From prison camp to building new life

At school, he knew he’d had an unusual start to life but he just wanted to fit in with the other kids. Now he’s written a book about it.

Nelson-based Chris Potter started life in a prison camp in Hong Kong with his English mother, Norah.

There, as a toddler, he learned to salute and bow, to stamp on cockroaches in bare feet to entertain fellow prisoners, and to do as he was told, because if he didn’t the consequences could have gone far beyond being sent to his room.

It was Stanley Civilian Internment Camp and Chris arrived there in February 1942 aged five months, after losing his English father on Christmas day 1941 while he was helping to defend Hong Kong from the Japanese.

“He was an architect and he was in the volunteer defense corps. What was he doing fighting? All fit men who weren’t doing ‘essential’ things had to be in the volunteer defense corps … nobody really thought that the Japanese were going to come in force,” says Chris.

Only hours after the Japanese attacked Pearl Harbour they invaded Hong Kong.

They had been at war with China since 1937. The tiny multinational army and civilians of Hong Kong didn’t stand a chance against the seasoned warriors.

Life changed dramatically for those who survived. Norah had enjoyed an active social life in Hong Kong before marrying John Potter in 1939.

She worked as a personal assistant to a banker who was tasked with stabilising the Chinese currency, using a large sterling loan.

“People had gone from eating well and being looked after - having ‘the boy’ and ‘the cook’ and ‘the amah’ (housemaid) - to living ten in a room and getting boiled fish heads and rice to eat, on a good day.”

They spent three years in the prison camp before being liberated late in 1945 and repatriated to England.

Norah never blamed the Japanese or the German people, knowing they were all victims of a war mentality.

Chris discovered his mother’s diaries and records just after she died. She’d recorded her memories on wrappers of cigarette packets and labels off cans, from Americans in the camp.

The book, My Beautiful Island – from England to New Zealand via Hong Kong and a War, tells the story of Norah’s journey from England to Hong Kong as a young, single, professional woman; to romance and marriage; to war and survival; then building a new life in the years that followed.

Chris will be launching My Beautiful Island at Nelson Library. Sunday 16 May 2-3 pm. You can find his book at Volume bookshop in Church Street, Nelson, www.volume.nz

By Charlotte Squire.