"I am a child of internment," George Cautherley said. "My mother told me I was conceived in a brothel hotel in the western district of Hong Kong." Cautherley's parents, Dorothy and George, a British couple, were among the "enemy nationals" rounded up and taken to a rather sleazy hovel, near the present-day Macao Ferry Terminal, soon after the Japanese seized Hong Kong on Dec 25, 1941.

George Cautherley, 73, spent the first three years of his life in the Stanley Internment Camp with his parents and thousands of other internees. Edmond Tang / China Daily

The detainees were crammed into a cheap hotel with nearly 1,000 other people. They didn't know how long the ordeal would last or, indeed, whether they would survive it. To ease the unrelenting mental tension, Cautherley's parents decided to focus on something other than the situation they found themselves in. Having a baby seemed a good idea.

Cautherley was born on Sept 2, 1942, in the Stanley Internment Camp, where he would spend the first three years of his life, roaming around barefoot (shoes were not considered essential supplies) - a bit of a free spirit who did not realize that he and his parents were in an internment camp with about 2,800 other detainees.

"Those of us who were born there were more fortunate than those who were brought over as adults, because for us there was nothing to compare it with," Dennis Clarke said. He and Cautherley are the only two people born in the Stanley Internment Camp during the Japanese occupation of Hong Kong known to be living in the city of their birth.

Clarke, born on Jan 31, 1944, was too young to have any memories of life in Stanley in later life. What he does remember has to do with the detritus of war; the sound of the deafening sirens from the battleships moored in the harbor, and the searchlights that sawed through the night sky well after the occupation was officially over.

Clarke and Cautherley, who left the camp in September 1945 with their families, have lived abroad for many of the eventful years between then and now. They have had high-profile careers - Clarke as an hotelier and Cautherley as a leading medical products and biotech industry entrepreneur. By coincidence, both men chose to return to Hong Kong and make the city their home, eventually. Earlier this month, 70 years after they left the camp, Clarke and Cautherley finally had a chance to catch up - at the very spot where their lives began.

Family connections

The grass on a little square patch at Stanley Cemetery will remain forever young. The tiny enclosure is cordoned off by four headstones that were erected in memory of the children who died at the camp. It's located on the way to the spot a little higher up the slope where the young soldiers of the Royal Canadian Rifle Regiment, who fought their last battle in an unsuccessful stand to defend Hong Kong against the advancing Japanese, are buried.

One of the headstones was carved in memory of Dennis Clarke's brother Anthony, who died aged 11 months on Dec 14, 1942. As a child, Clarke visited the spot with his mother, Mildred. It was an annual ritual. "I don't remember those visits being a picture of sadness. It was more like a family outing," he said.

Revisiting Stanley Cemetery as the 70th anniversary of Hong Kong's liberation approaches probably inspires a different set of emotions in him today. After all, the burial ground was once part of the internment camp in which he and his brother were born, and one of them never left. Clarke sees his personal loss in the context of the big picture. Commemorating war is as much about remembering the dead as remembering those who lived to tell the tale, according to Clarke. "I didn't suffer in the war, but there were millions who went through hell. For them it was a nightmare. Those scars never healed," he said.

George Cautherley's connection with Stanley Cemetery goes back almost a century and a half, when Bridget, his maternal great-great-grandmother, accompanied her husband, an Irish soldier called Private William Purcell to Hong Kong. She died in 1864 at age 26. An unpolished granite tablet engraved with the names of five women stands close to the spot where Bridget's remains lie.

The women, who were nurses, were gang-raped and then murdered during a massacre of medical professionals and wounded soldiers committed by Japanese soldiers at the military hospital at St Stephen's College on the morning of Dec 25, 1941.

Cautherley's mother, Dorothy, a volunteer nurse at Bowen Road Hospital, from where medics were sent on secondment to other facilities, could have been one of them. It was by sheer luck that she was on duty at Bowen Road on that fateful day.

Sharing and caring

Cautherley was born at Tweed Bay Hospital in the camp as a typhoon raged. His mother was anemic and had malaria when she gave birth. She required a blood transfusion and special care, which the sparse facilities at Tweed Bay could barely provide. One of the reasons she pulled through was because fellow inmates pitched in with post-natal care and helped babysit her infant son.

One of young Cautherley's minders was 19-year-old Mabel Redwood, who would sometimes push him around the cemetery in a pram. Mabel's older sister Barbara, who married Frank Anslow, a fellow internee, recorded the birth of "Baby Cautherley" in her diary. Today, Barbara Anslow is the point person for anyone looking for information on the history of the Stanley Internment Camp.

It's a theme she is ever ready to talk about. On the phone from her home in Essex, England, the spirited 96-year-old said internement was the first time many British people had met expats from outside their own communities - US nationals, Dutch and Eurasians. "Internment with different nationalities gave me a much wider view of human society than I had before," Anslow said.

She doesn't remember the Japanese warders as particularly barbaric, soulless monsters, as they appear in most war narratives. "We didn't see much of Japanese brutality at the camp, only heard about it," Anslow said. "Personally, I didn't have any dreadful experiences with the Japanese. I guess it is harder for people who did to forget. After the war we found that our camp wasn't as difficult as many others in the Far East, so we had reason to be grateful for that."

Clarke would probably agree. He remembers being told by his mother, who was ill during most of her stay at the camp, that she was "very well-treated by one of the Japanese soldiers. The man would smuggle rations for her."

Cautherley, too, has a curious about Japanese soldiers, was told to him by fellow internee Bill Macaulay, who was drawing a pension from the British Army at age 12 for supplying information. One day Cautherley noticed a couple of Japanese officers marching up the slope. Following in their footsteps was a pint-sized human, imitating their gait. Macaulay was terrified of the consequences, in case the soldiers noticed the little mimic. When they did turn around, the officers, far from seeing the act as an insult, seemed greatly amused. Macaulay grabbed the impetuous young Cautherley, for it had been he who was having a go at playing "army guy", and rushed him to his mother before the officers could change their minds.

Taste of freedom

Life was still hard. It was a test of resilience and true grit, pitted against a stack of odds. Soap was scarce. Food contained rat feces. Anslow's diary - which she has since turned into a novel called The Young Colonials - was mostly written on toilet paper.

Yet there were probably only a few occasions when the internees seriously feared for their lives.

"In January 1945, an Allied plane dropped a bomb on the camp and killed 16 internees," Anslow recalled. "This reminded us that if the Allies decided to invade and retake Hong Kong, we would be in the thick of it, and might be killed by our captors."

Cautherley has faint memories of his mother clutching him as they watched fellow internees die in that explosion. The other time they were scared was immediately after the announcement that the Japanese had surrendered.

"Those two weeks were the most trying," said Cautherley. "The Japanese were still around. The internees were relieved to be told they were free, but they could not show it. It was feared that the Japanese might shoot everybody and commit mass suicide."

The tension remained until, and even after, a British Royal Navy fleet arrived on Aug 30 commanded by Rear Admiral Cecil Harcourt signaling that the war was well and truly over. Freedom remained just a notion until the internees managed to step outside the perimeters for real and walk free.

Postscript

On Aug 15, Barbara Anslow attended a "Victory over Japan Day" event at the Cenotaph in London's Whitehall to commemorate those who died in the war. She read a poem - A.E. Ogden and V. Merrett's The Fepow Prayer, a eulogy for the "Far East Prisoners of War".

Dennis Clarke and George Cautherley will meet again in Hong Kong in December. They will be joined by about 20 others from across the world with links to the Stanley Internment Camp - a mere fraction of a fraction of those who were interned there, but good enough to keep the flame of memory burning.