Before & After Photos
My Father in the left photo is the one with the cigarette, soon after the British division of the Recovery of Allied Prisoners of War and Internees (RAPWI) for Sumatra arrived at Camp 2, the Sumatra Pakan Baroe railway hospital death camp, following the Japanese surrender. In the photo on the right, he has gained weight and is now an Attaché in London.
Liberation
My father was one of the welcoming committee, waiting at the gate of the camp to meet the RAPWI team led by Major Jacobs. When the major was ushered into a small stuffy office with a table and a few benches, my father looked at him from the other side of the table and the major said that his eyes were ‘very large and without any sparkle’. Then, he quoted my father as saying “This is not the moment for speeches,” in a voice Major Jacobs described a sounding dull. “But I still would like to say: thank God you are here.” This was in August, 1945.
On 24 August, nine days after the surrender, my father started taking action. He put the security of the camps near Pakan Baroe in the hands of the British Indian former POWs. The were provided with one hundred rifles and some ammunition to carry out their new task as guards.
For the sick men in the worst condition, he organised a sick bay in one of the barracks that had previously quartered the Japanese. He also arranged for a ferry boat to be retrofitted and manned to transport 400 Gurkas to Singapore.
My father was also one of the officers who welcomed Lady Mountbatten when she visited Camps 1 and 2 in September 1945. She and my father became good friends and he and my mother visited her and Lord Mountbatten when he was back in the UK.
The Arrival
My father left Sumatra for Singapore on 24 September, 1945. He returned to the UK in early November 1945.
After a brief encounter nine months earlier, my mother had fallen pregnant and was due to give birth in early November.
When my father arrived at the station of the coastal town where my mother was renting a house, her father and sister were there on the platform to meet him. They had the terrible task of explaining to him why she wasn’t there to greet him herself. He was carrying a huge basket of fruit, a luxury item at that time, and he walked over to a woman sitting on a seat and handed her the basket. I can’t begin to imagine how devastated and betrayed he must have felt when he heard the news.
The Lie
Their first meeting must have been unbelievably awkward. My mother said she was standing by the piano when he walked into the room. She told my father a story that the father was an American airman (see the full story here) and showed him the official letter she had received informing her of his death.
No doubt, the version that my mother concocted would have sounded far more palatable than the real story. Furthermore, since the airman was dead, the story ended there—no loose ends. My mother gave birth on 13 November, and the baby was adopted by a couple known to my mother’s housekeeper. As far as I know, my father never knew the truth. I was in my forties before I learnt that I had a half-sister.
As a footnote, many months later, my mother and father were in a taxi in London, and there sitting in a taxi next to them was her dancing partner, and then he was gone! It must have given her quite a shock. What are the odds? She never saw him again.
A Tragic Scenario
When they were reunited after the war, my mother had gone through an unwanted pregnancy, and my father was skin and bones and suffering from what would now be recognised as PTSD, present in at least one-third of Far East POWs.
Of course, there was little understanding or acknowledgement of the ongoing trauma that Japanese POWs suffered after returning home. Many of them were suffering from the long-delayed effects of a starvation diet and the impact on their eyes and their mental health, as well as long-term problems resulting from having had dysentery, malaria, tropical ulcers and cholera, to name but a few of the diseases.
The men were told explicitly not to talk about their war experiences. They were told that the war was over, and people wanted to look forward. This was particularly difficult for the thousands of returned Far East POWs. In Australia and America, those who were prisoners-of-war under the Japanese were treated as special cases, but not in Britain.
My mother told my sister that my father would be awake at 3 am every morning and go and walk up and down the beach, and talk to the fishermen.
What hope did my parents have of overcoming such traumatic experiences and building a successful marriage together?
Off to Boarding School
My parents decided that they needed time alone, presumably to focus on their relationship. I was not included in that scenario. I was packed off to The Sacred Heart Convent in Brighton, an exclusive Catholic boarding school that accepted fee-paying girls from wealthy families. The school had an excellent reputation, and one of the pupils was even a French Princess, the niece of the King of the Belgians.
I’m learning these additional details about the convent now, but at the time I was sent there, I was only five years old, too young to appreciate such niceties! It must have been terrifying to suddenly be alone in a strange place with women in long black clothing and my mother and father suddenly disappearing.
My first memory of the school is looking up at the huge stone steps leading up to the entrance of the massive building, my parents on either side of me, holding my hands and helping me scramble up.
This was the second time my mother left me somewhere else, and my father barely knew me. If only they’d sent me back to my great-aunts!
My convent school experiences are my earliest memories, and I’ll share them with you in my next post!
Anyone else have memories of POW fathers returning home after the end of WWII?
Reference: Hovinga, H. (2010). The Sumatra Railroad: Final Destination Pakan Baroe 1943-1945.
I cannot wait for you to publish this novel.
Are you putting this together as a memoir from your own child and then adult point of view? It might be even more powerful to fictionalize it, and tell it in the present tense from the POV of one or both of your parents. That is how I decided to tell my parents' Oak Ridge WWII stories, although obviously there are many choices that go into the decision to create a memoir vs. a novel. I struggled with that, but ultimately wrote it as a novel with a lot of fictional elements. Still, I really enjoyed imagining how my mother might have felt as a young woman. I think the process helped me grieve for her more fully, even though she died in 1992. However, as we commented after your last post, your mother sadly did not have a lot of bandwidth for mothering. That might make it extra painful and difficult to try to enter her inner world!