Day Joyce Sheet
[3] While the sheet's size and fragility prevent it from being put on permanent display, it can be seen in the Exhibits and Firearms Department by prior appointment.
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.
During the battle she joined other auxiliary nurses in La Salle College, a Catholic boys' school in Kowloon City that was commandeered as an emergency hospital for the war effort.
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.
For three years they were to contain in their noisy folds all my written pages and to keep them safe through exciting searches"[5] 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.
By the time Day was liberated, the sheet had accumulated 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.
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.
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.
Most of the secondary sources on the Day Joyce Sheet were written by Bernice Archer, who extensively researched the experiences of interned civilians under Japanese occupation during the Pacific War.
