Linda then had a whole sequence of attacks, nearly dying on several occasions, and she had to live the rest of her life aware of these little bombs always threatening to go off in her head. She achieved her aim of working in a big insurance company, investigating suspicious claims and worked diligently on these cases. Her good humour, so terribly shadowed, could make her friends forget her condition; but she could not escape her congenital weakness. She died at the age of forty-six.
My second daughter was born in 1957. She enjoyed a normal and healthy childhood and became a successful nurse and midwife.
My frequent absences on the lecture circuit were a contributory factor, no doubt, to the breakdown of my marriage, but they were also a symptom of its failure. I wanted to get away. In 1970 I moved out for six months, later drifting back, but it was never the same again. In 1981 I left for good.
CHAPTER ELEVEN
WORK AND THE strong pull of the currents that run through everyday life – no matter how threatening they can seem to someone whose memories are bad – give the illusion of sweeping us away from the past. Like many men who went through Japanese prisons, I found I could allow my professional life to crowd out my desire to settle those old accounts.
Although I relived the past more often than I wished and had, again like many of my wartime comrades, accumulated a library of books about the campaigns in Malaya, the Burma-Siam Railway and the camps, I still felt a certain reluctance to confront that past directly. In the 1970s, my friend Alex Morton Mackay – by then living in Canada – found my address through an ex-POW organization and wrote me an affecting letter in which he described how I had been an example and an inspiration to him, with my arms in splints and my specs taped together; but if I recognized myself in his description, I knew it was not the whole story. No one is a hero to themselves. I found it difficult to reply to Mac, but we did eventually correspond and one day, after a service of remembrance for those who had died in the Far Eastern war, we finally met again. Fred Smith joined us for lunch in London. It was my only reunion with these two men who had meant so much to me.
But that past was not easily denied. The need to know more about what had happened to us in Siam was not some idle curiosity, and it asserted itself powerfully whenever I had time to think. After my retirement in 1982, I could put off no longer the need to know, the desire became more intense than ever. I wanted to find out what had really happened; why the Japanese had made the search of our hut on that particular day, and if somebody had tipped them off. I wished to establish the exact sequence of events. I also wanted to find out more about the Japanese responsible for the beatings and murders, apart from those already brought to justice, and above all more about the Kempei personnel who had tortured me at Kanburi. I knew nothing about their units, their names or their fate after the war. The prospects of finding the right men, of finding them alive, even of making a start were so remote; but as the events receded the obsession grew. It was like trying to reconstruct a coherent story from evidence reduced to tattered rags, faded documents, bones and rusty rails. And memories, which are even less durable.
Perhaps I was trying to recover something of what I had been before being sent to war and put to work on an insane railway. I also admit that I wanted to make them pay, pay more than they had already done. The more I thought about it, and thought about it, the more I wished to do damage to the Kempei men if I could ever find them. Physical revenge seemed the only adequate recompense for the anger I carried. I thought often about the young interpreter at Kanburi. There was no single dominant figure at Outram Road on whom I could focus my general hatred, but because of his command of my language, the interpreter was the link; he was centre-stage in my memories; he was my private obsession. His slurred and struggling English; his endless questions; his repetitiveness; the way he gave voice to the big torturing NCO: he represented all of them; he stood in for all the worst horrors.
By the time I had hardened my desire to search out the truth, I had already met Patti. I was still lecturing to audiences about industrial relations around Britain, and one day in 19801 found myself standing on the platform at Crewe Station, that great and historic railway junction in the centre of England. I should not have been there at all. I had gone to Chester to view a book auction – the old collecting urge was still as strong as ever – and went to the station to take the train back to Manchester, then on to Edinburgh, only to find that the train was cancelled. I am still grateful for that blockage on the line, whatever it was. Instead I took a train to Crewe, where I knew I could meet a train going up the west coast to Scotland. I had not spent a lifetime learning about railways for nothing.
At Crewe I was just in time and as the Glasgow train pulled in at the platform I ran for it and climbed aboard. I had a first-class ticket, so I entered an old-fashioned carriage with a corridor and separate compartments. The third compartment was occupied by a pleasant, good-looking woman sitting alone and that was the compartment I chose. I was suddenly aware that I had let myself become a bit shabby, with my old prisoner’s teeth and good but well-worn clothes, even though I looked younger than my sixty-one years. She made me feel awkward, this slim, handsome, dark-haired person who looked at least fifteen years younger than me, a glamorous and confident woman from a different world. Her face, however, had so much trusting kindness in it that I forgot about age and fashion.
She was consulting a little book, The Observer’s Tourist Atlas of Great Britain, which she balanced on her knee as she traced her journey up the west coast. She was English, and had worked here as a nurse, but had lived in Canada for many years, and this was a journey of rediscovery for her. I was pleased to learn that she had run an antiquarian bookshop in Montreal. She was on her way to visit a friend in Glasgow. I was soon discoursing about the history of the towns we were passing through, hoping that I was not boring her. But there was a kind of instant rapport between us that made me go on.
Two men got in. I refused to move my raincoat off the seat, coldly and stubbornly. The captive’s ability to obstruct could be very useful; I did not want an audience for what I now realized was a very important conversation. Three hours later the train drew into Carstairs and I screwed my courage up and asked her if she would have lunch with me the next day in Glasgow. She said yes.
It emerged quickly that we were both living rootless and not altogether happy lives; her marriage was as reduced as mine. We saw a lot of each other, and spent some good time together in Somerset, where she was staying during her British holiday. And then she went back to Canada. There were many letters and long-distance calls after her return. At an age when changes of emotional direction seemed impossible, and when I was already brooding on my vengeful quest, I had fallen in love. And then we were together: she came to live with me in Edinburgh. I was now part of a second extended family, Patti’s sons Graeme, his wife Jeanne, Nicholas and Mark welcomed me. They gave me hope for the future. Quick thinking about the movement of trains can have strange outcomes, though it failed to surprise me that my meeting with the woman who would play so great a part in changing my life should take place on a railway.
I did not tell Patti all at once about Malaya and Siam during the war, but it came out slowly. She was discovering for herself that she was living with someone with unusual problems, but meanwhile I carried on with my quest. In January 1985, I published an article in the London ‘FEPOW Forum’, a newsletter for ex-prisoners-of-war, appealing ‘before it is too late’ for information about the events at Kanburi in 1943.1 asked for eyewitness accounts, for information about the ‘American’ interpreter and the Dutch doctor. As for the seven officers, I looked around and they were all dead, Mac having died a few years before, and ‘Daddy’ Smith, the frailest of all of them, living until the age of ninety before passing away in 1984. And I could tell that Fred was dying: ‘My chest has been very bad lately and the cough is getting worse’, he wrote to me that year; in the same letter he admitted something which he had always been able to keep concealed; ‘My nerves were cracking during the nights, always at night-time.’ Fred’s heart – that indestructible rock of support – gave out five years ago.