Mother’s diary outlines tale of internment in Hong Kong during WWII

A Nelson man uses a diary and letters written by his mother to tell her story of pre-war colonial life in Hong Kong and 3½ years in a Japanese internment camp. Cherie Sivignon reports.

Nelson author Chris Potter asked his mother, Norah, to tell him about the years during World War II they spent in the Stanley Internment Camp on Hong Kong Island when he was little.

She never did.

However, when Norah died in 1996 and Chris started to clear her house at Taradale, Napier, he found a folder containing her handwritten account of those events. It had been placed in full view on the table.

Complied years earlier, Norah begins her account by saying her memory of those days is still fresh “and I want Christopher to read of them in the future”.

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It seems that while Norah was unable to talk about that period of their life, she was able to write it down and leave it for her son. She kept notes over much of the 3½ years the pair were in the internment camp – snippets recorded on the back of wrappers from cigarette packets and tinned food. Wrappers that survived the war.

Chris has been able to flesh out the account his mother left him via letters Norah wrote to her family in England, mostly to her mother, Emily. Chris’ grandmother saved all of that correspondence, tied in a bundle in chronological order. Norah’s family also kept many mementos including photographs, newspaper clippings of Norah’s marriage and Chris’ birth, even the Imperial Airways tickets Norah used to travel from England to Hong Kong aboard flying boats in 1938.

Aged just three months when the Japanese invaded Hong Kong in December 1941, Chris has few of his own memories of those early years.

However, he does recall how to bow to a man in uniform, how to gain parental approval by finding and stamping on cockroaches and how a little plant in the camp – that Chris now knows is Mimosa pudica – will fold its leaves inward and droop when touched.

Chris also remembers a lesson he learnt first hand not to pick up a “shiny bit of metal” after a bombing raid.

“It was red hot.”

Chris gathered the information his mother left for him, the candid correspondence that was kept by family members and some sections of post-war talks Norah delivered and used it to write a book called My Beautiful Island.

The title replicates the exact words Norah used in a letter after describing the “bomb craters, shell holes, wrecked houses” and “gaping hillsides” she saw en route for the internment camp on the Stanley peninsula.

Chris wrote the bulk of the book in 2020 during the Covid-19 lockdown at his home in Nelson. It was eye-opening for him to learn more about Norah as a person, not just as his mother.

“She was clearly determined, resourceful, imaginative, insightful and above all articulate,” Chris writes in his book. “All that, and she was a vibrant, energetic, attractive young woman.”

Chris says he wishes he knew more about his father, John, who died on the final day of the 18-day Battle of Hong Kong – Christmas Day, 1941.

A leading architect from England, John – like many of his fellow colonials – was a member of the Hong Kong Volunteer Defence Corps and part of the final stand at Maryknoll, a fight he did not survive.

“I would have loved to have talked to her [Norah] about her and my father,” Chris says. “She never spoke about him.”

Little correspondence from John himself survives, but some of the buildings he designed still stand as a tangible reminder of his contribution to the former British colony, including the Royal Hong Kong Yacht Club, which was officially opened on Kellett Island in 1940, and Christ Church in Kowloon Tong.

John joined architectural firm Leigh and Orange in Hong Kong in 1931 and in 1935 was offered a partnership.

Norah spent much of her childhood on the south-east coast of Kent. She had strong European influences from an early age including French-speaking nurses and travels to Belgium and France. She attended Cheltenham Ladies’ College where she took German and then made multiple visits to Germany and Austria. Norah worked at the Bank of England and in 1938 was seconded for service in Hong Kong, working as a secretary for British Treasury representative on the Chinese Currency Stabilisation Fund, Cyril Rogers.

The work was demanding and Norah put in long hours. She also enjoyed a rich social life in Hong Kong. Her letters outline balls, dinners, lunches and numerous outings, from long walks to sailing trips.

Chris says that prior to the Japanese occupation, his mother seem to accept without question colonial rule and all of its trappings. “I know she completely rejected these attitudes later in life.”

In early October 1938, Norah writes about lunch “with a Miss Dorothy Potter, out here on holiday”.

“Her asset is an extremely nice brother, an architect who sails and whom I would fain see more of,” Norah says. “He drives a V8 too, which would recommend anyone in my eyes!”

In January 1939, Norah writes of having had “five proposals in the last three weeks and the reason I am still unengaged is that the only one I want is not forthcoming, dash it”.

By August 21, however, John had proposed and the couple were married at St John’s Cathedral on November 29, 1939.

Norah writes about the war often – how awful it is to be “so cut off”, how some mail is lost because ships have been sunk, talk of a possible invasion by the Japanese forces.

Life for the couple was good though. They lived near the beach and had household staff including an “amah”, who washed and cleaned. Although John was busy with his work, the couple still enjoyed an active social life. When Chris was born on September 3, 1941, Norah and John were delighted.

That wonderful life changed suddenly with the invasion. Everything they owned was looted or burnt. John went into active service while Norah, with baby Chris in a sling on her back, “ran from bombed house to bombed house” seeking shelter from the shelling.

Norah and Chris were taking refuge in the Matilda Hospital when the Governor of Hong Kong surrendered the colony to Japan – just a few hours after John was killed.

Following a short period at a friend’s house, Norah and Chris were moved to the Stanley Internment Camp where they spent the rest of the war until it was liberated in August 1945.

Food features frequently in Norah’s correspondence about those years of internment – mainly because there was not enough.

“We did receive Red Cross supplies but very little,” she wrote after the war. “I think six parcels each over the whole period but how these parcels were longed for, treasured and hoarded.”

In her diary, Norah describes one such arrival: “It is marvellous. The taste of butter, your fingers carry the smell and the milk. The cheese was bad but it’s all right cooked. The raisins and prunes were wormy but we ate everything. Until you have suffered starvation, you can’t appreciate our joy.”

Norah was still breastfeeding Chris in the early days of their detention so he was relatively well. Blond and healthy, he and Norah were photographed for what were believed to be propaganda shots. Norah’s requests for copies was granted and some of those photos survived the war.

Those photos are amongst a collection of items Chris has loaned to the Hong Kong Museum of History.

Chris says he was contacted by representatives from the museum after his book was published as they were keen to borrow some items photographed and included in its pages. The objects that Chris loaned included several photographs, the first edition of the Stanley Journal, a sketch of Norah and Chris drawn by a fellow internee, one of Norah’s letters written during their internment, a Hong Kong $1 note, signed by internees for Chris to commemorate his first birthday and a pair of shoes made for Chris in the camp.

Assistant curator Jazzy Lam said the objects would be displayed in the museum’s permanent exhibition, called “The Hong Kong Story”. That exhibition was being revamped and was tentatively due to reopen to the public in mid-2024.

“I was gobsmacked that the museum should take any interest in this at all,” Chris says

Work was difficult to secure in post-war England after Norah was repatriated. In May 1946, she took a job with the Military Government in Germany, part of the effort to rebuild the country. Chris attended boarding school in England until her return in early 1948.

Chris says Norah had no intention of staying in England, finding the post-war atmosphere, the rationing – and the weather – intolerable. She considered several countries but settled on New Zealand. They sailed in May 1948 and initially settled in Napier.

In 1955, Chris was enrolled as a boarder at Nelson College. He believes Nelson College was chosen because Norah’s landlady had a link with the school. So began Chris’ link with the city and so it was to the Nelson-Tasman region that Chris retired after a career in IT.

Norah joined the local Business and Professional Women’s Club and the National Council of Women and protested for peace. In 1955, she started working at Napier Boys’ High School and in 1957 she married an English teacher she met at the school, Allan Ruffell.​

She marched for nuclear disarmament and the Save Manapouri Campaign and against the Springbok tour in 1981.

Chris says he read with “pride but not surprise” his mother’s forgiving attitude towards the Japanese and the Nazis.

“She was clearly able to make the distinction between the political leaders and the ordinary people in both countries.”