When the Japanese took Borneo in 1942, Agnes Keith was captured and imprisoned with her two-year-old son. Fed on minimal rations, forced to work through recurrent bouts of malaria and fighting with rats for scraps of food, Agnes Keith's spirit never completely died. Keeping notes on scraps of paper which she hid in her son's homemade toys or buried in tins, she recorded a mother's pain at watching her child go hungry and her poignant pride in his development within these strange confines. She also described her captors in all their complexity. Colonel Suga, the camp commander, was an intelligent, highly educated man, at times her adversary, at others a strange ally in a distorted world.
