Day Joyce Sheet - Biography

Biography

Day Joyce was born Miss Daisy Mary Sage on 12 November 1905 in Yoxford, Suffolk. Before the Second World War, Day (as she was called for short) had completed a degree in biology and when war was declared she also trained as an auxiliary nurse. Bored with waiting to be called-up for service for the Second World War in Europe, in March 1940 she accepted a job as a biologist for the Hong Kong Education Department. It was while she was working in this post in Hong Kong that the Japanese attacked on 7 December 1941.

During the battle she joined other auxiliary nurses in La Salle College, an emergency hospital on the Hong Kong mainland. Shortly before Hong Kong surrendered to the Japanese on 25 December 1941, the Japanese took over the hospital. Day and other nurses remained in La Salle College until 20 January 1942 when they were interned with the approximately 2,000 other Western civilian men, women and children in the bomb-scarred prison warders quarters of Stanley Prison on the south eastern peninsula of Hong Kong Island. Stanley is in the neck of the peninsular and, as Day wrote in her memoirs, it was "a relatively easy place in which to make a cage with the sea to reinforce the bars." ("Ordinary People: The Sheet", ID no. P324, p. 66.)

Day survived the war and was repatriated in August/September 1945. On her way home to England she was so ill she was put into hospital in Colombo. While there some friends, Willoughby G. Beauchamp and his wife Kathleen Beauchamp, found her and took her to their home in Colombo to recuperate. Arriving at Lyneham RAF base in Wiltshire some time later she and others were taken by coach "smoothly on that Autumn morning, through the chokingly emotive beauty of the English countryside to Victoria Station, London. Nobody that I knew was there. I sat on my Hong Kong basket and cried" (p. 270).

Day never recovered fully enough to return to Hong Kong. She spent some time in Norway to recuperate further and, on her return, she took a job as a warden at Sheffield University. While in Sheffield she met and married bullion merchant Eric Joyce.

In the early 1970s, when "enough time had elapsed for the fierce agonies of remembrance to be controlled and for the worthwhile, interesting core of the business to remain in the memory" (p. 1), she began to write. Assisted by her loose leaf diary, which she claimed was "sadder than memory," and the Sheet, she wrote her memoirs of her time in Hong Kong during the war. In 1975 she donated the memoirs and the sheet to the Imperial War Museum, London where they have remained ever since. Mrs. Daisy Mary Joyce, pre-deceased by her husband, died of cancer on 19 October 1975.