<Begin Segment 11>

TI: So what was it like at the house? So they took your father, your grandfather, your mother, and Victor, leaving you, your grandmother, Pearl, and, I guess, your other sister.

RM: Well, getting back to the fact that the war produced a juvenile delinquent, I think in what I wrote, the story that I wrote, I said, well, I wasn't like, like a swaddling baby, a suckling baby, I think I said, being yanked away from its mother's arms. I was an eight year old. I was free. That was the thing that absolutely delighted me. Nobody around to tell me what to do. It was great, wonderful. For a juvenile delinquent it couldn't have been better.

TI: So all the authority figures, or a lot of them, were just taken away.

RM: Gone.

TI: Gone. And you were on your own. Well, there's, but still you had your older, you had Margaret and then later on Victor. Did they try to keep you in line?

RM: My sister Margaret would write charts out and stuff, typical of a teenager. She'd get very detailed in this, saying Ramsay is gonna do this and my sister Pearl is gonna do this and whatnot, and me, probably, she had a line for, but of course she couldn't make anybody do it. So we didn't. I think my sister Pearl was always a good player. She always played by the rules and she was always very nice, and she probably played along, but not me. I was just doing what I wanted to do.

TI: How about your grandparents? Did they ever come and try to get you to do things?

RM: Not really. Knowing how my grandfather was to start with, I mean, he was almost a juvenile delinquent himself, as far as, I mean, a navy man off the ship, and he acted accordingly, I think. So I think he understood that part.

KN: Did your grandparents clean house after they returned, or your grandfather returned?

RM: Everybody had to try doing things for themselves, but there was usually a staff of one live-in maid, one come every day kind, a day maid.

KN: Did they feel that had to, though, clean the house of Japanese items and anything that they had which might be suspicious?

RM: My grandfather had swords and, and anything that looked like a weapon was confiscated immediately. And I did get it back. In fact, I still have it. I probably got to take it to Brian 'cause he could use it over there at the Cultural Center. But my son and, my son in particular really enjoyed that thing. He'd take it out for all his friends to see and it's, it was a ceremonial sword. It has, when you take the hilt off, there was no signature on there for the person that made it, so I think it was appraised at one point, and there's something written in Japanese about the quality of the piece, and I think the quality is excellent except that, of course, at this point it's, carbon steel rusts, so the blade's, the blade's rusty. And it hasn't been cared for.

TI: But how about things like papers, letters? Were any things like, anything like that destroyed during this time?

RM: Coming from a literate family, everybody wrote stuff down. Let me put it that way. I don't, I don't consider myself literate in terms of the rest of the people in my family. I'm surprised I got published at this particular point, but that's the kind of family I came from and there's nothing but paper around that house. A nightmarish amount of stuff that I actually had to physically look through. Enough to make you gag. And of course, like I said, each piece had somebody's personal mark and, and that's kind of scary when you think about it. You're sitting there all by yourself looking through people's writing, especially like my sister. My sister wrote a lot and, my sister Pearl, that is, and I think she did want to become a novelist at one time or another. And I would say the least literate person is the one that's doing the writing at the moment. You never know.

<End Segment 11> - Copyright © 2011 Densho. All Rights Reserved.