The Mushroom Years

Taken from a life of comfort and privilege in the British Concession of Tientsin, North China, and thrown into Weihsien Prison Camp in Japanese-occupied China, three young British girls face deprivation and hardship during the bitter years of World War II.

The Mushroom Years tells the story of the house arrest and eventual imprisonment of a British family in the Orient through the eyes of a teenager. Pamela, her sisters, and her parents are caught with a few thousand innocent Allied Nationals in the harsh reality of war. Now, more than fifty years later, the author's intimate recollections of the horror, the humor, and the humanity that made survival possible for both prisoners and captors alike, allow us to experience in vivid detail a rare and relatively unknown aspect of World War II.

The author, Pamela Masters (the teenage Pamela Simmons), tells of a serene existence suddenly spinning out of control, as she is transformed from a flippant teenager to a shaken survivor by the vagaries of war. We believe you, like the author, will never take life for granted again.

Chapter 1, The Fatal Eighth

Monday, December 8, 1941
Tientsin, North China
For one vivid moment I didn't feel the numbing cold, or realize the menace charging me with a fixed bayonet; all I saw was Ursula, safe in the British zone, and smoldering defiance exploded within me. Letting out an angry bellow, I slammed the side of the Jap's weapon with a heavily gloved hand, catching him completely off-guard. As the bayonet spun out of his frozen hands and he scrambled after it, I fled through the Concession gates . . .

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