To the Kwai and Back: War Drawings 1939-1945

"Ronald Searle documented what he saw in quite graphic detail. If you look here, you can see a soldier with a bayonet in a prisoner’s back. The prisoner has to hold a rock up in the air above his head, and if he lowers it, the soldier will bayonet him. It’s horrible. He also went into the hospital, and, for example, here’s a picture of a man dying of cholera. There are a lot of pictures of men with prosthetic limbs. It’s just drawings of people around, his equivalent of my father’s diary. It’s a wonderful book. It is so different from St Trinian’s . It is amazing it’s by the same person. He wasn’t all doom and gloom. In my book, I talk about how they put on shows and Ronald Searle did the scenery. He also did a cartoon for my father—my brother has got that framed at his home. There is a varying amount of text. Here’s a typical double page. The text (about cholera) reads, “Without sophisticated emergency treatment—and there was little or nothing in the way of treatment—one swiftly shrank to nothing and died within 24 hours. To reduce the sources of infection, there were no more burials and from then on our nights were illuminated not only by a great, ever-burning bonfire in the centre of the camp, but also by the Bosch-like glow of the funeral pyres that were now sending all too many of us up in smoke.” (By Bosch, he means the artist, Hieronymous Bosch). I wasn’t sure about putting this as one of the five books, because it can be a bit hard to get hold of, but you can get it second-hand, or your library could order it. That’s what my father said in the Yorkshire Television programme. They were just these skeletal bodies, desperate for relief that he couldn’t give them because he didn’t have anything. All he could give them was water. He had nothing else."