Most wartime diaries are written on paper. Some are scribbled in notebooks or loose sheets and hidden beneath floorboards, or tucked inside clothing. The most famous wartime diary is undoubtedly that of Anne Frank, but there are many others whose accounts are equally compelling. One of the most unusual records of the Second World War, however, was kept by Day Joyce, a biologist interned at Stanley Camp in Hong Kong. Her diary was not written on paper at all. Instead, she stitched it into a bed sheet.
The Day Joyce Sheet. Credit: Imperial War Museums
On 8 December 1941, just hours after the attack on Pearl Harbor, Japanese forces launched their assault on the British colony of Hong Kong. After fierce fighting, Hong Kong surrendered on Christmas Day.
The occupation of Hong Kong by Japanese forces transformed life overnight. Many Allied civilians along with soldiers were rounded up and sent to Stanley Internment Camp, located on the southern side of Hong Kong Island. Conditions in the camp were difficult. Food was scarce, overcrowding was common, and internees faced years of uncertainty. Yet amid these hardships, camp residents attempted to create a semblance of normal life. Schools were established, concerts were organized, religious services were held, and people found countless ways to preserve their dignity and morale.
One of those internees was Daisy Mary Sage, or Day Joyce. Before the war, Joyce was a biologist working for the Hong Kong Education Department. When war was declared, she trained as an auxiliary nurse hoping to get called for Europe. Instead, the war came to her when Hong Kong was attacked.
During the fighting that followed, she served in an emergency hospital at the La Salle College. After Hong Kong’s surrender, the Japanese took over the hospital and Day along with the other nurses were sent to the bomb-scarred prison warders quarters of Stanley Prison. The Stanley internment camp was one of the largest unsegregated internment facilities in South-East Asia during the Second World War, with approximately 2,800 men, women and children interred.
Close-up details of the sheet. Credit: Imperial War Museums
Like most prison camps during the war, the conditions at Stanley internment camp was very poor. There were no cooking facilities, no furniture, little crockery or cutlery, toilet facilities were filthy, shamefully inadequate, and without water. Accommodation was cramped and grossly inadequate. All useable space, such an under staircases, corners in passages, kitchens and pantries and servants’ quarters were converted into living space with little thought given to hygiene and public health.
There was also the question of safety. Japanese guards were always on prowl and often at night they crept up behind the women with their rubber-soled shoes and frightened them. After the Japanese military took over the camps, the assaults and beatings increased.
In the face of this tremendous stress on her physical health and mind, Joyce tried to keep check on her sanity by keeping a diary. Initially, she wrote on loose sheets of paper and hid them in a pair of Chinese pyjamas. “What was of prime importance of the pyjamas was their creaking and their crackling. For three years they were to contain in their noisy folds all my written pages and to keep them safe through exciting searches,” she wrote in her memoirs.
Close-up details of the sheet. Credit: Imperial War Museums
Later, she acquired a bedsheet about 8 feet by 7 feet and with the help of a needle and loose threads pulled out from hospital linen, she started sewing her thoughts.
“It was not begun with any purpose consciously in mind, nor was it continued with any 'after-the-war' ideas. It was simply a hand steadying, mind employing, secret thought recorder of my own.”
Joyce covered the cloth with names, symbols, dates, illustrations, and coded references. The cloth contained the names of fellow internees, references to births and deaths, depictions of camp activities, and countless personal memories. Some symbols carried meanings that only Joyce understood. By the end of the war, the sheet had accumulated 1,100 names, signs and symbols, including two years of camp diaries in coded words and the signatures of “so many men, women and children, and of heroic people who will not come home.”
Day Joyce with her sheet. Credit:Gwulo
“To say it is code,” Day wrote, “is making a very simple idea sound far too grand, but it is true in so far as I hoped what I was doing was not too obvious. To an enemy enquirer I was just learning better English.”
After the war, Joyce preserved the sheet and eventually helped historians understand its many symbols and references. Without her explanations, much of its meaning would have remained hidden. In 1975, she donated the embroidery to the Imperial War Museum in London. According to later accounts, the needle remained in the cloth at the exact point where she had stopped stitching when liberation arrived.
Today the Day Joyce Sheet is recognized as one of the museum's most remarkable artefacts. Because of its size and delicate condition, it is not always displayed, but historians continue to regard it as an invaluable record of civilian internment during the war. It can only be seen by prior appointment.
References:
# Day Joyce Sheet. Wikipedia
# Bernice Archer & Fedorowich Kent. The women of stanley: internment in Hong Kong 1942–45
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