Background To The Sheet
Throughout the war Day kept a diary on loose sheets of paper and embroidered the sheet. The loose leaves of the diary she hid 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" (p. 110).
The sheet, approximately 8ft x 7ft (2.5m x 2m), was "looted" at the outset of the war and was "born" in La Salle emergency hospital. Having managed to get "a needle from somewhere" she pulled some threads out of the hospital linen and 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" (p. 36).
When not being embroidered the sheet was kept, undetected, between the rugs on her camp bed.
When completed the sheet contained 1100 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." "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" (p. 100).
Sixty years on, using Day's memoirs as a key, we are able to decode the meanings of the coloured patches of materials, the signatures, the various symbols and the different coloured threads lovingly chain stitched on this "gay and colourful, not very beautiful, much stained" sheet (p. 2). In the process, this apparently placid and randomly embroidered sheet reveals Day's secret thoughts and a record of the "horrors, points of light and peaks of hope...the big things and little things, important things and silly things" in the lives of the internees in Stanley Camp Hong Kong during the Second World War (p. 2 and 105).
Read more about this topic: Day Joyce Sheet
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