After

My wife and I soon had a child, a girl, and took her to the local church to be christened. There on the wall was a Roll of Honour — and my own name was on it, among the dead. We pointed it out, and had it erased.

The war did not let go so easily as that. Some thirty years after I came home, my second wife Lorna and I were on holiday at a hotel abroad, and as we sat in the restaurant I saw three Japanese come in, single file. Whatever crossed my face, Lorna had me change places with her so that I sat with my back to them. Thirty years on, I still could not bear the sight.

For the last dozen years or so I have gone two or three times a year, a fortnight at a time, to a Combat Stress home, and they have done wonders for me — counselling, therapy, and above all the relaxation sessions. It was they who encouraged me to set my memories down, and so to make this book. I have been taken out, too, by the Not Forgotten Association, on trips along the canal and once to a Garden Party at Buckingham Palace.

The friends who shared it have mostly gone now. Tom and I drifted apart in the end, more from distance than anything, but I have missed him sorely since his death a few years ago; Harry, who is in these pages too, died the year before. Of those of us from the York area who were held in Rangoon, I seem to be the only one left.

Of all I brought home and kept, one thing I have looked at more than most — a letter that reached us in September 1945, when we had only just got back.

The Queen and I bid you a very warm welcome home. We mourn with you the deaths of so many of your gallant comrades.

I would like to thank all my family and friends for their help and encouragement in this work — my wife Lorna, my sons Michael and Robert, my daughters Sheila and Kathleen, and my good friend Wendy. Without them I could not have finished it.