War baby: Son reveals parents’ Hong Kong PoW camp love story
Left to right: English journalist George Giffen in Hong Kong, before World War II; Billie Gill. Photos / Supplied
From the archives: In 2019, Kiwi war baby and journalist Ian Gill wrote for the Listener a moving story, Finding My Father, of how he was conceived in a Hong Kong PoW camp, the misfortune to which he owes his life, and his parents’ unlikely love story. Gill has taken his family search further, discovering the story of his mother’s heritage against a backdrop of China from the Anglo-Chinese wars of the 1840s to the advent of Communism. He has now released the book Searching for Billie: A journalist’s quest to understand his mother’s past leads him to discover a vanished China. His original Listener story is revisited here.
On October 25, 1945, I was delivered at Lower Hutt Hospital, one of the first “war babies” to be born in New Zealand after World War II. It was an ordinary enough event, but it took decades for me to unravel the complicated backstory.
I don’t recall exactly when I learnt from my mother, Louise Mary “Billie” Gill, that I had been conceived in a Japanese prisoner-of-war camp in Hong Kong. She raised me as a solo mum and would tell me – and others – my father was Arthur “Paddy” Gill, her Irish soldier husband with the British army, who had died in the war. (In fact, Paddy survived, and he and Billie divorced amicably after the war.)
It was not until I was 17 that she thought I was ready to be told that Paddy was not, in fact, my biological father. They had married in Hong Kong in January 1940, but he had soon been posted to Europe – the brief marriage had not gone well and, although she was carrying their child, he had told her not to follow him.
The Japanese attacked Hong Kong on December 8, 1941. After the British surrender, Billie and her son, Brian, then 17 months old, were taken in January 1942 to Stanley Internment Camp, with some 2800 civilian PoWs, mainly British, American and Dutch. Though ethnically Chinese, Billie was a British national.
She waited until 1975, when I was 29, to tell me the fuller story; she wanted me to understand it in context. She was working for the United Nations in Geneva, I was a journalist in Wellington and we met in Hong Kong. She introduced me to people from her past, including her school chums from Shanghai, where she had been educated in British schools after being adopted by an English postal commissioner and his Chinese wife.
Mum took me to the southernmost peninsula of Hong Kong Island where she showed me around the school and grounds that had been Stanley camp. At the cemetery next to the former camp, we stopped at the gravestone of her first-born, Brian. She told me I had been “two sons rolled into one”, a remark I didn’t fully understand.
Billie was 28 when she entered Stanley. Looking after Brian, a calm, sweet-natured child, in a teacher’s bungalow shared with 50 people was challenging, but it gave her focus in a world of constant hunger, disrupted sleep and endless queuing for rations of watery rice, or the bathroom.
Billie would bathe Brian in a Cow & Gate powdered milk tin with water heated over a charcoal chatti. She tried to soothe him when he cried out for nourishment.
A Visit to the Beach
On May 9, 1944, after Billie and Brian had spent two years in captivity, two women offered to give her a break and took Brian to Tweed Bay beach, which the Japanese had recently opened to the internees.