'We were covered with lice and had no proper clothes'
13-year-old Olga Henderson was imprisoned in a camp in Singapore on VJ Day, 15 August 1945. Now, 80 years on, she tells her story of punishments, hunger and the undying dream of going home.
Chris Terry
- Rosie Millard
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To some, the war in Japan is a distant appendage to the horrors of the Second World War in Europe. Not to Olga Henderson (née Morris). Now 93, she was interned aged ten, effectively as a civilian British prisoner of war along with her family. Olga, her parents and three siblings, Mary, Peter and George, were held captive for three years, first in Japan’s infamous Changi Prison, then in Sime Road Camp, a former RAF base in Singapore. It was little more than a couple of huts run under a system of starvation and fear. By the end of the war, these miserable barracks housed over 4,500 European civilians, including 328 children.
On VJ Day, 15 August 1945, Olga was 13, filthy, emaciated, barefoot, her developing body clothed in nothing other than a pair of underpants and a dirty rag. “We were in front of the hut, where there was about eight feet of sandy mud, and we heard the plane,” she says. “What looked like confetti started raining down. But it wasn’t confetti. It was leaflets saying the Allies had won and the war was over. We started playing with the leaflets.”
Her description of life at Sime is jawdropping. They ate nothing more than scraps of vegetables and scrapings of rice filched by her mother, who was the camp cook for the Japanese soldiers. “We were like walking bamboo sticks,” she says. “We were covered with lice. We had no scissors to cut our nails, no proper clothes and no food.”
We tried very hard never to anger the Japanese guards. The punishment was horrendous
Olga Henderson – interned in Japan's Changi prison, aged ten
The trauma began in 1942 when she and her family were living in British Malaya (now Malaysia) when it and Singapore were both invaded by the Japanese. The family had to flee their home with half an hour’s notice. A British soldier knocked at the door and said the invaders were just behind. After failing to gain passage on an evacuation ship, the family were captured by the Japanese, held in a field and marched to Changi jail. Despite this trauma, she says the family never considered escaping from the camp.
“Never. You never bothered planning escape, because the punishment was too horrendous. They say in Singapore you can still walk along a certain road and hear cries of pain. That’s where they tortured escapees. My brother Peter was 11 and was whipped for picking up half a piece of fruit that had fallen from a tree. It was regarded as stealing, and stealing was a very serious crime. We would try very hard never to anger the Japanese guards. They only had to put their hand on their cane and we’d fall into line. They went into a temper quickly, because they were treated brutally, too. They were trying to carry out orders from above and trying to be perfect. So, of course, that travelled down to us.”
Olga (second left) with her mother and siblings circa 1940. Memoir In The Shadow Of The Raising Sun
Yet starvation made the children reckless. “My friend Eileen got up at night and dug up some roots from a tapioca plant. She put the plant back into the ground, but of course the next day it began to wilt. She was caught and her punishment was being made to kneel in the sun all day. Her father, who was in the men’s camp, saw her through the barbed wire. He protested that his daughter was being tortured. They beat him up.”
The sun was a terrible punishment. “We had to work in the fields all day, and you were lucky if you had anything to shade you from the bright sun. My father went blind in camp, and my mother and sister eventually lost their sight, too. My smallest brother George, who was only five when we were captured, was the worst affected by the lack of food. He grew up to be a normal height, but all his organs had been starved of nutrition, so they didn’t develop properly. In the end, he died of a heart attack.”
Hers was an extraordinary childhood, if you can call it that. Christmas was celebrated with seven pieces of meat floating in a tub.
At Changi, there was a modicum of infrastructure. She and other girls were encouraged to join a Girl Guide troupe run by an internee, the remarkable Elizabeth Ennis. The girls would meet once a week in a corner of the exercise yard. As a surprise present for their captain, they managed to secrete scraps of cloth, which they stitched into a quilt for her. It’s now on show at the Imperial War Museum. Toys came in the form of paper dolls, and school lessons did take place.
In Sime Road Camp, however, there were no toys or books; school lessons for the children were led by adult prisoners, in the form of chanting by rote. “Our teacher Julie would put some dirt in a piece of cloth and bind it into a sort of ball,” remembers Olga. “She would throw it to us and say, ‘Three times eight,’ and whoever she threw it to would have to say the answer as they caught the ball.”
When the Allied plane flew over Sime, Olga and other prisoners were digging a large hole at the foot of a hill. She didn’t know it, but they were digging a mass grave. “We were told it was for food storage. I later learnt it was so the guards could put us all in there and blow us up. They didn’t have enough food for us, so they were going to kill us.”
Two years ago, Olga published a memoir, In the Shadow of the Rising Sun. “I had no interest in writing my memories, but I was prompted to do so after experiencing Covid. The strictures of getting food and of seeing people brought it all back.”
Her one sadness now is that she feels the reasons behind her harrowing experience have been forgotten. They are not forgotten by her; having been denied so much at a young age, she keeps her clothes carefully and never wastes food. “People don’t know about the Japanese war. They have no clue it ever happened. What are they teaching young ones now?”
Did she ever think she would perish? “That was the funny thing. I didn’t think I wasn’t going to make it. We always thought we were going to go home. And after they dropped the leaflets, they started dropping bread.”
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Olga features in We Were There (Wednesday BBC2) and will be part of Friday’s VJ Day 80 coverage on BBC1
Authors
Rosie Millard
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