A new book tells how Kathleen Foster was robbed of her childhood. The theft, we learn, took place on one of the most infamous days in world history, December 8, 1941.

For on the day that the Japanese bombers struck at Pearl Harbor, Mrs Foster’s education was to take a violent turn for the worse.

Aged just 11, her studies were interrupted by the arrival of Japanese troops in her school’s compound in China.

The headmaster was arrested and thrown in prison, guards were positioned at the gates and the chapel was turned into a stable.

At the age of 80, she is preparing to grapple once more with the demons of her past after being one of the people featured in Stolen Childhoods: The Untold Story of the Children Interned by the Japanese in the Second World War, by journalist Nicola Tyrer.

The book examines what happened to the British children who were rounded up when Japan entered the war and were to spend three long years living on what was effectively the frontline of a war, in daily contact with an enemy whose values were alien.

Mrs Foster was among those who were separated from parents and were to experience hunger and illness in a brutal new world, which effectively ended a forgotten era of European colonialism.

She and her sister Beryl were to be interned for almost three years in two camps.

The 70th anniversary of Pearl Harbor is fast approaching. But Mrs Foster, pictured, admits that the traumas of her childhood are never too far away.

Her mother always refused to talk about her daughter’s years of internment, while Mrs Foster came to feel that she had been abandoned by her parents.

In her fifties she eventually felt the need for counselling.

“It was the most liberating thing I have ever done,” said Mrs Foster, of Liddiard Close, Wantage. “It helped me to evaluate what had happened to me.”

The daughter of a missionary, Mrs Foster was born in the inland Chinese province of Shensi in 1930.

Even before the Japanese invasion, her family had to face dangerous times when the Red Army was marching through the area. “At one stage my parents hired a man to carry my sister and me in baskets and, while they carried what they could, we fled the city. We were away 11 days, arriving at a mission station where they had given us up for lost.”

Her father preached in villages and she still recalls the plight of the young people.

“I saw starving children with swollen bellies, women with bound feet hobbling painfully. I was stared at because I had blue eyes.”

At the age of seven she was sent to boarding school on the coast of northern China. “Because my parents worked far away they left me there without a visit for three years.

“I was in the company of others in the same situation. I am still in touch with many of them.”

Years later she says she would look at her own children and question the kind of parenting she received, believing her father had been a missionary first and a father second. “I’d look at my own children as they reached seven and think, ‘how could they?’”

Her father died in 1941.

“A teacher sat me on her lap to break the news,” she recalls, “But that sort of physical contact wasn’t natural and it never happened again.”

Three months later the arrival of the Japanese meant she faced a far bleaker existence. She and the other children were given armbands to wear, showing their nationalities.

Later when the army took over the school building, the children were marched to the other side of the city, with a single semi-detached house built for one family transformed into a crowded girls’ school with 33 mattresses spread on the floor of the loft.

“The guards were professional soldiers and not unkind,” said Mrs Foster. “My sister was in a camp not far away and we were allowed a visit occasionally.”

But after 10 months they were taken to the Weihsien, a camp which housed 1,500 internees from all over the north of China.

She recalls one Chinese escaper being electrocuted on the barbed wire that surrounded the camp.

“There were real fears the Japanese might slaughter the inmates or that the internees might be caught in the crossfire between competing guerrilla bands. We children knew nothing of this.”

The children were all allocated work. “I used to work in the laundry scrubbing and hanging out washing. We had soap. In winter grey sheets froze on the line.”

Food shortages worsened as the war progressed. “We had to swallow a teaspoon of ground egg shells for calcium. In spite of that, when we returned home, the dentist said he’d never seen such soft teeth.”

In the camp she came to know the Olympic runner Eric Liddell, of Chariots of Fire fame.

Liddell, who became a missionary, had sent his family home but was captured before he could follow them.

“He was very popular, always willing to help,” recalls Mrs Foster. “He gave his running shoes to one of the pupils, who wanted to run like him.”

The running legend was to die of a brain tumour in early 1945.

While summers were unbearably hot, the winters were freezing. “Heating was by stoves fuelled by coal dust mixed with earth and water to make balls. I was no good at chopping wood and took it around a corner so that no one could see me. A guard came to my rescue and chopped it for me. I developed chilblains and was given boots that were too small, so the toes had to be cut out.”

The end came on August 17, 1945, when a plane circled the camp. “Unbelievably seven men came floating down on parachutes. The internees went mad and rushed the gates. The guards stood still. Barefoot on stony ground, we went to meet our rescuers. They landed in a field of grain and were borne in to the camp on willing shoulders.”

But her ordeal was far from over. Soon after leaving she suffered pain in her hip and was found to have osteomyelitis. Luckily there was penicillin, the newly-discovered wonder drug, on board a ship in the harbour.

“In Hong Kong I was looked after by a number of doctors. They were all interested to see how well penicillin worked.”

When the two girls arrived in Liverpool, she and her sister struggled to recognise their mother. “One of the staff pointed her out. My sister said, ‘that’s not my mother — she would never wear a hat like that’.”

She believes the separation had a major impact on her life.

“For a long time I suffered from a lack of self-esteem.”

Mrs Foster went on to work as an arts teacher, before coming to live in Oxfordshire 12 years ago when she retired. Now divorced, she regularly sees her two daughters and one of her sons, who all live near Wantage.

The book tells of her years of unhappiness in her fifties.

“I realised that I didn’t have to believe this and that and I stopped going to church. My mother told me she was ashamed of me,” she told the author of a Stolen Childhoods, a book that will surely leave her own children feeling nothing but pride.

l Stolen Childhoods is published by Weidenfeld and Nicolson (priced £20).