"Women Beyond the Wire"  by Lavinia Warner and John Sandilands was first published 1982 by Michael Joseph; reissued in Arrow paperback, 1997.

This book, about the horrific experiences of women taken prisoner by the Japanese in WW II, was co-authored with Lavinia Warner, producer of the hugely successful television series, Tenko, for the BBC.

The notion that the Japanese were ineffectual little fellows, strong on pomposity but short-sighted, muddled and distinctly inferior, the stereotype which had caused them to be so dangerously underrated in the first place, did not survive because it was so constantly spiked by examples of their terrifying savagery. One night a shot rang out in the darkness and in the ensuing flurry of noisy activity among the captors it emerged that a sentry had shot and killed another Japanese who had been moving about the camp too stealthily. Even the kindest of the ladies found it difficult to feel as appalled as they might at the tragedy, but the incident restored the deadly threat of the ever-present rifles and bayonets and made stepping out of the bungalows at night a nerve tingling experience.

If any further proof were needed that a devil lurked in even the most mild-seeming of the Japanese, their treatment of the natives was chilling in the extreme. A Malay caught trying to sell food at the wire was tied to a post by the gate in an excruciating way that made his every move a torment. He was left there for two days receiving, by way of attention, only off-handed kicks and clouts from the guards, and was then taken away to some unknown fate.

This public punishment, and there were to be more examples, engendered an atmosphere of brutality that lingered over everything, and there was now a new method by which the Japanese could impose themselves as masters of the women every day. This was the ritual of Tenko, which came to be so called by the prisoners because it was the word shouted by the guards as they rampaged through the camp driving the women out to be counted. In addition to the early morning count there was often a Tenko at noon, so that the women caught the full blast of the midday sun, and indeed at any hour one of its most objectionable aspects was its unpredictability. As soon as it was called everyone was obliged to drop what they were doing and hurry out into the roadway where the counting process would begin at the whim of the Japanese guards and continue endlessly until the total met the curious necessities of their mathematics.

It was a very personal imposition: a peasant-soldier could strut and posture as much as he pleased while the women wilted before him in the heat. Perhaps in subconscious counter to this arrogance some of the Dutch women drew on their comparative affluence to turn out for Tenko looking their best, including a dash of lipstick but there was one guard, pursuing who knows what strange private phobia, who would grow infuriated at the sight of it and hit the offenders across the mouth.

Tenko was never a true contest between the fuming women and their oppressors, because the Japanese had the trump card in terms of humiliation. Before the count began the women had to bow. No single gesture could more graphically have expressed submission in the Western mind, and there were innumerable devices for lessening the sting. 'We would tell each other that we ought to do much more of it because it was so good for the figure,' Shelagh Brown said, still ruffled all those years later, but the bow was so bound up in the Japanese order of things that to refuse was to risk a tempest of wrath. Margot Turner, restored to health and back in the camp, described the bowing, as 'very irksome', which could be translated from her understated style as totally infuriating. Margot took the view, like the Australian nurses, that she was a military prisoner who should not have been placed with civilians anyway and one day, when the indignities felt unbearable, she failed to offer the bow. She was promptly punched in the face, hard enough to knock out one of her front teeth.