AT 14, TAM SO-LAN ran away from home to join Mao Zedong's army. The year was 1949, it was a school holiday, and a friend asked if she wanted to become a communist soldier. Despite her father being a ranking Kuomintang officer, she said yes, bid her grandmother goodbye and left.
Her immediate family never saw her again. Years later, she tried to trace her father and brother (her mother had died when she was a girl) but they seemed to have been swallowed up in that epic period of China's turbulent history.
Tam, now Polly Edwards, 67, has had an equally tumultuous past. But hers is a story that has remained in the background of her public life with Jack Edwards, 84, a former Japanese prisoner of war and honorary chairman of the Hong Kong Ex-servicemen's Association and the chairman of the Hong Kong and China branch of the Royal British Legion. Married to Jack since 1990, Polly can be seen at all former-POW functions, encouraging and supporting those who need help. It seems a natural role to play for someone who has lived a more dramatic life than most.
More than 50 years after leaving her family home in Wuhan in Hubei, she recalls her first day at Changsha in Hunan province - where she enlisted - and the excitement and romance the army seemed to promise. At 6am, the new recruits were roused and given 20 minutes to make their beds and get ready for their first drill. 'We were all young girls and boys, hundreds of us, marching on this big ground. Turn left, turn right; turn left, turn right,' Polly says, turning her torso this way and that, head held high.
The marching continued until 8am, when breakfast of congee, vegetables, meat and nuts was served. 'We never had a table,' she remembers, explaining that meals were eaten sitting on the floor. The rest of the morning was spent in the fields, farming vegetables, and from 2pm, there were three hours of classes in Chinese, maths, Chinese literature and history. After dinner came self-criticism sessions, at which recruits discussed their shortcomings and vowed to improve themselves. Lights out was at 10pm.
Polly, who was known in the army as Tam Ping, says the first month of endless marching taught her the importance not only of self-respect and independence but also doing as she was told, namely to 'work hard and be a very good girl'. This appeared to pay off when a female officer showed up at Changsha to pick dancers and singers. The recruits stood to attention while the woman pointed to individuals, telling them to join one of two groups.
