Camp prisoner marks VJ Day by decorating church

"I've done the flowers in church as a thank you for bringing me out alive," Anne Bawden said

A former captive in a Japanese-run prison camp has helped decorate an East Sussex church in honour of fellow inmates that did not survive.

Anne Bawden, 96, has provided and arranged flowers at All Saints in Hove ahead of VJ Day on 15 August.

During World War Two she spent over three years in Lunghua Civil Assembly Centre - a civilian internment camp near Shanghai - after being imprisoned age 12.

"No matter where I've lived I've done the flowers in church as a thank you for bringing me out alive and bringing my parents out alive too," she said.

Ms Bawden told the BBC she was released from the camp aged "16, going on 25, because you grew up very quickly in camp".

VJ Day was "extremely emotional", she said.

According to Ms Bawden, prisoners soaked rations of soy beans to make milk for young children and babies, fed the remaining pulp to people with dysentery or malaria, and turned the skins into a "watery stew" for everybody else.

She said in one incident a fellow prisoner answered back to Japanese guards, who "started to beat him up in in view of the whole camp".

"There wasn't very much that we could do about it and he was taken away," she said.

Pat Owtram's father was captured while serving in Singapore

Pat Owtram, 102, was among the thousands to descend on Buckingham Palace to celebrate VJ Day.

The capital "just felt the one place to be", she said. "I think we all went to the palace and shouted 'we want the King'."

Her father was captured in Singapore although her family initially heard he was "missing in action", according to the Women's Royal Naval Service veteran.

It was "quite a long time" until the family learned he was taken to a prisoner of war camp, Ms Owtram said, when "the Red Cross must have let my mother know that he was alive".

According to the former Wren, deployed to the Kent coast during WW2, she knew her father was "having a very tough time" but that "his morale was extremely good".

When they received a telegram to say the war was over and he would be released, the family "knew he was on his way home at last".

"We could certainly celebrate that," Ms Owtram added.