Memoir vs fiction, by Y S Lee

Over the past two years, I’ve been reading memoirs from survivors of the Pacific War – that is, the Pacific theatre of the Second World War. Nearly all of them are awe-inspiring, and I’ve already blogged here about Freddy Spencer Chapman’s The Jungle is Neutral and Nona Baker’s Pai Naa: The Story of Nona Baker.

Refresher: historical sources are typically divided into two categories: primary (artifacts from or documents created during the time of the events in question) and secondary sources (an item that interprets and analyzes the primary sources). It’s a broad-strokes sort of distinction that makes putting together a bibliography more straightforward. Although memoirs are typically written after the events in question, they are generally classed as primary sources because their authors were involved in the relevant events.

However! Having recently read a fair amount of memoir, I’ve come to distrust its simple categorization as a primary historical source. This unease began with my first Pacific War memoir, Freddy Spencer Chapman’s The Jungle is Neutral (1949). It’s a brilliant book, packed with adventure and anthropological insight. Freddy’s voice is distinctive and charming, and while he shies away from emotional and psychological insight, I finished the book with a strong appreciation for his character (possibly too strong: my husband took to calling him "your historical boyfriend”).

Freddy Spencer Chapman

Still, I wondered how Freddy could possibly recall the terrifying and chaotic events of his three years in the Malayan jungle in such impeccable detail. This is a challenge in all memoirs. I am hard-pressed to remember what I ate for lunch three days ago, and in times of conflict or high excitement I often question, after the fact, my memories of what went down. Yes, Freddy kept detailed diaries while he was in the jungle, but on several occasions he was forced to destroy them because they were at risk of falling into enemy hands. His surviving diaries are held at the Pitt Rivers Museum, but they cover only a portion of his time in the jungle.

After reading Freddy’s memoir, I turned to Brian Moynahan’s recent biography of Freddy, Jungle Soldier: The True Story of Freddy Spencer Chapman, for context. Moynahan is a biased biographer – a longtime fan of Freddy who wants to burnish and prolong his hero’s fame. Even so, at one point, Moynahan points out a significant discrepancy between Freddy’s surviving diary and an event he describes in The Jungle is Neutral.

For publication, Freddy altered the event, probably in order to make it feel more dramatic. Moynahan disagrees with this decision, believing the original diary entry to be superior in terms of tension and the sheer danger of the situation. Either way, though, we now have a primary source (diary) imperfectly converted to a memoir - which is still technically a primary source. Yet we already know that it’s been corrupted. And if we have evidence of this with just one of Freddy’s surviving diaries, how many other events have been elided or embellished or just imperfectly reconstructed? We’ll never know.

This question becomes even more complicated when memoirs are written long after the events they describe and are mediated through others. Pai Naa: The Story of Nona Baker was first published in 1959, fourteen years after Nona Baker emerged from the Malayan jungle, contributed source material to Freddy Spencer Chapman’s official report on local Communist organizations, and returned to England.

Nona Baker is not credited as the author of her memoir!

Baker doesn’t mention keeping a jungle diary. Her narrative voice is quiet, wry, self-deprecating. She doesn’t in any way seek to portray herself as a heroine: rather, she insists that she was only “busily saving [her] own skin”. Perhaps this is why it took her fourteen years to produce a memoir, and why she distanced herself from the story even further: even though her narrative is written in the first person, the book is officially "by" Dorothy Thatcher and Robert Cross. To what extent is Baker’s voice really her own, here? And what sorts of artistic license have Thatcher and Cross taken with the shape of the story?

My last example today (though I have many more!) is actually a novel by Han Suyin (best known for her 1952 novel A Many Splendoured Thing, which was filmed as Love is a Many Splendored Thing and was also later adapted as an American soap opera). And the Rain My Drink is set during the Malayan Emergency of the early 1950s – the last days of the British empire in southeast Asia.

Han Suyin, the pen name of Elisabeth Comber

While And the Rain My Drink is technically fiction, Han Suyin inserts herself (using a name that is itself a pseudonym) into the novel as a character. This is a postmodern move which ought to undermine the ideas of narrative voice and the conceit of “truth” throughout the work. But the character Suyin tells her story in the first person, in conventional and realist terms. Because of this, and since the character Suyin’s biographical details map directly onto those of the author Han Suyin, the whole novel reads instead like a memoir of Han Suyin’s time in Malaya, with a few imaginative excursions. It presses the genre of memoir into the services of fiction - an act that points up the highly contrived nature of memoir itself.

Perhaps this is only appropriate – that we should end up in such an ambiguous tumult. A wide view of history will always include competing voices, and the line between fact and fiction begins to blur immediately upon examination. I’m thrilled to be feeling my way, step by careful step, in the company of such splendid adventurers.

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Y S Lee is the author of the award-winning Mary Quinn Mysteries/The Agency Quartet (Walker Books/Candlewick Press).

Liberation from Weihsien Camp, by Janie Hampton

In August, Clare Mulley wrote in History Girls about the atom bombs dropped on Japan which killed over 150,000 people. A terrible event: but by bringing the war to a final end, millions of lives were saved. Many of these were Allied soldier prisoners-of-war but some were children, imprisoned without their parents in China. This is their story.

Eric Lidell & Brownie   

When the war began, Europeans living in China were not unduly worried. During Japan’s invasion of China in 1937, the international compounds were ignored. But after the bombing of Pearl Harbor in December 1941, all enemy civilians became prisoners of war, including 150 children of British and American missionaries who attended Chefoo boarding school on the north east coast. 

In 1943, after 18 months internment in Shantung Province, they and their teachers were moved south to Weihsien ‘Civilian Assembly Centre’. Inside a high wall was a small compound with a collection of huts and kitchens, and 45 Japanese guards. The 1,450 prisoners included Trappist monks, White Russian prostitutes, British businessmen and Cuban jazz players. There was no sanitation or running water and little to eat. The freezing winters brought chilblains and pneumonia, while the scorching summers led to dysentery and typhoid. Eric Lidell, the missionary and Olympic gold medal winner featured in ‘Chariots of Fire’, died of cancer there in February 1945; and only a few months later the Girl Guide captain Louise Lawless died of typhoid.

The camp had thriving Boy Scout, Girl Guide and Brownie Packs and while the children were kept busy with school, games and errands, by August 1945, three months after peace in Europe, the adults knew the situation was grave. The Brown Owl Evelyn Davey from Liverpool, weighed just 98lb and her periods had stopped.  ‘We just got used to being thin and hungry,’ she told me in 2006. She and a missionary called Eugene had been courting for a year but wondered if they would survive another winter. ‘We read Winnie the Pooh to each other.’

Eugene & Evelyn with their Brownies & Cubs, Weishien, China

The rumours of imminent peace meant even greater danger: without Japanese guards, the starving Chinese surrounding the camp would steal what little food they still had, or Communist guerrillas might kidnap the children as hostages. If defeated, the guards had been ordered to kill all prisoners, regardless of age.

On the morning of Friday, 17 August, the men were carting sewage, Boy Scouts were carrying water in buckets, women were cooking bones and rotten vegetables for soup and the Brownies were singing in church.

Brownie Log Book 1944

Mary Taylor aged 12 was lying in her dormitory, suffering from diarrhoea. ‘I heard the drone of an airplane.’ Through the window she saw a B-24 circling overhead. ‘Beyond the treetops, its silver belly opened, and seven parachutes drifted into the fields beyond the Camp. Oh, glorious cure for diarrhoea!

 ‘Grown men ripped off their shirts and waved them at the sky. Prisoners ran in circles, wept, cursed, hugged and danced as the plane circled back. The Americans had come!’  Cheering, weeping, disbelieving, dressed in rags and emaciated by hunger, the prisoners surged through the gates. The guards quietly retreated to their barracks.

‘These gorgeous liberators were sun-bronzed American gods with meat on their bones,’ wrote Mary. The seven US paratroopers had been warned they were unlikely to return alive from ‘The Flying Angel’. Instead they were hoisted onto shoulders and carried back to the camp in triumph, where they were greeted by the Salvation Army brass band playing a victory medley of national anthems which they had been practising in secret for four years.

Commandant Tsukugawa, known to the children as King Kong, surrendered but the US Major Stanley Staiger handed back his sword and ordered him to defend the camp against Communists and looters.

 The prisoners were told the Japanese had surrendered and they would be evacuated but meanwhile supplies would be dropped by air.  The Weishien Girl Guides sat up all night making giant letters out of the parachutes to read ‘OK TO LAND’. The next day B-29s dropped canisters of clothing, food, Lucky Strike cigarettes, chocolate and chewing gum. ‘Unbelievable riches and our joy knew no bounds! Our ordeal was over,’ Margaret Vindon, then 18, told me. She and her brother had been on their own for six years.

After a crate of Del Monte peaches crashed through the kitchen roof, the children were told to run for cover whenever they sighted bombers. ‘They were not about to have us survive the war and then be killed by a shower of Spam,’ said Mary Taylor.

The Americans were determined to cheer everyone up with music. But weakened by undernourishment and exhausted by suspense, the internees were horrified when ‘O What A Beautiful Morning’ premiered in 1943, played over the camp loudspeakers at dawn. This was not their idea of liberation. ‘We hadn’t missed western pop music, because we had never heard it before,’ said Margaret Vindon.

In all this excitement school continued for the Chefoo children. The headmaster decided that the 16 year-olds should take their School Certificate before the evacuation, using old examination papers. Once back in Britain, he explained the unusual circumstances to the Oxford board; they all passed and most were admitted into universities.

It took several weeks to evacuate all the internees by train and plane. The children the  faced the task of tracking down their parents.

The missionary Dr Hoyte spent months searching for his six children in China. He found them in Hong Kong where he told them that their mother had died of typhus. ‘I had been only six when I had last seen him,’ Elizabeth Hoyte remembered.  ‘Now I was in the strong arms of the half-familiar stranger, and we began the gentle probing business of getting to know each other again.’

The Taylor family - Kathleen, Jamie, Johnny and Mary - had also not seen their parents for over five years. They travelled into the interior of China by plane, train, mule cart and finally on foot. Chinese peasants blinked in amazement at the four foreign children struggling through the mud. ‘There, through a window, I could see them – Daddy and Mother. Caked with mud, we burst through the door into their arms – shouting, laughing, hugging – hysterical with joy,’ remembered Mary Taylor.

Beryl 11 & Kathleen 15 Strange, 1945.

When Kathleen and Beryl Strange, aged 15 and 11, arrived in Liverpool by ship at the end of December, they too had not seen their mother for five years. ‘The last time,she was wearing Chinese clothes, with her hair in a bun,’ Kathleen told me. ‘When my teacher said, “This is your mother,” I said “No it isn’t. She would never wear a brown hat like that.” ’

Estelle Cliff’s mother had moved from inland China to Durban, hoping to find her children there. ‘It was six years before we came,’ wrote Estelle. ‘It was a terrible wrench from our camp extended family, and we hardly knew our parents.’

After coping with internment, the children now had to endure separation from their friends and teachers. No-one thought of the emotional effect of taking children to a cold post-war Britain where they were strangers.  But they had learned not to make a fuss, and many of them did not mention their childhood for 50 years. ‘When you are a teenager,’ said Estelle Cliff, ‘all you want to be is “normal”.’

Evelyn & Eugene Heubener, 1947.

I do not condone the use of nuclear weapons. But without the atomic bombs AT Hiroshima and Nagasaki, the Pacific War might have continued for two more years and these stories have ended very differently. Over 200,000 Allied prisoners of war, up to 800,000 U.S. soldiers, 2.3 million Japanese troops and 28 million civilians who believed they should die for their country, all lived to see peace.


We can only hope that, now the Japanese government has voted to re-arm, they have learned the lessons of 70 years ago.