FORMER prisoner of war of the Japanese, Barbara Sowerby, is angry the £10,000 compensation she will be getting is 55 years too late.

Grandmother Mrs Sowerby, 64, said she is convinced the decision to pay out the money now after more than half a century of bitter negotiation, is only because a major Japanese trade fair is to be held in London next May.

Mrs Sowerby, who lives in The Butts, Aldbourne, where she and her husband run a furniture upholstery business, said: "This is just a softener to keep us off their backs in London next year.

"Otherwise we old fogies would be there demonstrating and asking where our compensation was."

She said she is angry that since the Japanese surrender in 1945, thousands of former prisoners from the Japanese war camps have died, many of them penniless.

Mrs Sowerby was five years old when she and her mother, her sister and baby and three brothers were taken prisoner in Hong Kong.

Families who had been unable to get on the last boat to freedom before the Japanese took control of the island, were given five minutes to leave their homes.

"I can still remember arriving at what we called the Indian Quarters during the night, and feeling something squelching under my feet. The next day I was appalled to discover it was blood. The smell was horrific and to this day I cannot stand places that smell nasty,"she said.

Her father who was an overseer in the docks, had volunteered to join the Hong Kong Volunteer Defence Corps. The family later learnt he was captured by the Japanese and tortured.

One of Mrs Sowerby's brothers, Fred, 22, was also taken prisoner and forced to work in the docks. When his father became too ill to work, Fred did a double shift to cover for him. "They made him watch his own father being tortured,"she said.

"Our diet was largely rice although we were given a tiny sprat for lunch or what we called tiffin.

"We used to raid the Japanese dustbins but you had to make sure you didn't get caught. One day we found some banana skins which we fried and ate."

In 1945 the Japanese PoWs in Hong Kong were liberated after the American dropped the atomic bomb on Hiroshima.

Mrs Sowerby celebrated her tenth birthday on the ship returning to Britain with her mother, brother, sister and baby who had been in prison with her.

Mrs Sowerby is bitter she has never had an apology from the Japanese.

She said the only compensation previously was £45 which was awarded to her mother in 1948, and which was paid in installments over three years.

Mrs Sowerby said she has tried to forget, but she has never forgiven the Japanese for robbing her of not only five years of her childhood, but also of her father and several of her brothers.

On Remembrance Day on Sunday, members of the Association of British Civil Internees Far East were invited for the first time to be represented at the Cenotaph in Whitehall, and Mrs Sowerby attended.

"At last we have been recognised before we all finally die out. I am one of the youngest members of the association, but we are having members dying at the rate of two or three each day," she said.

"So many of them never lived to see the compensation which should have been paid when they were younger so they could get some benefit from it.

"Too many have died without receiving even a penny for what they were put through by the Japanese."