My stepmother, Wilhelmina Tempest, who has died aged 94, was one of the last survivors of wartime Japanese internment camps. She then retrained as a nurse, going to Britain to pursue an interest in burn injuries and plastic surgery.
Her grandfather was a Dutch protestant missionary in West Papua. When the second world war reached Sumatra (then a Dutch colony) in 1942, her father, Willem van Hasselt, was the headteacher of a bush school. Conscripted into the Dutch army, within three weeks he was captured by the Japanese and sent to work on the Burma railway. He survived because, being born and bred in Sumatra, he had better resistance to the local diseases.
Wil and her mother, Pieterlina (nee Aalfs), were interned along with all non-native women and children. She talked about her experiences only very late in life. All the camps they were moved between were marked by filth, disease, hunger, overcrowding and an ever-present threat of sexual and physical violence from their captors.
The immediate and paradoxical effect of the Japanese surrender was to place the women in mortal danger. It took six weeks for an allied force to arrive from Singapore, by which time the power vacuum had been filled by insurgents, many anxious to settle scores with their former colonial masters.
Fortunately, a remarkable Canadian woman, Joan Bamford Fletcher, who had arrived in advance, supervised the evacuation of 2,500 internees, mostly in very poor health, to Padang – a 450km trek across mountain roads under the threat of constant attack. Wil and her mother were among those rescued, and they were able to return to the Netherlands in April 1946, along with Wil’s sister, Mien, who had been in Jakarta for medical treatment and interned separately. Her father, who had suffered greatly on the railway, joined them later that year.
Despite her lack of secondary education, Wil trained as a nurse, arriving in the UK in 1957. While working at St Lawrence hospital in Chepstow, which specialised in burn injuries and plastic surgery, she met my father, Michael Tempest, a widowed doctor and plastic surgeon with two small children. They married in 1959.
In 1962 she accompanied him to Ibadan, Nigeria, to develop a plastic surgery unit where he developed a surgical technique to repair the ravages of noma, or cancrum oris, a facially disfiguring tropical disease affecting young children.
The family returned to Chepstow in 1965, settling in a village in the Wye Valley. Like many medical wives, Wil provided stoic support to my father, who was “married to the hospital”, sacrificing her nursing career to bring up the children, of which they had three more.
In retirement, Wil was an enthusiastic member of the U3A, studying a range of subjects from French and philosophy to drama and folk dancing. Although she lived in the UK for 65 years, she never renounced her Dutch citizenship and was mortified by Brexit.
Michael died in 1995. She is survived by her children, Ewart and Ruth, and stepchildren, James and me. Her son David predeceased her.
