Coming Home

Back in England we were de-briefed alongside prisoners from other theatres of war. Our interviews were noticeably short; the men freed by the Russians, we noticed, were questioned at length about how they had been treated. It seemed more trouble was expected from that quarter — and so, in time, it proved, in the long Cold War that followed.

During my interview I was asked whether I wished to claim for personal things the Japanese had taken — and there had been three gifts, given me in England five years and more before: a signet ring, a good fountain pen, a cigarette case. I claimed ten pounds to replace them, and was sent five, that being the limit, I was told, without receipts. Whether they meant receipts from the Japanese who took the things, or from a shop five years gone, I never discovered.

Soon after I got home I was admitted to the York Military Hospital. One morning a nurse turned back my sheet and found what she took for a piece of leather; it was the sole of my foot, which had come away — left like leather by all those barefoot miles on the melting tar.

The army had its own ideas of a welcome. The battalion's paymaster was housed in the Rowntree's chocolate factory in York, and when Tom and I went to draw some pay I gave my name as Corporal Troughton — only to be told they had a Private Troughton on their list, and that I had been reduced to the ranks under a rule that demoted prisoners of war six weeks after their return to England. And the three years' pay that had accumulated while I was captive, and was now paid out, the taxman fell upon, deducting tax for the whole period — though, paid properly at the time, I should have paid none. When I queried it, I was told only that I was lucky to be married, or I should have paid a great deal more.

The world had moved on without us, and we did not always fit back into it easily. Four of us who had been prisoners would meet for a quiet drink, and one evening, in a lounge bar empty but for a little old lady over a half of Guinness, we fell to talking of life in the jail — at which she finished her drink in a hurry and was gone. It dawned on us afterwards: she had taken us for criminals just out of prison. Beer itself was scarce, the pubs opening for an hour and then shutting, so that we learned to order four pints apiece and sit sixteen on the table at once. Very early on I walked into a pub, ordered a pint and twenty cigarettes, put down half a crown and waited for my change — and got a shock when I was asked for more, both having gone up a great deal while I was away. We could not seem to fill ourselves: a couple of hours in the pub, then the fish-and-chip shop, then back to the pub, and supper after that at home. Years later I saw the same thing in the displaced persons who came over after being worked half to death by the Germans.

Once, at a function in the drill hall in York, Field Marshal Slim came along the ranks talking to each of us, and to the four of us about Burma. One of the lads said they had been a long time getting down to us; Slim's reply was that they had caught the Japanese camp commandant at last, and hanged him.

There was a harder homecoming waiting, too. Before I went away I had been engaged to a young woman in York, and through all my five years abroad she had visited my family and waited, not knowing whether I was alive or dead, with only the War Office "missing" to go on. When I got home my mother told me she had married, just three months before. And after so long without the company of women I hardly knew how to be near them; walking down the main street in York, if a woman came towards me I would stop and study a shop window until she had passed. Two or three pints, I found, helped to mend the difficulty — and perhaps I should have gone to one of the rehabilitation centres, to get used again to an England much changed from the one I had left in 1939.

In time I met a young WAAF, and introduced Tom to her friend, and the four of us went about together. I married a few months later, and Tom was my best man; the reception was held in a café — the very café an officer had bought for another Rangoon man who had looked after him in the camp. Later Tom married in his turn, and I was his.