Wairarapa 'land girl' recalls POW days

BLOOMING: Mildred Turley in her home garden, a far cry from toiling in vegetable gardens during World War II. PHOTO/FILE

Japanese prisoners-of-war interned in Wairarapa during World War II got away lightly when it came to working for their captors, so much so they shared picnic days with their guards, a Masterton woman recalls.

Mildred Turley was not much more than a slip of a girl when she joined a party of other women tending gardens in Greytown during the war, working within a stone's throw of the prisoners who were also supposed to be putting in some hard graft.

Instead the Japanese, according to Mrs Turley, spend a great deal of their time wandering round the fields or on the road with little or no supervision from the guards or lounging about calling out to the women.

On wet days as women in raincoats kept toiling away, thinning out rows of vegetable seedlings, moulding up potatoes or removing tomato laterals, the prisoners retreated to the comfort of covered lorries to stay dry.

What was most galling for the young Mildred Rowles, who shared spartan accommodation on site with the other female gardeners for bare minimum wages in an effort to help the war effort, was the attitude of the New Zealand soldiers guarding the prisoners.

"The Japanese would call out things to us which always caused great amusement to the guards, who we all thought were lax and horrible especially as we had brothers fighting overseas.

"I had lost my only brother, Bill, in Egypt."

She said sometimes the prisoners and guards would hold picnic days on which the Japanese wandered around "picking wildflowers" from the side of the road adjoining the gardens.

For the young women being in such close proximity to unsupervised enemies of the country was unnerving.

"I used to think to myself, my God, am I safe," Mrs Turley said.

She can clearly recall a visit made by the "top brass" from the prisoner-of-war camp at Tauherenikau to the gardens.

"He was pouncing about with a little white poodle on a lead and I think he must have once served in India as he had one of those little leather things that looked like a fly swat dangling from his wrist."

Mrs Turley also recalls the time the female gardeners went on strike.

"That was on one of the really wet days. It was pouring with rain but we were expected to work through it in our raincoats, thinning vegetable seedlings.

"The Japanese prisoners were allowed to keep dry on the tray of the covered trucks - it was far too wet for them or the guards to be outside.

"Maureen, who worked with us, stood up from her work in the fields and said 'I'm not putting up with this'.

"We all followed her into the kitchen, still wearing our wet-weather gear, and sat down until a man who was one of those in charge of the gardens arrived and told us off, saying we were to keep working.

"We refused to go out," she said. "If it was too wet for the Japanese to work that day, it was too wet for us."

Mildred Rowles, who was from a Featherston family, worked in the gardens while awaiting acceptance to begin nursing training.

The work was five days a week and she shared a hut with her close friend June Card, using a communal kitchen for cooking and eating. About six other girls also lived in huts on-site.

"We got paid by the government but it was a very low wage and we had to supply all our own food, and cook it.

"Sometimes I would bike into Greytown or home to Featherston for a feed."

She said at one stage June Card's father, John Card, who was mayor of Featherston, was so annoyed over what the young women had to put up with at the gardens he wrote to the newspaper complaining at the whole idea of women having to work more or less alongside Japanese prisoners.

After the war, Mildred Rowles was to meet and marry Martinborough man Trevor Turley, who had been a prisoner-of-war in Germany.

He had been captured during the fighting in Greece and Crete but had been repatriated by the Germans because of an injury he had to his neck and which they feared may have been a source of infection.

Mr Turley had been taken to Barcelona where a swap was made for German prisoners-of-war.