Kohi woman stole from dead to live

Lorna Johnstone at her home at Kohimarama in Auckland. Picture / Brett Phibbs

When villagers on the outskirts of Yokohama buried their dead in the local graveyard, they left by tradition gifts of food.

When darkness fell, a nurse would volunteer to crawl from the prisoner of war camp nearby and steal the offering.

Sometimes the volunteer was 91-year-old Lorna Johnston of Kohimarama, the last survivor of six Australian Army nurses selected in 1941 to serve in Rabaul in what was then New Britain.

"We believed our spirits were more important than theirs," she says today. "And the atomic bombs dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki were heaven-sent because they finished the war in Japan."

The story of the bridge-playing "polar bear" - she's a cold water swimmer - came to light at a book launch last month detailing the life of former Dilworth School pupil Bill Spensley in Rabaul and his disappearance as a Japanese prisoner of war. Lorna is in the book and she was in the audience.

Born in remote Hay, New South Wales, she is the last of a family of eight, all of whom celebrated a 90th birthday.

When she was liberated after almost four years of near-death privation, weighing 31kg, she made for Auckland to start life anew, married and never left.

Memories came flooding back as excerpts from the book were read out.

Eleven months after arriving in Rabaul she was taken prisoner by the Japanese. "We were a band of 18 terrified women, tormented at night, poked with rifles but never violated.

"The local bishop was German and he had sway with the Japanese commander".

After six months, the order was given to move out. A Japanese naval officer, who said his name was Michael and educated at Eton and Dartmouth, told them, plum in mouth, they were going to paradise - Japan.

They travelled in the hold of a ship used to transport horses, the stench overpowering.

The nurses were joined by 85 Australian officers for the 10-day trip in oven heat, hatches battened down in rough seas, their meagre belongings wrapped in strips of thin curtain, slung over their shoulders like a swag.

Once a day they were allowed on deck to use a toilet hung over the ship's side.

"The officers behaved like gentlemen. They smuggled tins of bully beef on board and shared it to supplement our one meal a day of rice and some water."

Soap was a joke; they all washed in sudsless salt water.

In Yokohama they were taken, minus the officers, to a tourist hotel where the duty receptionist asked them, grimy and unkempt, if they wanted single or double rooms.

"We thought it was a brothel," says Mrs Johnston. "We chose doubles and showered and bathed for hours."

The POWs assumed they were there because there were important Japanese in Australia, but no Australians in Japan to exchange with them - "except us".

It wasn't so, and it's still a puzzle. The Australian Government never knew their whereabouts, nor did their families.

After 10 days they were moved to the nearby American Yacht Club where they met a Mrs Jones, who was taken prisoner in the Aleutian Islands in the Bering Sea and sent to Japan after being forced to watch her husband's decapitation. "We made a fuss of her."

Yacht club incarceration lasted two years, the women enduring bitter winters with no heat and cold showers.

The menu was watery rice for breakfast, no lunch and the same for dinner with carrot tops on the side, occasionally nourished with slivers of cat or dog.

"We pinched everything we could lay our hands on."

Anything they could retrieve - peelings, scraps - was shared. If they found bread, it had to be cut into 19 pieces.

"Try doing that with hungry eyes watching your every move." Cigarettes from Red Cross parcels helped - no prisoner smoked and two fags bought a sweet potato.

To stay sane, they learned to play bridge with a deck of cards made from cardboard in a Red Cross parcel, the deck long since on display at the War Memorial Museum in Canberra. After two years they were moved to Totsuka in the countryside to share much less room and it became the worst of times.

"In winter it snowed endlessly and we were on a near-starvation diet, our clothes a patchwork of rags. We had to find the energy to pump about 100 buckets of water a day and the only thing that kept us going was a belief in hope." Day after wretched day, death blinked before they did.

At Christmas, 1944, they thought the end had come with the first of many US air raids on nearby cities but they were too rural for a direct hit. When incendiaries had Yokohama and Tokyo ablaze they prayed the Emperor's palace hadn't been hit or they would have been shot.

With American liberation, they were taken first to a hospital ship, then flown to Okinawa for assessment, Manila, Darwin and home ... 61 years ago this month.

Lorna married Auckland soldier and stock agent, the late Bill Johnston, in 1947 and has three daughters and five grandchildren.

She had a daily swim at Kohimarama beach well into her eighties, now reduced to a November-through-May regime. Irrepressible, she's booked a flight to Australia this month to toast a grand-daughter's 30th birthday.