Jacqueline Passman's Reading List

"This was the most incredible escape story, because escaping from the railway was almost impossible. Surviving it was unheard of, and when you were caught, it was routine for all escapees to be executed. There was impenetrable jungle on all sides and the locals were offered a good sum of money to report anyone who did escape. Still, they managed for a while. Five of them died in the jungle. And when they were caught—betrayed by someone who was bribed—and brought back, they somehow managed to have their sentences commuted to jail. Dad went to see Jim Bradley in hospital after he came back. I actually included that in the diary, because it was so amazing—Dad’s words repeating what his friend had said. They’d been quite friendly all the way through, part of a group of officers. I’m a little bit uncomfortable about the separation between officers and the ordinary ranks. I’m sure the officers were more comfortable and had privileges, and I’m very conscious of that. But they also had responsibilities. James Bradley was one of the engineers who were absolutely vital to their survival in the camps. I hadn’t realized what the engineers did… First of all, building the latrines. That was always the first thing they did when they set up camp. They built huts to sleep in. They provided electricity using batteries. They just made life more comfortable. When they were sent to Selarang, there were 15,000 people in barracks built for 800. It was all concrete, and they had to dig into it to make latrines. It’s very difficult for us to imagine conditions like that. What we complain about now is nothing compared to what they had to put up with. They survived nearly seven weeks. For the last three, they were virtually starving and only had water. Jim Bradley credited his survival to my father, because one of the conditions that caused a lot of unnecessary deaths was tropical ulcers. They were hacking their way through thick bamboo. It was sharp and cut their legs. My father had given Jim Bradley some sulphonamide, which he ended up needing. Dad said that he had suspected why Jim Bradley had asked for it, but didn’t ask any questions because it was much better that he didn’t know. Unfortunately, every time people escaped, the ones who were left behind were put on starvation rations for a few weeks."

"He’d also kept notes, but his diary is a lot shorter. It’s a very different perspective, because he talks a lot about faith. He was a very humane person. My father and Eric Cordingly were from different religions, but they got on really well. They both had a job to do. One thing I hadn’t realized is that they were both only ‘attached’ to the army. In all the records, it says Army Chaplain, Army Medical Officer, treated separately with non-combatant status. Louise, his daughter, has sent me the books she’s written based on her father’s story. We were put in touch by a mutual Far East prisoner of war organization and she was thrilled her father was mentioned 86 times in my father’s diary. I also have quite a few photographs of our two fathers together. We’ve kept in good contact since. Eric Cordingly writes that although it was maybe the worst time, it was also one of the best times in his life, because so many people who you wouldn’t have expected would come to his church services—whether it was for the religious side or just getting together and singing together. He found it a very fulfilling time. Yes. I can understand the attraction. I found the book very moving. The church in Changi was in a little mosque. I know Dad, in a way, was a little bit envious, because he said people were spilling out of the church. They also had Jewish services, but there weren’t so many people. I think 0.5% of the army was Jewish, and not all of them would have come. What I liked was the way they used to have discussions about all sorts of topics at night. They just enjoyed each other’s company. They had a fair knowledge of war events in Europe, thanks to their illegal radios. One of the reasons why my father’s diary was so difficult to decipher is that there are bits cut out. He realized that if the Japanese got hold of the diary, they would realize he could only have got certain items of news from an illegal radio. I don’t think they had any awareness of what Hitler was doing to the Jews in Europe, but then that also applied to people in the UK. In Dad’s medical room, he had a chair with hollow bamboo legs. That’s where they kept the bits of the radio—inside the legs of the chair, and then some of it, apparently, in one of the pipes of the sink. If he’d been caught, I don’t think he would have survived to tell the tale because it was absolutely forbidden. Keeping a diary was bad, but having an illegal radio was the death penalty. No. I have read a huge tome about Jewish Far East prisoners of war and there’s only one anti-Semitic incident documented. As far as the Japanese were concerned, the prisoners were all the lowest of the low. Their religion was not an issue. In the last year, they actually provided materials for the Jewish prisoners to build a synagogue within the camp. They hadn’t previously had a proper synagogue; they just used odd rooms up to then. The Japanese seemed to actively encourage religious services. I think it was because it kept the prisoners out of mischief. Also, I think they were a little bit superstitious: you didn’t upset other people’s gods. The whole rationale in the Japanese army was brutal, so each successive level would brutalize the people below them. For the bottom-ranking, ordinary Japanese soldiers, the only people they had to take it out on were the prisoners. There was a television programme, maybe two or three years ago, where they interviewed two Japanese guards. One had been a high-ranking officer and one was very low. The one who was high up said he had no guilt at all. He was just following orders and they didn’t do anything wrong. The one who was in the lowest echelon of the army ranks said he still, even after all this time, had sleepless nights about the way they treated the prisoners. Yes. The Padre was caught passing notes, so he was tied to another prisoner, and they were both put in a 10-foot-deep pit. They were given nothing. Then, at night, one of the Japanese soldiers, a Christian, climbed down a bamboo ladder and gave them sweetened tea and two bananas. This soldier would almost certainly have been shot if they’d found that out. No, and that is a fault I ought to rectify. I have been to Japan. I went with my daughter and granddaughter a few years ago. The place that made the biggest impression on me was going to Nagasaki. I found that so horrific and so moving. I can’t really get my head around it, because I know that if it hadn’t been for the atomic bombs dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki, none of my family would be here. There was a limit to how long my father could have lasted under POW conditions. But does the end justify the means? I’m not sure. Also, it wasn’t just for that generation: the radiation effect spread through subsequent ones too."

"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."

"I included this one because if somebody is really interested in what happened from a medical point of view, this is a very readable book. It’s an academic assessment of the problems they had and it covers a lot. They have gone through every possible source of information. I was actually given a copy because they took bits from my father’s diary. One of the interesting things that came out of the incarceration is that the medics from all the different divisions used to meet regularly for what was called the ‘Changi Medical Society.’ They would discuss how they treated different diseases and try to understand why treatments would work with some people and not with others. It was a very good network of all the medics and they learned a lot. My father said they learned about eye conditions and they certainly acquired much knowledge about vitamin deficiencies, that’s for sure. Yes, Dad was very focused on vitamin deficiency. He does mention it many times in his diary, but I didn’t want to make the book too heavily medical. It was difficult because there’s obviously a lot of medical detail in the diary. All of them, really, but particularly A and B. They got some vitamin C because they did have vegetables, though not many. The lack of vitamin A caused eye problems. Vitamin B is the one that’s in yeast and unpolished rice. The lack of it causes beriberi and there were a lot of outbreaks. Yes. Dad was disappointed because after a while he realised they were just being collected from the floor with all the dust, and there wasn’t enough vitamin B in them. They used to eat the weevils as well, because they were a small source of protein. They ate anything and everything – even a snake! I don’t think so. I do know the Japanese kept back a lot of Red Cross parcels that came with food for the prisoners of war, which were found afterwards. The prisoners were desperate for Marmite because it contains vitamin B. After Japan surrendered, they found jars and jars of Marmite stored in one of the larders of the Japanese officers. The prisoners were allowed to keep ducks and chickens, which they bought from the locals. They grew crops and did what they could to supplement the diet, with mixed results. It worked better sometimes than others. My father said he reckoned they had so many they didn’t care if half of them died. If one died, there was always another one to take his place. And in fact, of F Force—the last group to go up, who were sent to the northernmost camp—more than half of them did die on the railway. They were in camps in a hitherto unexplored jungle area, cutting through jungle that people had considered wasn’t fit for putting a railway. The Japanese wouldn’t have had many amenities, so I assume they kept the best ones for themselves. Yes, it was built, and the best thing for the prisoners of war when it was finished was that they could travel back on it. It took three days to travel back compared to the horrendous journey they’d had going up eight months previously. Dad said that, as far as he knew, they hardly used it during the war and certainly, by a few years after, it was not used at all. In the end, it was mainly used by the Japanese to transport the soldiers who were guarding the prisoners."

"I put this on the list because I thought it’d be good to have something fictional. I’ve read quite a lot of novels based around the war in the Far East and this one is by far the most realistic. I think my father would have said, ‘This is what it was like.’ But it’s very graphic. It was televised recently, and many of my friends said they couldn’t watch it because it was so unpleasant. The book won the Booker Prize. It is an interesting book, a compelling read, combining the horrors of working on the railway with a love story—an unusual combination. Yes, his father was a doctor, which is why it resonated with me. It’s set in three time zones: the carefree period before the war, the horrors of the prison camp, and then, a section well after the war, when he was a celebrated war hero, and has been asked to promote a fellow POW’s book of war sketches As an old man he is tormented by memories of the past, and these shape the novel. When I read it, it was the first time I’d read a book set in this period where I thought, ‘This is by somebody who knows what it was really like.’ Yes, I did. A friend who read it did not like the frequent time shifts, but that didn’t worry me. I thought Flanagan treated a difficult subject in a thoughtful way. He never forgets it and he still has nightmares about the horrific events he witnessed. As far as I know, my father never did. Obviously, that’s something I couldn’t know for sure, but Dad didn’t seem to be that sort of person. In the book, the doctor, as he gets older, gets very difficult, and people don’t really understand why. No, I can’t say that it did. I think you’re very lucky if you can compartmentalize your life and say, ‘This is the past. It’s not going to define me. I’m just going to get on with it.’ Dad did say to me that he had wondered if he would get out, and whether he would ever have a family. They actually thought they might all be impotent from the diet. So the fact that he not only had children, but grandchildren, and then five great grandchildren before he died… I try very hard and I like to think I have. I’m definitely a glass-half-full person."