave her a military style funeral. Of course we had to ... eh … dig … we had to dig our own … we had to dig graves ourselves and then carry them … eh, we had to do all that ourselves and em … but then there were so many deaths. There were some nuns, there was one order of nuns, I think there were about 6 of them and they all died and em … we lost … eh … we lost 4 nurses there with that disease. They didn’t all die with that. One of them died of … oh no, Sister Raymont died of that Banka fever and Shirley Garden - well I am not sure what she died of - whether she had worms so badly … eh … Blanche Hempstead - she had a terrible cough and I don’t know whether she had any sort of cancer and then Rene Singleton, she died and eh … she was unconscious for several days. Probably beriberi killed her, I don’t know. And anyway, we buried 4 of our nurses on Banka and we found that place very upsetting. I had got that disease, whatever it was too, and I was pretty sick, but eh … one of the doctors, Dr McDowell, happened to come along and asked me what was the matter and I said, well "I have got malaria", and she had had a breakdown earlier in the piece and anyway she had a bit of quinine that she gave me and em … eh … oh the doctor, the German doctor, Dr Goldberg, she had given me an injection of quinine. It was most unusual to get all this treatment, but I was working in the hospital, so she gave me an injection of that when I was practically unconscious and em … Dr McDowell, she gave me atabrin, that’s right, Dr McDowell gave me atabrin, she had a little bit of that. And one of the nuns, Sister Imelda, she was in charge of the hospital, she had a little bit of plasmaquin and she gave me that. Only a little bit, but you know, I turned the corner. It was just remarkable that I was able to get that sort of medical help. Do you think you were any fitter than the other nurses, the ones who died? Fitter to begin with or … ? We were all pretty fit because, you know, we had all passed medicals to get into the army and we were all pretty fit, but em … perhaps.. perhaps, well, I could live on less food than they could … you see some people need more food than others and em … I don’t know. But em. Banka was the last one of the camps wasn’t it? In that camp we had to sew bags for the Japanese for the tin mines. There were tin mines on Banka, there is one there still and em, yeah we had to sew. And you had to sew your name in, because then, if there was something wrong with the bag, they knew who had sewn it. But you got paid for that, so they said, but the pay, it turned out, they brought in some durians and things that you could buy, you were privileged to buy them, but it wasn’t much good if you didn’t have any money. So, I think they gave us durians whilst you sell the … you know what durians are like, the bit around the seed is beautiful to eat, so we would sell that and keep the other bit for ourselves, because you can eat that too, yes. Do you want another chair? No, I am ok. Yes, well, em, we moved off from that camp then, after a bit, back to Palembang on ships, dreadful trip. No room on the ship, barely room to sit down, the toilet was a plank over the side which you had to climb out and squat on if you wanted to go to the toilet and eh … we buried one woman at sea, we buried another woman when we got to Palembang and eh … then from … we went by train from Palembang, across country to em … eh … Loeboek Linggau. We were on a rubber estate there. What year now? Em, this is the end of 㤴. So there are starting to be rumours of the war coming to an end? No, not yet, … Not yet. No. Eh … we got our first letters at the end of 1944, we had written one card home in 㤳, that is the only time we ever wrote home. The letters we got in 㤴 - everybody didn’t get letters, only a few got them and they had been written in㤱 and 㤲. Eh … we got a few letters a couple of times, but they were all old when we got them and eh … we went on to this rubber estate and em there were huts scattered all over the estate. There was one bit that we set aside as a hospital and em … 8 of us, or 10 of us, slept in a hut near the hospital and we all worked in the hospital, but the other nurses slept … eh lived around in various spots in the camp and helped to look after the people who were in the various huts dotted around the camp. A lot of the people were sick. The ones that were … oh, the dying ones we put in the hospital, but the others they tried to look after. Well now, we lost … [sneezing] … we lost 4 more nurses in that camp unfortunately. We had a lot of deaths, we were constantly burying people, digging graves and burying people in that camp. Eh … yes, things were terrible. There was a stream went through the camp and we bathed in that - we got water from a well, but it was also used for toilet purposes too, so it was a … fairly unsavoury, but it was the only place we had to wash and em … in the hospital that I worked in … eh … we had those lights ... little, with the palm oil and the little bit of material soaked in palm oil. We had very little light and eh … we nursed people on platforms. They were side by side on these platforms and eh … of course, you had to nurse them on your hands and knees and em … trying to feed them … if you were trying to feed 3 or 4 at once it was hard to get from one to the other … eh … you would have to, you know, tread, step over them .. get to one to the other to try and feed them and eh … eh, we, we used tins for them to use for toilets and then we had a … an old bath tub type of thing at the door that we used too. When it was full two of us, one of the nuns eh and if I was on duty, the two of us would carry this down to the stream to tip it in and em … you would come across a wild pig or a wild animal of some sort in the night, in the dark. I don’t know who got the biggest fright, the pig or us, but anyway … Was there a sorting process in the creek that you drew water for washing lower than you drew water for drinking and you tipped your sewage in lower still? Oh, what was the use? People were using it up further, there was no way you could … Right, so you couldn’t do anything like that? No you couldn’t. We got water for cooking out of the well, but em. Do you think that may have been why the guards in the other camp refused to allow you to drink the water that looked fresh, maybe it was being polluted further up too? We got it out of a tap. No, I don’t think they were looking to help us. Right, ok. I wouldn’t think so. Em .. So you were here in this camp when the war ended? Yes, that is the camp we were in when the war ended. How did you know about the end? One day … well we heard rumours that something was happening, we didn’t know what, and then one day the Japanese brought in 14 sucking pigs and said we had something to celebrate, but we didn’t know what, but anyway, we ate the pigs. But eh … there was a change in their attitude, but we also heard rumours that they were going to exterminate all their prisoners and get rid of the evidence. We didn’t know what was going on and em … eh … we just didn’t know. But then the Japanese called us all together and made this announcement … em … "Barang suda habis", you know, the war is over. And there was just dead silence, nothing happened. Eh … and he went on talking, he talked on and on about how they had done the best they could for us and how they had looked after us and so forth and that they would still go on looking after us and em … Were you quite convinced that you were on the winning side? Well, we didn’t know. You just assumed so because they had become deferential? Yes, they never told us who won, but we … eh he was so upset, you know, was crying and, you know, we knew we had won the war, but eh … he didn’t say as much, just that the war is over. And eh … so prior to that, they had brought in a band and forced us all to go and hear it. They had rounded us up and forced … and actually it was a beautiful band … really it was like an orchestra, it was lovely, and then they made us write letters to say how much we had appreciated it. Whatever happened to them, I don’t know, but em … the war was over … so eh … things went on just the same, people kept dying, you know. Did food continue to come? Did the Japs continue to provide food? Oh yes, yes, they brought in Australian tinned butter, that they had had all along, peanuts, oh all sorts of things came in and em … eh … it was wonderful. And then the men from the men’s camp came over and they were looking for their wives and children and so forth and of course, it was a wonderful time of reunion for some of them, but then … it turned out that some of the men’s wives had died, or some of the husbands had died, and they hadn’t known anything about it. When we were in Irenelaan one old lady didn’t know her husband had died until they … just threw all his belongings into the camp and em … so you know, people just didn’t know whether their husbands were alive or not and em … eh … Marguerite Carruthers went over to the camp to see Andrew and em … he was so bad with beriberi that she could just sit beside him, you know, while he passed on. Which was very sad, to get to that stage. Well, one of our nurses died on the 18th August after the war had finished. But the war had been over about a fortnight before we knew anything about it, so … eh … oh we just had to keep on going and looking after our sick as best we could and … until we finally got out. But eh … mmm Who came to take you out? Well, there was a Major Jacobs and em … eh … there were a couple of us, I think 5 of them parachuted in. A couple of Australians, a couple of … Bates and Gillen came in em … they were the first people that we saw. They came in to see us and of course we overwhelmed them with questions. Asked them all sorts of things, you know, who had won the Melbourne Cup and who won the football and .. eh … you know, all sorts of irrelevant questions I suppose. And … eh … they told us about penicillin, which we had never heard of and … eh … somebody said, "Oh, it cures gonorrhoea" or something, I don’t know why we would be interested in that, but, yes, it was a funny time. So how did you get back to Australia? Eh, well some weeks later Nesta James was wanted on the phone in the middle of the night. Well this was something so unusual, well she came back and said that we had to get ready to get on trucks to go to Lahat and we were going to be flown out, so we eventually got on trucks and went to Lahat and em … we had to go on a train. We got on this train and the train had never moved out before 7.00 in the morning or some time and nothing on this earth would shift them, so we just sat on the train and waited. Hayden Leonard and one other man were there. They had em … eh … pistols I think. That is the only protection we had, you know, if there had been a riot of the natives, there was nothing anybody could have done and they told us not to eat anything that was on the train or was given to us. But anyway, we took no notice of that and we hopped in to everything we could. Eh … well eventually we got to … must have got to Lahat I suppose did we or where did we get to? And em … they said a plane was coming for us and it was so long coming that I think we thought we were going to spend the night there, just out in the open. Anyway this plane came in, it was nearly dark and eh … these two women stepped out of the plane, they had em … eh … tropical army uniforms on that we had never seen before and we didn’t recognise them and then somebody realised that it was Miss Sage and Jean Froyd, Jean Froyd had been one of the girls that got home on the Empire Star. END OF SIDE B, TAPE 2 TAPE 3, SIDE A So they knew then that we were really going to be taken out and then Major Windsor got out of the plane an em … he said, "Where are the Australian sisters?" And of course we said, "We are", and just mobbed him, but they didn’t recognise us, they didn’t realise it, so … Miss Sage then said, "Well where are the rest of you?" and we just said, "Oh well, they are all dead." So, we got on the plane and were flown out to Singapore and em … when we got to Singapore … we were taken somewhere - I don’t know where we were, somewhere at the airport I suppose - and Lady Louis Mountbatten was there to meet us. And anyway, all I could think about was getting a decent cup of coffee and something to eat, but Lady Louis’ aide, those Aide de Camp, whatever they are, all dressed up in kilts I think he had, from memory, and he would insist on asking me questions. And, do you know, I never did get that cup of coffee. "Lady Louis wants to know this, that and the other", you know and em … so I kept answering these jolly questions, yes. And finally we were taken to the 14th Australian General Hospital, which was set up in St Patrick’s School which we had evacuated from and they proceeded to clean us all up. They reckoned we smelled or were dirty, and we weren't, but anyway, they put us in baths, I think, or something and then, in the middle of the night, somebody stripped me naked and painted me all over with something because they said I had scabies. Well, I wasn’t aware of it and em … I don’t know what they painted me with, but eh … people led, there wasn’t much in the way of clothes to give us, some of the nurses lent us night clothes. And we got something from the Red Cross I think, but instead of sleeping on the beds, we preferred to sleep on the floor. Well, we had been sleeping like that for so long that we had got more comfortable that way, but em … yeah … we were … then we … Did you appreciate being nursed or was this a problem to you? You had looked after other people so often? Yeah, well I didn’t have to have anything done for me, I was able to get around, do for myself. Some of the girls were very, very ill. Jenny Greer and Betty Jeffrey, you know, they were sick and … but I was able to get up and look after myself. They brought us food and they were trying to not give us too much to eat. But people bringing us in food, they brought us in eggs and things, and they would bring this nice plate of hot soup and we would get an egg out of beside us there and break it into the soup, and I could no more do that now than fly to the moon, but we could do it then all right. But they were not letting us have many visitors, but then quite a few people did come to see us, but they eh … we had our hair done and … What was the strangest thing that you found after having been in limbo for 4 years. What was the oddest thing about this new world you were coming in to? Oh, mmm, well we couldn’t get used to seeing so much food. Eh … and … I don’t know, one of the oddest things was, there was a lady, I think she was party of Lady Louis’ entourage and eh … she had pink or purple hair or something and we were all staggered about this and we were all peeping round the corner to have a look, we couldn’t believe it. Oh, I don’t know. What about women in slacks? Oh well, no that didn’t … eh Didn’t throw you at all? No, not at all, because we had had practically no clothes and we were wearing all sorts of things ourselves. No that didn’t throw us at all. Although we didn’t recognise the army uniform, but we came to terms with that pretty quickly. Em … I don’t know … really … it is hard to say. Well never mind, how did you get from Singapore down to Australia? Did you go straight back or did you stay in Singapore? No, we wanted to come straight back, but they kept us there for about a month. I think, I don’t know why they kept us there, some of the girls were sick of course, but em … I think they didn’t want to bring us home, they wanted to make us look a bit better before they brought us home and they were going to fly us home, but they brought us home in the Manunda, in the hospital ship, so em … So where did you get to in Australia? To Sydney or Melbourne? We got to Perth and Perth gave us a wonderful welcome, had flowers everywhere, people were wonderful. I was met by em … eh … Gordon Asby, he was a minister that I had known when I was young at our house at Murtoa and em … he was a Padre or Chaplain in the Air Force and he met me at Perth and the hard thing was for us to meet the mothers and the parents of the girls that had been killed.
Return to previous page	Listen to interview

Top of page

Victorians at War - Oral History Project