Captive Fathers, Captive Children: Legacies of the War in the Far East 9781350194243, 9781350194274, 9781350194267

Table of contents :
Cover
Contents
List of figures
List of tables
Note on cover
Foreword by Sir Tim Hitchens, KCVO, CMG
Acknowledgements
List of abbreviations
Prologue
Introduction
1 Life in captivity
2 Bringing war into the home
3 Remembering and commemorating
4 Finding meaning in memories
5 Home as a site of remembrance
6 The search for military family histories
7 Place and pilgrimage
Afterword: A reflective coda
Notes
Select bibliography
Index

Citation preview

Captive Fathers, Captive Children

New Directions in Social and Cultural History Series Editors: Sasha Handley (University of Manchester, UK), Rohan McWilliam (Anglia Ruskin University, UK) and Lucy Noakes (University of Essex, UK) Editorial Board: Robert Aldrich, University of Sydney, Australia James W. Cook, University of Michigan, USA John H. Arnold, University of Cambridge, UK Alison Rowlands, University of Essex, UK Penny Summerfield, University of Manchester, UK Mrinalini Sinha, University of Michigan, USA The New Directions in Social and Cultural History series brings together the leading research in social and cultural history, one of the most exciting and current areas for history teaching and research, contributing innovative new perspectives to a range of historical events and issues. Books in the series engage with developments in the field since the post-cultural turn, showing how new theoretical approaches have impacted on research within both history and other related disciplines. Each volume will cover both theoretical and methodological developments on the particular topic, as well as combine this with an analysis of primary source materials. Published: New Directions in Social and Cultural History, ed. Sasha Handley, Rohan McWilliam and Lucy Noakes (2018) Art, Propaganda and Aerial Warfare in Britain during the Second World War, Rebecca Searle (2020) Welfare State Generation: Women, Agency and Class in Britain since 1945, Eve Worth (2022) Family History, Historical Consciousness and Citizenship: A New Social History, Tanya Evans (2022) Forthcoming: Capital Labour in Victorian England: Manufacturing Consensus, Donna Loftus British Humour and the Second World War: ‘Keep Smiling Through’, edited by Juliette Pattinson and Lindsey Robb

Captive Fathers, Captive Children Legacies of the War in the Far East Terry Smyth

BLOOMSBURY ACADEMIC Bloomsbury Publishing Plc 50 Bedford Square, London, WC1B 3DP, UK 1385 Broadway, New York, NY 10018, USA 29 Earlsfort Terrace, Dublin 2, Ireland BLOOMSBURY, BLOOMSBURY ACADEMIC and the Diana logo are trademarks of Bloomsbury Publishing Plc First published in Great Britain 2023 Copyright © Terry Smyth, 2023 Terry Smyth has asserted his right under the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act, 1988, to be identified as Author of this work. For legal purposes the Acknowledgements on pp. xi–xii and viii constitute an extension of this copyright page. Series design by Liron Gilenberg | www.ironicitalics.com Cover image © Kranji Canteen sketch/watercolour (1945) by Corporal William ‘Bill’ Norways (1918-86) of the 2nd Cambridgeshire Regiment All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or any information storage or retrieval system, without prior permission in writing from the publishers. Bloomsbury Publishing Plc does not have any control over, or responsibility for, any third-party websites referred to or in this book. All internet addresses given in this book were correct at the time of going to press. The author and publisher regret any inconvenience caused if addresses have changed or sites have ceased to exist, but can accept no responsibility for any such changes. A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library. A catalog record for this book is available from the Library of Congress. ISBN: HB: 978-1-3501-9424-3 ePDF: 978-1-3501-9426-7 eBook: 978-1-3501-9666-7 Series: New Directions in Social Cultural History Typeset by Integra Software Services Pvt. Ltd. To find out more about our authors and books visit www.bloomsbury.com and sign up for our newsletters.

Contents List of figures List of tables Note on cover Foreword by Sir Tim Hitchens, KCVO, CMG Acknowledgements List of abbreviations Prologue Introduction 1 Life in captivity 2 Bringing war into the home 3 Remembering and commemorating 4 Finding meaning in memories 5 Home as a site of remembrance 6 The search for military family histories 7 Place and pilgrimage Afterword: A reflective coda Notes Select bibliography Index

vi vii viii ix xi xiii xiv 1 23 45 71 93 115 135 153 173 184 236 237

Figures 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10

Executed for no apparent reason by Charles Thrale Angels of Life by Sally Grumbridge Prayers by the Kwae Noi by Sally Grumbridge The FEPOW Building at the National Memorial Arboretum, Alrewas, Staffordshire Inside the FEPOW Memorial Building at the National Memorial Arboretum The memorial at Omi after the unveiling on 5 September 2014 Isla’s bookshelves Doug’s ‘shrine’ The author at the entrance to the mine near the Hiroshima 6B POW camp The Artist from Essex: drawn for my father by Leonard L. Rogers, an American Marine also in my father’s POW camp

33 38 81 87 89 90 125 129 170 175

Tables 1

The three dimensions of memory practices: a heuristic framework

96

Note on the cover Cover artwork by Corporal William ‘Bill’ Norways, 1918–86 (copyright the Norways family). Bill Norways trained at the Chelsea School of Art from 1935–6. At the outbreak of war he was enlisted in the 2nd Cambridgeshire Regiment and shipped to the Far East. When Singapore surrendered to the Japanese in February 1942, Bill became a POW. In 1943, he was used as labour to build the Thai–Burma Railway where he suffered from malnutrition, cardiac beri-beri, bronchitis, malaria and dysentery. This half-completed watercolour depicts the canteen in Kranji POW camp, Singapore, 1945. It is one example from a portfolio of artwork, fashioned from meagre resources, that Bill managed to bring home to England.

Foreword by Sir Tim Hitchens, KCVO, CMG There can be few greater honours than representing your country overseas. I was lucky enough to be the British Ambassador in Japan between 2012 and 2016. You support British business, advise ministers, welcome artists and performers, help British nationals in trouble. But any Ambassador will also tell you that the moments which remain longest in the memory are the encounters with remarkable individuals who have relationships in the country which are deeply personal, and bring extraordinary insight into the everyday. In 2014 I took part in a ceremony in a small town called Omi – literally, ‘blue sea’ – which looks out onto the Sea of Japan, in Japan’s remote north-west. During the Second World War the Denka factory in Omi had been used to hold prisoners of war. After many years aware of this unsettling legacy, the owners of the factory had decided, working with relatives of those prisoners of war, to create a memorial. The ceremony was the unveiling of that memorial. In some ways the event was highly personal. Relatives of those who had been imprisoned, wanting to remember their loved ones, and bear witness to the place where they had suffered during the war; and the inheritors of the factory’s legacy, aware of what had happened there during the war, and wanting to mark their knowledge of that memory. But the event was also part of a very large picture: the way the Pacific War brought ordinary people from across the globe into direct, and deadly contact with each other; and the question of how we make sense of that period, and understand its complex effect on all those who were engaged in the war. Japan today would not be what it is without having lost the war; the allied forces won the war, and set the rules for the peace which followed. Those rules are now facing challenge from new forces which feel less bound into the post-war settlement. Terry Smyth was one of those who came to Omi for the ceremony in 2014. He had recently begun a PhD at Essex University researching the legacy of having a father who had been a Far East Prisoner of War (FEPOW). That PhD turned into this book, which examines the relationship between fathers who have been captive and their children, and especially how they are remembered and

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Foreword by Sir Tim Hitchens, KCVO, CMG

memorialized. Those memories and relationships are all special; but some are comforting, while others contain trauma. At the end of the war there was an uneasy few weeks when the Emperor had announced Japan’s surrender (‘we must endure the unendurable and suffer what cannot be suffered’) but allied forces had not yet reached much of Japan. In Omi, the allied prisoners of war knew that the war was over, but they did not know what would come next. Their guards, too, knew that they no longer had the authority to imprison their charges, but did not know how to discharge them. When eventually a train was sent to Omi to collect the former prisoners, they marched themselves through the streets of the town to the station to depart. One can only imagine the mixed emotions: prisoners delighted to be free, but longing for the safety of the boat home; townspeople and guards relieved the war was over, but terrified of possible retribution to come as the balance of power switched to the occupying forces. What strikes me is how everyone involved had profoundly mixed emotions. And that suggests that any simplistic retelling of the stories of that time do not bear true witness to the complexities in all those human hearts. Those returning home were never the same; and those greeting them would never be the same. Terry’s book is a serious and well-researched contribution to our understanding of the individual humans living through exceptional times. Sir Tim Hitchens KCVO CMG, President, Wolfson College, University of Oxford Ambassador to Japan 2012–16

Acknowledgements This book draws on research undertaken as part of a PhD, awarded shortly after my seventieth birthday. The research process brought me into contact with numerous other children of FEPOWs, individually, at remembrance events and at conferences. I want to thank those who went on to become participants in the research, welcoming me into their homes and sharing their stories so generously. The four years I spent popping in and out of the University of Essex, adjusting to life as a (very) mature student, was the most intensely satisfying educational experience of my life. The overriding reason for this was the relationship I was able to form with my two supervisors, Professor Mike Roper and Dr Mark Frost (now Associate Professor of Public History at University College London). From the point at which I expressed interest in joining Essex, they gave their expertise and advice freely and were unstinting in their encouragement and intellectual challenge. At the culmination of the PhD when tensions were running high, my viva examiners Professors Sasha Roseneil and Joanna Bourke conspired to create an engaging, testing and stimulating experience that boosted my confidence considerably. Professor Bourke, in particular, drew my attention to the heinous crime of using ‘impact’ as a verb. Along the way, many academics at home and abroad were amazingly generous in sharing their articles and experiences. Indeed, at one stage, after sending me yet another of her papers, Carol Kidron, Head of Anthropology at the University of Haifa commented ‘No problem … but soon you’ll know my work better than I do!’ A number of Essex University academics have influenced my work, perhaps without their fully realizing how or why, in particular: Alix Green, Linsey McGoey, Tracey Loughran, Ewa Morawska, Ken Plummer, Paul Thompson and Zhou Xun. The Rab Butler Chair in Modern History at Essex, Lucy Noakes, also one of the editors of this book series, has given me unwavering encouragement, and guided my publication ambitions towards Bloomsbury. A big thank you must go to Emily Drewe and editorial colleagues at Bloomsbury Academic for having faith in the book, so enabling me to share this research with academics and others interested in the social and cultural history of war, and to Abigail Lane for holding my hand through the publication maze.

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Acknowledgements

I first met Lizzie Oliver at the 2015 FEPOW Conference in Liverpool. She had completed her PhD the year before and was well on the way to publishing her book Prisoners of the Sumatra Railway. During the conference and since, she has been a great source of inspiration and advice about the nitty-gritty of the publication process. Thank you Lizzie. I must also make special mention of Clare Makepeace, who died in April 2019 at the young age of forty. Serendipitously, Mike Roper was the link between me and Clare: he had been her PhD external examiner. Mike put us in touch and, for four years or so, we were in contact by email. Eventually we met face-to-face, at the 2017 launch of her book Captives of War, a uniquely memorable and creative event that integrated music and performance. She was such a compassionate and empathetic historian, a warm, charming and bright person, and a hugely talented academic. Thank you Clare. My thanks go to the following friends for generously granting image permissions: Toby Norway for his father’s painting on the cover, and Sally Grumbridge for Figure 2 Angels of Life and Figure 3 Prayers by the Kwae Noi. I must also thank the Thrale family and the Imperial War Museum for Figure 1 Executed for no Apparent Reason by Charles Thrale. This book would not have been possible without the influence of Keiko Holmes OBE and her many dedicated supporters, both here and in Japan, for organizing pilgrimages to remote POW camp sites across Japan. Her long-term commitment to individual ex-FEPOWs and their families, together with her efforts to promote reconciliation between British and Japanese communities at every level, is extraordinary. I must make particular mention of Jinsai Sugino, one of Keiko’s volunteers, who has become a great friend and supporter of my research over the past few years. I also want to give special thanks to Yuka Ibuki, a member of the Prisoner of War Research Network Japan (POWRNJ), for inviting me to assist her with translating a range of war-related documents. Yuka and her husband Juji have been staunch friends for several years. Finally, not a word of this would have been written without the unwavering love and support of my family, in order of appearance they are … my wife Lalitha, daughters Amanda and Julie, son-in-law Murray, and grandchildren Maya and Aden.

Abbreviations ANT

Actor Network Theory

COFEPOW Children of Far East Prisoners of War CRU

Civil Resettlement Unit

FEPOW

Far East Prisoner of War

GCE

General Certificate of Education

H.M.S.

Her Majesty’s Ship

IWM

Imperial War Museum

LGBTQ

Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, Transgender, Queer or Questioning

LSTM

Liverpool School of Tropical Medicine

MBE

Member of the Most Excellent Order of the British Empire

NA

National Archives

NMA

National Memorial Arboretum (Alrewas, Staffordshire)

OBE

Officer of the most Excellent Order of the British Empire

POW

Prisoner of War

POWRNJ

Prisoner of War Research Network Japan

PTSD

Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder

TB Tuberculosis UV Ultraviolet VE Day

Victory in Europe Day

VJ Day

Victory over Japan Day

Prologue ‘A child is a hollow vessel with a thundering echo’1 Somewhere in the heat and humidity of Java, my father, Edwin Smyth, was captured by the Imperial Japanese Army. It was the spring of 1942, and he was to spend the next three-and-a-half years as a prisoner of war (POW).2 Until his death in 1995 he remained steeped in his memories of this time, and his traumatic wartime experiences had a profound effect on me and on the wider family. After retiring from full-time employment, I began to research my father’s time in the Far East. With the generous help of people in Britain, USA and Japan, I eventually discovered the name and the precise location of the prisoner of war camp in which he had been incarcerated, and from where he had made his daily trek to work in a coal mine.3 Once armed with the location, I wanted to visit. And so, in 2010, my wife and I travelled to Japan for the first time, as part of a ‘pilgrimage’ of reconciliation.4 During the course of these trips, and subsequently, I met many survivors of the FEPOW camps,5 and many more of their children.6 As a result, I became intrigued by why it was that, as adults, many of us are still gripped by our fathers’ captivity, tenaciously researching the facts, and becoming active in remembrance events. In short, why is it that seven decades after the war, we remain fascinated by what our fathers went through? And why does this fascination hold so much emotional sway after all these years? To finally answer these questions, I edged my way towards a PhD. In spite of – or perhaps because of my advancing years – I decided to take the plunge, and got the research underway in 2013. While immersed in the fieldwork, I clearly recall noticing that I had set myself the target of completing the PhD in three-anda-half years, the same length of time my father had spent as a prisoner of war. Just a coincidence, but as someone deeply invested in this traumatic history, it was a feature that gave me moments for pause and reflection, as well as placing questions of temporality firmly in the forefront of my mind. Loss lay at the heart of my research: behind my decision to begin, present in all the interviews, and baldly manifest in the barbaric realities of war. As a

Prologue

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child, I knew that something important was missing from my life; I felt I had lost a father. And I knew, albeit vaguely, that this was somehow connected with his being a prisoner of war. Uncommonly as it turned out, my father was one of those POWs who spoke freely – perhaps too freely – about his captivity. As a young boy, I was in no fit state to listen, to really listen. The history went into hiding. I shut out all the stories, closed my ears to the arguments, and waited for sixty years to pass.

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Introduction

Tell me about your early childhood memories … Well, one morning – when I was about seven – my father was in a really bad mood, very tense. He grabbed and pulled at the tablecloth. The breakfast crockery and cutlery that my mother had just laid out crashed to the floor, a cup smashing against the fireplace. This was going to be worse than usual. I curled up tight in my armchair, hands over my ears, eyes shut tight. By that time, I had learned that if I didn’t react in any way at all, his outburst might end more quickly. My mother started to cry, got to her knees and gathered up the broken crockery into her apron, wiping her eyes as she did so. She was accustomed to this, as was I, but the familiarity didn’t lessen the tension and distress. My father stood over her, shouting at her. ‘Why did you make me do that?’ he screamed. ‘You know this is your fault, don’t you. Don’t you?’ My mother cowered silently, carefully skirting round my father, as she tried to collect the broken crockery. ‘What a mess. Why can’t you just tell me the truth.’ And so the argument went on  – my father shouting, holding himself back from striking out. He never attacked me or my mother physically except for the one occasion when he kicked out at my mother’s leg. His anger was because he believed that people were looking at him, laughing at his appearance. My mother’s repeated attempts to challenge his irrational belief fell on deaf ears. When I was older – in my early teens – I would retaliate, argue back. But, my overwhelming memory of those times was that logical argument never, ever, won the day. Rows came to their end through mutual exhaustion, rather than any acceptance on my father’s part. [An edited extract from the author’s personal journal, 2009]

As an only child with few friends, I had no one to talk to about these events. Forming the emotional background to these outbursts were my father’s frequent recollections of Java and Japan, of his malaria, beriberi, dysentery and death. And his regular nightmares. The papers relating to his 30 per cent war pension acknowledged these medical conditions and also diagnosed ‘psychoneurosis’, although the records never mentioned his odd and intractable belief, or the extent of the rows with my mother.

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Captive Fathers, Captive Children

Matters at home were made worse when I began to lose my hair at the age of eight. Over the next few months it all fell out. My father made desperate, yet ultimately futile, attempts to get my hair to regrow: osteopathy, spiritual healing at a local ‘cult’, long-distance prayer from Harry Edwards,1 prescribed steroid creams, numerous mail-order potions, and ultraviolet (UV) therapy at the local hospital and at home. As the years passed repeated failures grew into acceptance. Once a medical problem, I was now more of a social problem. Isolated at home, by my mid-teens I had abandoned school, despite fraught visits from the education welfare officer. My mother fended them off, while I listened in secret from the top of the stairs. In 1967, armed with no school qualifications at all, I still managed to squeeze into the local nurse-training school, courtesy of a good-hearted matron and the General Nursing Council’s ‘entrance test’ which, in that era, gave a chance to those poor souls who had potential but no GCEs. My father’s outbursts became less frequent as I got older but the background tensions were ever-present, as were his paranoid ideas about appearance. I should point out that he was a goodlooking man in his prime with no features that could possibly be construed as a reason for others to mock. At the age of seventy-five, my father still had Japan on his mind. In papers I discovered after his death, he had typed out extracts from Aidan MacCarthy’s book A Doctor’s War. As a POW in Nagasaki, MacCarthy had witnessed the aftermath of the atomic bomb, and he described in heart-wrenching detail how the city had been laid waste. The final sentence my father had copied out was ‘Many had lost their hair’.2 Underneath, in forceful handwriting, my father wrote (over his signature), ‘I was in my Prison Camp (between Hiroshima and Nagasaki) under the effects of the atom bomb (although the bomb was the only thing that got us out!)’. For the rest of their lives both my mother and father claimed that the cause of my hair loss was my father’s exposure to radiation in Japan. As far as I am aware there is no empirical evidence for this, but it was common (and frequently with good reason) for the survivors of the Far East war and their children to attribute subsequent medical ills to the effects of captivity. Searching for explanations for my father’s behaviour, I grew to appreciate the profound and prolonged influence of life in the camps. His mother and sister told me once that before the war he had been rather touchy, stubborn, and awkward in company. Despite this he was a proud man with a strong work ethic, and a powerful drive to ‘put food on the table’. After the war, these qualities led him to refuse the offer of a place in a Civil Resettlement Unit,

Introduction

3

and later to turn down three to four weeks in-patient assessment in Queen Mary’s Hospital at Roehampton.3 For better or worse, he just wanted to get back to work as soon as possible. As a self-employed signwriter in a seaside town business was seasonal and precarious: he could not afford to turn away customers. Although these personality traits may have helped him survive wartime sufferings, they were not best suited to post-war life. No matter how much I sympathized and empathized with his ordeals, both during the war and afterwards, and respected his commitment as a family ‘provider’, the end result was that I failed to reach a secure emotional attachment with my father. Sadly, that state of affairs lasted a lifetime. My purpose in sharing my childhood experiences in this way is to demonstrate how the complex legacies of the Far East war are intrinsically psychosocial, how they constantly ruffle boundaries, and how they constantly confound attempts to draw clear lines between cause and effect. They reflect how individual psychic crises remain alive and fluctuate over a lifetime, in ways that are inseparable from the wider global and historical contexts. The social and cultural history field offers a fertile and dynamic framework within which to undertake the search for greater understanding of these deeply felt multilayered traumas. This belief was strengthened when I came across an interview with Penny Summerfield that she gave in 2020: Social and cultural history offers a range of understandings that are very important in the modern world, how people have lived in the past, the views they’ve held, what they’ve thought. How different cultures have shaped people’s views of themselves and each other, friendship and cooperation, enmity and strife. How different cultures have created the parameters for emotional expression and the capacity for exercising agency and creating change. It also taps into material factors, such as living conditions and consumption, the interaction between memory and history, the role of material objects, and personal and collective memories. It shows how present-day concerns are not new, but offers parallels with our dilemmas differently configured. Social and cultural history tells us that we’re really part of a global experience stretching back across the decades and, in that sense, it has an incredibly comforting – although at times disturbing – message, which is that we’re not alone.4

The potential for fresh directions in social and cultural history can be seen from the titles of the other books in Bloomsbury Academic’s New Direction series. My particular pathway through this rich landscape embraces the core methodologies of oral history and memory studies, interlaced with insights from psychoanalysis, psychosocial studies and trauma studies, and sets them all

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Captive Fathers, Captive Children

within a life-course perspective: this integrative and interdisciplinary approach is my ‘new direction’. Four interrelated themes remain active throughout this book: captivity; trauma; remembrance; and the psychosocial. Because oral history was the principal means of data collection in the research, I begin with a brief background. *** The flourishing of social democracy in the years following the Second World War provided the right conditions for the emergence of oral, and local, histories: the twin pillars of ‘history from below’.5 Oral history in its present guise of recorded interviews arose at a time when protracted trauma had placed memory centre stage in the lives of ordinary people. Rob Perks suggests that oral history in Britain was a much-needed corrective and radical alternative to the dominance of prevailing male elite perspectives on history, and became aligned with ‘socialist, communist, and feminist’ ideological positions.6 In those early days, oral history was largely a ‘recovery’ history, a valuable means of plugging important gaps in the written historical record, such as the voices of the working classes and, more recently, those of ethnic minorities and the LGBTQ communities (Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, Transgender, Queer or Questioning).7 One feature of my interviews was that the only criterion for inclusion in the research was that of having a father who had been a FEPOW. Therefore the background of participants cut across the divides of social class, gender and sexual orientation. Contemporary oral history enquires into a great diversity of issues, undertaken in a bewildering assortment of settings, and is employed by academics and amateurs alike. Radical changes in digital technology over the past thirty years have allowed methodological variations to suit different objectives, heralding major innovations both in content (the what) and process (the how) of the discipline. Much of this work has focused on finding new archival techniques, but equally significant is the effort to understand and exploit social media, and how everyday mobile devices, such as smartphones, can be used to enhance communications between interviewer and interviewee.8 Oral history, then, has prospered within a broad social and cultural landscape which has allowed it to evolve reciprocally with wider developments in the field, and beyond, including a range of intellectual trends such as ‘post-structuralism, post-colonialism, feminism and psychoanalysis’.9 The extent of the productive relationships that oral history has formed with other disciplines, methods and epistemologies is testimony to the work of luminaries

Introduction

5

like Alessandro Portelli, Luisa Passerini and Paul Thompson.10 From the early focus on recovering histories, oral history now embraces both ‘facts’ and ‘meanings’,11 a shift that has stimulated fresh theoretical frameworks and languages. However, there is no rigid polarization at play here because facts and meanings are inseparable, a view recognized from the early days. Paul Thompson sees this as the relationship between ‘life history’ and ‘life story’ – the one a chronology of events, the other ‘a creative narrative device used by an individual to make sense of their past’.12 The role of the interviewer is also being reframed, from that of ‘objective’ researcher, aloof from the meanings being revealed within the interview itself, to someone whose presence and influence needs to be accommodated and utilized in the search for understanding. As the ‘subjective’ and ‘the intersubjective’ were brought closer to centre stage, researchers became increasingly aware of notions of positionality and reflexivity. Post-positivist perspectives introduced this subjective dimension into oral history and changed the balance between interviewer and interviewee. Instead of focusing primarily on the interviewee’s explicit contribution, the interviewer had a freer hand to explore more implicit meanings. Yet, despite this enhanced selfawareness, the assumption still persisted that the subjectivities of interviewer and interviewee could be largely accounted for by ‘social structures and scripts’.13 To go deeper, however, Michael Roper invites us to look to the unconscious for a more holistic understanding, through accessing the ‘subterranean aspects of the interview relationship’.14 Other oral historians have also found value in incorporating insights from psychoanalysis into their practice and theorizing,15 most particularly those who use the psychosocial approach in their work.16 I return to this topic later in the chapter when I discuss how my own methodology evolved.

The conundrum of ‘captivity’ Prisoners of war were not the only captives to emerge from the Far East war: many of their children also became captives – of their fathers’ trauma. The Latin origin of the word ‘captivity’ means to ‘seize or take’.17 The returning prisoners of war were still young men but they had lost several years of productive life. To make matters worse, some of their children were to have periods of potentially happy and healthy childhood snatched away because of their fathers’ captivity. In certain cases, the fathers’ pain and trauma could not be contained, and spilled

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Captive Fathers, Captive Children

over into expressions of anger and even violence. For the majority, however, the experience was more benign. Yet, even when the fathers’ emotional turbulence was not clearly visible to those around them, the children often sensed that all was ‘not well’ with the father or within the family as a whole. Away from its concrete meaning as physical incarceration, the word ‘captive’ also evokes the idea of ‘being captivated’, or enthralled. Whether our childhoods were painful or fulfilling, or a combination of the two, many children of POWs shared an enduring fascination with what happened to their fathers. Something about the nature of POW captivity and its impact on our early years drives us to discover more, to understand more. And so, in that sense too, we – the children – are also ‘captives’ of our fathers’ histories. We now know a great deal about the hardships suffered by the POWs, but the children’s stories have been rarely heard. In Captive Fathers, Captive Children I investigate the lives of those children who were both observers of their fathers’ struggles, and survivors of their legacy. Through in-depth interviews, I examined what they remembered about their childhoods, the father–child relationship, and how their memory practices as adults were influenced by psychic factors and the wider cultural context.18 I apply this term ‘memory practice’ to any activity designed to give meaning to memory. It includes official remembrance events, the study of military family history, pilgrimages to sites connected with the war, commemorative activities in the home, such as how we curate photographs, mementoes and other artefacts, and online representations, for example tribute websites and the use of social media platforms. As a result of early family experiences, these children could be left with persistent, sometimes uncomfortable, sometimes confusing, psychic needs. At their core, these needs emanated from the unique nature and consequences of the fathers’ physical and psychic traumas, and the manner in which these were transmitted to the children. A principal aim of this book is to show how trauma flowed through and between generations, and how the children used different genres of memory practice to make sense of their own lives and past relationships. Memory itself is not a static phenomenon, but seeps into many of life’s unexpected corners and crevices. Memories that emerge from global tragedies such as slavery and colonialism, the Far East war, the Holocaust, and Hiroshima and Nagasaki, are especially potent and transmissible. They trigger and sustain expanding constellations of collective memories, and their loosely bounded nature invites comparisons, ‘cross referencing, and borrowing’, as Michael Rothberg has shown.19 In her

Introduction

7

research with descendants of Holocaust survivors, Carol Kidron illustrates how this ‘spread’ of ‘memory-work and identity-making practices’ enables some descendants to ‘perceive themselves as wounded survivors of a distant past’.20 By tracing the connections between the fathers’ traumas, the children’s memories, and later memory practices, Captive Fathers, Captive Children reveals how the children were able to revisit, review and reconstruct their relationships with their fathers over the lifespan. In its origins, the book is an act of remembrance that acknowledges both the suffering of the POWs and the resilience of their children whose lives were shaped to a significant degree by the wartime experiences of their fathers.

Trauma and its transmission Let’s step back to the autumn and winter of 1945, when nearly 40,000 servicemen returned to Britain from the Far East following three-and-a-half long years of brutal incarceration. These repatriated FEPOWs carried the emotional and physical scars of their captivity into the home with ramifications that, at this temporal and socio-cultural remove, we find hard to imagine or comprehend. Being a FEPOW was an overwhelming, traumatic and unusually disruptive life event, and severely dislocated the men’s material, psychic and social lives. Despite there being differences between the camps, captivity had certain common features: psychological and physical humiliation; the absence of a predictable end point; exhausting and dangerous work; inadequate food; little or no contact with home; and the perpetual threat of lethal tropical diseases. In the pages that follow, I try to convey the visceral qualities of being a POW in the Far East; in the words of Santanu Das ‘to capture … the texture of experience’.21 Repatriation, when it eventually came, failed to bring instant relief. Indeed, for many families, it was the start of yet another battle. The men’s chronic health problems were felt for decades, with the wives and families left to pick up the pieces. The majority of former FEPOWs did not talk openly about their memories, especially within the family. The children often commented on this ‘silence’, and also remarked on how they sensed an emotional distance in their fathers’ behaviour. For a few participants, childhood and adolescence were dominated by fraught memories of aggression and tension in the home, raising and recycling the spectre of the father’s brutalization in the camps. Despite this, the prospect of social shame and possible condemnation could persuade the

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Captive Fathers, Captive Children

families to keep such behaviour secret. By giving voice to these hidden facets of post-war family and social life, we recognize and respect the intrapsychic, relational and social struggles that took place within what Eva Hoffman refers to as the ‘postgeneration’.22 *** Recent decades have seen the emergence of trauma as a dominant yet rather unwieldy umbrella concept, capable of clouding as well as clarifying the nature of harm or suffering at personal, social or societal levels. Trauma began as a term to describe physical harm, then ‘migrated’ to incorporate major psychological distress, and now encompasses damage done to whole populations.23 The people who contributed to the research on which this book is based lived through the post-Holocaust and post-Hiroshima decades, and have experienced the radical transformations in our understanding of trauma. Many came to interview with that conceptual inflation deeply ingrained in their personal and cultural backgrounds. James spoke of personal trauma in a way that suggested an easy familiarity with its usage in contemporary discourse: What I remember … is shouting. And I think what was more frightening was when it was in the other room … It’s a well known thing, isn’t it, where the person not having it done gets a bit more trauma than the one it’s being done to.24

Just how does trauma flow between generations? The research into intergenerational transmission of trauma divides into two main branches. There is an established strand of quantitative research that chases correlations between the symptoms of post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) in fathers and in their children.25 On the other hand, qualitative approaches such as psychoanalysis try to unravel how emotional and behavioural patterns enable trauma to pass between generations.26 But trauma transmission may need no words at all, as Carol Kidron’s ethnographic fieldwork spotlights.27 In Chapter 2, Brenda describes how her father didn’t speak about his captivity within the family, but regularly withdrew into their ‘front room’ for days on end.28 In The Generation of Postmemory Marianne Hirsch introduces the influential concept of ‘postmemory’, the term she uses to describe how memories are transmitted between generations, not only through family relationships, but also through wider discourses that include cultural products such as paintings, photographs and fiction.29

Introduction

9

The changing faces of remembrance There has been a marked growth of public and academic interest in remembrance in recent times. Children of FEPOWs participate regularly in commemorative events, and often take on activist roles in groups such as ‘COFEPOW’ (the Children of Far East Prisoners of War).30 The 70th anniversary of the end of the war in the Far East (‘VJ Day 70’ – Victory over Japan), held on 15 August 2015, was an occasion marked by major events in London, in Lichfield Cathedral, and at the National Memorial Arboretum in Staffordshire.31 Providing much of the energy and expertise for these events were the three principal activist organizations: COFEPOW, the Java Club,32 and National FEPOW Fellowship Welfare Remembrance Association.33 Each of these was founded, or has been led, by daughters of FEPOWs. In 2020, the coronavirus pandemic had a severe impact on plans for the 75th anniversary with many events being cancelled, postponed or severely restricted. Nevertheless, a major commemorative event did take place at the National Memorial Arboretum. Although scaled down, the dignity and emotional intensity of the occasion were maintained.34 As the number of surviving veterans has declined, national and local media have increasingly ‘personalized’ their output by featuring the individual stories of those who remain.35 The children’s urge to preserve the memory of their fathers remains very strong, and members of the COFEPOW community continue to instigate new memorials. In the years immediately preceding the ‘VJ 70’ anniversary, plaques were erected on Liverpool’s Pier Head36 and in Southampton’s Town Quay Park37 to commemorate the arrival of the ships carrying repatriated FEPOWs and civilian internees. Fundraising for both plaques was initiated by the daughter of a FEPOW.38 National remembrance events expose potential clashes between cultural and personal memories. When the children attend such events, they bring with them a unique set of mixed emotions, but these rarely surface because any discord jars too easily with the public narrative. By default, the almost exclusive focus on the fathers’ stories has kept the lives of their children in the shadows. The wish to preserve their fathers’ stories, boosted by wider society’s lionization of former POWs as war heroes, deflects attention away from their own lives. No doubt, for some, this deflection has been welcomed (or at least not resisted). By unconsciously or consciously drawing a veil over traumatic family events any tarnishing of the family’s reputation is minimized. Neither academic history, nor the popular media, has any great incentive, then, to look beyond the stories of the FEPOWs themselves. As a consequence, the general public has remained

10

Captive Fathers, Captive Children

largely oblivious to the strains imposed on families when the FEPOWs returned from the war, and wider society has been deprived of opportunities to learn from this legacy. One needs to ask whether there have been any alternative routes for the expression of the children’s stories, such as at COFEPOW remembrance events or through online social media sites.39 The culture of memory disclosure in such groups, however, encourages the circulation of narratives that are circumspect and normative. By this I mean that conversations are generally steered away from the subject of personal childhood trauma or other memories that suggest implicit criticism of the father or the family, or that might be seen to besmirch the wider FEPOW community. To circumvent this self-censorship and to hear the quieter, more transgressive voices we must turn to more intimate, marginal spaces: to what Barbara Rosenwein refers to as ‘emotional refuges’ where the children are able to speak privately and in confidence.40 Coffee breaks and the corridors of conferences provide such opportunities – as do research interviews. At one FEPOW history conference I attended, a range of presenters, many of whom were the children of FEPOWs, impressed with their knowledge of a particular historical or cultural niche. But it was in the unofficial, interstitial spaces of the conference that the children came together in twos and threes to share personal memories of childhood. Once I had noticed this, and after raising it with one or two other delegates, I became aware that my research might indeed be tapping into a psychic strand that, while tacit, was also potent. What I might otherwise have overlooked, or dismissed as insignificant, emerged instead as a pivotal step in the progress of the research. As Andrew Abbott has pointed out ‘there are places in the social world where the laws of human behaviour rise very near the surface’, and I appeared to have found one such place.41 When it comes to the disclosure of traumatic memories, timing matters. Daniel Bar-On emphasized how his interviews with Israeli families who had suffered in the Holocaust had to wait until the late 1980s, when ‘the need to talk … became greater than the need to maintain silence’.42 Timing also mattered in my research. When I began in 2013, most former FEPOWs had died, and many of their children – themselves into middle age or beyond – were ready and willing to tell their stories. The timing was also propitious because the ‘baby boomer’ generation, into which most participants fell, was still largely healthy, and fully expected to remain so even after retirement.43 With this ‘second-wind’, many of the children had begun to discover or rediscover their fathers’ wartime histories. Frequently social-media savvy, they were now hunting down the facts of their fathers’ captivity, and in the process were able to exploit digital

Introduction

11

technologies, thereby subtly reshaping the memory industry that had grown up around the history of the Second World War. Amplified by the First World War centenary commemorations, there has been a swing towards cultural rather than biographical interpretations within war remembrance.44 At the same time, the image of the FEPOWs in the British social imaginary had settled into one of passive actors, in a distant conflict, played out in the margins of the Second World War. But the FEPOW children began to challenge that homogenized caricature. By their passionate commitment to learning more about their fathers’ role in the war, they have not only consolidated the father’s presence within individual family structures, but have also established his material and symbolic place in global history, and in wider post-war discourses over nuclear weapons. They remained blind to any separation between the cultural and the biographical with both strands intermingling freely across a cat’s cradle of psychosocial complexity.

Methodology and the research relationship As I had anticipated, my interviews were wide-ranging, challenging and emotionally demanding. Because they encompassed decades of lived experience, a great many inter-related themes and tenuous memory strands emerged, meshing with a variety of complicated personal, cultural, historical and geopolitical reckonings. For these reasons, I needed an approach that would allow participants to reconstruct their life stories in their own way. Therefore, instead of adopting a structured model of oral history interviewing, I chose to base my methodology on the psychosocial approach set out by Wendy Hollway and Tony Jefferson in Doing Qualitative Research Differently.45 They propose a ‘free association narrative’ method that requires the researcher to stay alert to inconsistencies, silences and gaps in the narratives. Emotions and reflexivity emerge as distinct ‘ways of knowing’ in this method, which more closely reflects everyday experience where the emotional, the cognitive and the corporeal invariably work hand-in-hand. The goal of psychosocial research is to explore ways of understanding that do not reduce to either psychological or social explanations and do not uncritically locate these in ‘the individual’ or ‘society’, or in ‘internal’ and ‘external’ worlds.46

A particular strength of the psychosocial approach is that it invites both parties in the ‘research relationship’ to bridge the apparent divide between ‘interior’ and

12

Captive Fathers, Captive Children

‘exterior’ lives. In turn, this supports my aim of addressing the conscious and unconscious connections between, on the one hand, the fathers’ experiences of captivity, and on the other, the adult children’s memory practices as manifested throughout their lifetimes. By agreeing to participate in this research the children had the opportunity to reveal quite personal and sometimes traumatic experiences to a person they judged trustworthy and safe. Because we were part of the same generation and shared the critical biographical fact of having a FEPOW father, I was perceived to be ‘one of them’ – an ‘insider’. At the start, this trust was provisional. I was ‘on probation’ until the interview got underway, at which point my preconceptions and levels of understanding could be tested. While ‘insider’ status certainly eased my access into the FEPOW community, I had to remain aware of what we were both taking for granted. Some participants assumed we shared similar attitudes towards the Japanese people, or held the same opinion of the cataclysmic events in Hiroshima and Nagasaki. Others expected me to be an expert on the history of the war in the Far East, or of the politics of FEPOW activism.47 If asked, I did share some of my own experiences. However, if this needed more than a brief response to a question, such as ‘which camp was your dad in?’, I explained I would be happy to do so at the ‘end’ of the interview. In the few cases where this occurred, I found that a little personal disclosure could push the interview to a newer and sometimes deeper emotional level. The danger, of course, was that I would inadvertently allow my, or my father’s, stories to overshadow those of the people I was interviewing. In the event, the children’s engrossing accounts proved powerful correctives to any such tendency. *** Oral history has long been used to investigate war and its multiple legacies, its early purpose being to ‘recover lost histories’.48 However, my purpose was to go beyond the ‘recovery’ of history to explore the emotional roots underlying why the fathers’ POW experiences continued to exert an emotional grip on the second generation. Why did so many of the children actively pursue their interest with such intensity over many decades? Why had it remained a ‘live’ issue for them, and why and how did they engage with specific memory practices? By drawing on concepts from psychoanalysis, the psychosocial approach offered a means of exploring ‘the relationship between the biographical experience and psychic life of the individual human subject and the social formation in which she lives, relates and is formed, with the intertwining of the psychic and the

Introduction

13

social, of inner and outer worlds.’49 Adopting a life-course approach enabled me to draw memories into the present to examine how they contributed to the children’s current psychosocial states, their expectations, memory practices and thoughts about the future.50 The psychosocial approach facilitated access to deeper intersubjective levels of the research relationship, and demonstrated how participants were trying to relate to ‘the father within’.51 Although oral historians may sometimes advocate a pre-planned approach to questioning,52 many also acknowledge the role of unexpected emotional and unconscious aspects of the interviewer–interviewee relationship.53 When oral historians interpret their interviewees’ life stories, we sometimes draw upon ideas from psychoanalysis: about the enduring significance of formative relationships, about unconscious motivations and influences, or about transference in the interview.54

By anchoring the research methodology in the oral history tradition I was encouraged to keep a tight grip on broad historical themes, and how the individual’s life story sat within wider cultural and global forces.55 When employing psychosocial methods, researchers look for signs of unconscious motivation at all stages of the research process. These signs include inconsistencies in testimony, unexpected ‘turns’ in the narrative, sudden intrusions of emotion that seemed out of keeping, and ‘slips of the tongue, confusions of past and present, confusions of identity, momentary lapses of reasoning, prolonged pauses …’.56 Interviewers need also to remain conscious of their own responses to what they are hearing and seeing (that is, to the ‘countertransference’). The processes of transference and countertransference are what make a relationship ‘distinctively psychoanalytic’.57 However, while transference and countertransference are most commonly spoken of in clinical discourse, in reality they are inescapable features of everyday life.58 In their original incarnations within psychoanalysis, transference denoted the unconscious transferring of emotions derived from a past relationship (for example feelings towards a parent) onto the analyst in the present. Countertransference referred to ‘feelings unconsciously provoked in the analyst in response to material mobilized by the patient’.59 It is the task of researchers using a psychosocial approach to remain sensitive to their own feelings as the relationship evolves, and never to dismiss their subjective responses, but to incorporate them into the patterns of meaning they construct from the interviews. In my research, I followed Paula Heimann in using the term countertransference ‘to cover all the feelings’ the interviewer experiences towards the interviewee.60 Unlike psychoanalysts, psychosocial

14

Captive Fathers, Captive Children

researchers do not offer interpretations to their research participants, but use their awareness of psychoanalytic ideas to ‘develop sensitivity to material that arises in empirical research’ as an integral part of their data analysis.61 Historian Michael Roper, who also uses a psychoanalytic framework in his oral history work, draws attention to how interviewers often show a ‘recuperative urge’ when faced with distress in participants: The motivation to want to give back something to people who have in some way experienced oppression or been silenced – the recuperative urge – was and remains a keystone of oral history. In the oral history interview itself, such motivations may take unconscious forms, for example as manic reparation, the omnipotent desire to want to make good another’s past, as if we were capable of effacing the private pain caused by social oppression and exclusion.62

As the interviews proceeded, I found my field notes burgeoning with observations on the physical setting and how these were becoming layered into the dynamics of the interview. To accommodate this, I began to write ‘scenic compositions’, a technique to make data gathering more embodied, more sensual and affective.63 Adopting this ‘scenic’ approach meant writing reflective field notes on all aspects of the interview, including photographs I had taken at the time.64 To illustrate this, let me introduce Esther. My field notes show the significance of the physical environment, and how countertransference influenced the relationship being forged between us: The living room was quite small with little choice over where to sit. We both sat on the single large settee, one at each end, and I had to twist my neck slightly to make reasonable eye contact which, after half an hour or so, began to ache. The tape recorders were on the coffee table in front of the settee. As she turned towards me, the light from the window directly behind her threw her face into deep shadow – an awkward arrangement but one I could do nothing about. My face on the other hand was in full light.65

The layout of a small living room with few seating options meant that Esther was comfortable while I got a crick in my neck. Her shaded face mirrored the guarded and self-effacing tone at the start of her testimony. As the interview proceeded, I became aware that the seating arrangement was taking on metaphorical qualities. During her childhood, Esther had been kept in the shade by her father, a very dominant figure, and with whom communication had been invariably one-sided. In the interview, however, she was able to ‘turn the tables’ by creating a situation in which she was more in control. The seating orientation enabled her to see my face clearly, whereas the backlight from the window meant I could

Introduction

15

barely make out hers. In this physical and psychosocial configuration she felt able to talk with greater freedom. Here is a further extract from my field notes: she described not being able to answer her father back at any point in her life, then towards the end of the interview added ‘I don’t get the chance to talk about myself very often!’ … On the way home in the car, I was feeling rather tense and uncomfortable physically – a feeling I couldn’t really explain. But, once the thought emerged clearly, that what she really wanted was the chance to talk about herself, I suddenly relaxed! I was making no demands on her, neither was I ‘crowding her out’ with my own concerns or preoccupations. I was just prepared to listen.66

My delayed awareness of the transference and countertransference dynamics in this interview made me question what it was the children were seeking – consciously or unconsciously – from these interviews, and also what I might be looking for. Interviews, even those conducted by email, are relational engagements, meetings of mind, that go beyond the mere exchange of words. They entail a ‘presence’, an emotional tone, a communication style and an aesthetic dimension. Together, these different registers interact to influence the process and outcomes of this form of research, and contribute to its epistemology. Working in this way demanded methodological agility. So, while oral history and the psychosocial approach provided the bedrock, other methods were needed to accommodate the material dimension – the photographs and personal artefacts that participants brought to the interviews. My growing awareness of the role of objects and the material environment challenged my methodology. As Daniel Miller has also noted, psychosocial approaches – and psychoanalytic theory in particular – are less at ease when faced with the material world.67 One approach that does take objects seriously is the awkwardly named ‘actor network theory’ (ANT). Conceived by Bruno Latour in the 1980s, ANT dares us to view material objects as integral to our social networks, as ‘relational entities’.68 Throughout my fieldwork, I witnessed this in practice. Take the example of Rex who had a profoundly ambivalent relationship with a collection of family letters: There was a set of letters which I ha- … actually really ha- … I have not opened. I have not read. That my mother had sent to my father before Singapore fell. The good old British post office returned them. They were laid unopened in the same envelope … After my mother died I opened them, but I haven’t … [lowers voice] I haven’t read them. You haven’t read them. It’s too … I’m too rubbish …

16

Captive Fathers, Captive Children Really? Yeah, it would be [his voice cracks, and he becomes tearful] Do you think you’ll ever, kind of …? [Rex shakes head]. … … No, right.69

Although he broached this revelation in slow and hesitant fashion, there was also a sense of inexorability about his disclosure. Raising this early in the interview suggested a pressing need to do so, like an emotional hurdle to be overcome before further progress could be made. I had taken his words – ‘After my mother died I opened them, but I haven’t read them’ – as an invitation to respond. His voice had cracked briefly. At first, I had felt confused because I thought he was starting to laugh in an embarrassed, self-mocking way, but then I saw that he was on the verge of tears. I was pulled into his emotion, and left wondering just what he meant by ‘I am rubbish’. These letters were objects imbued with powerful emotional resonance and showed how human vulnerabilities and material features could be subtly intertwined in such meetings. After this intense episode, Rex kept his emotions under careful wraps for the remainder of the interview. As the interviews progressed, I noted that the theme of ‘movement’ was becoming particularly prominent. In both physical and psychosocial senses, movement holds a special place in the minds and hearts of the children of Far East prisoners of war: the fathers’ journeys out to the Far East, transportation in the ‘hell ships’, their often tortuous repatriation journeys; then, finally, the psychological, material and financial adjustments needed to reintegrate into a much changed British society. Many of the objects and images the children showed me during interviews embodied movement. They had often been on the move, not only geographically but also emotionally as the children came to ‘re-see’ items they had lost track of, or had forgotten about. These objects had a peripatetic life that could be traced: in and out of different containers; out of one attic and into another; boxed, bagged and sometimes discarded; strewn across oceans and continents; variously loved, hated or ignored. What I was observing when introduced to these items were not static tableaux but transitional objects in transitional resting places, objects that flitted in and out of memory, occasionally becoming a source of family jealousies and tensions between siblings. Accounts of conventional oral histories have tended to focus heavily on the interview itself, at the risk of sidelining the broader relationship that develops between the researcher and the person they are interviewing. ‘Research relationships’ begin well before the interview. Indeed, they begin from the first awareness of a prospective participant, possibly even before this, in an abstract, anticipatory sense. For instance, what kinds of people am I likely to

Introduction

17

meet? Then comes the first email or phone call, a name, an address, my reply, their use of language. They often mentioned their fathers at this initial contact stage: he was an officer, he was a private, he was ‘on the railway’, he died in the camp, and so on. From these first moments, countertransferential reactions started to bubble under the surface, and continued throughout the research. So, for me at least, the research relationship was the cornerstone whose influence stretched from first awareness, through the interview and follow-up emails, and evolved further during the processes of transcription, analysis and write-up. Even now, as I prepare the final draft of this book, each participant assumes a distinct and dynamic personal presence that continues to challenge my putative understanding of their circumstances. *** At the start of this research, I posted a request on a Far East Prisoner of War online community group, giving details of who I was, the purpose of the research, and inviting expressions of interest. The sole criterion for recruiting participants was that each of their fathers should have been a British POW in the Far East during the Second World War. In the invitation, I explained that I was also the son of a FEPOW. The responses I received suggested that my disclosure gave respondents the confidence to express further interest. The online invitation generated a rapid response (eight contacts within the first three hours), and I was concerned that this might lead to excessive homogeneity in the final sample. This proved not to be the case, however. The FEPOW online group was much more diverse than I had imagined. It included members who were deeply involved – almost ‘professional’ – in their level of engagement and expertise, but also revealed others whose interests were marginal or sporadic. I supplemented this ‘purposive’ sampling with a ‘snowball’ approach that arose spontaneously in the course of the fieldwork, as existing participants recommended others, or when people appeared from totally unexpected sources.70 Despite the imponderables, the ‘maximum variation sample’71 that finally emerged encompassed a range of behaviours and emotional differences that were clearly recognizable in the wider population of children with exFEPOW fathers. At first, I had considered restricting the study to children whose fathers had survived the war, but rejected this after I received an email from a man whose father had died as a POW. Despite having no memory of his father, his life had been deeply scarred by the loss, and the ambiguous circumstances of his father’s death added to his troubling preoccupation.72

18

Captive Fathers, Captive Children

Before each meeting, my purpose was to establish a working rapport with each person and ensure they had realistic expectations of the interview. My own preparation was also important, and included choosing opening questions that stimulated (or at least did not inhibit) the narrative flow. Normally, my first question invited participants to talk about their earliest childhood memories. The unstructured nature of the free association interview method does provoke apprehension, and the first question often carries particular weight. Would I be presented with a well-rehearsed script, or would responses be more spontaneous? In practice, some participants did begin with a well-crafted monologue that needed to be performed before unplanned testimony could appear, and a few people introduced highly traumatic memories from the outset. I drew up a list of ‘open’ questions to be used as prompts if necessary, but these were rarely used. If a participant chose to ignore or skirt round specific topics, then these responses became data in their own right. When the narrative flow appeared to be ‘drying up’, I used the ‘scenic memory’ technique suggested by Gabriele Rosenthal.73 I would ask interviewees to think themselves back into their home environment, and describe what they could ‘see and hear’ through questions such as ‘What would I have seen or heard if I had been a fly on the wall when you were a child?’.74 In that way, I invited oblique observations on how their father’s POW life might have been ‘present’ in the childhood home. Military rank could be a sensitive topic. Rex asked me outright whether my father had been an officer. In fact, he was a private – a gunner in the Royal Artillery – with a lingering distrust of the officer class. Once I had revealed this, however, this fact seemed to play a part in how he ‘weighed me up’. Much later in the interview, he found a way of rescuing the situation, after I told him that my father had been a coal miner in Japan: It was a coal mine? A coal mine. Oh, I didn’t understand that. Oh, my God. … Bloody hell! … Was he fed sufficiently?75

I felt he had been searching for a way to validate my father’s wartime identity, and to raise his status in both our eyes (and vicariously mine in his). The relationship warmed noticeably from that point and, very soon afterwards, he asked ‘Do you want something to drink?’ My interviews were rarely tidy affairs, but they did succeed in allowing the children to talk about their lives with minimal interference from me. Nevertheless, the process of reflecting on interviews could be uncomfortable, and occasionally

Introduction

19

forced me to search my own past for answers and routes to understanding. The following is from a field note written after my interview with Deirdre: I realize that I am capable of listening to her account of very harsh physical and psychological treatment by her father with a degree of equanimity … and I wonder why this is. Looking back, as a child I had to isolate myself from psychological stresses. Later, as a mental health nurse, I had to listen to many bizarre and painful stories, without giving away my personal feelings. Did this have some effect on my capacity to feel participants’ expressions of pain ‘in the moment’?76

Later, while listening to recordings of interviews and reading through transcripts, I often felt more emotion than I did while carrying out the interviews, a phenomenon that goes to show how the research relationship could unfurl in unexpected ways. Sara Ahmed reminds us that ‘Messiness is a good starting point for thinking with feeling: feelings are messy such that even if we regularly talk about having feelings, as if they are mine, they also often come at us, surprise us, leaving us cautious and bewildered.’77 Transcribing interviews is sometimes seen as academic drudgery, and it is common for researchers to employ professionals to do the job. However, I found that by transcribing the recordings myself I was able to ‘relive’ the interviews, and ensure that the sounds of the voices would not be relegated to a mere ‘staging post en route to its transcription and transformation into a written text’.78 Although I carried out an initial thematic analysis, I soon realized its serious limitations in psychosocial research.79 Narrative psychologist, Dan McAdams has also met this problem: A psychological theme is not likely to be indicated by any particular word, nor captured fully in a phrase or single sentence. Instead, a theme is typically drawn as an inference from an extended passage of text. … the researcher needs to read the narrative passages with an open and discerning mind, searching for ideas that strike the ear as especially salient, recurrent, surprising, or potentially revealing of central psychological dynamics and issues.80

Although the process of transcription may seem tedious in comparison with the inherent vitality of the interviews, I often experienced embodied responses while transcribing and when reading through transcripts. My reactions were comparable to those described by Andrew Sparkes: My stomach churns and I feel a wave of anxiety spread throughout my body. I feel sick and want to block out such thoughts and feelings. I often feel like this when I read part of the interview transcripts. The deep visceral nature of my feelings is as inescapable as it is indescribable.81

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Captive Fathers, Captive Children

Cultivating a psychoanalytic sensibility across the entire research process, perhaps especially during the analysis, allowed a form of intellectual ‘roaming’, akin to Thomas Ogden’s idea of ‘reverie’ through which disparate ideas and experiences are associated or synthesized.82 I limited my interpretative observations to post-interview data analysis, and I did not disclose these to participants. This is consistent with Hollway and Jefferson’s position that interpretation for the psychosocial researcher ‘is separate from the participant and has a different audience’.83 A final thought on the research process: psychosocial interviewing is testing. The level of emotional and cognitive demand is considerable, and derives from both the content of the testimony and from the stress entailed in conducting an interview over which one has only loose control. Reflecting on why this was the case, I eventually concluded that much of it resulted from the demands of handling time (or, more precisely ‘times’) within the immediacy of the interview. During each interview, there was a need to balance three temporal dimensions simultaneously: ‘physical time’ (as measured by my watch, and bodily functions), ‘biographical time’ (the chronologies of both our personal stories – the participants’ and mine – including the intersections between the two), and ‘historical time’ (the details of the war in the Far East and that preceded and ran alongside the biographical timeline). Then there were also the moments when ‘the child’ – my adult interviewee – suddenly introduced a shockingly traumatic memory and the flow of time itself seemed to stop, to ‘pool’,84 to well-up and submerge any other sense of time passing in the interview. While the emotional demands of qualitative interviewing have long been recognized in the literature, these cognitive and temporal aspects of interviewing have received much less attention. Using a psychosocial approach in the field of social and cultural history is unusual, especially when the topic is so closely aligned with the Second World War and its ramifications. However, the life experiences of the FEPOW children are extraordinarily varied historically, socially and culturally, and warrant a fresh approach. Psychosocial interviewing and analysis obliges the researcher to engage with intersubjective dynamics, consciously and unconsciously, whilst not losing sight of the impact of historical circumstances and discourses on the individual psychic material that emerges, and as such is particularly attuned to studies that involve a degree of ‘insider’ research. ***

Introduction

21

The following chapters develop the themes touched on in this Introduction. In Chapter 1, I examine how the psychic and physical conditions of captivity affected the men’s sense of self, and heralded the challenges they faced on their return to family life and civvy street, which is the topic of Chapter 2. This is where participants’ memories of childhood come most clearly to the fore, illustrating the varied ways in which war trauma entered the home and made its impact on families. The men’s reintegration into society was repeatedly compromised by state inadequacies, and the failure to acknowledge how incarceration could inflict long-term damage. Chapter 3 focuses on memory and remembrance, and examines concepts such as postmemory, memoryscape, collective, communicative and cultural memories, and memory activism. This leads into Chapter 4 which acts as a bridge, and a vantage point, connecting the ‘raw material’ of childhood memories to the memory practices of the adult children. It explores the concept of memory practices, and proposes a number of key concepts through which to analyse participants’ engagement with memory practices, including generativity, reparation and turning points. I also propose a heuristic framework that offers a speculative alignment between memory practices and motivational dispositions expressed as three dimensions: knowledge-driven; emotion-driven; and values-driven. Although this research emphasizes the distinctiveness of individual experience, social research (qualitative or quantitative) always looks for ‘patterns and relationships’.85 From my data, I identify three broad genres of memory practice that I address in discrete chapters. The first is how families managed their memories in the home, by curating mementoes, artefacts and photographs; in this way, the home itself became a site of remembrance (Chapter 5). The second genre centres on the children’s yearning to discover the fine detail of their fathers’ POW lives and their military family histories (Chapter 6). Finally, there is ‘pilgrimage’ (Chapter 7), the urge to visit places associated with the father’s incarceration. This is the most holistic and immersive of the genres, through which many children were able to address anew their relationships with their fathers. While Bruce Scates, Carol Kidron, and Kyoko Murakami and David Middleton have analysed pilgrimages in specific war-related contexts,86 none has attempted to integrate pilgrimage with childhood memory, and memory practices across the life span, or indeed employ a psychosocial methodology. In the spirit of reflection, I have decided against a traditional conclusion for this book. Instead, I finish with an ‘Afterword’ in which I return to issues from the Prologue, and add further examples of my ‘fieldwork messiness’. I finish by

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Captive Fathers, Captive Children

sharing extracts from letters written by Japanese soldiers, and invite readers to recognize the humanity of the ‘other’, even in the aftermath of a brutal world war. *** I finish this Introduction with an extract from my interview with Isla. Her words capture the essence of this book, and reinforced my rationale for using the psychosocial approach. Half-a-century after the end of the war, and twenty years after her father had died, Isla was watching a TV documentary that included newsreel footage of returning Far East prisoners of war. The footage showed men disembarking from a repatriation ship. Remarkably, and to her astonishment, she recognized her own father among them: And when I saw him being helped … on that ship, and he looked like a skeleton, with skin on. And he looked like … he looked like he didn’t know what was happening, and he was … he wasn’t old. He was just a young man. And … he looked dazed. And I wanted to throw my arms around him and hug him, and say, I’m sorry, Dad [she makes a hugging gesture, and cries]. I’m sorry I was naughty. I’m sorry I didn’t ask you, and I’m sorry I didn’t appreciate all you went through. But it was too late because he wasn’t there.87

These words convey a daughter’s raw emotions and her overpowering feelings of empathy towards her father who had been a prisoner of war on the Thai–Burma Railway. They also reflect her internal conflicts, and the feelings of guilt and regret that so frequently inhabit memory and trauma within these families. She is momentarily cast back to childhood, and in so doing reveals how tenaciously the past clings to the present. Her gestures and tears recall what Edward Casey refers to as the ‘active immanence of the past in the body’, and are poignant reminders of the need for a holistic and compassionate approach as we strive to unravel complex and contradictory human emotions and behaviours.88 By tracing the relationship between memories of childhood, and memory practices over a lifetime, Captive Fathers, Captive Children contributes to the literature on the children of British FEPOWs and adds a new dimension to prisoner of war studies, and the social and cultural legacies of war more generally.

1

Life in captivity

This chapter paints a picture of the sensory and psychosocial world of prisoners of war in the Far East – a distillation of their experiences – in the knowledge that it will always be an inadequate and fragmented depiction. Life in the camps changed the men, and brought into being vivid memories and bodily consequences that they were obliged to carry home. Throughout this chapter, I have chosen extracts from POW testimonies and writings that I hope will both invite empathy and provoke the imagination, and reveal what captivity felt like ‘from the inside’, from an experiential and personally embodied perspective.1 I begin with three quotations that illustrate the extremes of POW life, and offer snapshots into the contrasting experiences the men had to face and mentally process over their years of captivity and beyond. As the bodies burnt they crackled and popped. One raised an arm as the nerves tautened in the heat. One of the pyre makers waved back. Have a good one, Jackie. You’re out of here now, mate.2 In the early days it was a spectacle of chaos and horror. Stairways and monsoon gullies ran with blood. Packed side by side, in wards and corridors, the patients suffered agonies and torture from the heat and flies, and their unattended wounds. The stench that arose from this bloody concourse could be smelt hundreds of yards away from the hospital area.3 magnificent scenery … the high mountainous backbone of Malaya, remote and awesome; the silent forests and the tangle of impenetrable jungles; the blue waters of the gulf of Siam across deserted sands … the ibises, cranes and herons.4

The first extract is from Richard Flanagan’s Booker prize-winning novel The long road to the deep north, based on his father’s time on the Thai–Burma Railway. My father told me eerily similar stories of corpses ‘sitting up’ in the flames; the rituals surrounding death were raw, brutal and often stripped clean of any civilized veneer. The other extracts are both from Ronald Hastain’s diary

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White Coolie, published soon after the war in 1947, and distinguished by its wonderfully vivid and detailed descriptions of everyday life, interspersed with reflective interludes in which the beauties of the natural landscape offered brief spiritual and aesthetic respite. His writing transcends the traumatic memories themselves, and fashions an ‘inner space’ that allows new meanings to emerge.5 Between December 1941 and March 1942, around 50,000 British troops in the Far East surrendered to the Imperial Japanese Army and became prisoners of war.6 The experience came as a considerable shock: ‘If you see any Japs … don’t shoot, the Dutch have capitulated!’ With these words, W/Cmdr Gregson destroyed any illusions of salvation we might still have maintained. My companions and I looked at each other in dismay and disbelief.7

Tens of thousands of young British men, many quite ‘green’ from a military point of view, suddenly found themselves in the hands of a battle-hardened army. Little imagination is needed to conjure up how they must have felt at that moment: demoralized, disorientated, angry, scared. Many had left Britain in crowded troopships in the winter of 1941, landed in the Far East early in 1942, and in March found themselves prisoners of the Japanese, in whose hands they would remain for the next three to four years. Some had barely engaged with the enemy. With tens of thousands of POWs on their hands, the Japanese military leaders soon discovered that ruthless efficiency in military combat was no preparation for dealing with these unanticipated and unwanted logistical challenges.8 Legally, prisoners of war were a distinct group, their rights protected by the 1929 International Convention on the Treatment of Prisoners of War (‘Geneva Convention’). Although Japan had signed the convention, they had not ratified it. Despite Japan informing the Allies of its ‘intention to correspondingly apply’ the principles of the convention, the Minister for the Army, General Tojo, explained at his war trial that ‘necessary revisions of the principles of international conventions could be made in accordance with the demands of the immediate situation and in accordance with Japan’s domestic law.’9 Within the Japanese military, the task of looking after the FEPOWs was deemed very low status; indeed it was ‘despised’.10 The Japanese military ethic was derived from Bushidō, the ‘way of the samurai’, whose codes of honour demanded unwavering loyalty to the emperor, and viewed any form of surrender with contempt.11 Against such a background, and the unexpectedly large and dispersed contingent of slave labour they had on their hands, it was perhaps

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inevitable that local Japanese camp commandants would be ‘indifferent to the health of their workforce’, and that widespread mistreatment would occur.12 As a result, it was ‘soon recognized that the privations suffered by FEPOWs were of a different order of magnitude to those experienced in Europe’.13 Conditions in the Far East were particularly severe,14 the diet was poor, clothing inadequate and tropical diseases prevalent.15 Military discipline while incarcerated could be a bone of contention – especially in camps with POWs from more than one nation – but, in the main, pre-capture discipline stayed intact. ‘The men were influenced by habit, by threats of post-war retribution, and the pragmatic realization that some form of discipline was necessary for survival.’16 The men were overworked, subjected to harsh and oppressive control, and deprived of effective medical treatments. As a result, around 27 per cent of British FEPOWs died, compared with approximately 4 per cent in Europe.17 Death rates were particularly high amongst the men building the Thai–Burma Railway.18 Despite POW medics performing heroically, and with great ingenuity, disease was rampant. Red Cross support (for example food parcels and inspections of the camps) was much more sporadic than in European POW camps.19 Faced with this degree of unremitting trauma, captivity dug deep into the psyche.

‘The Jap is a species on his own’20 To scores of millions of participants, the war was also a race war. It exposed raw prejudices and was fueled by racial pride, arrogance, and rage on many sides.21

Racism was expressed freely on both sides of the conflict. The image of the Japanese promulgated by Allied officialdom was of a country with a weakened military,22 a point of view consolidated by the ingrained belief that ‘their own forces could not be defeated by an Oriental adversary’.23 The Japanese, too, had few doubts about their own racial superiority, positioning themselves as the leading race in Asia. The notion of Japanese ‘purity’ figured prominently in this, which was consistent with the ideology of their Axis partners.24 Although the Allies were forced to quickly re-evaluate their estimations of Japanese military competence following the devastating defeats of 1941–2, evidence of racism persisted and was manifested in many diaries and memoirs. First encounters left an indelible impression. Sergeant Major Hastain and two of his colleagues ventured out of Singapore railway station to a nearby garage in search of water for a shave:

26

Captive Fathers, Captive Children Because they wore rubber boots we did not hear the approach of seven Japanese soldiers. Surprised and a little fearful, we watched the approach of these strange individuals. Although thick-set, they seemed abnormally small. … Their feet were shod in rubber boots with a split toe, which gave their feet a weird animallike appearance. … On their heads they had the peaked, close-fitting hat with a five-pointed star in the front, and the chin-strap that gives a particular ferocity to the oriental face.25

After making several neutral or flattering comments on passers-by in Singapore town, Hastain spots a Japanese man: ‘The Japanese business man or civil servant, alert and prying behind the thick-lensed glasses, bandy, squat and vile and most incongruously dressed in white shorts and shirt, brown shoes and beige halfsocks with purple suspenders!’26 These attitudes and attributions did not appear out of the blue, or as responses to the traumas of battle: both sides were being subjected to streams of propaganda. Simon Harrison points to how animal metaphors were used to describe the Japanese: ‘monkeys, rats, cockroaches, lice, vermin, reptiles, and so forth … Japanese soldiers were portrayed as brutish, simian, often rabid, with an affinity for jungles and jungle warfare unfathomable to civilized combatants.’27 The view of the Japanese as subhuman or evolutionarily inferior was a widespread racial stereotype in western nations during this period, and was visible at the highest levels. The diaries of the British Permanent Under-Secretary for Foreign Affairs Sir Alexander Cadogan referred to the Japanese as ‘little yellow dwarf slaves’.28 In 1945, American film director Frank Capra bundled together some of the crudest stereotypes to create a ‘masterpiece’ of propaganda: Know Your Enemy – Japan.29 Taking several years to complete, the film was finally released in August 1945, then withdrawn after the surrender, only to resurface in the 1970s. Its particular value now is that it represents a vivid summary of Allied attitudes to Japan that were forged during the war.30 When Attiwill speculated about the motives behind the behaviour of the Japanese guards, he was not shy in attributing these to the ‘Jap’s uncontrollable animal temper … seething with arrogance born of inferiority complex, which in turn has been implanted by western airs of superiority over all Orientals. So, the present situation represents for the Japs the turn of fortune’s wheel – the boomerang hitting back at us.’31 So, as well as contending with hostile and degrading physical conditions, the POWs were enmeshed in a toxic social space where mutual racism was taken for granted and flagrantly expressed.

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A changing self in a changing body The sense of being ‘embodied’ is anchored to a particular knowledge of reality. Philosopher Drew Leader begins his book The Absent Body in this way ‘human experience is incarnated. I receive the surrounding world through my eyes, my ears, my hands’.32 Our core identity and sense of self are built on the foundation of having a body of one’s own, separate from the rest of the world.33 But because the body is ‘always present as a continuous feature of all perceptual experiences’,34 it can easily get forgotten, escape attention, as we attend to our daily activities. As William James said, ‘that same old body always there.’35 The problem for the FEPOWs was that this ‘same old body’ began to make itself known in many new and painful ways: abruptly through injury or personal assault or, more insidiously, as the result of starvation or infection.36 The demands placed on body image and the sense of self were severe, traumatic and progressive, and cast a serious blight on the men’s sense of self-worth and self-esteem. You used to get up in the morning and push in the fleshy part of your leg, and if it stayed in and only came out slowly you knew that you were getting beriberi.37 And so the first thing you did in the morning was push that in. It was pretty bad. There were guys, they would get waterlogged and die.38

The fathers’ physical appearance was mentioned in many of the interviews, yet is rarely considered in any depth in the academic FEPOW literature. One reason for this neglect, I suspect, is that the appearance of the men has been so closely woven into popular culture – written and visual – that it has become a cliché. But these homogenizing representations inhibit insight into the psychic and phenomenological changes that transformed young men formerly in good health into prisoners of war suffering from chronic sickness and debilitation. By focusing on the experiential level of camp life, we are better placed to do justice to the specific sensitivities, sensibilities and physical changes the men brought back with them into civilian life, and which then went on to shape the lives of their children. Kenneth Attiwill describes how the tropical climate of Java began to change the body’s appearance in the early stages of captivity: Bodies are daily a deepening brown, many of us could pass for Wogs at a pinch, especially the dark-haired ones. On the surface we all look remarkably healthy. But under the brown skin all sorts of ailments are beginning to appear.39

When malnutrition brought on vitamin deficiencies, the men’s lives could take a distressing turn with the eruption of scrotal dermatitis (‘Changi balls’

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Captive Fathers, Captive Children

or ‘strawberry balls’),40 the symptoms of which were ‘swelling, excoriation and weeping of the scrotal skin’.41 Hastain confirms this and points to the lack of available treatments: ‘almost every other man was suffering from inflammation of the scrotum, an uncomfortable and distressing complaint that was, however, treated with good humour rather than the requisite palliatives which were unobtainable.’42 To add to the discomfort, the condition was worse at night and played havoc with sleep.43 The skin is our largest organ, and without it we would die. Unlike other organs of the body, the skin does not sit neatly in a body cavity: we feel it as ‘everywhere’. We don’t say, ‘our skin is painful today’, we are obliged to identify which part of the skin is giving us trouble. From our earliest days, the skin serves as our most concrete of boundaries, and does so before the differentiation and emergence of our personality.44 As Jay Prosser reminds us, it is the ‘interface between psyche and body, self and others’45 and derives its meanings from an ‘enfolding of culture, psychical life and embodiment’.46 As such it plays a dynamic role in the development of subjectivity.47 Because of these multiple material and psychosocial resonances, the skin played a profound role in the everyday experience of camp life. The skin inscribes the passage of time. Although not the only indicator (posture and gait being others), changes in the men’s skin often made them look older than their chronological years. The skin holds us together, both physically and psychically. The complex relationship we have with skin begins when ‘the baby acquires the perception of a bodily surface through the contact with the skin of the mother when he is being cared for by her (e.g. during breast-feeding)’.48 French psychoanalyst Didier Anzieu uses the term ‘skin-ego’ to describe this ‘psychical surface that connects together sensations of many different kinds’.49 It follows that the skin plays a foundational role in how we form attachments with key people in our lives, beginning with the mother. But our need for secure attachments does not begin and end in childhood. We carry it with us throughout life. However, the impact of captivity severely distorted and confused this sense of security, with serious consequences for the families of many of the men. The savage environment of the camps did more than lay its filth on the skin; it became an integral part of the skin itself, infiltrated the psyche and threatened the men’s self image. The emotional as well as the physical impact can be felt in the words of John Coast: A tottering stream of just human beings … the musty, decaying smell of the jungle vegetation; the acrid, bitter stench of dirt, dirt ingrained into the bodies and become a part of the skin; and underlying it all the stink of sick men, of dysentery, of unhealthiness.50

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Trauma was etched into the men’s skins but, like a palimpsest, deeper psychic layers would be gradually revealed in later years. Jay Prosser draws our attention to this: the look of our skin – both to others and to ourselves – brings to its surface a remembered past. It is a phenomenological function of skin to record. … Skin’s memory is burdened with the unconscious.51

We can easily understand why, when the integrity (indeed the life) of the individual was at stake, damage to the skin would feature prominently in the minds and the bodies of the men. Let us imagine these men for a moment, at first despairing and self-conscious as they begin to lose weight, then showing the first signs of tropical disease and the effects of malnutrition. As weight falls away, the skin begins to reveal the impress of the skeleton beneath; tropical ulcers appear and suppurate. Sensory changes – ulceration, injury, inflicted pain  – quickly come to the fore: the skin, sensed from within, plus the sight of one’s own, and seeing the skins of others. Bodies were re-sculpted by malnutrition and disease, skins changing daily, identities transformed, views of the sick body not normally seen. The skin could no longer be relied upon, and was added to the growing list of things that had let them down. In a literal way, the skin was ‘marking time’: marking their time in the camps.

The impact of illness and disease I am horrified at the sight of John’s body. Small suppurating sores began on his fingers, spread to his arms and legs, and now cover his entire body. Over in Jack’s camp, Phil is in the same condition. Ted has got them on his fingers. Arthur has them on his legs. Now I’m breaking out, with two patches on my posterior and other on my scrotum.52

The only available treatment for these sores was what Attiwill believed to be copper sulphate: ‘The effect of being painted with this is like being marked with a red-hot branding iron. I’m so curdled with shock at the raw pain I’m unable to scream.’53 The POWs suffered from many potentially life-threatening afflictions, including dysentery, malaria, tropical ulcers, cholera and nutritional deficiencies, such as ‘wet beriberi’, dysaesthetic neuropathy (‘electric feet’), and various ghastly skin diseases.54 Strongyloides was common amongst POWs on the Thai–Burma Railway, and remained a topic of interest because of its ability to persist in the body over

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Captive Fathers, Captive Children

many decades, with serious, even fatal, consequences.55 Strongyloides stercoralis is a soil-based organism that thrives in a hot and humid climate, as found in Thailand. The larvae enter the body by ‘burrowing into the skin of the feet’.56 They gradually work their way up the body until they reach the lungs and throat, where they get swallowed into the gastro-intestinal system. There they breed, before passing down the bowel to be excreted. When they reach the lower bowel and anus, they can re-enter the body (a process known as ‘auto-infection’) and start the process all over again. Around 20 per cent of those working on the Thai–Burma Railway were infected in this way.57 Tropical ulcers were especially grim. ‘Lt. M. E. Barrett, who worked in the ulcer huts at Chungkai prison camp in Thailand, wrote: “The majority were caused by bamboo scratches incurred when working naked in the jungle … Leg ulcers of over a foot in length and maybe six inches in breadth, with bone exposed and rotting for several inches, were no uncommon sight”.’58 For the unfortunate 27 per cent who did not survive the ordeal, death made its presence felt in many graphic ways. Attiwill’s first encounter with death was a case of dysentery in Java. ‘A life has gone, through sheer willful neglect of responsibility.’59 They have a ‘ready supply of coffins, which lie in the hospital yard like invitation cards.’60 Aside from the men who died on the ‘hell ships’ and were buried at sea, corpses were either buried on land or cremated. Frederick Taylor remembers the ‘terrible stench in our camp from the fires that burnt the corpses, the nightmare that all the men were not dead when they were placed in the flames will never leave me.’61 The level of morale, and the capacity to maintain a hopeful attitude, played a part in the survival of some POWs. Eric Osboldstone recounted the ‘peculiar’ behaviour of some POWs at the end of their tether. There were guys in there – they had given up hope … And they just got thinner and thinner. We had a whole group of them that would bring out their rice sacks and lie in a row out in the hot sun. And just lie there and pull the thing over them and they just faded away … They’d come out – there’s something peculiar about it. They’d lie down there and they’d pull this sack right over their face, about four or five or six of them, and they’d all lie in a row and they’d just fade away and die.62

Hastain also commented on this. Deaths from diphtheria had grown alarmingly, especially amongst the younger men in their early twenties, who Hastain noted ‘seemed to show no fight’.63 According to Max Hastings, in the early days of captivity, some younger POWs just gave up, especially those from deprived

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31

working-class backgrounds whose physical reserves had become depleted during the Great Depression of the 1930s.64 Under these circumstances, it became critical for POWs to find ways of managing their emotions at different points in their captivity. Laurence Rees describes the experiences of Peter Lee who was incarcerated in several camps across the Far East. Anger is his first response: the visceral one of attack and retaliation. Once he appreciates the futility, rational thought takes over: ‘You have to realize the situation you are in and order your actions according to that situation. In other words, in those situations you have to take it. In the old British phrase, you have to grin and bear it.’ Rees sees Lee’s response as ‘an exercise of phenomenal self-discipline’, through which ‘he banished hatred and even anger from his emotional make-up.’65 Conditions in the camps certainly demanded self-discipline in order to survive. However, as later chapters will suggest, ‘hatred and even anger’ can never be truly banished in the absolutist way Rees describes; these emotions persist, and may be passed on to the next generation.

Punishments Physical punishment was part and parcel of incarceration by the Imperial Japanese Army, and indeed was used to maintain discipline amongst its own troops and camp guards. The POWs were bottom of the pile and so subjected to humiliating corporal punishment from anyone above them in the hierarchy. Attiwill commented on the most common form of punishment: Face-slapping might be an accepted form of punishment among the Japs … a general can bash a brigadier … But it is something a white man cannot take without his gall boiling to bash back. A bash across the face is extremely painful and provoking.66

Soon after the surrender, General Tojo Hideki, Japan’s minister of war and also prime minister, laid down the ground rules for managing the POWs. The essence was that ‘They must supervise their charges rigidly, taking care not to become obsessed with mistaken ideas of humanitarianism or swayed by personal feelings.’67 In practice, ultimate power remained in the hands of the commandant in charge of each camp, and the pattern of punishments varied enormously in the hundreds of camps stretched across east Asia. As well as receiving punishments themselves, the POWs were often forced to witness violence inflicted on their comrades. This included many executions.68

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Captivity normalized brutality on a grand scale, infiltrating every aspect of life. In Singapore, Ronald Hastain records finding the ‘decaying bodies of bayoneted Chinese in the ditches’ and ‘on the main roads the heads of Malays and Chinese were exhibited with posters describing their crimes.’69 In a particularly cruel incident, following many requests for clothing, the POWs were ‘thrown a bundle of filthy blood-stained garments which had been cut off the bodies of our own dead and wounded.’70 But the descent into barbarism was captured most shockingly in an unimaginably sadistic act described by Norman Burrows. In his unpublished memoir, he recounts a day in Singapore when an Australian soldier owned up to stealing a sack of rice in cahoots with a rickshaw boy. The boy had already been summarily shot. After a little while one Australian stood forward and said ‘it was me.’ Anyway, they beat him there on the spot, and then opposite was a garage, they took him across to the garage and in this garage they had a huge vice – an engineers vice – and they put this Australian’s head in this vice and while we watched they tightened it until his head cracked like a walnut, and he was dead.71

The effects of such memories and postmemories are both profound and unpredictable. While on my first visit to Japan in 2010, Norman Burrows’ daughter-in-law had first described this incident to me. For the next ten years, I could not bring myself to share it with anyone else. Whenever these mental images threatened to appear, I would actively block my thoughts. I had chosen not to inflict this ‘deposited representation’ on anyone else.72 Now, a decade later, the act of writing has allowed me, in part, to come to terms with this postmemory. In Figure 1, FEPOW artist Charles Thrale depicted the naked horror of captivity. The men quickly learned that they could minimize the pain by suppressing any outward expressions of emotion, as George Cooper discovered: During a beating it was unwise to utter any sound, as this only inspired the Nip who was administering the flogging to even greater efforts; on the other hand to stick it quietly earned the victim the guards’ respect – they would give him the thumbs up sign and say ‘Good’ in Malay.73

The psychological turmoil compressed into situations like this was hard to contain. Having to seek acceptance, praise, or even admiration, from the guards who were beating you was difficult enough at the time. But even more damaging in the long term, the men were obliged to carry these memories, emotional conflicts and contradictions into their peacetime lives. Disconcertingly, there is another side to this story, one which challenges the uniform discourse of POW suffering with which we are so familiar. As journalist

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Figure 1  Executed for no apparent reason by Charles Thrale.

and author Brian MacArthur reminds us, ‘This is not a story of unremitting cruelty’.74 Some guards could show compassion towards the prisoners, and occasionally a few lasting friendships were struck. One such was formed between Bill Norways and Kameo Yamanaka, a Japanese soldier who was a dedicated Buddhist and pacifist. After the war, Norways wrote to Yamanaka, thus initiating an exchange of letters that lasted over thirty years until Norways’ death in 1986. During the correspondence, Norways sent a poem to Yamanaka. Yamanaka replied that he would have it engraved on a granite tablet. That tablet now stands close to where Yamanaka’s ashes are located. Proof then that, even under the most extraordinary circumstances, two ordinary mortals were able to

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Captive Fathers, Captive Children

see beyond the constructed enemyship entailed in war to recognize something of themselves in the other, and to experience empathy with him.75 In 2015, Norways’ son Toby visited Yamanaka’s family in Japan, so extending the family friendship into the next generation.76

On the move FEPOWs were often on the move, shifted regularly between different parts of the occupied territories to meet the labour needs of Japan’s wartime economy. There were horrendous train journeys with the men packed into cattle trucks, and pitiless ‘death marches’ in Borneo during which failure to keep up could mean instant execution. Ronald Hastain was one of 600 men transported from Singapore to Thailand by rail. The men were packed into trucks twenty feet long and seven feet wide, thirtytwo men in each. ‘… the overcrowding was frightening’. Although they received food at stops along the journey ‘the lack of drink caused an endless craving for water’. After one thousand miles of ‘extreme discomfort’ they reached Ban Pong.77

Most agonizing of all perhaps were the journeys in requisitioned merchant ships. These ‘hell ships’ carried an assortment of cargos, Japanese troops and POWs. Men were crammed into the holds and many lost their lives due to the appalling conditions on board. Over the years, the hell ships, together with the construction of the Thai–Burma Railway, have emerged as emblematic of extreme Japanese wartime brutality. Michno estimates the death toll on these voyages as a minimum 21,039 POWs out of a total of just over 126,000. Most deaths were ‘collateral damage’, caused by Allied submarines and planes.78 Ken Attiwill made the voyage from Java to Singapore in the hold of the Singapore Maru. Accommodation took the form of wooden shelves: As soon as the lights are put out, the hold comes alive with beetles and cockroaches of various sorts and sizes. … They emerge in the quiet gloom, creeping with horrid touch over bare limbs and faces.79

Sleeping was difficult; no room to lie back, always on your side, with a man on either side, ‘breath to breath’. Attiwill decided to sleep with his backpack between him and the man immediately behind. Even in this dysfunctional environment such proximity could trigger a minor crisis of masculinity. ‘This is uncomfortable for us both, but I prefer it to the hot moist body of a man.’80 In 1944, Ronald

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Hastain found himself one of 750 POWs packed into the hold of the Asaka Maru, in a convoy of thirty-eight ships. ‘It seemed as if we were just melting away, and all the time one was fighting for breath.’81 After a while the captain allowed some of the men to move to the decks thus relieving the pressure in the hold. Rations and medical supplies remained inadequate and, with no room for exercise, the expected diseases soon appeared. Malaria recurred and beriberi worsened each day. An outbreak of bacillary dysentery triggered uncontrollable diarrhoea and pain. The smell of the stale miso, the loathsome curry powder, dried seaweed and powdered whitebait permeated the ship, and when served up in hot water caused one to vomit at the first sight and odour.82

At one point in his account of the four-week journey, Hastain described a curious psychological response that afflicted him. He writes of experiencing a ‘dual personality’ in himself, a depersonalization experience that ‘was so profound and deeply impressed upon me that it is lived over and over again in subsequent dreams’.83 I passed through days when I was someone quite different from the essential ‘me’. I said things and acted like an automaton … a separate, aloof, unimpassioned personality saw everything with an amazing clarity … like a kinematic record.84

Later in the journey they hit a heavy storm in the China Sea. Waves crashed over the ship, and one of the tankers in their convoy caught fire and sank. Hastain allows himself to reflect on what the drowning men might have been going through … then, ‘Quite quietly and unobtrusively I was sick.’85

Relationships between the POWs Much has been made in popular culture of comradeship in the camps, and there is no doubt that friendships were important for both psychological and material reasons. But much of this has been needlessly romanticized. Captivity in itself does not change human nature, and greed and selfishness can erupt when survival is at stake. Captain Duncan recalls his five weeks sailing on the Yashida Maru86 from Java to mainland Japan. There were 2,000 POWs on board, sixty-three of whom died at sea. Bartering took place between the POWs and Japanese troops, the POWs acquiring extra food in exchange for their remaining valuables.

36

Captive Fathers, Captive Children Unfortunately this ‘changy-changy’ practice led to a great deal of theft as the more unscrupulous element in our midst, having disposed of all their own belongings, did not hesitate to steal from their comrades both dead and alive, whilst the officers’ baggage which was stacked in one of the holds was all thoroughly looted and in many cases, the only warm clothing that the officer possessed was taken and bartered.87

However, survival often depended on the willingness of friends to care for each other, as Captain David Usher recalled: ‘everybody had dysentery. They lay in their own excreta. Unless they had a mucker, a pal, to look after them they stood little chance of survival.’88 Even in the strange circumstances of POW life, the tenderness and compassion shown when men undertook intimate tasks for other men could be hard to come to terms with, unless of course the care was being provided by medics. Ronald Hastain benefited from the ministrations of a fellow POW. He described how ‘My friend came and tended to my wants. Picking me up in his arms, and placing me on a bamboo stool, while he re-made my bed, and even washed me, for I was as weak and helpless as a baby.’89 At Chungkai on the Thai–Burma Railway, Ernest Gordon was having a hard time fighting off diphtheria when he looked up to see ‘A man was standing in the doorway. … He was naked save for a loin-cloth. … “Good evening, sir. … I heard you needed a hand and I wondered if you’d care to let me help you.”’ Gordon was surprised by ‘Dusty’ Miller’s offer, but he agreed: ‘it was so different from the attitude we had come to accept as normal. It seemed centuries since I had heard anyone volunteer to tend a sick man’. Dusty gave him the ‘first decent wash’ he’d had for six weeks, and then looked down at the skin ulcers on his legs. ‘Mm, quite a mess, aren’t they? I think I’d better wash them first. Then I’ll clean out the pus.’ Dusty was a man of faith – a Methodist – who, by his behaviour, was to influence Gordon’s own conversion to Christianity while in captivity.90

Managing time and morale How do we reconcile the familiar images of cruelty and suffering in the camps with the sheer monotony of living under those conditions, of a ‘sentence’ with no known end, and with miniscule prospects of escape? Captivity savagely disrupted the established patterns and rhythms of pre-war life, and replaced them with novel extremes: long hours of unremitting physical labour – as experienced on the Thai–Burma Railway or in the coal mines – interspersed with periods of grinding boredom. Interrupting both extremes were bouts of acute illness but

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also the occasional blessed relief provided by POW entertainers and improvised theatrical performances. In some camps, organized sporting and educational activities also took place, such as writing, painting and drawing, even career talks. Many of the ‘men’ were really just boys when they joined up and had no clear idea about their futures. In one camp on the Thai–Burma Railway, a ‘Careers Council’ was set up to help these young men. Hastain recalls that, despite being ‘lost, humiliated, naked and sick in body, we could yet ardently discuss politics, education, art, religion and social ethics.’91 The POWs faced an indeterminate sentence, but their diverse backgrounds ensured a plethora of talents and skills. The Japanese attitude to these activities varied considerably and could change in an instant, especially when matters of ‘face’ were concerned. Yet, despite the risks involved, these men managed to hang on to their morale through an impressive range of entertainments and educational opportunities. In recent years, Sears Eldredge and Midge Gillies have revealed the extent and significance of this little-known aspect of FEPOW life.92 Eldredge sums up the POWs’ dilemma this way: a group of men who continued as combatants in another war – not with the enemy without, against which they could do little, but with the deadly enemy within, who employed the powerful weapons of uncertainty, boredom, and despair to try and defeat them.93

And he stresses ‘the value of the performing arts to prevent minds and emotions from atrophying while fostering a collective identity in the midst of a world where solitary withdrawal was a death sentence.’94 John Coast, a young officer, was actively involved in organizing these activities and entertainments: As more than half the camp were so sick after six weeks that even the Nips couldn’t see how to get work out of such derelict bodies, we tried to organize every conceivable type of lecture and talk to interest the sick men in the dreary hours which they must otherwise spend lying silently and painfully on their bamboo slats … anything was of interest to those interest-starved men, and the most boring lecture was greedily listened to. Also, we took it in turns whenever we could to read books to them.95

Responding to the natural environment As incongruous as it may appear, the POWs were not immune to the beauty of the natural environment in which they found themselves, and were often able to respond to, and draw on, its creative and nurturing potential. Many

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Figure 2  Angels of Life by Sally Grumbridge.

first-hand accounts refer to how the splendour and spiritual power of the natural environment offered a ‘gateway’ to a world beyond the camp. Figure 2 expresses how the men were able to remain sensitive to the fragility and beauty of their surroundings. Captain Atholl Duncan received the personal effects of a young man from Scotland who had died in Tandjong Priok, Java. Amongst his belongings was a piece of writing of considerable poignancy and poetry, as evidenced in this extract: Every night between a quarter to and eight o’clock, you see them gather at the gateway (now barb-wired off) … At first, only a few men could be seen standing by the fence, but as the nights have gone by, the numbers have increased. … Storm clouds catch and hold, for a brief period, the final rays as they sweep upwards, and hazy films of cloud cap them with a golden mist … as we turn from Sunset Gate to walk back to camp we can ponder on the fact that … before we see it again, the sun, which has given us such a beautiful few minutes, will have provided a glorious June day for our loved ones at home.96

Hastain also found solace in the ability of the natural environment to offer compensation for the horrors he could not escape: The world was at war. Men were fighting everywhere. Women and children were dying. Yet Nature threw a translucent mantle of every colour across a glowing sky. The colours came and went as in a kaleidoscope. What would Turner have done with such a sunset!97

Mostly, however, it was the blazing hot sun followed swiftly by torrential rain that bore down on the POWs, rather than the aesthetics. These ‘freaks of climate’98 – quite alien to men from a temperate zone – imposed considerable strain on weakened bodies.

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Whereas most descriptions of the POWs’ environment were written, visual artists were also to be found in the camps. Fortunately for later generations many were willing to risk punishment or worse to record what was happening around them.99 Many of their paintings and drawings are explicitly documentary, undertaken to record the general conditions, illnesses and injuries, and atrocities as evidence for subsequent war-crime trials. From time to time, however, we can see a freer hand at work in their choice of subjects, and this approach could provide psychological escape. Ronald Searle, perhaps the most famous of the FEPOW artists, made a ‘little sketch’ – a self-portrait – while in Changi prison camp: ‘With my back to the wire, under gently swaying coconut palms, I had – for a half-hour at least – transported myself to another, less sordid island.’100 Other POWs found ways to meet their emotional needs through fantasy. Brian Catlin was the flight engineer on board a Catalina flying boat that spotted the Japanese fleet as it headed for Ceylon. The plane was shot down, and all surviving crew members taken prisoner. His daughter recalled a highly distinctive memory her father shared with the family which showed how he used fantasy to create an imaginative connection with home and family that restored his hope under otherwise disheartening conditions. He told us that when he was working on the docks – this is a little weird – he would sometimes urinate in the water to feel connected to his mum. He said that he felt that that bit of him dispersed in the sea got carried across the world, taken up in to the clouds and fell as rain on Cracken Edge, ran down the hill in the stream and ended up in his mum’s wash tub and she was touching him as she did the washing. Thinking about that used to make me cry.101

Communication with home By and large, British prisoners of war in Europe received regular communications from home, but letters and parcels between Britain and the Far East were much rarer. This was damaging to the mental well-being of the POWs and created much anxiety for their families who were often in the dark about why they had stopped receiving letters. In the absence of any definitive information from official sources, families understandably hoped that, if still alive, the FEPOWs were reasonably safe somewhere in a POW camp.102 This impression was encouraged by articles in The Prisoner of War, the magazine produced by the Red Cross and St John War Organisation,103 and given free to next-of-kin. The front cover of the June 1943 edition shows a group of

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POWs posing for a group photograph over the caption ‘This summer scene was taken at Campo P.G. 73’.104 Although this is an Italian POW camp, the image sets out to create a general impression of well-being which many wives and families were likely to have latched onto. In the December edition, an unnamed POW in Osaka POW Camp, Amagasaki Sub Camp wrote (his letter dated 10 April 1943): My health is excellent, and I am working each day, except Tuesday, for payment. The work is very suitable, and I have received excellent co-operation from all the factory staff, the group foreman especially.105

My mother had no contact with my father between January 1942 and May 1943. Finally, she received official notification that he was alive, but a prisoner of war in Japan. In June 1943, my mother wrote this poignant letter to my father, who was a sign-writer by trade. If your camp is in a place where the sun is always out, I can partly understand how you will be feeling … I’ve been sitting out in the back garden this afternoon trying to get sunburnt, but I don’t seem to be very successful … I do hope you will soon be able to write me a letter and tell me what sort of work you are doing. I hope it is something you can get on with, and be interested with. Have you tried learning the language yet? I should think the signs would be interesting to you, if you get time to copy them.

In truth, he was losing weight by the day and spending most of his time slaving in a coal mine sixty miles from Hiroshima. Given the months of distress and turmoil the families suffered as they made repeated attempts to discover the men’s fate, it is understandable (even unavoidable) that they would wish to believe all was well.

Trauma and its consequences A ‘shattered self ’ is not reconstituted as the former personality.106

Life for a POW consisted of a bewildering array of daily trauma, to which was added the more existential challenge of being both ‘victim’ and ‘witness’ of trauma.107 Some ‘minor’ traumas could be anticipated to some extent, for instance face slapping after failing to bow to a guard, but the penalties were often unpredictable. As a consequence, each man lived with the fear of sudden, unexpected trauma, whether through punishment, injury or the impact of disease, set against a background of three to four years of unfolding cumulative trauma. A regime of oppression and frequent punishments will produce compliance in

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any setting, but the hallmark of full capitulation as a POW was being forced to violate moral principles and ‘to betray … basic human attachments’.108 Being part of a group of men underpinned by British military discipline may have helped moderate the damaging psychic impact at the time but, for many, this simply masked deeper injury to the psyche, as became clear after the war. The behaviour of the Japanese military in the Far East incorporated acts of cruelty that stand comparison with any others across history in the depth of their depravity. Indeed these horrors continue to circulate in the darker recesses of contemporary FEPOW discourse. Massacres, mutilations, medical experiments, hell ships, death marches and cannibalism all figure powerfully.109 Isla recounted one of her father’s stories: ‘one night they [the Japanese] gave them a dinner – the POWs – and then the next day at tenko they said,110 did you enjoy your Christmas dinner, because it was made with the liver of a POW?’.111 Trauma does not impose itself in neat or predictable patterns. Long-term trauma is not completely distinguishable from the sudden and disruptive impact of ‘acute’ trauma; the latter can punctuate the former, which itself will wax and wane, and trauma may be revived many years after the initial traumatizing event (or series of events).112 Traces of the past may have been repressed, yet remain active within the unconscious ready to break through into the present. Trauma may be so removed from the realms of normal human behaviour that it seems to lie completely outside the reach of human comprehension or symbolization. Social convulsions like war may create conditions that individuals find impossible to process,113 conditions that constitute a ‘break’ of some kind, a ‘shutdown of narrative’.114 In Helen Epstein’s words ‘Whatever lived inside me was so potent that words crumbled before they could describe’,115 and this impact could still be felt at a generational remove. Graham put it from a son’s perspective: I can’t cope with it. I can’t cope with anything to do with what he … what he experienced … I can’t cope with anything like that. I don’t like watching it on a television even. And I wouldn’t see … I wouldn’t go and see any films that were supposed to take place in any situation like he was in.116

Participants in this research narrated their life stories from childhood up to the time of interview, creating a psychosocial canvas on which to picture the longer term consequences of captivity trauma. Seventy years after the event, the British government still acknowledged the broad causal relationship between the POW experience and negative health effects: ‘Many ex-Far East prisoners of war suffer from things like bad nerves and stress problems. This is because of the way they were treated while they were prisoners.’117 Much research on

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British former FEPOWs focuses on their physical health, such as the effects of specific tropical diseases and chronic malnutrition.118 However, in a seminal review, Jones and Wessely confirmed that many FEPOWs also experienced serious psychological changes, such as post-traumatic stress disorder, which they contrasted with the situation following the First World War when psychiatrists were of the view that incarceration might actually protect POWs from significant psychological damage.119 In the first few decades following the Second World War, it was thought that long-term negative effects of captivity were unlikely. However, these hopes were soon dashed by the Vietnam War veterans who showed how the damaging psychological effects of captivity could indeed infiltrate deeply into civilian life.120 Subsequent retrospective research has shown broad support for this finding although, as would be expected, studies have varied in their approach and in their results.121 In the USA, the Medical Follow-up Agency began studying the health of POWs soon after the Second World War, and published their first report in 1955.122 The Vietnam War then led to the establishment of the Robert E. Mitchell Centre for POW Studies,123 which has offered Annual Medical Evaluations to all American POWs.124 Variables that best-predicted longer term mental health included the age at capture (the younger the age, the worse the outcome), the extent of post-traumatic symptoms at the time of repatriation and physical torture.125 A follow-up study of US POWs held by the Japanese showed higher mortality rates (compared with controls) in the first few years after the war, but this excess (mainly due to accidents, tuberculosis and cirrhosis of the liver) had disappeared by the mid 1950s.126 Nevertheless, in a literature review published a few years later, Julius Segal was able to confirm that ‘the extraordinary stresses of incarceration are related to a heightened vulnerability to physical and psychological health problems over the long term’.127 On this side of the Atlantic, the British government failed to institute any systematic, national medical follow-up of FEPOWs. So, while the men were treated for their war-related illnesses, and monitored individually at various military hospitals, special units and by family doctors, the opportunity for nation-wide longitudinal research was lost.128 Hence the over-reliance on US mortality and morbidity data.129 Persistent physical problems continued to affect a sizeable number of ex-FEPOWs for decades after the war. In the UK, the most significant research has been carried out by the Liverpool School of Tropical Medicine (LSTM), in collaboration with veterans organizations. LSTM has generated

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a considerable amount of invaluable research data that confirm the longterm effects of captivity. The school began this work shortly before the end of the war and it grew steadily until 1967 at which point LSTM became the official centre for Tropical Disease Investigations. LSTM has shown that the ex-FEPOWs suffered from three main long-term medical consequences: Strongyloidiasis (the disease caused by the Strongyloides stercoralis parasitic worm); neurological problems due to nutritional deficiencies; and a range of psychiatric problems.130 Amongst FEPOW families, there is a natural tendency, in the absence of any other plausible explanation, to attribute later health problems to the traumas of captivity. This thread ran through many of my interviews, and was a reason why war pensions became a thorny issue,131 as Derek discovered: the trouble with Far East prisoners of war like my dad, suddenly, down the line their health would start breaking down … and course you had to prove whether that was due to war service. Which was a big contention of my dad and my mum, you know, and they couldn’t prove it, really.132

Research into the impact of prisoner of war experiences on wives and families has been sparse and concentrated mainly on the first few years after the war. However, even after thirty years the fall-out from captivity continued to play a major role and, for some wives, became like a ‘never-ending movie’.133 Yet, despite this chronic burden, it would be wrong to conclude that every outcome was negative because ‘post-traumatic growth’ has now been confirmed across a range of settings.134 Incarceration was such an all-encompassing and overwhelming experience that it prompted many POWs to re-appraise their lives and values, and to: rethink their philosophies and to develop a finer sense of self worth and of life’s values, thus turning a malignant and cataclysmic experience into an instrument for growth and emotional maturation135

Segal and his colleagues also proposed that the ability to rise above immediate hardship and pain increased the chances of survival.136 However, conflating a finer sense of ‘self-worth’ and of ‘life’s values’ in this way may not be sufficiently discriminating. Conceivably, survivors could still emerge from captivity with a finer sense of life’s values but also suffer a fractured sense of self-worth. That trauma may sometimes encourage victims to review and re-evaluate their lives is exemplified by the altruism shown by those ex-FEPOWs who channelled their experiences into charitable activities, such as assisting fellow veterans and widows with their battles over war pensions, and by supporting ex-FEPOW

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associations. Indeed, a number of FEPOWs went on to receive national honours for their work in this field, work which, on occasion, the children have continued. My overriding purpose in this chapter has been to convey the experiential dimensions of life as a Far East prisoner of war, in order to better convey and contextualize the traumatic memories the men brought back with them into the family home and into post-war British society. I shall conclude with the words of Frederick Noel Taylor, a private in the Royal Norfolks, who wrote the following while sailing home on the repatriation ship Chitral. His evident joy was tempered with feelings of unreality and hesitancy over whether ‘existential trust’ could easily be restored after such cataclysmic experiences137: The guards then started to go missing and we heard the Americans had dropped two atomic bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki. There are no words that can ever tell you how I felt. It was like being awakened from a bad nightmare, was I awake or still dreaming, would it start all over again.138

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Bringing war into the home

On Friday 28 January 1944, the Secretary of State for Foreign Affairs, Mr Anthony Eden, rose to his feet to make the following statement in the House of Commons. He began: I fear I have grave news to give to the House. Members will be aware that a large number of postcards and letters have recently been received in this country from prisoners in the Far East: and that these almost uniformly suggest that the writers are being treated well and are in good health. There is no doubt from what we know about particular areas that some of these communications, at any rate, are in terms dictated by the Japanese authorities. I regret to have to tell the House that information which has been reaching His Majesty’s Government no longer leaves room for any doubt that the true state of affairs is a very different one so far as the great majority of prisoners in Japanese hands is concerned.1

In graphic detail rarely witnessed in the House of Commons, he went on to describe specific cases of extreme brutality inflicted by Japanese soldiers. A lack of accurate intelligence, together with government defensiveness and reluctance to reveal what they already knew of atrocities, led to misunderstandings about the nature of captivity in the Far East. This patchy understanding of the situation on the ground was also a critical factor in the failure of the British government and military to adequately meet the needs of the returning prisoners of war. By early 1944, the families had begun to receive ‘reassuring’ but highly censored and misleading official postcards from the FEPOWs themselves, at which stage the government felt it had little option but to be more transparent with the British people. With the government’s position now aired publicly, the question in the minds of loved ones was whether they should they prepare for a homecoming or a bereavement.2

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The process of repatriation At the end of the war there were approximately 180,000 European and North American POWs in Japanese hands,3 with around 63,000 in Japan itself.4 The Allies had a major task on their hands to get the men home in reasonable time. The logistical challenges were considerable. Planning was severely hampered by the dispersed location of the camps, haphazard Japanese record-keeping, and the Japanese tendency to reorganize, relocate and rename the camps. Wes Injerd and Mindy Kotler have estimated that there were 775 POW and civilian camps across the Japanese empire, with 185 in Japan, and 590 elsewhere across the other territories.5 The British government had been planning for the aftermath of victory against Japan for some time, but anticipated that this would be a gradual process, with the POWs being liberated progressively as the Allies occupied Japanese territory. When the Americans dropped the atomic bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki, however, the war in the Far East came to an unexpectedly abrupt end, and recovery planning had to be accelerated.6 Even after the formal surrender on 2 September 1945, many POWs remained at risk of malnutrition and tropical disease, and even random attacks from maverick Japanese troops. In anticipation of this precarious situation, General MacArthur issued General Order No. 1 on 16 August that ordered the Japanese to give the locations of POW camps, and to guarantee the men’s well-being until they could be liberated by the Allies.7 For British POWs, the journey home could be long and convoluted, particularly if they needed sustained medical attention.8 While frustrating, many men benefited from the extra time it took to reach home. They were able to continue treatment for their health problems, and to put on much needed weight. Official records tell us little of the impact these repatriation journeys had on the liberated FEPOWs.9 For that we must turn to personal accounts, such as that of Norman Burrows who worked on the Thai–Burma Railway before being sent to the Iruka copper mines in Japan from where he was liberated by American troops. His words bring home the daily reality and atmosphere of the time: Arriving at Tokyo we were taken to Yokohama bay. Here we were sorted into groups by our apparent state of health. On the docks we were once again sprayed with disinfectant. … We were like a load of cattle. I was taken to a large American hospital ship and given a bed. When I got onto this bed with brilliant white sheets and pillow, I felt as if I was sinking away into the next world. I couldn’t sleep it was too soft. … We left the hospital ship and were back on the quayside again and here we were made to strip and once again sprayed! All our belongings, if we had any were to be sterilized. My New Testament came back looking as if it had been in an oven, it probably had.10

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With characteristic irony, Norman’s words vividly capture how emotionally challenging and disorienting repatriation could be. His journey home took him to Vancouver, then across Canada by train to Halifax, Nova Scotia, where he boarded the Ile de France for England: seven days later we were in Southampton, here it was thick fog. We had to wait on the ship all night for the fog to clear. In the morning the boat edged into the docks. Now the British army really took over and the orders were that no friends were allowed to greet us on the dock. Evidently we were wild men and needed taming. … Then the word went around that we had to be searched – customs! There were chants of ‘Oh yea we’re home all right’.11

Later, they left Southampton by train: Finally we pulled into what we were told was Clapham Junction. There were no name plates up as yet. We were not actually in the station and it was pitch dark. Then men with oil lamps swinging came along the train and they were locking all the doors. We spent all night locked in that train, there were nearly riots. Then finally we moved off and arrived at Amersham. From the station we were taken in lorries to our new concentration camp. We were locked behind a wire fence. We never even had a wire fence around us in Thailand.12

The sharp disparities between the camps in the Far East and those in Europe were fully recognized by the War Office. In 1944, they published a handbook for the relatives of POWs in Japanese hands in which they listed the ‘difference in the Japanese outlook and general conditions of living’, ‘the far spread area over which camps are scattered’, ‘differences of climate’ and ‘the absolute control exercised by the Japanese authorities over means of communication’.13 The brutal conditions in the camps were not mentioned expressly, perhaps because the handbook was written for an audience of anxious relatives who had received precious little concrete information in the previous two years. Given Mr Eden’s statement, and the lively debate amongst physicians and psychiatrists, the War Office should have been in little doubt that many POWs would be returning home with psychological as well as physical scars.

Medical and social responses to the returning FEPOWs Trauma associated with war has become an unsettled domain within psychiatry and social policy. The return of the FEPOWs in the second half of the 1940s took place during a betwixt and between period when medical opinion and state responses were shifting from the First World War focus on physical explanations

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(and treatments) of ‘shell shock’14 towards the emergence in the 1980s of ‘posttraumatic stress disorder’ (PTSD), a category that swung the balance firmly and more humanely towards psychological support. The wide-ranging discourses that remain alive around both ‘shell shock’ and ‘PTSD’ demonstrate clearly the persistence of war trauma in the social psyche. As a result the social and medical responses are still evolving over a century later, contributing to what is sometimes referred to as a ‘genealogy of trauma’.15 From the First World War masculinist belief that ‘psychiatric casualties’ could be avoided by ‘high morale, esprit de corps, leadership, careful selection of recruits, and training’,16 the nature of war trauma is being reframed, belatedly, to accommodate issues of female trauma, thus enabling a challenge to dominant assumptions about the history of war.17 Contemporary medical opinion was divided over just what to expect from the men on their return, and indeed how the state and medical professions should assess or respond to the men’s needs. In January 1944, the British Medical Journal published an article by Major P. H. Newman on the ‘prisoner of war mentality’. Drawing on lessons from the First World War, together with evidence of those POWs who had returned from Europe, Newman recommended establishing an organization capable of ‘dealing with “release” phenomena’, including ‘a prisonerof-war club in all large towns’ where advice could be offered to ex-prisoners and relatives alike.18 Newman’s article provoked a spate of letters in response. Billings and Eley both reminded readers of the specific circumstances of the Far East which had been a gap in Newman’s piece. Eley cautioned against the formation of POW organizations because he believed the prisoner of war ‘wants to forget’ and would prefer help to be provided ‘within the confines of, or centred from, his own home, where are concentrated all his longings, thoughts, and desires’.19 Billings concluded pessimistically, but with some prescience: These are very, very slow wearing-down cruelties, the relief of which can result in no ‘acute emotional reaction’ but a chronic psychological stigma. … There is only one class of man or woman who can experience all this (and much more) and who can be rehabilitated to fit into normal reconstructed society again – and that is the ‘superman’. The remainder will be a problem for their lifetime.20

Harkness was of similar mind, and remarked on the public reaction they might receive: ‘the very large majority of our returned prisoners of war will be problems for their lifetime. The men on return will find the war over and be bewildered and hurt by public reaction and indifference.’21 As we can see, there was little consensus amongst psychiatrists about how best to manage the

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returning FEPOWs. These differing opinions were based on the particular biases of individual doctors, some of whom had been active during both world wars – as officers of course. During 1944, a consensus began to build that more needed to be done to support the returning POWs (from Europe only at that stage) and to provide, as Newman had suggested, something akin to a decompression chamber to ease transition to civilian life. Lieutenant Colonel Tommy Wilson, a psychiatrist who had worked at the Tavistock Clinic before the war, wrote a report for the War Office in February 1944, which led to the establishment of twenty Civil Resettlement Units (CRUs).22 The CRUs offered practical programmes that included communal activities and vocational guidance, as well as psychiatric help if needed.23 CRUs were designed to ‘bridge the gap’ between captivity and civvy street by updating the men on how Britain had changed while they had been confined in the Far East. Talks were supplemented by visits to local employers and labour exchanges, and a Civil Liaison Officer experienced in ‘welfare and personnel work’ – a post ‘usually held by a woman’24 – was available to assist with personal or family matters. Limited medical support was also offered. Although attendance was voluntary, 60 per cent of POWs released from European camps attended a CRU.25 By the time the bulk of the 40,000 repatriated FEPOWs began to arrive home in the autumn and winter of 1945, CRUs had been deemed a success, and were opened up to the new arrivals. However, only 12 per cent of FEPOWs attended. Many of these men were in poor physical condition and CRUs were not equipped to meet their needs.26 To aggravate matters further, the official line was that the FEPOWs should not talk about their experiences, and this instruction was extended to their families who were told not to ask questions. The government’s position was made explicit in a leaflet entitled ‘Guard Your Tongue’, authorized by the South East Asia Command, and handed out to the men during repatriation.27 The tone of the leaflet is clear from this extract: Your story, if published in the more sensational press, would cause much unnecessary unhappiness to relatives and friends. If you had not been lucky enough to have survived and had died an unpleasant death at the hands of the Japanese, you would not have wished your family and friends to have been harrowed by lurid details of your death.28

Readjustment was difficult for many FEPOWs, and the causes remain complex and contentious. The humiliation of defeat, a sense of being let down by the British high command, brutalization in the camps, or survivor guilt have all been proposed.29 Arguably, however, the military injunction to stay silent,

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combined with low CRU take-up, conspired to ensure that too few ex-FEPOWs were able to share their traumatic memories or to receive sensitive and timely psychological support during the immediate post-war years.30 While the men were in the Far East significant social and cultural changes had occurred in Britain and these added to the disorientation they felt on their return. Women had taken on greater responsibilities in wartime Britain, which some returnees felt to be a threat to their self esteem.31 The years spent in captivity encouraged the men to entertain ‘highly coloured fantasies of his return home and of his reception’.32 Singly or together, these factors sometimes provoked serious marital disharmony and social dislocation. Worries over infidelity were not uncommon, intensified by post-war anxieties over impotence due to the effects of incarceration and malnutrition.33 Couples had often decided to marry in the early years of the war, as was the case with my parents. The outbreak of war, his decision to enlist, and their marriage, all took place in a little over three weeks. For the first two years of their marriage contact between my parents was only sporadic due to his training as an anti-aircraft gunner, and deployment in the home counties. With most FEPOWs not attending the civil resettlement programmes, wives and families were left with the task of managing their loved one’s reintegration into a society much changed by war,34 one which also saw serious shortages of clothes, food, consumer items and even teachers.35 In August 1945, page six of the ‘Far East’ edition of the Prisoner of War magazine included a full page article on ‘Planning their food – some useful hints on diet for repatriates’ accompanied by a photograph of ‘natives working in paddy fields’, and sound nutritional advice couched in homespun philosophy. The final paragraph emphasized the need to get things back to normal as quickly as possible: ‘Men and women who have unfortunately been in Japanese hands will, we may well hope, quickly return to their normal ways of living; and the period of imprisonment recede as a nightmare that has passed.’36 But the nightmare was reluctant to loosen its grip. The men had lost threeand-a-half crucial years from their lives, and the process of obtaining or restarting work was often far from straightforward. Women were expected to abandon their newfound freedoms and work roles, and settle for being full-time wives and mothers. For this and other reasons, home life could be strained and behaviour extreme, as this account shows: Having been brought up by her [that is, her mother, who had been working as a teacher] for six years I found it impossible to accept this ‘interloper’ as boss.

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… My mother just said quite lightly, ‘You’re late, Ted’; my father without a word kicked over the table, breaking all the crockery which was difficult to get, and I went over to him and kicked him on the leg and told him how much I hated him. My mother was kneeling on the floor picking up the broken crockery and crying. This pattern of events went on for many years.37

Returning to civilian life Repressed memories, suppressed emotions and distorted patterns of behaviour were part of the ‘unrecognized baggage’ that the men brought home with them.38 The trauma of captivity had wrought deep-seated personality changes in many of the men, and presented their children with considerable challenges. Children born in the 1940s and 1950s were raised by parents whose memories of the war were still fresh, and the effects of warfare crudely visible in the bombed-out areas of towns and cities.39 James described how the legacy of the war became normalized: ‘We used to go and play in bomb sites. I didn’t associate the word bomb site with bombs. It was just a flat place. Where a building had been.’40 By the 1950s, war and militarism had become inescapable parts of family life. As Roland Quinault points out: ‘Most grandfathers had served in the First World War, most fathers in the Second, and most young men were currently called up for two years of National Service.’41 By the time the POWs began returning home during the autumn of 1945, the country had already celebrated VE (Victory in Europe) day (8 May) and VJ Day (15 August). Once back in Britain, the men were tasked with finding a role within patterns of family relationships that had themselves been subjected to protracted stresses and strains. Many were returning to parents, wives and girlfriends (and sometimes children too) they had not seen for three-and-a-half years or more, and barely heard from. They needed to regain the composure necessary to re-embrace the ebb and flow of civilian life within a society that, as Claire Langhamer notes, was going through a period of ‘significant discursive change and emotional instability’.42 Through these early years, the fathers’ emotions were often kept under wraps, suppressed and repressed in the drive to establish new lives and livelihoods,43 and home became the space where psychic conflicts were played out. Participants in my research were the involuntary witnesses to these struggles. Writing about military masculinities, Atherton sums up the challenge facing ex-military men:

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Captive Fathers, Captive Children When leaving the military men undergo a process of redomestication, not only back into society, but on a much more personal level. They are returning to a space that … has been romanticised as existing ‘outside of ’ and ‘apart from’ the regimented, military mode of life. And yet, it is a space that must now contain within it a body that has been domesticated by the military. It is a space that has been conceived of as the natural domain of the family. And yet, it is a space that these men must negotiate everyday if they are to maintain this family ideal.44

My interviews regularly revealed memories of sharply demarcated, gendered domestic roles and control over resources. Wives were expected to take responsibility for the preparation of meals and for providing direct childcare, while the men ‘put food on the table’. These patterns proved quite resilient, necessitating change only when life events, such as the wife’s illness, intervened. One of my most abiding and acutely uncomfortable memories is that of my father’s control over the ‘housekeeping money’, reinforced in the Friday ritual of counting out pound notes, one by one, into my mother’s hand. Despite the persistence of gendered divisions of domestic labour, there was evidence of fathers gradually becoming more involved with family life in this period, a state of affairs that Laura King describes as a shift towards ‘family-oriented masculinity’.45 The degree to which men became ‘domesticated’ after the war remained contentious, however, with others arguing that the years spent in combat or incarceration created a persistent ‘flight from commitment’ on the back of the ‘all-male camaraderie of service life’.46 The constraints of family life led some men to see home ‘as a prison and … a constant reminder of the physical and mental scars received while in action or in service’.47 Perhaps this also lay behind the behaviours of those ex-FEPOWs who vented their problems through excessive alcohol consumption, violent behaviour or emotional detachment. Many of the children felt a sense of ‘absence’ or ‘emotional distance’ in the presence of their fathers, but we need to interpret these observations against the background of prevailing social codes, established between the wars, in which both men and women were expected to ‘exercise restraint, reason and rationality in their emotional and affective relationships’.48 Whether the emotional ‘absence’ or ‘distance’ as remembered by participants was produced by the trauma of the father’s captivity, or was influenced predominantly by ‘the emotional restraint and resilience that were judged to have underpinned victory’,49 can only be evaluated fairly through careful examination of individual cases. Participants did often attribute their fathers’ psychological remoteness to their incarceration, but generally did so only after considering what they knew of his background and pre-war personality.

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Children need security to flourish. Roger Kennedy adopted the notion of the ‘psychic home’ that consists of ‘identifications with family members’ which enable the parents to provide continuity and construct a supportive base for the children to ‘eventually leave, and ultimately to build up their own home’.50 Forces that undermine identifications, continuity and support also disrupt a child’s capacity to create their own identity, to ‘feel at home’ with themselves. For the children of ex-FEPOWs, tensions between intimacy and withdrawal could leave them with a fragile and unsettled sense of home. Although Isla had a warm relationship with her father, his behaviour regularly threatened his children’s sense of security and stability. She recalled how he would go out for long walks after his ‘temper tantrums’. Standing next to her youngest sister, gazing out of the window, she would think ‘what if we never see him again’.51 In more dramatic vein, Selena illustrated how the everyday experiences of a child could blend images of bodily trauma with disturbing resonances of war, and complicate the processes of identification. It was only with an adult perspective that she could start to contextualize her memories. She began her testimony with a vivid memory that was both poignant and uncanny: My earliest memories of Dad are coming into the kitchen and finding him bleeding into the sink. He had strange lumps on his elbow that were creepy when I was little. Just a few years ago they got bigger and burst and puss and shrapnel came out! The bleeding thing was because sometimes the use of his hand would just stop – suddenly – and he would drop what ever he was holding. All our cups had the handles glued back on with araldite. Araldite played a major role in my early life. He often cut his hands during these episodes and would stand at the sink trying to stem the flow.52

Images do not come much more commonplace than the kitchen sink. These scenes from childhood made a profound impression on Selena, and her memories of those moments pursued her into adulthood. As the example suggests, everyday domestic life is a strangely powerful setting, capable of normalizing behaviours that, in any other context, would be described as bizarre or even pathological. Such behaviours were ‘taken for granted’ in some families, and only hindsight, stretching back over many decades, allowed them to be construed differently. Louise explained it this way: ‘they’re just mum and dad, aren’t they? Just get on with it. ’Cos when you’re a kid, it just is what it is, isn’t it? … If you’re brought up in a family that doesn’t talk about anything, you don’t expect to talk about anything.’53 In Carolyn Steedman’s words, ‘In childhood, only the surroundings show, and nothing is explained … the landscape and the picture it presents have to remain a background, taking on meaning later, from different circumstances’.54

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Beyond the home, a father’s trauma often went unnoticed. To the outside world, these men were mainly unexceptional, hardworking citizens who paid their way. The family, though, witnessed the legacy of the trauma close-up. If the father’s behaviour spiralled out of control, families might close ranks to contain the problems inside the home. These strategies repelled scrutiny by outside agencies, attention that might otherwise have brought shame on the family. In this way they protected themselves ‘against forms of governance from outside’.55 Deirdre’s father was a violent man, whose oppressive behaviour had become normalized in the family: The next door neighbour actually came round and spoke to my mother and said, you know, I think your husband needs to be reported, he said. … And she pleaded, begged with him and said, it wasn’t his fault. He’d spent three and a half years in a prison camp, and bla-bla-bla. She related that to me afterwards, you know, when I was older.56

The threat of shame drove Deirdre’s mother to protect her husband from external intervention, and perhaps punishment. Thus, the mother held the couple together, and also reduced the chances of later retribution at his hands. By attributing her husband’s behaviour to FEPOW captivity, she rationalized it to her own psychic and physical ‘advantage’ while staving off interference from strangers. Another participant, Lorna, said that her mother believed her husband – also a violent man – would be ‘repaired by family life, and could be loved into “mental health”.’57 The children, of course, were rarely of an age to comprehend such nuanced psychosocial aspirations.

Memories of childhood The legacies of captivity affected family life in numerous unpredictable ways. The physical health of the father was a major factor, and influenced the everyday lives of the children through the direct and indirect impact of symptoms, treatments or behavioural limitations. The impact of nutritional deficiencies proved more intractable than anticipated,58 and certain tropical illnesses like strongyloidiasis persisted for decades.

‘It was just ill-health all the time’ Derek described how his father’s ill-health affected the family’s life in ways that were low-key, yet pervasive and cumulative. Derek had a pronounced stammer

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and was a little diffident at the start of our conversation, but still very keen to tell his story. We sat by the window in his living room, overlooked by a bookcase that held photos of his father and mother, more distant family members, together with VHS videos and DVDs on war history. He described his childhood memories of his father: As I say, he didn’t speak a … like a lot of prisoners of war, he, he never spoke about, about … the c-c-c- conditions out there. … m- me father used to go into erm … tropical diseases erm … ward every year to … for a check-up. And that used … I can remember as a young child m-m-m-mum and me elder brother, we used to troop down there, on a Sunday. And we would visit him in … in erm … this hospital there.59

Derek’s rapid switch from a FEPOW trope (‘he never spoke’) to the impact of illness on family life suggested an overriding need to share this aspect of his early life. At the beginning of the interview, he had summarized his father’s wartime activities with little sign of any stammer, which implied he had prepared for my visit, or that he had told the same story many times, or perhaps both.60 Derek’s father had suffered a great deal in his own early years. During the Depression, at the age of five, he was sent to an orphanage after his mother died. He joined the Territorial Army at seventeen, and in July 1941 found himself in Singapore. As a POW he went from Changi to the Thai–Burma Railway. Derek said his dad’s survival could be put down to three things: his orphanage upbringing; having no mum; and his Christian beliefs. And he was ‘a small bloke. He used to say, a bowl of rice would keep me going, but it wouldn’t keep a big bloke going’.61 Despite these ‘advantages’, illness interrupted his repatriation. On arrival at Waterloo train station, he was felled by an attack of malaria and taken straight to hospital by ambulance. Like many returning FEPOWs, he bore recurrences over many years. One of Derek’s childhood memories stood out from all the others, and must have been a disorienting experience for a young boy: I can always remember … w-w-w- when I was a kid … he came out the bathroom … well y’know he’d have a wash and shave, and he had these massive red slashes on his back, like red wheals all right across his shoulders. I said to my mum, what are these things on dad’s back? And she said oh, it’s something he picked up in the war. And, it was just left at that.62

Derek’s recollection was a dramatic and poignant juxtaposition of domestic routine (a ‘wash and shave’) with tropical exotica (‘red wheals’). His father was a victim of the parasitic worm strongyloides stercoralis that was (and still is) widespread in Thailand. The red wheals that made such an impression on Derek

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were the signs of ‘creeping eruption’.63 This disease was commonly misdiagnosed in Britain, and greater understanding of the problem had to wait until the 1970s. As many as fifty years could pass before a diagnosis was made. In a near literal sense, therefore, Derek’s father carried the war within him, as a living presence, an unbroken link between past and present. By witnessing his father’s symptoms on a daily basis, Derek was an intimate party to a very particular form of recursive, pernicious and embodied, intergenerational transmission of trauma. Derek’s father later developed Type 1 diabetes, which led to regular insulin reactions and crises at home. In the mid 1960s, he was diagnosed with tuberculosis (TB) in both lungs, as a result of which he spent over a year in a TB sanatorium.64 Every Sunday, the family would take the coach to go and visit him. Eventually he went on half pay and the family had difficulties making their mortgage repayments. Deteriorating health and trips to hospital increasingly dictated the pattern of family life. After taking ill-health retirement, a serious heart attack contributed further to his demise, and he died in 1986 at the age of sixty-seven. Because of his father’s chronic ill-health Derek was never able to form the kind of father–son relationship enjoyed by many of his school friends. ‘As a child, I can’t really say that he interacted with us much, really. We didn’t kind of go out, play football or anything like that.’65 Despite these constraints, Derek maintained a warm relationship with both parents throughout their lives. He identified strongly with his father’s resentment over the British government’s treatment of the ex-FEPOWs and their widows, and was particularly aggrieved about the war pension his father was awarded. Derek’s story shows how a father’s ill-health could fundamentally reshape the day-to-day lives of his children. Towards the end of our interview, Derek reflected on the connections he felt between his father’s ill-health and his childhood: it was just me dad being sick all the time, you know. I just can’t really remember him being … relatively well. I mean at school … well I said, me dad’s in hospital. Oh, what’s a matter with him? Oh, he’s having tropical diseases. He’s there for a week, you know. And they’d go … (laughs) … you know.66

‘Somebody coming into your life that you’ve never seen before’ Children born before or during the war were quick to notice changes in disciplinary regimes after the father’s return. Angie was born in 1941 and recalled life during the air raids when she used to sleep in the kitchen under a Table Morrison Indoor Shelter that doubled as a dining table.67 Life was fun as a

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small child – ‘a house full of jolly young people … I became very spoiled’.68 Then, in 1945, her father made his dramatic entrance: I have a memory of standing at the edge of the living room in tears because a strange man in uniform had just spanked me. I also remember my mother’s face, sort of remorseful but siding with him. It was probably the first time I had ever been disciplined.69

Establishing a new relationship with a man who was both her father and a ‘stranger’ was always going to be difficult, and ‘cut right across established routines and disrupted intimate relationships’.70 The change was abrupt, despite the attempts of most mothers to keep the presence of the father alive within the home, and in the minds of their children, by marking birthdays, displaying photographs and writing letters.71 Despite the family’s best efforts, maintaining or establishing any semblance of a secure attachment with the father was bound to be a challenge to both parties. Graham, the oldest of my participants, was born in 1938 and was an only child. As he put it, ‘My mother was ultra-protective of me. And consequent to that, I am rather soft … and quite liable to be frightened.’72 In the early part of the war, his mother strove as best she could to maintain a psychological presence for Graham’s father in the home. He was required to kiss a photo of his father every night before bed, but this ritual gradually subsided when she discovered he was a prisoner of war. Graham sensed that things had changed. In his father’s absence, he identified strongly with his maternal grandfather who was a blacksmith. He described their relationship in richly sensual terms: ‘I used to spend a lot of time apparently standing on the forge door watching him. I can remember the smell of his leather apron … I always used to like sitting on his lap when he was in the house … He told me how to plant radishes.’73 Through the post-war years, Graham never managed to establish a similarly intimate or secure attachment with his father – ‘I mean this is somebody coming completely into your life that you’ve never seen before. …. I don’t think I was frightened of him, only insofar as you’re always frightened of your dad, to a certain extent.’74 Throughout the interview Graham emphasized how his adult personality had been forged by his mother and grandfather, not his father. The father’s attitude to discipline featured prominently in interviews, usually manifesting as a demand for unquestioning compliance. However, this should be seen against what Kynaston refers to as the ‘harsh or authoritarian’ background to family life in those times,75 and the specific habits inculcated during camp life. In Robert’s case, he was expected to address his father as ‘sir’ until he was

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twelve. His father made strong and explicit links between discipline and survival, emphasizing how a strict approach to hygiene practice in the camps reduced food contamination and diseases like cholera and dysentery: He did say on one or two occasions that those with the best discipline and the spirit would get through. If you followed orders and you kept that kind of military thing going it was better for you than if you said, fuck, it doesn’t matter.76

‘We never had roast pork’ During captivity, many peacetime desires, such as the sex drive, were overwhelmed by fantasies of food, which may explain why attitudes to food held such a prominent place in the minds of the veterans, and why food-related behaviour appeared repeatedly in the children’s testimonies.77 Two food tropes dominate the FEPOW narrative: an aversion to rice; and intolerance of waste. Because the Asian diet depended so heavily on rice, a belief took hold that once home FEPOWs would be reluctant to include it in their diet. What is sometimes overlooked is that regular service personnel stationed in Asia before the war were accustomed to eating rice-based meals, and they usually adjusted better to the POW diet, and so had fewer problems with eating rice after their return home. Responses could be more idiosyncratic, however. Stella’s father wouldn’t have savoury rice in the house, but did eat rice pudding. And Joanna’s father wouldn’t have white rice but would eat brown ‘because it had goodness in it. He was obsessed with goodness and vitamins.’78 Joanna recalled how food could trigger painful memories: We couldn’t ever have pork. He couldn’t have pork being cooked in the house because it was the smell of the burning bodies. So, we never had roast pork.79

Years of chronic malnutrition and debilitating illnesses caused many men to lose interest in food altogether as a pleasure. Isla’s father never ate large meals, ‘he just ate enough to survive. He was a very fussy eater, and he couldn’t eat a lot. His digestive system had obviously been affected.’80 Robert’s father too ‘had never been a great eater. If you took him out to a restaurant for a nice meal, … not interested. Not interested in the food. To him it was fuel.’81 Robert recalled a conversation towards the end of his father’s life, when he was being tube-fed following surgery. When they put this thing in his stomach, this is marvelous, he said. They said, you can’t stay on that forever. You’ve got to get this thing going [the swallowing reflex]. He said, no, don’t worry about that. Just leave it in, it’s fine.

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You know, I remember that conversation. It was odd because he couldn’t stay like that and he was going to die.82

‘His hands would be round my mother’s neck’ Recurring nightmares were very common in the first few years after repatriation, and they featured heavily in the children’s memories.83 Fathers sometimes ‘acted out’ nightmares to the great distress of the family. Isla described how her father would ‘wake up and his hands would be round my mother’s neck ‘cos he’d think she was a Japanese guard, so that was terrible.’84 The intersubjective routes through memories could be tortuous. Occasionally participants described ‘memories’ of nightmares as if they themselves had witnessed them when, instead, they were stories related by their mothers. Helped by gentle prompting on my part, Louise finally managed to secure a definitive status for her ‘memory’. She began with an emotional response (‘it just used to frighten me a bit’), followed by what came across as a first-hand account (‘he’d just start shouting in the night’).85 At that point she began to question herself (‘I was more sort of told about them’), then moved to a position of greater certainty (‘It was what I was told’).86 By initially claiming the memory of her father’s nightmares as her own suggests that she was unconsciously tapping into a recollection already well embedded in a network of family associations. Yet step-by-step, she was able to extricate herself from what was in fact a postmemory. These shifts in Louise’s account make us aware of how family stories are created, drawn upon and then reproduced or modified through subsequent generations. In the early post-war years, the men often seemed to need periods ‘away’ from the family, to absent themselves physically, emotionally or both. Paradoxically, by removing themselves in this way, their ‘presence’ became even more powerful in the minds of their children. Participants who described situations such as these had been unable to discuss them directly with their fathers: more often it was the mother, if anyone, who proffered an explanation. While most men managed to cope with the effects of captivity without incurring or inflicting noticeable psychological damage, others were less fortunate.

‘It was one of those things’ In Brenda’s family, certain topics of conversation were off limits. My interview with her was a hesitant affair during which she was politely guarded, and

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a little anxious. She responded to my open-ended questions with brief responses only, and I found myself needing to shape the interview more than usual. Gradually, however, she began to reveal more about her father’s behaviour: He just went off on some days, he’d go off on his own in the front room and he’d sit for hours, pondering. I don’t know what was wrong … If he had some days off, he’d just sit in the front room. And he wouldn’t come and join us or anything. And I think he was probably relating back to what happened in the war. I mean, I never knew if he suffered. He obviously did suffer because mum said when he came back he wasn’t the same person she married. But, of course, in those days when you marry someone, you stay with them, don’t you?87

I asked her how long these episodes lasted: Two or three days, maybe. She cooked him his dinners, she took them into him, and he wouldn’t eat them. And when she went to bed, he’d come out. He’d come out into the kitchen and make himself a jam sandwich. She knew that ’cos he didn’t clear up after himself (laughs) … I probably shouldn’t be telling you this, but still … but never mind. It was one of those things.88

While analysing my interview with Brenda, I pondered on why I was feeling uncomfortable. I felt frustrated when she lapsed into silences or slipped into familiar FEPOW scripts. It seemed to me that both of us had ‘gone missing’ at times during the interview. As I transcribed the recording, I gradually became aware of associations with how my father had used our ‘front room’. As an amateur musician with a passion for brass bands and popular classical music, he occupied the front room as his place of escape. He would spend whole evenings there playing records, away from me and my mother. The music that shuddered daily through the wall between his ‘front’ and our ‘living’ room was not simply his method of dealing with a traumatic legacy, but his means of communicating with me and my mother. The dividing wall was a way of creating an interpersonal barrier, but he made sure it didn’t block all communications. The music emanating from the front room became the soundtrack to my childhood. My father’s ‘escape’ was brash and loud; Brenda’s father pursued a quieter form of distancing, but both represented absence, both physical and psychic. How could these experiences not have affected us both in profound ways? Eventually, I came to the tentative conclusion that, during the interview itself, she was conveying to me how she had felt when her father withdrew to ‘the front room’; the process of transference and countertransference appeared to have released a logjam in my understanding.

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The past bursts into the present In a few families, war trauma was transmitted explicitly, through brutal and oppressive behaviour, with violence and abuse flaring and inflicting fresh traumas on the children. The impact of repeated episodes of trauma has been well-documented over several decades, and labelled ‘complex’, ‘sequential’ or ‘cumulative’ trauma.89 Although the existing FEPOW literature occasionally exposes violently abusive behaviour by the father,90 for the most part those deeply corrosive memories stay trapped in the psyches of the affected individuals and their close relatives. Lorna shared her story by email, and I have resisted the temptation to edit or correct the extracts in any way. The unedited text offers an insight into how trauma can crack narrative coherence and rupture a coherent sense of self.91 Her writing conveys a tone and sensibility that hovers on the margins of the unconscious and the conscious, and between present subjectivity and the social catastrophes that scarred her family history, namely the Depression and the Second World War. The war flowed freely through the interstices of her account, within which she claimed clear links between the memories of her childhood experiences and her father’s time on the Thai–Burma Railway. In the following extract she turned her attention to food, but her account ranged (and raged)92 across multifaceted psychosocial and historical landscapes: My father could not stand food wasted in any way. My cousins begged not to come to our house as he was known as uncle … with the strap that went around corners. They were frighten of him and his gruffness sarcasm and threats of violence His insistence to eat all vegetables ? preventing ‘vitaminosis’ Instilled by Dr Bruce Hunt eating greens was critical to future one survival. One of my cousins was begging my mother to intervene so he did not have to eat greens … beans. She was not game enough to challenge Dad even though she felt for the child. Dad had starved in the depression as his father struggled to keep his business afloat and provide for a large family. Meal times were never enjoyable Dad would force food down my throat. I did not like fat in the mutton stews. I regurgitated it up and i would be made to to re-eat it I would have to stay at the table till eaten !!!!! He too had been force to eat rotten meat to stay alive a few times.93

Lorna’s distress was etched into the text as she described her young self regularly undermined and punished by her father. Repeated switches in focus force the reader into disorientating changes of temporality and spatiality. Associations in Lorna’s writing (and thinking?) were loosened, and psychic boundaries made

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more porous, thus increasing the proximity and intensity between her and her father’s experiences, and between her and the reader.94 Joanna’s father had had a ‘long war’, firstly embroiled in the retreat from Dunkirk in 1940, then dispatched to the Far East and the Thai–Burma Railway. He rose to the rank of Captain, and after the war became a successful businessman. Very soon after repatriation, he was transferred to a Civil Resettlement Unit where he stayed for six weeks. Later he went to university to train as a teacher, but this ambition was thwarted after losing his temper with a pupil while on teaching placement. Ten years or so after the war, his behaviour became increasingly volatile: He would just lose his temper with us. … you just sort of waited to be, you know, you’d be hit. I got hit m … more … more than my brother. Mostly because I was defending my mother. He didn’t hit my mother but he would be vile to her, and upset her. I think the last time he hit me I was … s-s-seven … teen. … Yeah. … And so because I was always the one defending my mother, he would lash out at me.95

Her slight stutter and hesitation ( … s-s-seven … teen) revealed her discomfort and embarrassment in openly disclosing that she was still being hit by her father at the age of seventeen. Joanna normalized the dynamics of her family life as best she could and, rather than blaming her father, blamed herself.96 By rationalizing her circumstances in this way, she maintained a semblance of control over events, and also clung to a degree of attachment to her father. But as she discovered, this psychic position was untenable in the longer term. For most participants, the effects of transmitted trauma were felt most acutely in childhood. But Joanna found herself drawn into a physical ‘re-living’ of her father’s traumas when she was in her thirties, and her father in his seventies. Her mother was suffering from terminal cancer, and very close to death: At about three thirty in the morning, she sat bolt upright in bed, eyes open. Very distressed. I was terrified. Never seen anybody dying before, let alone my own mother. So, I said to my father, I think mummy is in distress. I don’t know what to do. Eventually, he came in and he just said right, he said, I’m going to end this for her now, Joanna. You wouldn’t have an animal treated like this. And so he held the button down and morphine just went rushing in.97 And then he went out, and said, I’m going to make a cup of tea. He said, go and get a mirror, and hold it in front of her face Joanna, you’ll soon tell when she stops breathing. I was left in there with her. I was holding her hand and crying, and beside myself, but … He did that, he went and made a cup of tea! It was extraordinary! … And then he called the undertakers. And I just

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remember hearing them zip the body bag. I couldn’t hear a zip for years after that … because that was the zipping my mother up.98

At seven in the morning, he gave Joanna her ‘instructions’. He demanded that everything belonging to her mother be removed from the house and burned: He lit a bonfire. He burnt the mattress, he burnt her wigs, he burnt letters, love letters between them, which she’d kept years and years. … He burnt photos. … I was then having tugs-of-war at the bonfire with photos and things and trying to get things off him, putting them in the boot of my car.99

Afterwards, Joanna reflected on what had happened, and concluded that her father – under stress and, by that time, suffering from mild dementia – had been re-enacting behaviours learned in the camps: ‘because when they had cholera, they had to burn their bodies. So, the first thing they would do would be light a bonfire.’100 Under considerable duress, Joanna had been a reluctant participant in a ‘traumatic revival’ derived from the buried memories of her father’s cumulative trauma; trauma that he had been unable to properly symbolize in earlier years. Davoine and Gaudillière describe the kind of situation Joanna experienced as an event that: opens a breach in the continuity of their daily life, one in which incongruous geographies break through. This event should always be considered a traumatic revival, that is, an autonomous process without memory.101

Joanna’s description of her father’s behaviour after her mother’s death suggests such a ‘breach’. His personal past burst into their shared present, and for a while his dominant psychic ‘geographies’ were those of the POW camp and the horrors of the Thai–Burma Railway. Her mother’s death and her father’s behaviour at that time were so overwhelming that Joanna was only partly able to exploit what Laub refers to as the ‘customary defences against traumatic experiences … dissociation, derealization, depersonalization’.102 In their temporary absence, her father’s behaviour dragged her into his psychic orbit: controlling her actions, once again treating her as a frightened child. Joanna’s story illustrates the consequences of cumulative painful experiences, and also the impossibility of ever completely disentangling their relative impact. The struggle to cope ‘invades and erodes the personality. … the victim of chronic trauma may feel herself to be changed irrevocably, or she may lose the sense that she has any self at all.’103 In Joanna’s case, over many decades and through a series of events and memory practices (touched on in later chapters), she was gradually able to recontextualize this event, enabling her to live alongside her memories.

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Intergenerational transmission of trauma: unravelling a mystery Tightly guarded family secrets, awkward pauses in communication, missing photographs, hidden letters, unexplained tears at the mention of a city far away, phobically avoided television shows, and telling slips of tongue, together constitute the invisible pathway through which traumatic experiences of one generation are passed on to the next.104

As this quotation from Salman Akhtar suggests, everyday expressions of intergenerational transmission are legion. A focus on everyday experience represents one strand of research into the topic. Another route is through biographical or psychoanalytic approaches that focus on individual life histories or unconscious processes to explore how repressed emotions are unconsciously transferred between the survivor and his children. A further prominent strand is what we might call the medical-quantitative, a positivist perspective in which medically-oriented researchers look for correlations between symptoms of posttraumatic stress disorder (PTSD) in fathers and their children. Historically, much research into intergenerational transmission has been spurred on by the attempt to confront and comprehend the consequences of the Holocaust. By comparison, the impact of prisoner of war trauma on the second generation has been relatively neglected, with most of the extant studies being based on the experiences of American and Israeli, rather than British, families. What has not been undertaken to date is research that uses a life-course perspective to reveal the psychosocial connections between childhood experiences and adult memory practices. In the absence of any straightforward and tidy research lineage, I shall draw attention to those authors whose work I have found particularly useful. After conducting a review of the literature, Rachel Dekel and Hadass Goldblatt were confident enough to conclude that ‘clinical observations and empirical research have shown that the consequences of traumatic events are not limited to the persons immediately exposed to the event’.105 Beyond that point, however, they found generalizations problematic. For the most part, they found that what passed between fathers and children fell into two clusters: ‘mental distress’; and ‘family functioning’.106 Distress encompassed ‘PTSD, anxiety, depression, or behaviour problems’, and family functioning was adversely affected by fathers who were ‘controlling, overprotective and demanding’ or who displayed ‘emotional numbing, detachment, and avoidance’ behaviours.107

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An earlier study by Natan Kellermann proposed a set of ‘universal’ features shared by children most at risk of unconsciously absorbing the trauma of the parent.108 These children were more likely to be born early after the parents’ trauma, were first born or only children, had parents who had undergone ‘extraordinary mental suffering’, and were part of a family in which relations were characterized by enmeshment109 or where the trauma was spoken about too little or too much.110 Each of these factors, in various combinations and degrees, were observable in the lives of my research participants. In his 1995 book Fear and Hope, Daniel Bar-On examines the stories of five Jewish families. He observes that the children of Holocaust survivors have particular difficulty with establishing emotional independence from their parents, and are inclined to struggle with anger. He also proposes a connection between intergenerational transmission of trauma and attachment theory.111 The originator of attachment theory, John Bowlby, suggested that attachment is an autonomous drive for protection and safety that is present across both human and animal worlds. The child seeks a ‘secure base’ from which to explore the world, in the knowledge that, should danger arise, the attachment figure is still there to offer protection.112 As a result of its early attachment experiences, the child creates an ‘internal working model’ of itself and others through which, if all goes well, they can develop trust, grow in confidence and achieve a secure sense of self. If all does not go well, and a secure base is not established, the internal working model will be shaped by insecurity and traumatic experiences; as a result, the child will internalize a sense of danger and have problems coping. The way in which attachment patterns unfold during childhood is critical because, once established, they remain broadly stable between infancy and adulthood, and may go on to influence the attachment behaviours of subsequent generations.113 The experience of captivity itself could trigger ‘attachment injury’ in the father, which might then be recreated in the child.114 If this occurred, children were then faced with an impossible dilemma: the father – a key attachment figure – was now ‘both a source of fear as well as the only potential haven of safety’.115 Against that background, the child was left with a disorganized and insecure attachment strategy that could disrupt later relationships. Bar-On identified four specific processes affecting Holocaust survivors that were associated with transmission. These were emigration, immigration, ‘specific family structures and process’ and ‘personal processes’.116 While not arguing for equivalence or close parallels, I suggest there are certain resonances with the lives of the FEPOWs, certainly at the individual experiential level of young men in their late teens or twenties. ‘Emigration’ is reflected in the mass of troops that

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departed Britain in 1941 thereby creating a ‘rapid severance’ from their families.117 We can also detect the challenges of ‘immigration’, firstly in the struggle to adapt to an alien Asian culture under hostile circumstances, and secondly in the men’s return to a ‘new’ post-war Britain with its many novel demands. Changes to ‘family structures and processes’ are apparent in the dismantling of the hopes and expectations of families, their own internal ‘timetables’ forever disrupted. Finally, ‘personal processes’ are evident in how the men were fundamentally changed in their post-war personalities and behaviours. My aim in proposing these tentative comparisons is to carve out greater conceptual space for a more nuanced appreciation of what individual British servicemen went through in the Far East, and the painful ramifications for their families. This ‘historical event’, as Bar-On describes the Holocaust, ‘flooded the frame of the personal life story far beyond its regular family-bounded context’, and has become an unconscious organizing principle for many family members.118 In the case of the Holocaust this has had global reach. For the families of Far East prisoners of war, the reach has been more restricted, but arguably no less painful. In 1998, Michelle Ancharoff and her colleagues came up with an unusually clear organizing framework with which to think about how trauma could be transmitted. This comprises four overlapping categories: silence; overdisclosure; identification; and re-enactment.119 Silence works in a number of ways. Many of the children commented on their fathers’ reluctance to speak about their memories of captivity, and family members often chose to avoid traumatic topics that might upset the parent. ‘Families collude to maintain these silences to protect themselves and the survivor from post-trauma reactions.’120 Eventually, however, the silence becomes a barrier to spontaneous communication in the family by marking out ‘no go’ areas. It was this reciprocal ‘silence’ between father and child that participants commented upon. Many children told me how their fathers only recounted amusing stories of their time in the camps, thus creating a barricade around the traumatic memories. One consequence of this ‘under disclosure’ was that children filled the gaps in the fathers’ stories through fantasizing or by drawing on the POW stories circulating in popular culture. A longer term, and more constructive reaction, was the creation in adulthood of an intense curiosity about the father’s past, and I return to this in Chapter 6. In fewer cases, overdisclosure was the problem, and became a powerful and pervasive mechanism of transmission. A few fathers spoke about their painful experiences in unrestrained and realistic detail. Paradoxically, this could propagate a ‘conspiracy of silence’ because the children were too young to absorb what they were being told, while being obliged to take on the burden

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of transmission. Silence and overdisclosure could interact, giving rise to tension between ‘silence and noise in the lives of sons and daughters’.121 The children repressed memories of the father’s traumatic overdisclosure, so that only the ‘silence’ was remembered to screen otherwise distressing raw experiences. My personal experience suggests that the disclosure of ‘raw detail’ per se is only one factor in these situations. Also significant is the sheer volume and regularity of disclosure, especially in a home context of fragmented and heated family interactions, that cause the child to ‘split off ’ these distressing aspects of everyday life. Like silence, overdisclosure fails to provide information in a manner that the child can process safely. ‘Often the detail is overwhelming and the child becomes terrified rather than knowledgeable.’122 Identification, the third mechanism, results from regular exposure to the father’s behaviour. In what is a perfectly normal process in personality development, children imitate aspects of their parent’s behaviours. Over time, some aspects of the father’s behaviour may become embedded, unconsciously, within the child’s own evolving personality.123 Paradoxically, if the child is exposed to extreme behaviours from the father – for example, as a result of intense overdisclosure, or by being physically punished – then the very capacity to ‘feel’ may be reduced (‘psychic numbing’) and the process of identification might itself be interrupted.124 A number of my research participants spoke of how they began to identify with their fathers only much later in life, often well after his death. The resistance to identification could sometimes be conscious. Charles came close to tears at several points during our interview, and indeed tears did break through when speaking of his late wife. After a short pause, and in a voice fraught with emotion, he said ‘I have spent most of my life trying not to be like my father.’125 This statement felt a little out of context at the time but, on reflection, its appearance crystallized the emotions underlying much of his other testimony. The final mechanism of transmission is re-enactment: ‘essentially, what is created is an isomorph of the survivor’s experience in another person, a relationship that generates a pattern or structure parallel to the survivor’s trauma experience’, but usually less intense.126 Earlier in this chapter, we saw how Joanna was embroiled in such a scene at the time of her mother’s death. In some cases, captivity led to feelings of distrust and hypervigilance, dysfunctional emotions and patterns of behaviour that could then be transmitted to the child. Re-enactment could also make an appearance in mundane family settings. James had a troubled relationship with his father throughout childhood. His father used to take the family to the seaside for a very particular activity.

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Captive Fathers, Captive Children He used to make the kids wear those Japanese underwear things, that you’re supposed to roll up the crack in your backside [the Japanese loincloth or fundoshi]. And he thought that was a sensible thing to wear, so he made the kids wear them.127

Dressed in this way, James’ father would make them play rugby on the beach, but only after he had treated the ball with sticky dubbin wax. The ball was as hard as rock, and the sand stuck to the dubbin ‘so it was like having this rocket of sandpaper hurled at you … horrible thing to do’.128 James described how his father had an ambivalent relationship with the Japanese in the post-war years. He couldn’t forgive them, but he made his children wear the fundoshi, and remained captivated by their culture. In his turn, James had also become fascinated by Japanese films and, at the time I met him, he was learning aikido.129 Paradoxically, after three years of harsh captivity in Japan, James’ father had identified with certain aspects of Japanese culture. We might consider this an unconscious means of defence, perhaps initially as a retaliatory means of ‘taking from’ the aggressor.130 Despite their traumatic origins, James’ father integrated these cultural aspects into his own identity before transmitting this ‘pattern or structure’ to his son.131 Salman Akhtar’s words at the start of this section suggest that trauma can be transmitted without fanfare, through subtly embodied processes. In her influential paper ‘Toward an ethnography of silence’, anthropologist Carol Kidron describes examples of tacit intergenerational transmission through everyday experiences, and proposes that traces of trauma form an ‘experiential matrix’132 comprising ‘the visceral body’,133 artefacts and practices. One of her interviewees, Eve, at first denied any knowledge of her parents’ Holocaust past.134 Then, after a long silence, she commented ‘But you know the Holocaust was present in my home’, and went on to describe how she had to put her head under the pillow to block out the sound of her mother’s nightmares.135 In my interviews with children of former FEPOWs, I discovered similar examples of how trauma made its way into the routines of everyday life. Unspoken, unsymbolized and unprocessed trauma persisted quietly, repressed yet still active. Psychoanalysts Françoise Davoine and Jean-Max Gaudillière invite us to consider how personal lives and devastating historical events such as world wars are intertwined.136 In their thinking, history ‘does not simply serve as a backdrop to the familial relations rendered separately’ but is integral to a proper understanding of transmission.137 People caught up in great historical and collective traumas may convey to subsequent generations – unconsciously and in non-verbal ways – those aspects of their experience that have become ‘stuck’,

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that is, not processed effectively into memory, or adequately symbolized.138 If family relationships inhibit smooth transitions between generations around their stories of trauma, breaks in the ‘social links’139 might occur, thus risking significant psychic elements becoming ‘buried alive’.140

‘I was just another lad without a father’141 Transmission of trauma does not need the physical presence of the father. In my interview with Doug, I became aware of significant unresolved losses in his family which left him emotionally blocked and frustrated. These disturbing losses made their appearance at pivotal moments in the interview. Doug was born in 1941, and his father died as a prisoner of war in very controversial circumstances. The impact on Doug has been acute because of his inability to obtain a definitive account of his father’s death in the Far East. Doug’s trauma was compounded by lies promulgated by Japanese officialdom, further aggravated by lack of transparency on the part of the British government who perpetuated a false story that his father had perished when the hell ship he was on was sunk by the Americans. In truth, his father was part of a large group that had embarked earlier at Ballalae island. When an American invasion of the island was feared, the majority of the POWs were bayoneted or beheaded and ‘the bodies were stripped of their identity tags and dumped into a large pit’.142 In November 1945, 436 bodies were discovered by the War Graves Unit of the Australian army, and the remains finally recovered. Doug’s mother had also been doubly scarred by loss. While still a young girl, her father had died after being invalided out of the First World War with shell shock. Now she had lost her husband as well. Doug’s family was evicted from their army house on Christmas Eve. They acquired an old army barracks hut, quite close to ammunition dumps, and the family was raised there. ‘No water, no electricity, no sanitation.’143 His mother eventually remarried, and promptly destroyed all Doug’s father’s belongings, including war letters. Doug managed to salvage his war medals. Although he has no memory of his father, he remains a powerful psychic presence in Doug’s life. He showed me a few photographs; in one, Doug is being held in his father’s arms. In a subsequent email exchange, I asked him about his religious beliefs: I am convinced that I have some sort of Guardian Angel. My angel – I call him my ‘Little Man’ is into pretty girls, aircraft, pretty much most of what I like, and keeping me safe. Is it my father?

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Captive Fathers, Captive Children Too many things have happened in my life that cannot be ‘fate’ or whatever. So often, I have been in the right place at the right time. Once I stopped my machine and went out of the workshop for a breath of fresh air. There was a rumble, and when I looked up, there was the ‘Battle of Britain’ flight flying right over the street. Another time a chap called me over, just as a forklift truck caused a tall pile of skips to fall where I had been standing. Many other things have happened like that. No explanation.144

Trauma transmission is a diffuse and complex process, one that connects us to events that are spatially and temporally disparate yet resonate irrevocably with our personal lives and present-day family relationships. As Davoine and Gaudillière remind us, we are always part of a bigger history.

3

Remembering and commemorating

Memory touches every aspect of our social and personal lives, and finds expression through a myriad of genres, material forms, and in recent decades via an explosion of rapidly evolving communication technologies. Although ubiquitous, its nature is fragile. In Austerlitz, W. G. Sebald reflects nostalgically on the nature of memory, and how easy it is for memories never to be made, or passed between generations. how little we can hold in mind, how everything is constantly lapsing into oblivion with every extinguished life, how the world is, as it were, draining itself, in that the history of countless places and objects which themselves have no power of memory is never heard, never described or passed on.1

Remembrance figures powerfully in the lives of a great many children of Far East POWs. From the photographs they display on their walls, to the commemorative events they attend; from objects kept in lofts, to the websites they create or interact with. Eva Hoffman describes the second generation as ‘the hinge generation in which received, transferred knowledge of events is being transmuted into history, or into myth.’2 Many of the people I interviewed did indeed feel the burden of responsibility for being members of this ‘hinge generation’, and took very seriously the need to preserve the memories of their fathers’ captivity.

Memory and forgetting Although memory in its various guises permeates every page of this book, it remains an elusive concept, beset by a proliferation of perspectives and terminologies.3 In recent years, prominent anniversaries of the First and Second World Wars, the Holocaust, and Hiroshima and Nagasaki have boosted interest in war commemoration, and generated an enormous quantity of recorded

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reminiscences. Amongst this profusion of ideas is an important insight: that memory is best seen as ‘ongoing work’, rather than something static that we simply possess, ‘not as the storehouse of that experience, but, instead, as a relational process at the intersection of different durations of living’.4 On that basis, then, it becomes possible to tease out how memories are contextualized, recontextualized and revised. At the individual level, memory is a mainstay of our identity, providing a sense of continuity and the conditions necessary for a social existence.5 But memory can also stretch out well beyond the individual, embracing past experiences that are shared and recalled by groups of people. This is the idea of ‘collective memory’6 or one of its close conceptual cousins that jostle alongside, such as shared memory, social memory and collected memories.7 Even though memory may appear to be a pivotal if tricky abstraction, its roots lie deep within the material world – ‘remembering through the material’ as Zachary Beckstead and his colleagues describe it.8 Physical objects, place and landscape form a material framework within which memories are able to surface,9 and the testimonies of the children confirmed this close interrelationship. Widening the lens still further, we encounter the notion of ‘memoryscapes’ an idea that draws together several synergistic concepts that blend the material and the metaphorical. In a recent volume on the Second World War in Asia, Hamzah Muzaini defines memoryscapes as: spaces upon which memories of the past have been inscribed materially (i.e. physically in stone and plinth), socially (i.e. embodied through rituals or practices), or symbolically (in terms of discourses or invested meanings).10

Memoryscape provides a helpful conceptual canvas on which to explore the intricate relationships between physical landscape, on the one hand, and abstract constructs such as emotion and the ‘spatiality of memory’, on the other.11 It is particularly useful in addressing the legacies of captivity because it facilitates thinking about how memory ‘circulates, migrates, travels’,12 both spatially and temporally, including their transnational implications: Memory straddles established divides, it moves and travels, and it is actively transformed in the process. And yet, a significant part of what continues to fascinate scholars about memory is its groundedness in concrete locations.13

These topics return to the fore with greatest intensity in Chapter 7, which discusses the children’s emotional responses to the places of their fathers’ traumas.

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Jan Assmann, a major figure in memory studies, created an elegant framework in which he modelled memory, time and identity into three levels. The ‘inner (neuro-mental)’ level holds individual memory, the inner self and subjective time. The ‘social’ level embraces communicative memory, the social self and social time. Finally, the ‘cultural’ level contains cultural memory, cultural identity, and the historical and geopolitical dimensions of experience.14 Psychoanalytic ideas lie within the ‘inner’ level, psychoanalysis being rooted in memory; this is seen in the concepts of suppression, when memories are forced out of awareness by a conscious effort, and repression, when this takes place unconsciously. In the same paper, Assmann highlights a key distinction between ‘communicative memory’ and ‘cultural memory’. Communicative memory ‘lives in everyday interaction and communication’, in the informal and unstable world of conversations between veterans and their children and grandchildren, veterans with their peers, and in oral histories, and so has ‘a limited time span of three interacting generations’.15 ‘Cultural memory’ on the other hand accommodates the more distant, and less fluid, past. It depends entirely on external symbols that require ‘institutions of preservation and re-embodiment’, such as museums, curators, rituals and monuments.16 We know that many FEPOWs chose not to share memories across generations at all, but restricted their reminiscences, often to a narrow band of their peers. On this basis, I would suggest that our understanding of communicative memory needs to distinguish between ‘communication between generations’ and ‘communication within generations’. Hirsch also recognized a similar distinction between ‘familial’ postmemory that occurs ‘vertically’ between family members (‘intergenerational’), and ‘affiliative’ postmemory which takes place ‘horizontally’ between members of the same generation (‘intragenerational’).17 Although communicative memory may appear at first glance to be rather haphazard and informal, it is still subject to tradition, group relationships, cultural norms and organizational structures. Since the end of the war, FEPOW associations and communities have formed and re-formed for the purpose of providing reunions, weekends away, conferences and memorial services where ex-FEPOWs, their wives and families satisfy their psychic and social needs through reminiscing together, each of which facilitates communicative memory.18 Inevitably, over time, the content of communicative memory will diminish, slowly crystallizing into cultural memory via various institutional products and practices. The transitional period that lies between the two phases has been referred to as the ‘floating gap’.19 Digital technologies that allow easy

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access to first-hand testimonies via video and audio recordings are blurring the boundaries by ‘keeping alive’ communicative memory.20 Assmann makes a further discrimination between communicative and cultural memories by arguing that communicative memory requires no specialists. In contrast, he suggests that ‘cultural memory always has its specialists, both in oral and in literate societies’.21 If cultural memory is conceived as emerging only after communicative memory has elapsed, then some roles do not fit comfortably into the framework.22 A case in point is the child of a FEPOW who becomes an expert in the field, and is acknowledged as such within the community. Such individuals may straddle the ‘gap’ while remaining firmly rooted in the communicative memory sphere. Chapter 6 will show that some of these children (the ‘COFEPOW researchers’) have evolved into ‘specialists’, able to negotiate with ‘institutions’ about which representations, objects and identities will make the transition into cultural memory. *** The process of forgetting is burdened by the assumption that ‘remembering and commemoration is usually a virtue and that forgetting is necessarily a failing’.23 But it is easy to overlook that the capacity to selectively forget is as critical as selective recall. Without both faculties, we would be hard-pressed to sustain an identity, or make much sense of our memories: Just as memory serves an important ethical function during periods of forgetfulness, forgetting permits life to move forward in eras that cannot escape memory’s grip. Both, moreover, are necessary for true historical understanding.24

Friedrich Nietzsche was strident in his support of the need to forget, to be able to strike a balance between past and present – ‘the past has to be forgotten if it is not to become the gravedigger of the present’.25 Aleida Assmann adopts a counterintuitive position, that ‘forgetting is the default mode of humans and societies’.26 In her view, forgetting ‘happens silently, inconspicuously and ubiquitously, while remembering is the unlikely exception from the rule, requiring conscious efforts and specific framework.’27 This is perhaps a conclusion reached more readily with age. Forgetting also gives us the opportunity to make a new start, and this can take one of two forms: a version in which ‘the page is simply turned over’; or the alternative in which ‘the page must be read before it is turned’.28 These metaphors are well attuned to the situation of the former FEPOWs and their children. The

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majority of participants who came forward for interview fell into the group of people who needed to discover and understand before ever entertaining the prospect of ‘turning the page’. Aleida Assmann refers to the latter as ‘therapeutic forgetting’, but it must begin with ‘a memory that has been reworked and processed’.29 Paul Connerton set out seven types of forgetting, one of which is its ability to help us establish a new identity,30 and here we are reminded of Eva Hoffman’s tentative conclusion about the responses of the second generation to the Holocaust: Sixty years later, I feel, this is the only thing that can be done: to acknowledge, turn, bend towards the victims rather than away from them. There can be no other recompense, no other closure. Sixty years later … and after all that can be done has been done, it may also be time to turn away, gently, to let this go.31

Most children of Far East POWs would find this position very uncomfortable. A very familiar trope in mainstream FEPOW discourse is that of ‘we shall never forget’32 and this is also a central tenet in Holocaust commemoration. But responses are never uniform, and on occasion could be extreme. Two of the children recalled how their mothers had ‘forced’ forgetting on the family, fuelling their need to find out more. As we saw in Chapter 2, Doug’s father had died in the war, and his mother spoke little about him after the war. On her remarriage she started ‘destroying everything of dad’s. … just wiped his memory. I don’t understand it.’33 Louise’s father suffered a lethal heart attack when she was fifteen, after which her mother erased him entirely from their lives ‘by the time he died, and after he died, nobody ever mentioned him. It was like he just wasn’t there.’34 Three weeks after his death, Louise’s brother got married, but the father was barely mentioned at the wedding. I’ve got to say that I just didn’t know him … I didn’t know him … and … I don’t know what there was to know about him really. It’s like … a stranger almost. It was a very small life, I think they had, you know, sort of, safe. He wouldn’t go abroad … another of my mum’s complaints.35

The unfulfilled relationship with her father made its impact during the interview. I felt a growing sense of ‘confinement’ in her language and in her presence: a sense of psychic confinement. Eventually, this yearning from the past led Louise to undertake a pilgrimage to the Thai–Burma Railway that I discuss in Chapter 7. ***

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Authors from a literary tradition often provide insights into traumatic memory that complement or surpass the work of academic scholarship. The writings of Charlotte Delbo, an Auschwitz survivor, carry particular authority and affective weight. She proposes a ‘memory of the senses’ or ‘deep memory’.36 Deep memory ‘preserves sensations, physical imprints. … For it isn’t words that are swollen with emotional charge.’37 She contrasts this with ‘ordinary memory’: the means by which we try to render events ‘intelligible, pegged to a common or established frame of reference, so that they can be communicated to, and readily understood by, a general audience’.38 For Jill Bennett, sense memory is a process ‘experienced not as a remembering of the past but as a continuous negotiation of a present with interminable links to the past’ involving ‘not so much a speaking of but speaking out of a particular memory or experience – in other words, speaking from the body sustaining sensation.’39 Also pertinent to how the children told their stories is the distinction between semantic and episodic memory.40 Semantic memory ‘may be likened to an encyclopaedia, while episodic memory is like a personal diary.’41 Episodic memories link together to form ‘autobiographical memory’.42 Michael Corballis develops the purpose of episodic memory: Episodic memory is notoriously unreliable and incomplete, and it has been proposed that its primary function was not to serve as a faithful record of the past, but rather to provide a basis for imagining and planning of future events.43

Corballis claims that the ‘human mind has evolved to wander, not only back and forth in time, but also into imaginary worlds, and into the minds of others.’44 The free-association psychosocial interview offered a conducive psychic space for this ‘mind-wandering’ to take place. Under these conditions, the children were able to ‘recall’ their episodic memories and group them into narratives, thus forming ‘autobiographical memories’.45 However, rather than observing random ‘wandering’, the assumption of the psychosocial approach is that the researcher is actually witnessing (and co-creating) the products of the interviewee’s unconscious processes in real time and learning from the intersubjective dynamics evolving within the interview.46 This type of self-reflective ‘wandering’ and the future-oriented quality of episodic memory facilitate the reconstruction of past relationships and self-identity that lie at the heart of Chapter 4. As we have seen, memories can have a problematic and ambiguous relationship to life events, and Marianne Hirsch’s influential notion of postmemory allows us to develop this line of thinking further.

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Postmemory Marianne Hirsch’s childhood was dominated by her parents’ repeated stories of personal Holocaust trauma. She describes how their memories intermingled with and ‘crowded out’ her own,47 in such a way that their ‘disparate subjectivities’ became connected.48 She calls this intergenerational phenomenon ‘postmemory’: ‘Postmemory’ describes the relationship that the ‘generation after’ bears to the personal, collective, and cultural trauma of those who came before … these experiences were transmitted to them so deeply and affectively as to seem to constitute memories in their own right.49

However, Hirsch recognizes that parental memories are not simply swallowed whole by the next generation. The children will also change them, ‘by imaginative investment, projection, and creation’, processes that add to their emotional force. That said, the children can be ‘overwhelmed’ by these ‘inherited memories’ and by the ‘traumatic fragments of events that still defy narrative reconstruction and exceed comprehension.’50 In the extreme, the children’s life stories risked being ‘displaced, even evacuated, by our ancestors’.51 For the children of FEPOWs, postmemory was heralded by their first awareness of their fathers’ captivity. Participants commonly said that they seem to have known for their whole lives that their fathers had been prisoners in the Far East, without necessarily being able to pinpoint exactly how or when they had first heard about it. For Selena, this vagueness had confusing and rather humorous consequences. I don’t remember when I first knew about dad having been a prisoner, it’s as if I always did. I was obviously a bit confused about it as I am reputed to have told all the class and the teacher that Dad was in prison … when he turned up at a class event the boys in the class looked at him with awe and wonder and the teacher seemed a bit scared.52

Joanna, on the other hand, was quite precise. Walking into her parent’s bedroom, she found her father crying. She was seven years of age. ‘It was the first time I’d seen my father cry, so I just didn’t understand what was going on … And my mother said, Daddy’s been to see some friends who died – been to their graves – and he’s very upset.’53 Hirsch’s work is driven by an explicitly moral purpose, her aim being ‘to uncover and to restore experiences and life stories that otherwise might remain absent from the historical archive.’54 She is concerned that the ‘sense of living connection’ with the Holocaust is ‘passing into history and myth’ and gradually

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being eroded.55 While time inevitably drains the intensity of personal memory, her fear is that this erosion will close down vital ethical discussions about trauma and memory. However, the growth of social networking and other memory practices is complicating this process, and enabling memory and postmemory to be reframed. FEPOW websites, Facebook pages, and online discussion groups are widely used by many FEPOW families.56 These technologies now expose us to an extensive and sometimes confusing diversity of online personal and family materials that in a previous era would rarely have seen the light of day, records of events that were ‘prone to fall off from the edges of memory’.57 Now, though, we are able to ‘glimpse into the overlooked, mostly forgotten affective qualities of the past, as movement, gesture or expression.’58 Cultural and artistic works are also significant in transmitting traumatic memories,59 and have proved influential in the postmemories of the COFEPOW community. Films like The Bridge on the River Kwai,60 The Railway Man61 and Unbroken62 have contributed powerfully to the cultural background through which memories and postmemories of Far East captivity are filtered. Perhaps more than any other, The Bridge on the River Kwai stands as the foremost cultural touchstone in this field, at least for a British audience, having received wide critical acclaim and numerous awards since its first showing in 1957.63 Several participants referred to the film in their narratives, but from quite contrasting social and generational perspectives. Roberta’s father took her to see the film but he said it was ‘nonsense’, explaining that ‘so far from taking a pride in their work the POWs tried to sabotage the railway, chucking a handful of white ants into the foundations of bridges rather than trying to preserve them.’64 When Louise was around fourteen, she began to notice her father’s reactions – ‘the whisky would be consumed, he’d get angry shouting at the TV … when all I wanted to do was enjoy a good film.’65 Mark’s father was a Eurasian volunteer in Singapore, and only nineteen years of age when sent to the Thai–Burma Railway: ‘Dad had no apparent problems with watching The Bridge on the River Kwai or Tenko66 on TV, and he loved It Ain’t Half Hot Mum,67 but his personal experiences were left unsaid.’68 There are hints here of Mark’s father keeping painful unconscious emotions under lock and key by behaving in ways opposite to what might have been expected (sometimes referred to as ‘reaction formation’).69 Doug was angered by the prominent role given to the film which, he felt, displaced public awareness of other sites of atrocity. His father was executed on one of the Pacific islands where they were building airstrips: ‘And everybody knows about the bridge on the river Kwai, but nobody knows about the airstrips. What airstrips? Well, they were on their way down to Australia, they were building airstrips. Hm!’70

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Artwork, such as that by Jack Chalker,71 Ronald Searle72 and Leo Rawlings,73 as well as numerous memoirs and diaries, films and TV documentaries also succeed in projecting deeply personal experiences into the public realm, and demonstrate the breadth of the aesthetic response to captivity in the Far East. Less familiar to the general public is the work of visual artist Charles Thrale, who has recently been restored to our gaze by historian Lizzie Oliver.74 An exhibition of over 100 of his paintings ‘The Valleys of the Shadow of Death – The Immortal Memory’ toured Britain between 1946 and 1964, when memories of the war were still fresh. It was described as ‘The first pictorial record in the world of the Japanese P.O.W. camps arranged and set to a story.’75 The funds raised were donated to the Royal Artillery Association. A souvenir catalogue accompanied the exhibition in which each painting was named and described in some detail and in sequence. The catalogue gives a clear indication of the scale and significance of Thrale’s exhibition in the two decades following the war: The Charles Thrale Exhibition opened in London in January 1946. Her late Majesty Queen Mary and the Earl and Countess of Athlone and Lord Rowallan were among the many people who saw it. Since then hundreds of thousands of people have visited it during the London showings and ten years’ country-wide tour of 120 cities and towns. … In addition, many millions more who have never seen the Exhibition have listened to radio descriptions in all parts of the world. Mr. Thrale in his first B.B.C. broadcast on the Home Service announced the purpose: ‘Good from Evil’.76

Like many FEPOW artists, Thrale created his materials from whatever came to hand. His paintings are both naturalistic depictions of life in the camps, and also multilayered ‘testimonial objects’ that physically embody that life.77 His paper was fashioned from: any old scrap that could be begged, bought or bartered, or even stolen from the Jap; he made brushes from thin bamboo and human hair, and paint from Crushed leaves – Crushed petals – Sediment of Medicine – Boiled Rags – Boiled Book covers – Jungle roots – Clay – and even his blood.78

As well as viewing the paintings, visitors to the exhibition were encouraged to share their responses in writing. The paintings themselves, supplemented by the visitors’ written comments, added to the imaginative postmemory store of those who visited the exhibition, or who learned of it from the press coverage. Alison Landsberg added to our understanding of the cultural transmission of memories when she coined the term ‘prosthetic memory’ to describe sources that ‘are not the product of lived experience’.79 While a close relative of Hirsch’s

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‘postmemory’, prosthetic memory focuses on ‘mediated representations’ like film or interactive museums that have the ability to create ‘sensuous memories’.80 Children who knew little about their fathers’ captivity relied on many such representations to engender ‘aesthetic empathy’81 and to create vicarious emotional connections with what they imagined were the experiences of their fathers. Prosthetic memories also allowed the children to modulate their exposure to the traumatic realities (and phantasies) of camp life. Disseminating greater awareness of FEPOW history could also be an ethical choice; for some of the children, the purpose behind promoting cultural products through social media was to engender greater understanding between the peoples of Britain and Japan, a position often linked to the fact that many, particularly young, Japanese have very little knowledge of Japanese atrocities in the Second World War.82 Postmemories pervade the work of both established authors and artists, and of the children of survivors, as they struggle to express the interiority of intergenerational trauma transmission. In her challenging novel And the Rat Laughed, Nava Semel curates stories, poems and diary entries to form a dynamic literary collage that addresses the (post)memories of the Holocaust across an imaginative time span of 150 years.83 Similarly motivated, in the series of terse chapters that constitute Nightfather, Carl Friedman narrates a child’s view of the Holocaust as she interprets her father’s account of the war and the concentration camps.84 Sometimes words are not enough. In Maus, Art Spiegelman employs the techniques of the graphic novel to represent the stark yet insidious impact of the Holocaust on his own family.85 Through words and pictures, Spiegelman takes the reader on a compelling and layered psychic journey during which the reader has to confront the narrative form itself: should we see the words and pictures as a unified narrative, or do they operate on different perceptual and psychic levels? Several participants, in their very different ways, experienced trails of trauma that shaped their life stories and set in train patterns of creative memory work that enabled them to address feelings of loss, guilt and confusion. Sally is a painter who responded to the postmemories of her father’s captivity through work that combines powerful images and text, using words taken from her father’s diaries. She spoke of ‘rediscovering’ her father – and herself – after she had learned about his POW experiences. In a series of paintings made after her visit to the Thai–Burma Railway sites,86 she adopted as her ‘signature’ a symbol that had been ‘stamped on a piece of fabric’ she found amongst her father’s possessions (see Figure 3).87

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Figure 3  Prayers by the Kwai Noi by Sally Grumbridge.

Toby, a scriptwriter, wrote a short story (and performance piece) that integrated past and present, autobiography and imagination, words and images. In Memoriam addresses the traumas of FEPOW life by manipulating time, so that he and his father become ‘contemporaries’ in the POW camp.88 This semifictional form gave Toby the chance to explore many underlying emotional aspects of his relationship with his father within an evocative fictional setting where he was able to acknowledge his suffering and to ‘say’ things to his father that had previously been left unsaid. By the end, one is aware that both father and son were prisoners in their own ways. The story also intertwines a series of meetings between the narrator and his counsellor – a reminder of Ronald

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Fraser’s influential In Search of a Past in which the author blends an account of his own psychoanalysis with oral history and reverie.89 Through their creative work, both Sally and Toby demonstrate how personal responses to trauma can be processed and communicated through distinctive and richly aesthetic forms of memory practice.

Collective memory and the ‘memory boom’ Collective memory represents a shift away from the individual and towards the group, and directs our attention to how particular groups shape their memories of past experiences: Collective memory and the institutions and practices that support it help to create, sustain and reproduce the ‘imagined communities’ with which individuals identify and that give them a sense of history, place and belonging.90

Collective memory emerges from the interactions between many different institutions, cultural products and individual practices, its content being constantly refined and (re)confirmed through these ‘cultural circuits’.91 That is not to say that aspects of collective memory are never challenged, just that there are strong emotional pressures to build a degree of consensus that encourages individuals to identify with the group as a whole. Although veterans’ associations were the main drivers soon after the war, in more recent years, these forces have been progressively expanded and mediated through online communications.92 Memorial pages on Facebook or other websites allow large numbers of individuals to interact with one another. Like any group new members soon begin to get a sense of which categories of memory or belief are deemed most acceptable to the online community as a whole. These online interactions naturally diffuse into the physical world because most members engage in both virtual and non-virtual environments. In a rare specimen of research in this field, Hamzah Muzaini and Brenda Yeoh examined how online memorials compared with physical sites of memory, and how moderators regulated what appeared on these virtual forms of remembrance.93 But it is in the ‘discussion’ segments where most self-regulation and self-censorship occurs that leads gradually to a greater uniformity of opinion and affective tone. Despite the inevitable group self-selection, the rapid sharing of historical details about individual ex-FEPOWs has unquestionably enabled these online sites to evolve into dynamic and expanding resources for families searching for the stories of their relatives.

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The immediate post-war decades are often described as a latency period during which there was minimal public interest in the history of the FEPOWs. However, this changed in the 1980s likely triggered by the revival of interest in Holocaust memory.94 In Aleida Assmann’s words ‘The paradigmatic shift from the model of forgetting to an orientation towards remembering occurred with the return of Holocaust memory after a period of latency.’95 The tendency of Holocaust survivors not to speak of their trauma in the immediate post-war years has been widely discussed in the literature. Bar-On locates this ‘conspiracy of silence’ in the first four decades after the Second World War, arguing that it resulted from pressures within Israeli society ‘which blamed the survivors, who went, it has been said, “like sheep to the slaughter”’.96 Parallels with the FEPOW situation spring to mind, but need to be applied with caution: the convoys of troops sent to the Far East in the autumn of 1941 were obliged to surrender in large numbers, in most cases after only a few days or weeks of combat: not the material from which heroes are normally made, or that encourages later disclosure. In 1980 ‘post-traumatic stress disorder’ was added to the medical lexicon, and this ‘official’ recognition made the discussion of traumatic memories more acceptable. Broader cultural and economic factors also played their part in promoting remembrance: increasing affluence, the growth of higher education in all developed countries, increasing leisure time and the growth of computerbased media. Two popular TV mini-series from the late 1970s – Roots (1977)97 and Holocaust (1978)98 – are also credited with preparing the ground for a closer examination of memories and postmemories across family and global histories. Macro-political inflection points proved to be significant influences: the growth of the European Union from the 1970s onwards, and the fall of the Berlin wall in 1989 both served to prompt the citizens of many countries to greater reflection and thoughts of the past.99 Bar-On makes a telling point when he observes that the adult children of Holocaust survivors are ‘the first generation to learn about the extent of these traumatic after-effects’.100 From our perspective in the 2020s, we can see clearly how the exponential growth of online historical and commemorative material has fed the determination of many children of FEPOWs to discover more about their fathers’ captivity.101 Eva Hoffman described her childhood as ‘a sort of fairy tale … an enigmatic but real fable’. This ‘deeply internalized but strangely unknown past’102 revealed itself through ‘flashes of imagery’ and ‘broken refrains’,103 concepts that seem to resonate with a period of latency, as does the extended repression that followed traumas in the POW camps. But with knowledge comes responsibility, and now that more of the historical facts and personal testimonies

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have come to light, those of us in the second generation have the challenge of how best to construct this knowledge, how best to question, and how best to act. Despite the existence of a putative ‘remembrance gap’, a few FEPOWs did publish diaries and memoirs quite soon after the war,104 and many more appeared from the 1980s.105 The Imperial War Museum was also busy acquiring more FEPOW-related material at this time.106 A further spike of interest in remembrance occurred in 1989 after the death of Hirohito, who had been the Japanese Emperor throughout the war. But it was in 1998 that the voice of the veterans rose to an emotional crescendo on the occasion of the state visit of Hirohito’s successor, Emperor Akihito. Ex-FEPOWs, aggrieved by the refusal of the Japanese government to pay adequate financial compensation, or give an acceptable apology, turned their backs in protest as the motorcade paraded down the Mall. Some openly burned the Japanese flag.107 We need to be careful that macro-level explanations of the memory boom do not occlude the significance of individual psychosocial and developmental factors. Bar-On believed that his work with three generations of Israeli families had to wait until the late 1980s when many survivors were willing to speak of their experiences because, by that stage, most felt they had built ‘normal’ lives for their families.108 During the 1980s, most FEPOWs were in their sixties, many were still in good health, and felt more comfortable with sharing difficult memories. Their children too – the ‘baby boomers’ – were beginning to reap the financial rewards of a better education than most of their fathers had enjoyed, and were better equipped technically and academically to engage in memory work. Many of the fathers still remained silent on the subject of their POW captivity (at least to their families), and the children had to seek out alternative sources of information as substitutes for direct accounts from their fathers. The strengthening of interest through the 1990s was reflected in the increasingly prominent role played by former FEPOWs and their children in remembrance events such as the Remembrance Sunday parade at the Cenotaph in London.109 The annual parade at the Cenotaph became the centrepiece of war remembrance in Britain and its rituals were replicated, on a reduced scale, across the country at local war memorials. Recent developments in media technology – and the exigencies of the coronavirus pandemic – have resulted in these ceremonies being shared more widely than ever before, and broadcasters have begun to create new media routes for personal testimonies to be heard.110 Despite the new media, the state’s overall influence on the public ceremonials enacted at the Cenotaph (and elsewhere) continue to embody the rigidities of the British class system, displayed most conspicuously in how rank and status

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are expressed during the laying of wreaths. While the Cenotaph might be seen as a powerful focus for remembrance, with the potential to ‘breach the fences of political ideology and social class’,111 individuals will interpret such events in idiosyncratic ways. Ben Gook’s description of commemoration, as an ‘event of intensified remembering with others’ at which ‘the true performative force of the commemoration … lies in the subjectivity of those it addresses’, seems to emphasize this point.112 Individual attendees can choose whether to be swept up in the emotions of the remembrance event, or to selectively identify with the ideologies being actively sponsored or tacitly endorsed. Joanna’s responses to participation in the Remembrance Day parade at the Cenotaph exposed the fault lines within the COFEPOW community. Her experience at the time was emotional, but ingrained with an acute awareness of class differences. She found the event ‘absolutely extraordinarily moving, with everybody clapping us in silence’.113 Later in the interview, she described her reaction to the mass of fellow marchers: ‘it sounds frightfully snobby [but] they were “other ranks”. … Very sweet, nice people, but absolutely nothing in common with them at all. … They were just … different. But obviously we all had that in common [i.e. the ex-FEPOW fathers].’114 Yet, while acknowledging the very different subjectivities involved, the common factor in their biographies still managed to exert a pull across class boundaries, if only for the duration of the ceremony. With the burgeoning public interest in the war, former FEPOWs were often in a better position than many other ex-combatants, not least because they had succeeded in carving out a clear and distinctive identity, and organizational capacity, supported by a substantial network of ex-FEPOW clubs. In 1952, sixtyfour of these local clubs came together to form the National Federation of Far East Prisoner of War Clubs and Associations.115 Although each experience of captivity was different, there remained strong psychological, social, material and political benefits to be had from constructing a consensus around a shared narrative. These groups had characteristics in common with what Francesca Cappelletto refers to as ‘mnemonic communities’, that is groups with ‘shared experiences, interests and identities’ that aim to ‘establish control over the memory of certain events and to legitimate actions of their group in the past and in the present’.116 A sense of individual and collective grievance also lay behind the ex-FEPOWs willingness to ramp up their public profile. Feelings had been hardened by their claims for compensation,117 and by witnessing the continuing financial struggles of the war widows.118 Personal bonds forged by membership of the ex-FEPOW clubs endured well into the twenty-first century, and have permeated – and animated – many in the second and third generations.119

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That said, many veterans did not join local ex-FEPOW clubs, indeed some were barely aware of their existence. In 1975, just a year before he died, Isla’s father was in hospital being treated for a heart attack. There he met a welfare officer who told him about the help he could have been receiving: ‘he didn’t even know about the Far Eastern Prisoner of War Association. The only thing he knew about was the British Legion. And he tried to join the British Legion round here, and it was awful.’120 Other veterans made a deliberate decision not to join any FEPOW association preferring, in so far as they could, to erect an impenetrable barrier between their military and civilian lives. For Deirdre’s father, this was driven by a profound bitterness that expressed itself rather quirkily, and certainly in a manner starkly inconsistent with the state-approved narrative of the Second World War: He was very bitter. Very, very bitter. … There was a big old sideboard, and on it there was a carving, bust of Churchill. With his cigar. I don’t know how he come by it, whether somebody did it in the camps or something … but it was a real likeness of him. When he got in a real temper, he would pick hold of poor old Churchill and launch him. And so in the end he had no cigar left at all.121

As noted earlier, most former FEPOWs were in their sixties at the start of the ‘memory boom’. Significantly perhaps, this is the same age range as most of the participants in this research. Seen in its psycho-historical context, this is the stage that Erik Erikson characterized as ‘generativity vs. stagnation’.122 People who have reached this phase of life incline towards ‘expressions of wisdom and preservation of culture’.123 In other words, it is the point at which one feels a particular pressure to pass on experience, to summate, to be a witness to one’s own past, before we too become history and myth. Far East captivity had disrupted the normal developmental time frame: education, career, work and relationships had all been put on hold and, in some cases, damaged beyond repair. For the veterans, the stage of generativity offered the chance to create psychic order out of disorder, and formulate a coherent narrative through which to attain a degree of composure. Now, in the wake of major war-related anniversaries,124 it is the children who are driven to tell their own stories.

Memory activism and entrepreneurship Memories of childhood, augmented by postmemories, drove certain individuals to take positive action rather than acquiesce into quiet nostalgia. This emergence of individual agency could be provoked or aggravated by what the children

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saw as institutional apathy. The results of this activism have been impressive. I have chosen to discuss two initiatives, both of which led to the creation of new memorials and associated memory practices. One is the story behind the UK’s foremost national FEPOW memorial; the other an account of how the patience, persistence and passion of a single FEPOW family persuaded a Japanese corporation to erect a memorial at their headquarters. The most striking FEPOW memorial in Britain is the FEPOW Memorial Building located within the National Memorial Arboretum (NMA). The NMA itself was the brainchild of Commander David Childs, a retired naval officer. Officially opened in 2001, the NMA is a vast and much-lauded commemorative landscape which, for the first time, allows the character of individual conflicts to be expressed.125 The driving force behind the construction of the FEPOW building was Carol Cooper, the Chairman and Founder of COFEPOW, whose father had died in Burma in 1943.126 Quite by chance, she discovered the existence of her father’s diary after it had been sold in an auction. He had kept the diary while a POW on the Thai–Burma Railway. This proved to be the serendipitous start of Carol’s ‘career’ in memory activism. The design of the building itself is ‘based on one of the large village huts that can be seen in Thailand’ and quite unlike any other memorial at the NMA (see Figure 4).127 The building and

Figure 4  The FEPOW Building at the National Memorial Arboretum, Alrewas, Staffordshire.

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its immediate surroundings incorporate richly visual and evocative material that never fails to make an impact on visitors. Uniquely, it also houses a small education and research centre. What is particularly inspiring about the FEPOW memorial is its empathic sensitivity and commitment to making the visitor experience meaningful. Karl Figlio makes a thoughtful distinction between a ‘monument’ and a ‘memorial’: Monuments are material objects, which freeze memories, confining them into ideological portrayals; memorials are sites of remembering, often differently, by different groups, but around which remembering is alive and ongoing.128

Here, Figlio is following James Young’s nuanced discussion set out in The Texture of Memory in which he argues that all ‘memory-sites’ should be seen as ‘memorials’, with monuments as a subset of memorials, the monuments being the ‘plastic objects within these sites’.129 Of course, Young’s clarification does not resolve the debate, but does help us move forward. Beyond endless definitional arguments lie pressing issues, some of which will be pursued through case studies in this chapter. Importantly, we need to stay attuned to the question of how we might approach the ontological gaps between different forms of memory (such as ‘inner’, ‘social’ and ‘cultural’), on the one hand, the different physical manifestations of memory sites on the other, and the way in which these ‘plastic objects’ operate as spatial scaffolding for commemorative events, individual activities, social gatherings and so on, where memories are triggered, imaginations ignited, political controversies provoked or losses faced. Given the interactive nature of its contents, together with the incorporation of a small research centre, the FEPOW memorial building stimulates fresh discourse, and ensures that the history of the FEPOWs cannot be ‘frozen in’ (see Figure 5).130 As Carol Cooper’s memory work exemplifies, a sense of injustice can drive individuals to challenge and overcome substantial bureaucratic hurdles placed in their path. When deep-seated cultural and political barriers are added to the mix, the difficulties are multiplied. The ‘memory entrepreneurs’ in the second example are Linda-Lee and Kevin Nicholls.131 Linda’s father was a POW in Omi camp in Japan. They first visited this remote site in 2010, as part of a pilgrimage organized by Mrs Keiko Holmes,132 and were very disappointed to discover that there was no POW memorial in the area.133 Soon afterwards, they launched a campaign to establish a permanent memorial to mark the memory of the sixty men who had died at the camp.134 Supported by the British Embassy in Tokyo,135 they succeeded in persuading the owners of the Japanese conglomerate (‘Denka’)136 to fully fund a

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Figure 5  Inside the FEPOW Memorial Building at the National Memorial Arboretum.

memorial to the tune of £150,000. A distinguishing feature of Japanese society and its economy is the large number of Japanese companies that have been going concerns for more than 100 years. Often family run, they include famous names such as Suzuki, Panasonic, Hitachi, Seiko, Mitsubishi, Nintendo and Nikkei.137 One consequence is that many major companies benefited from the labour provided by allied POWs during the Second World War. Denka is one of these. In the decades following the war, Japan was rebuilding its economy while trying to fend off claims for compensation from a range of aggrieved parties, with the inevitable souring of international relationships. The tangled nature of the post-war legal disputes is clearly demonstrated in a report by the US Library of Congress in 2008.138 Given this contentious and disputatious cultural and historical backdrop, it is hardly surprising that Japanese corporations and governmental authorities would display acute sensitivity over questions of POW-related monuments and memorials, especially when those proposals were advanced by states that were former enemies. In 2014, Linda and Kevin visited Japan once again to attend the highprofile unveiling ceremony at the company’s headquarters at Omi, Niigata prefecture.139 This ceremony brought to mind Young’s distinction between ‘collective’ and ‘collected’ memories.140 Young’s explicit aim was to ‘break down

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the notion of any memorial’s collective memory altogether’.141 He preferred the term ‘collected’ because ‘a society’s memory cannot exist outside of those people who do the remembering, even if such memory happens to be at the society’s bidding, in its name.’142 As someone who attended this ceremony at Omi, my observations before, during and after the event brought Young’s words into sharp focus. More than 100 people, representing different nationalities and different generations, gathered in a marquee on the rainy margins of rural Japan, and their memories could be realistically described as ‘collected’. The British Ambassador strove for a more collective position. As he wrote to me in an email a few weeks after the event: Both sides recognise the pain and suffering; on the Japanese side there is a clear recognition that this is an episode in their own history that they must own and accept; but that is not the same as feeling personally culpable … And on the British side, my sense is of a similar sense of shared history; of personal experience, often of a relative rather than themselves, but of an overwhelming desire not to forget, rather than the impossibility of shaking off the memory. At Omi I felt a sharing of something between the Japanese and British (and Australian and New Zealand) sides, rather than a negotiated truce.143

Figure 6  The memorial at Omi after the unveiling on 5 September 2014.

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His underlined words probably represent the psychic realities of those present, but perhaps not in such polarized terms. From my research participants’ stories, I recognize that it is possible to hold both points of view: a conscious desire ‘not to forget’ (seen as a positive choice) and a psychic inability to ‘shake off the memory’ (seen as negative). In neither the public language of the diplomat nor in participants’ testimonies does Eva Hoffman’s sentiment prevail; it seems clear that it is not yet the moment to ‘let this go’.144 What Linda and Kevin Nicholls were aspiring to create was not simply a monument where there was none, but a memorial that would be accessible to relatives and friends of the POW, and would promote reflection. This was to be aided by a book, kept in the company’s nearby headquarters building, that would explain the background. In practice, access to the memorial has not proved as straightforward as initially hoped (it is on a commercial site and some restrictions were to be expected), and the book similarly has not made its presence felt. My sense of what the company (and perhaps the government authorities) were prepared to accept – in a culturally and politically conservative society – was a monument, a ‘frozen’ concession to British, Australian, New Zealand and American sensitivities that did not ruffle the status quo (see Figure 6). Linda and Kevin support reconciliation and the idea of reflective transnational commemoration, and had hoped for a memorial that would promote this aim. However, emotions and moralities are too easily confounded when individual aspirations in the present collide with the ramifications of past global conflicts.

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4

Finding meaning in memories

This chapter acts as a bridge between the ‘raw material’ of childhood memories and the memory practices of adulthood. It focuses on how the children tried to make sense of the relationships they had with their fathers throughout their lives, and the narrative trajectories that emerged from the interviews. The children’s stories followed a very varied course but all showed how intergenerational trauma could be integrated into one’s lifespan to emerge as ‘a meaningful part of the survivor’s and the survivor’s offspring’s identity, hierarchy of values, and orientation of living’.1 As the children passed from childhood into adulthood and later life, and as new knowledge dawned, many began to rethink and reassess their relationships with their fathers. Participants did not make these reassessments in a socio-political vacuum. They were acutely aware of their father’s singular place in the history of the Second World War, and how their families had been plunged into a profound yet unwanted ethical dilemma. Always active in the shadows was the recurring existential unease that bound together many, if not all, of the children of FEPOWs, and that is the belief that, had it not been for the atomic bomb, they would ‘not be here today’. However, for many this recognition co-existed with the equally insistent and growing awareness of the horrors the bomb inflicted on the people of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. In that sense, these children were held in a state of moral and psychic conflict: they could not live with the bomb, yet would not be alive without it. The topic was only rarely raised explicitly within my recorded interviews; I took this ‘silence’ to mean that it was being treated as a shared ‘given’ (‘we all know that we wouldn’t be here without the bomb’), as a psychic avoidance strategy (‘I don’t want to talk about this because I can’t deal with the irresolvable conflict’), or as a moral judgement (‘they brought it on themselves’). This massive moral fog has become a contentious issue across the FEPOW community, and one that coloured and shaped the children’s memory practices.

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The first part of this chapter addresses the notion of ‘memory practice’, and I offer a heuristic framework to assist thinking about underpinning motivations. The final part is built around three case studies that show how ‘turning points’ during adulthood caused the children to re-evaluate their relationship with their fathers.

Memory practices The growing interest in memory practices points to a shift in the field from the study of memory as a phenomenon concerned with largely static representation, to one that engages with the ways individuals and groups ascribe meanings to the past by ‘doing’ memory.2 My research exposed the wide range and intensity of memory practices, and how they often became firmly embedded in the routines of everyday life and the domestic ecology. In the context of digitization, Ori Schwarz suggests that ‘a whole bunch of highly common mundane practices may be reinterpreted as memory practices that share with commemoration rituals, diary keeping and monuments much more than would appear at first glance.’3 Marita Sturken defines a memory practice as ‘an activity that engages with, produces, reproduces and invests meaning in memories, whether personal, cultural or collective.’4 Sturken also draws attention to the politics of memory, and how ‘the production and construction of memory through cultural practices has as its foundation the notion that memories are part of a larger process of cultural negotiation.’5 The role of politics is especially pertinent to the participants in this research because their memories – poised between micro and macrohistories6 – were rarely exempt from political and cultural forces, as Chapter 3 showed. The small memorial at Omine Machi in Japan illustrates the dilemmas at play. Local villagers erected this memorial in 1996 in order to commemorate the British and American FEPOWs who worked and died in the nearby coal mines. The wording on the plaque includes the following: ‘When the war ended on August 15, 1945, they returned to their own countries. But some of them died from illness.’ These words blocked out any suggestion of suffering and cruelty, and were carefully chosen to project (and protect) an ideological position that was acceptable to the local community and the wider political sensitivities. This suggested a form of ‘defensive forgetting, not just multiple memories based on different experiences.’7 Despite these challenges, the villagers’ decision to build the memorial five decades after the war is an indication of empathic humanitarian values overcoming political pressures. The local people behind

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the memorial have continued to support visits to the area by former FEPOWs and their families. In 2016, in an unanticipated turn of events, this memorial became the subject of further politicization. Its unexpected removal to make way for a solar farm, triggered protests from activists in Japan and UK, and support from the British Embassy in Tokyo. For some months, it appeared that the memorial might end its days stashed in the corner of a local council yard. Ultimately, however, diplomatic pressure ensured its survival and relocation to a nearby (and better) site where it remains as a place of remembrance for FEPOW families, and a focal point for reconciliation activities. During the analysis of participants’ testimonies, I became gradually aware of how the forces underpinning memory practices tended to fall into three loose clusters. Having noticed the pattern, I devised a conceptual framework to aid my thinking about the experiences of participants, and how the construct ‘memory practice’ might be unpacked. The framework, as outlined in Table 1, is heuristic in purpose, and its constituent concepts have a sensitizing not an operational, typological or essentializing objective. I hope it will be helpful as a means of creating a ‘usable pathway’ into the meaning of particular memory practices.8 In Table 1, the ‘dimensions’ are dynamic strands, each of which may come to the fore at different times, perhaps in response to unexpected turns of event. Because the impact of trauma can last a lifetime, and rarely subsides in an orderly or predictable fashion, we need to anticipate many fluctuations over time. A change in one dimension might unconsciously spark activity in another. For instance, discovering a new historical fact about the father (a desired outcome of ‘knowledge-driven’ practices) may reactivate repressed emotions and thus propel the person to seek out practices that meet these emotional needs. A combination of knowledge-driven and emotion-driven practices might provoke a value-driven response, such as deciding to engage in reconciliation activities. We can also conceptualize these dimensions as three processes that are always active in everyone, albeit at different degrees of awareness. The dominant expression (or combination of expressions) at any one time will vary according to childhood experience, life stage, family background and social circumstances. The relationship between dimensions and specific memory practices is complex and considerable overlap to be expected. Socio-cultural factors will influence the ‘choice’ of memory practice. Rex’s social background was firmly upper middle class. From my interview, and from the paintings on the walls of his home, it was clear that he took immense pride in his family lineage. In recent years, much of his energy had been devoted to adding to this stock of family knowledge by learning more about his father’s

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Table 1  The three dimensions of memory practices: a heuristic framework Construct

Dimensions

Memory practices

Knowledge-driven Fact finding, gap-filling; accessing public archives and creating personal archives; genealogy and family history; recording and disseminating (e.g. writing articles for newsletters, offering research services on a pro bono basis); attending and organizing conferences; visiting POW sites. Creating websites to share information.

Indicators

Emotion-driven

A preparedness or recognition that there is emotional work yet to be done; a willingness to come to terms with past relationships; engaging with counselling or psychotherapy (as client or therapist); involvement in informal mutual support processes during other activities, such as pilgrimages and conferences; creative work, e.g. explicitly through the creative arts or, implicitly, through ‘curating’ domestic images and artefacts, and the overt and covert rituals associated with this.

Value-driven

Political, social and welfare activism – e.g. widows’ pensions and other benefits, especially the Java Club & National FEPOW Fellowship Welfare Remembrance Association; personal crusades – ‘righting family wrongs’; activism based on religious or ethical precepts; reconciliation as an explicit aim (perhaps expressed through pilgrimages); resistance to any state manipulation, marginalization or suppression of FEPOW memory and history.

FEPOW life. He did this in conjunction with a small group of like-minded people in several countries whose fathers had all been held in the same POW camp. Taken in that context, then, Rex’s memory practices would seem to have been largely ‘knowledge-driven’. However, as I described in the Introduction, Rex also revealed uncomfortable emotions associated with his parents’ letters, that he had felt unable to read, which suggested that his search for ‘facts’ might have more layered associations. A multitude of individual factors influence which memory practices we adopt, not least personal finance. For many people, a pilgrimage halfway across the world would be out of the question and, for others, even a visit to the COFEPOW building at the National Memorial Arboretum in Staffordshire might be hard to afford. In earlier years, access to funding was a little easier,

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but only for ex-FEPOWs, their wives or carers. Between 1995 and 2006, the Japanese government funded a twelve-year programme of visits for British FEPOWs, a scheme that benefited 423 individuals.9 In the UK, the ‘Heroes Return’ programme awarded over £28million between 2004 and 2015.10

The legacy of childhood through the life course Participants who experienced childhood as fraught and fractured, often referred to their father’s emotional ‘distance’ or ‘absence’. The effect of this was to complicate the process of establishing secure attachments in the family, and to make it especially difficult to identify with the father. Both outcomes were further compromised in homes where overt aggression or physical abuse had occurred. Later in life, often after the father’s death, memories of childhood experiences could return with greater impact causing conflicting emotions to resurface, leading to feelings of guilt, remorse or forgiveness. Avery Gordon has described this graphically as a time when the ‘cracks and rigging are exposed’ and ‘disturbed feelings cannot be put away’.11 The argument in this chapter is that the impact of a childhood in which a father’s trauma was liberally yet unconsciously transmitted to his children created particular configurations of psychic need that flowed through adulthood. Reworking the past in this way begs the question of how we begin to think about the past from both historical and psychic perspectives. As the philosopher– historian R. G. Collingwood observed, separating one’s own past thoughts from the ‘flow of experience’ is difficult but he suggests we should look to evidence where available: Evidence such as a letter, a book or a painting or a very specific recollection of an action that ‘clearly’ revealed my accompanying thought. Having done so, I rediscover my past self, and re-enact these thoughts as my thoughts.12

But the influence of the present remains inescapable, and ‘we constantly reinterpret our past thoughts and assimilate them to those we are thinking now’.13 Collingwood goes on to propose that if we can do this for ourselves, then we are better able to do it for another person. So, when the children try to understand their fathers’ captivity, they will never experience the actual sensations of those whose worlds they are trying to imaginatively recreate: the smell of rice cooking, the stench of suppurating wounds, the weight of the iron nails used on the Thai–Burma Railway, or the dust in the coalmines of Kyushu. Despite that,

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they can discover something about what their fathers were thinking from what they wrote at the time (e.g. diaries), or from interviews conducted afterwards. We will never know (i.e. be able to ‘re-enact’) the immediacy of their thinking; we can only know the others’ thoughts in a disembodied sense, in a historical sense. Because we cannot escape the influence of the present, our perceptions and interpretations are never ‘pure’ but always mediated by what we have read elsewhere, discussed with others, or by the films we have watched. These are the challenges faced by the children as they tried to extract meaning from their fathers’ artefacts, photographs and other archival sources. This analysis highlights the struggle inherent in trying to unearth meaning from captivity that occurred many decades earlier. To address this problem, we need to move away from arguments about specifically historical knowledge, and Collingwood assists us in this task by offering a distinction between ‘thinking historically’ and ‘engaging in the science of psychology’.14 Thinking historically means to ‘re-enact’ experiences (dealing with what can be ‘re-enacted in the historian’s mind’), whereas thinking psychologically means entering into the experiences of others ‘with sympathy and imagination’, employing our affective sensibilities.15 Collingwood’s carefully delineated conception of what constitutes historical thought purposely distinguishes itself from ‘thinking psychologically’, but in their search for a better grasp of their fathers’ FEPOW experiences, the children have to grapple with both the history (the ‘knowledge-driven’ dimension) and the psychology (the ‘emotion-driven’ dimension).

Narrative and generativity Narrative lies at the core of memory practices, and is especially important in reproducing cultural memory: ‘as cultures change, so do their memory practices and their ideas of what is worth and desirable to be remembered’.16 Using photographs as his example, Jens Brockmeier concludes: If I do not only want to count the photographs from my past collected in that box and not only name the persons they show, but also want to point out why they mean anything to me at all, then narrative becomes the hub of my account.17

However, specific narratives were not always immediately apparent or clearly articulated during interviews. They often emerge disjointed, truncated or otherwise incomplete, or be heavily influenced by prevailing (and changeable) social discourses,18 or ‘collective frameworks’.19 Participants strived for a sense

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of coherence and acceptance, seeking psychic composure when faced with ‘lost histories’.20 They sometimes apologized for a story they felt might be deemed unsatisfactory in some way. As Robert put it, ‘If I’m waffling on a bit … you stop me.’21 In response to hard-to-accept, or hard-to-reveal narratives, the children sometimes ‘chose’ to build coherent stories that could be told and retold without exposing a vulnerable self. Other participants found that non-linear forms of narrative practice, such as the creative arts, allowed them to ‘work through’ difficult psychic material constructively. Psychologist Dan McAdams is a leading figure in the use of narrative research.22 His work demonstrates how concepts such as narrative identity, turning points and redemption could provide insight into the children’s life stories. The narratives we adopt are bound closely to our sense of self, and are reflexive constructions requiring ‘constant self-interrogation’ to maintain coherence.23 McAdams and Guo define narrative identity as ‘the internalized and evolving story that the person has constructed regarding how he or she has become the person that he or she is becoming.’ The implication, then, is that the person both ‘reconstructs the past and imagines the future as an ongoing story with setting, scenes, characters, plots, and themes.’24 Moreover, these autobiographical stories are based in fact on a very selective ‘reorganized subset of recollections from the personal past’.25 For the children of the FEPOWs, narrative identity is moulded from, and enmeshed within, personal autobiographical memories, familial postmemories and the affiliative postmemories derived from broader cultural sources that lie beyond the individual. McAdams draws heavily on Erik Erikson’s stage model of the life cycle, and on the concept of generativity in particular (which aligns with adulthood).26 His stages are matched to age bands, each of which brings a conflict or a challenge that must be resolved before moving on to the next. The normative emphasis in this model of human development tends to marginalize or pathologize any potential interruptions or dislocations to the smooth passage between stages. To reach maturity unscathed the child needs to achieve, between infancy and adolescence, various ‘psychosocial strengths’: trust, autonomy, initiative, industry and identity.27 Should these aims not be met, the individual is left to wrestle with a concoction of mistrust, shame, guilt, inferiority and identity confusion. Failure to achieve the psychosocial strengths associated with each stage can also be reframed as problems with attachment or identification, and the need to ‘make up ground’ later in life. The children of FEPOWs often entered adulthood with a unique combination of negative traces accrued from the struggles experienced earlier in life. When

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interviewed, most were in late middle age, and actively engaged in reworking their pasts, reconstructing their stories and those of their fathers, aiming to reconcile past and present. For McAdams, the ‘stage of generativity’ (adulthood) is concerned with ‘promoting the growth and well-being of future generations through parenting, teaching, mentoring, institutional involvement, and a range of other social behaviors.’28 Participants driven predominantly by the quest to discover their fathers’ military family histories often compiled comprehensive and detailed documents as a permanent record for future generations; others achieved similar results through contributing to online memorial sites. Highly generative adults are more likely to produce narratives that feature ‘redemption sequences’, that is narratives that include ‘setbacks, failures, losses, and disappointments’ followed by ‘positive outcomes’.29 Their incorporation creates opportunities to redeem past emotional traumas and set the scene for a new internal relationship with the father. Redemption sequences are often closely associated with ‘turning points’ in the narrative or, as Lynn Abrams refers to them, ‘epiphanic moments’.30 In some cases, participants displayed a particular capacity for generativity and reflection, by spontaneously pointing out redemption sequences in their own narratives. Deirdre described how her father became angry if they didn’t eat the food put in front of them: So, anyway, I suppose in the long run it made me a better person … What did? Well, everything that I went through, because I’d decided that my kids were gonna have the best upbringing ever. You know, I would be strict to a point, because I’d want them to grow up into proper people. … I mean my daughter, she always says, oh, mum, you know, I remember us growing up, I’ve only got happy memories with you.31

Deirdre’s reference to an idealized ‘best upbringing ever’ hinted at manic reparation, suggesting that her relationship with her father remained unresolved (an interpretation supported by other parts of her testimony). By wanting her children to ‘grow up into proper people’ she barely disguised her own history of low self-esteem. Selena’s relationship with her father had been warm and affectionate, but she still felt a need ‘to protect him from my failings … I did my best but was never convinced it was good enough. He never did or said anything to make me think he wasn’t happy with me, it’s just I felt I needed to be better. That he deserved it.’32 Her father told the family ‘little snippets of stories from the camps’ that often bore a moral message; these family stories then became models of redemptive practice for the children. As a result, he was held in high-regard

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and affection by his family.33 It is against this strong value-based background that we should see Selena’s explicit urge to ‘protect’ her father and to compensate him through her behaviour. A sense of guilt or regret suffused many testimonies, and generated the emotional drive behind participants’ subsequent memory practices. Many wished that they could have learned more about the war directly from their fathers. While they wished their fathers had volunteered information, they often felt moments of intense regret that they didn’t ask more questions when they’d had the opportunity. Kim’s comments were typical, although few participants had been given such an explicit invitation: I do have a really big regret. When I was a teenager I sat with my boyfriend and my dad and watched Merry Christmas Mr. Lawrence, and afterwards, he said, oh, what do you think of that then? And as a typical teenager, I went ‘Oh, that was boring, wasn’t it?’ And I didn’t really understand the concept, and what he was getting at. And I often think that, you know, if I had shown an interest then, he possibly would have opened up to me. But sadly – obviously – I didn’t. Erm … and it wasn’t until after he died that I came across some photographs, and I recognized one as being in Kandy in Sri Lanka.34

Regret has both emotional and cognitive components which may show themselves through ruminating and counterfactual thinking.35 As Kim said: ‘if I had shown an interest then, he possibly would have opened up to me.’ Stephen’s story shows how regret could colour a life, yet also release the psychic energy to flourish against the odds. Born in the early years of the war, Stephen was thought by other members of the family to have borne the brunt of his father’s immediate post-war trauma. The underlying details were never revealed to me, and I suspect were not widely shared within the family. Speaking of his mother, he gives the slightest of hints about the state of his father after repatriation, but screened behind a trope: ‘She cared for our Dad when he got back from the World War, a very different man from the one she married in 1939!’ When his father’s health was deteriorating sharply, circumstances conspired to prevent their meeting until it was too late: I did not take what was to be the last opportunity to talk to Dad about his illness or of his experiences in the war. I regret it deeply now. I have come to realize that I knew very little about my father and am perturbed by this terrible ignorance. Was it because I was so busy with my own family and a busy career, or was it because I had not cared about him enough or didn’t appreciate how little I knew about him?36

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In a single sweep, Stephen reflected on his relationship with his father, reviewed his own attitudes and values, and expressed his regret in passionate terms. He also determined to pre-empt any such outcome for his own children by writing his life story. For Stephen, writing for the next generation was a powerful form of memory practice designed to achieve both reparative and generative outcomes.

Reparation The theme of reparation runs through many of the children’s testimonies. Melanie Klein, whose clinical work focused on young children and their parents, is credited with introducing the idea of reparation into the psychoanalytic lexicon. In psychoanalysis conflict is never far away, in this case the ‘constant interaction between love and hate in all of us’.37 As Klein makes clear, these emotions are universal. They begin to evolve from our earliest days, in the crucible of the mother–baby relationship, and extend into the relations we have with our parents. Love–hate tensions continue throughout life, and these frustrations express themselves in ways unique to each individual. Klein frames the position as follows: in our unconscious phantasy we make good the injuries which we did in phantasy, and for which we still unconsciously feel very guilty. This making reparation is, in my view, a fundamental element in love and in all human relationships.38

It is important to distinguish between ‘reparation’ and ‘manic reparation’. Whereas reparation is based in reality, manic reparation is founded on a pretence, a lack of genuine concern, and aims to avoid feelings of guilt. In short, ‘mock reparation’.39 Although outward appearances may look the same, the interior motivations are quite different. In manic reparation, the individual avoids acknowledging guilt by exerting omnipotent control – that can be characterized as ‘That’s all sorted, then, let’s move on’. In these cases, ‘The full experience of the sadness, guilt, and despair … is avoided through manic defenses of denial and idealization of self and other, or through repetitive, exaggerated attempts at reparation.’40 For instance, if a child harbours idealized, unrealistic versions of their father (what psychoanalyst Karl Figlio calls ‘remembering false’41) then memories of childhood traumas and conflicts may remain repressed and unresolved. While much of this emotional turmoil occurs unconsciously, this is not the whole story. As a psychoanalytic concept, reparation ‘refers to an internal reality that can be expressed through an external reality’.42 In true reparation the emotions

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underpinning the sense of guilt are capable of being transformed and redirected into positive behaviours, which is not the case in manic reparation. Indeed Klein and others cite reparation as a powerful driver behind many socially constructive and creative endeavours. Michael Roper points out how reparation can manifest as positive action in the real world: In the individual’s attempt to repair damage to their internal world, reparation becomes, in Bob Hinshelwood’s phrase, ‘a powerhouse for mature energy and creativity in the actual external world’. It is through humanitarian projects in the external world that reparative impulses are enacted.43

Klein made little distinction between reparation in phantasy and reparation in reality,44 but for the children of FEPOWs this distinction could be critical given that so many of the fathers were no longer alive: reparation in phantasy was their only option. The experiences of Joanna – discussed later in this chapter – demonstrate the benefits of being able to ‘make repairs’ in reality, arising through unexpected opportunities occurring late in her father’s life. Others were not as fortunate, and were left with the aftermath of childhood, with the guilt of ‘not asking’, or being unable to work through their childhood traumas while their fathers were still alive. Figlio argues that we might even think of memory itself as reparation, ‘reviving the past through a benign and restorative relationship to it’, and manic reparation as embodying the ‘ambiguous, ambivalent, conflicted impulse to assert a falsifying, forgetting, or distorting memory against restorative memory’.45 While the concepts of reparation and manic reparation are valuable in understanding participants’ responses to the past, they should not be seen as stable phenomena or in binary opposition. The battles the children fought with their pasts saw repeated fluctuations between the two forms of reparation, as will be seen in Deirdre’s story later in this chapter.

Turning points in the lives of three daughters Looking back on our lives, we rarely see a smooth progression in our relationships, our work or in our health: we are all too familiar with life’s ups and downs. Social researchers have found the concept of the ‘turning point’ helpful in understanding how people construct meaning from perceived continuities and discontinuities.46 Dan McAdams defines a turning point very simply as a ‘particular episode in your life story in which you underwent an important

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transition or change with respect to your understanding of yourself.’47 These significant life events are generally taken to be persistent and often relational, and alter how we relate to others. Furthermore, it could be many years before individuals recognized the role of these new trajectories in their lives, and for them to be transformed into new personal narratives.48 The stories of Jacqui, Joanna and Deirdre show how major turning points challenged taken-for-granted aspects of their lives, and opened up psychological spaces for them to reconsider the relationships they had with their fathers, both subjectively (psychically) and objectively (behaviourally). Jacqui ‘I could hear him just breaking into a sob.’

Born six years after the war, Jacqui’s relationship with her father had been ‘awful’. By the time she had reached her early forties, Jacqui had lost both parents, and the boxed-up bundles of unread family papers shifted from loft to loft as she moved houses and relationships. After sixteen years, she finally began to work her way through these boxes. Amongst the dusty documents, she found numerous letters written by her father to her mother while he was in active military service, before he was taken prisoner. Reading these letters she was forced to confront a man much different from the person she had known throughout her life: He is a different person. I’ve read a letter where he talks about Cliff [her eldest brother], when Cliff was little. And this must have been when he was in the Sudan. He was away from mum for a year, before he was taken prisoner. He wrote letters all the way through the Sudan … to my darling, you know, all these little pet names he had for her. And, you know, give Cliff a kiss from me and bladi-bla-di-bla. So he was clearly different then.49

She says that her brother ‘got the worst … because [Dad] was so raw.’ Jacqui read this letter to Cliff on the telephone: And I read this letter to Cliff, and he … burst into tears. Cliff is now seventy-five, living abroad. And I said I want you to hear this – ’cos he never came to dad’s funeral – Oh, he did, he didn’t want to. I made him come – and I said, if you don’t come, you’ll really regret it. ’Cos you can’t be estranged from someone and then just not turn up. But he said, I don’t feel any different afterwards. But when I read this extract, of the letter that mentioned Cliff, and he had a fantastic pet name for Cliff, ‘bumbles’ or something. It was so sweet, and it was so affectionate. And I read this letter out, and Cliff, I could hear him just breaking into a sob.

The emotional impact of her parents’ letters inspired Jacqui to learn more about her father’s FEPOW experiences, as well as about his early years. To begin the

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process of reparation, in phantasy, she decided to visit his childhood home overseas for the first time. This was her version of a ‘pilgrimage’: to travel to the places her father knew, such as the lake he used to row across each day to get to university: I wanted to see where he grew up and feel what he felt. And I think I tried to understand how he got to be where he was. But I don’t know. I mean I would have liked to have known from his own words, what he felt and his hopes and fears. What did he think going to university the first time? What was that like? And what about when he got into the RAF. Was that exciting? Was he pleased or did he find it difficult?50

Jacqui’s emotional response to these long-stored letters energized an in-depth search for what her father was like before he was damaged by captivity. Her particular form of memory practice involved reconfiguring her relationship with her father: a ‘re-creation’ based on his whole life as a unique individual, not solely as her father. Once she had gathered some knowledge of his early life and his wartime experiences, she was able to identify with her father in an integrated and multidimensional way. Only then could she start to construct a rationale for the family’s post-war problems, and begin to understand why she was unable to establish a secure attachment with him in childhood. At a deeper psychic level, we might construe these letters and documents as a means by which her father made posthumous reparation. Like some others, Jacqui found that the emotional toll of searching and processing new information could be overwhelming, and prove difficult to blend into everyday life. She spoke about the effect the newly discovered letters had made on her and her brothers: I had a table in my office, literally covered with all this stuff … you see I just got so immersed in it. And I went to the FEPOW conference, and thought argh! It was just doing my head in. Just too much. Bringing up all sorts of stuff for me … I just thought, no, I have to take a step back, and think.51 Joanna ‘If he had died before he got dementia, I don’t think I would have even shed a tear.’

A further level of psychic complexity arises when difficulties between child and father thrust themselves into adulthood, and reactivate earlier traumas, effectively producing a ‘re-traumatization’. Joanna’s story exemplified this. As we saw in Chapter 2, Joanna’s traumatic memories of childhood were compounded many years later by the devastating events that surrounded her mother’s death.

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Later in life, however, Joanna experienced a series of critical turning points and redemptive sequences in her relationship with her father. In the first of these, an epiphany led to an unexpected apology. Her father was in his seventies when he read an article in a FEPOW newsletter written by the daughter of a Far East prisoner of war. The woman described how her childhood wasn’t like other people’s, how they were never allowed to make a noise, were never allowed to do this or that. After reading this article, Joanna’s father responded in a way that came as a shock to her and her brother: Anyway, my father cut this out of the newsletter and sent a copy of it to my brother and a copy of it to me with a cheque each for £150, which was very unlike him. And he just said, I read this and realized that this was what your childhood was like and I’m really sorry. This was the first time he’d ever acknowledged it. And he actually recognized that’s how he had been as a father whereas before he’d never done anything wrong. He was always right, we were always wrong. So it was interesting that he … he suddenly read that piece and thought, yes, that is what I was like.52

In his eighties, he developed dementia and entered a nursing home. Shortly afterwards, Joanna was approached out of the blue by an Australian ex-POW for help with writing an article about her (Joanna’s) father for a battalion newsletter53: I took the newsletter into the nursing home to show my father, and I said, oh, just wanted to know if you’d be interested in this, daddy. I’ve been doing some research, ’cos they wanted this piece about you, so I’ve sent them this, and there’s a photo of you. And he just looked at it, and he just turned to me with tears pouring down his face. And he said, I never wanted you to have to go through this, Joanna. … So that’s what it was all about. He never wanted us to suffer or know about any of his experiences because it would upset us. … And so they kept it all in. They were all told not to talk about it anyway. We suffered the consequences of it. But we weren’t actually to suffer the knowledge of it.54

From that moment, Joanna felt that their relationship became more positive, more reciprocal. Late in life, her father, having openly accepted some responsibility, was inviting forgiveness. Joanna was grateful that, regardless of the dementia, he always knew who she was. Despite her earlier difficulties with him, she began to accept his expressions of regret (‘I never wanted you to have to go through this, Joanna’) and began to restore, and feel, a greater identification and attachment towards him. In his now weakened state of health, she felt able to meet his personal needs in a practical way. The care she now willingly gave her father embraced a level of physical intimacy that previously she could only recall

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experiencing as a child victim of his dominance and control. After learning more about her father’s war experiences, she gradually began to repair that past through the care tasks she undertook for him: He never forgot me. Even in the middle of the night, and he’d wet the bed and you‘d have to get up at three in the morning and change the bed, get him in the shower and sort him out and … all the stuff you have to do as a carer. He always knew it was me.55

Towards the very end of his life he fractured his hip, and Joanna spent many hours with him in the nursing home. She refused to let him be taken to hospital. As his life ebbed away, she made associations with her postmemories of his FEPOW past that spawned powerful emotions: I’m not having that for him. He was a prisoner of war, he is not having that for his last days. So, I said, he’s staying where he is. And that’s what happened. Hours I spent with him. … He had the best possible care. But he took weeks and weeks and weeks … and he was … in the end skin and bone. He was probably about the size of when he came back from the war.56

Eventually he sank into a comatose state, but then had a moment of lucidity: He pointed at me … I was at the end of the bed … and he just pointed and said, Joanna. And I had to go round and hug him and everything, and I said to him, I’ve got your cygnet ring. Because it’s fallen off, his hands were so thin. I said your ring has fallen off, daddy, I’ve got your cygnet ring. Look I am wearing your cygnet ring. And he straight away looked at the ring, and then he looked at his hand. And he’d been in a coma for weeks! It was extraordinary. He was extraordinary. So, he definitely knew me.57

Joanna’s yearning for a ‘good father’ could not have been more evident. Her growing understanding and forgiveness of her father’s flaws were strengthened during her pilgrimage to Singapore (see Chapter 7), and her level of empathy was deepened by the background research she was undertaking. By adding to her knowledge in this way, she was able to put his war trauma alongside the trauma he had inflicted upon her and, perhaps, achieve a more balanced reparative response: Since he got dementia, and certainly since he’s died, I’ve done a lot more research into it, and going out to Singapore, and going round Changi museum. It is just absolutely dreadful what they went through. Dreadful. So, how, how they – how he – ever managed to live a vaguely normal life, I don’t know. … even getting back at all was a complete miracle, and how incredibly strong he must have been.

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Both in mind and body. Just to get through it and come back. The fact that he wrecked our lives … well it really wasn’t his fault. But it made me respect him more. Whereas before, I mean, I’d always said if he had died … well, anytime before, really … anytime before he got the dementia, I don’t think I would have even shed a tear.58

Her use of language, here and elsewhere, implied that her approach to memory practices were focused on meeting her emotional needs. The highly charged nature of her testimony suggested that she was enacting past feelings during the interview (itself a form of memory practice), as a way of reaching greater composure. Deirdre ‘You might have to ask me something.’

Deirdre’s childhood had been scarred by physical and emotional trauma, and many years afterwards she was still coming to terms with this. From a very young age, she had been traumatized by her father’s crushing behaviour. Deirdre was quite nervous about meeting me, and I had the impression that she had been bottling up these memories and emotions for many years. Her twin sister had initially agreed to be interviewed at the same time, but changed her mind at the last moment. According to Deirdre her sister had suffered even more than she had. I began the interview with my usual ‘open’ invitation – ‘Maybe you could tell me something about your early memories of childhood and see where that takes you.’ After struggling to get started, she responded with ‘You might have to ask me something.’ Once the initial hurdle was overcome, she spoke with increasing assurance for the next three hours. Her narrative was graphic and detailed, with powerful and emotive material emerging in the first few minutes: What are the first strong memories you have of your father, shall we say? … Well, to put it in a nutshell, me and my sister were petrified of him. You’ll need to explain that, though, won’t you? Yes. Well, he was a very violent man. And, you know, I don’t know how my poor mum put up with it. Erm … I mean I can explain to you … in incidents. Yes. … Please. I suppose my earliest memories … We lived in London. And it was a three storey house and we lived in the basement. And obviously when my father came home from the camps, he’d caught malaria like everybody else did, and he also had TB. He had a bit of a short, very short, fuse. And we’d been, you know, bathed and hair-washed and everything like that. I decided to go out in the garden and throw a load of dirt about. All got in my hair, on my clothes. He went ballistic! And, you know, aside from the good hiding I got, erm … I had, you know, quite

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long hair with little ringlets on. He just got these scissors and cut my hair off. So, I can remember that and feeling absolutely devastated.59

But worse was to come for Deirdre and her sister: There was, for instance, a time when he was teaching us to learn to tell the time. And we could only have been about seven. And he’d made these two little leather stools. He sat us in front of the fireplace, and on the mantelpiece was the clock. So, Jill’s there, I’m here. And he’d go out of the room, come back in and ask us what the time was. It was because we were so frightened, we couldn’t comprehend the telling of the time anyway. And obviously we got it wrong all the time. And he went out of the room again, and my sister was dying to go to the toilet. And she kept saying to me, [lowers her voice] ‘I need the toilet, I’m gonna wet myself.’ And when he came back in and asked the time, I said, Jill needs to go to the toilet. Badly. And he said, ’til you can tell me the time, you will not get up and go to the toilet. So, consequently, she wet herself. ’Course it … it all went into this leather stool that he’d made. [intake of breath] And [long exhalation] … … he just dragged her into the bathroom, and … he just punched and punched and punched her.60

Deirdre recalled this intensely traumatic memory with no melodramatic flourishes, and the manner of its telling made her testimony all the more difficult to witness. Barely school age, these twin sisters were subjected to extreme violence from their father. One can only imagine how Deirdre must have felt at the time, watching, and listening to her sister suffering in this way. Meanwhile, living conditions in their basement home deteriorated. Stagnant water had collected beneath the floorboards, and the council condemned the flat. Not long afterwards, her father was taken into a sanatorium for a year to undergo surgery for tuberculosis: You know, most children, if one of their parents had to go away for a long time would be mortally upset, wouldn’t they? We were highly delighted. … My sister and I were quite close, and we weren’t going to get hit any more. Do you know what I mean?61

The response of the children to their father’s hospitalization, while perfectly rational in the circumstances, demonstrated just how far the family had drifted away from the norms of a healthy home and family life. Deirdre spoke about her father’s upbringing and his career in the navy. Born in 1912, he was the ninth surviving child out of ‘about’ thirteen siblings, and had been raised in care. ‘This is why mum always made excuses for him. Because he was raised in Dr Barnardo’s.’62 Deirdre’s mother varied the rationalizations she made for

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her husband’s behaviour according to the situation. We saw in Chapter 2 how ‘three-and-a-half years in a prison camp’ was a sufficient response to ward off a neighbour’s threat to report his abusive behaviour to the authorities. At seventeen her father had joined the navy, remaining until the end of the war. Half-a-century later, in the 1990s, a few years before his death at the age of eighty-six, Deirdre began researching her family history. In the course of this research, she acquired her father’s records from Barnardo’s, but did not share them with her mother: ‘she was quite frail. She had osteoporosis, and, you know, she would have got very emotional reading that.’63 The discovery of the Barnardo’s records had a decisive impact on Deirdre, and drove her deeper into her family history. A decade or so later, she had moved on to uncovering more of her father’s FEPOW background. The Barnardo’s records had opened Deirdre’s eyes to her father’s socially deprived upbringing. But the most intense emotional turning point in Deirdre’s story of her relationship with her father came after the chance discovery of a small book. She described this key event hesitantly, almost with embarrassment: ‘We must talk about this, if we don’t talk about anything else. You know, I am … I am now … I-I’m pretty proud of him.’64 After the account she had given of her childhood, these words took me by surprise. She continued talking while showing me the book: I sent for this book … and I sat up all night reading it. How did you come across the book in the first place? Well, I actually went on Google and just googled my father’s name. And because he got the … DSM,65 is it DSM? All these different things came up about him. And he got it because of being on this boat … that took on the Japanese. So that must have been quite a startling find. It was. It was startling. So, yeah, basically by reading it, that’s how I found out, you know, that he landed on the island. But it was getting there from the boat sinking that was horrendous. ’Cos you’d got the Japanese firing down on you. There was eighty-eight I think people on board that boat, and it was a mixture of Chinese, there was some naval men. So you only came across this after your father had died. Is that right? Oh, yeah. I didn’t know about it before. And was your mother alive? Did you discuss it with her? Yes. I don’t think I had the book but there was quite a bit on the internet about that boat. So there was eighty-eight people on that boat and only ten survived.66

Deirdre’s adulthood was regularly punctuated by distressing incidents involving her father. Despite this, the revelations of his naval past, with its individual

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psychic and global historical resonances, caused Deirdre to rethink the relationship with her father. While throwing fresh, more positive light on her father’s character, this new information could not fully redeem the emotional damage already done. The underlying conflict between memories of humiliation and violence inflicted during childhood, and the later emergence of a tentative and posthumous sense of pride in more recent times, remained unresolved, as can be seen from the following extract: And he was eighty-six, I think, when he died. What happened was, he’d fallen over, after drinking about half a bottle of brandy, and broken his hip. And then mum decided she’d have to get an ambulance because he was in so much pain. Within two days he was dead. He was going down to the theatre, and there was me, my sister, my son – my father was very fond of my son. It was as if he was fond of the males in the family, but not the females. … So, quarter to two, two o’clock in the morning, I get a phone call, saying, your father’s got fluid in his lungs. He’s not going to survive. Do you want to come and see him? I didn’t go. I did ring my mum straight away. I didn’t say to her they’d asked me if I wanted to go and see him. And she didn’t say, should I go and see him? She did go and see him when he was laid out. But I didn’t actually go and say good-bye to him. I do live with that. But I suppose I just thought, well, there’s nothing I can do. And I didn’t want to go up there and say a lot of things I didn’t mean. So that’s why I took that decision. … I phoned my sister and said that dad had passed away. There’s no way she would have gone. She would have had the same thinking as me. So, when your dad died, what would you say was the state of your relationship between you and him? Well, it wasn’t as bad as with my sister, obviously. I was talking to him. But I’d quite often put the phone down on him. Because he was just so rude. … Apart from his drinking and his gambling, he was also a womanizer.67

My time with Deirdre was drawing to a close when, in response to my final question, she chose to describe how the family had handled the funeral arrangements. This turned out to be an event replete with ambiguity and vivid symbolism: Is there anything else that you want to say …? The only other bad thing I feel is, when my dad died, you get the discussion of what, you know, is he gonna be cremated? Is he gonna be buried? And I said to my mum, we could approach the Royal Navy at Portsmouth and perhaps put his ashes out to sea. I said that because he was a bit of a wanderlust, my father,

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he couldn’t settle in one place. I didn’t want to feel compelled that I’d gotta go and keep putting flowers on his grave, or … and birthdays and things like that. I didn’t want that pressure. And so, I was being a bit selfish really. And so we all went. My sister had never been on a boat in her life, not even across the channel, so she was a bit nervous. But it wasn’t actually scattering the ashes. We had to get a little casket, lead lined, so it was actually going to sit on the bottom of the ocean.68 When I found that out, I did feel bad. … ‘Cos I had this idea that you would open this casket and just let the wind take it. And where the wind took it, it settled you know. So, I do feel a bit guilty about that. You weren’t aware of that until it actually happened? No, no. Well, until actually we were at Portsmouth, and mum said, I had to get a flipping lead lined little casket. ’Cos my brother said to her – he was carrying it – he goes to my mum, God in heaven, he goes, what have you got in this box? And she said, well, it’s got lead in it. And then it clicked. And I thought, oh, God. So I said, they don’t open it then, and let the ashes out? And she goes, well, no apparently not. They need to know it’s on the bottom of the ocean. Yeah, so I did go through a stage of feeling very guilty about that. It was a lovely service they do. They do you tea, and sandwiches, and it’s all at no expense to us. It was quite a way out into the Solent. It was quite emotional really. Yeah. Plus the fact that I thought, he can’t come back and haunt me. Or us, I should say.69

Deirdre had made a significant emotional ‘turn’ well into middle age when she made a chance discovery about her father’s wartime life: from immersion in memories of a horrendous childhood, to a hesitant capacity to feel pride in her father, accompanied by fleeting feelings of guilt on her part. Deirdre’s pride in her father, or perhaps more precisely, her normative social need to express pride in her father, raises interesting questions. Had she made this transition despite, or because of, the childhood trauma? Was this a case of ego defence through reaction formation, or the partial healing of a damaged psyche? Was this reparation or manic reparation, or both? Deirdre’s behaviour at the end of his life suggested that she remained ambivalent, and still harboured negative feelings towards him. She had reached a point where she could feel some respect for him, was able to recognize and identify with his past struggles, but could not forgive the trauma he had inflicted on his wife and two daughters.70 As she wrote in a poignant and regretful email to me soon after the interview: ‘My father never showed any remorse to myself, my sister or our mother and neither did he ever apologize.’71 ***

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The personal accounts in this chapter show how children of FEPOWs have tried to find meaning in the memories they had of their fathers. As they repeatedly examined and re-examined these relationships, they revealed how often turbulent life-course trajectories created a unique interplay between their memories and present-day lives. The testimonies of Jacqui, Joanna and Deirdre illustrate the significance of turning points in their life stories, and also show how diverse these moments were. Coming to terms with problematic father– child relationships could take many decades, each participant having to find their own way of living with the psychological vestiges of the past. However, despite having to shoulder the negative consequences of insecure relationships, these stories also demonstrate that most of the children emerged with their personal resilience enhanced.

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Home as a site of remembrance

Although public commemoration of the war in the Far East has grown significantly in recent decades, it is in the home where our memories surface and circulate with most intensity. Eminent historian Jay Winter offers the context: War memorials are collective symbols. They speak to and for communities of men and women. Commemoration also happened on a much more intimate level, through the preservation in households of possessions, photographs, personal signatures of the dead.1

In a profound way, remembrance and memorialization begins and ends in the home. Plans are made there, records kept there, and while the plans are often executed elsewhere, their impact is always absorbed and processed most fully at home. Many different facets of domestic memorialization emerged during my research and grew in significance as the interviews proceeded. Despite this, the current research literature under-emphasizes the role of domestic artefacts in the memory practices adopted by the children of FEPOWs, and perhaps in memory studies more generally.2

The curious role of objects in our lives In Chapter 2, I referred to Roger Kennedy’s description of the ‘psychic home’ as the place where we house the collection of identifications and attachments we accumulate through childhood and which, with good fortune, provides a secure base for our future relationships.3 Our physical home complements the psychic one, and is the external canvas upon which we make visible aspects of our interior world, a process described by Daniel Miller as ‘objectification’: as our external world grows so ‘we enhance our capacity as human beings’.4 This memoryscape, shared with others in many cases, becomes a tangible container of remembered events and their associated emotions.

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Crossing another’s threshold to conduct an interview for the first time gives us privileged access to that person’s domestic memoryscape and is the start of a relationship that in many cases will extend beyond the initial meeting. The locale, the house or apartment, the furniture, the décor, the objects on display – each tell their own story, and taken together provide a unique setting for listening to stories of childhood, and the personal recollections of the often complicated relationships between father and child. The home and the objects within do not impinge on the interview from the outside, but become part of the interview itself, contributing to the tone and subtle boundaries that constitute an evolving research relationship. Acquiring possessions is an everyday and essential part of establishing, maintaining and modifying our personal identity, necessary both to reassure ourselves and to display to others. But objects are more than simple reminders of identity and continuity, they also provide ‘a symbolic link to significant others, living and deceased’.5 Wearing your father’s watch, displaying a photograph of your parents’ wedding, preserving holiday souvenirs … all are ways of staying in touch with the past and keeping an emotional connection with loved ones. Some mementoes and photographs are ‘coated with the alluring patina of loss’,6 and rise above the texture of everyday life. The objects treasured by the children of the FEPOWs have many accumulated and distinctive meanings, often derived from emotionally charged personal histories, thrown into heightened relief by the Second World War. In the lives of the fathers, and later in the lives of their children, we can observe how ‘memory-evoking possessions’ may become incorporated into an ‘extended self ’.7 Domestic memory practices include sifting through the father’s papers and belongings; searching for and discovering key artefacts; deciding how and where to store or display photos, documents or other items (and which family member would take responsibility for this); selecting which are to be kept, which discarded; and deciding what use should be made of them, for example, ‘archived’ or displayed, or perhaps used as the basis of creative work. Significant objects formed an integral part of how the children told their own and their fathers’ stories, and blurred the boundaries between subject and object: In this endless shuttling back and forth between the mind and the material world, it seems that objects can act like subjects and that subjects can be acted upon like objects.8

Artefacts touched by trauma, whether transmitted or experienced directly during childhood, are imbued with particular significance and complex emotional

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meanings. The relationship between memory, artefacts, images and the material environment is a close and evolving one. Sarah De Nardi believes we should treat war mementoes as ‘sites of feeling’, as objects embodying emotions, rather than mere ‘sites of memory or relics’.9 Expanding on this idea, Sabine Marschall describes ‘memory objects’ as: special objects or personal belongings that elicit deliberate or involuntary memories of homeland, home culture, important places, episodes in one’s own autobiographical past and significant social relations (kin, friends, colleagues) associated with home or origin. In a narrow sense, they are aide-mémoires, precipitating memory and facilitating the process of remembrance. Such special personal objects can be said to have agency in that they trigger emotional responses and stimulate social effects and actions.10

Donald Winnicott provided a psychoanalytic explanation for our attachment to special ‘evocative objects’.11 In his 1953 paper on ‘Transitional objects and transitional phenomena’, he set out his views on the place of objects in normal psychological development.12 As infants, we learn to distinguish between what is part of us (hand, fingers, leg), and what is not (cot, blanket, mother’s breast). In the course of this learning, the infant begins to ‘weave other-than-me objects into the personal pattern’.13 Many infants come to depend on these ‘comfort objects’ (such as a blanket or piece of cloth) to help them get to sleep, or to cling to when anxious. Winnicott called them ‘transitional objects’ and referred to the space they occupy in the child’s experiential world as the ‘transitional space’.14 As the child grows, one transitional object may be substituted for another while still meeting emotional needs; the transition from a comfort blanket to a pet rabbit would be a case in point. The use of transitional objects has its origins in the period before the child has gained a full awareness of external reality, which is why this influential pattern persists into adulthood, and why a cherished object can continue to symbolize attachment to the parents. In other words, it can act as ‘a substitute object for an important relationship’.15 For those participants whose childhoods were marred by an ‘absent’ father, we might surmise that certain artefacts with close associations to the father acted as substitutes for a lack of secure attachments in childhood. In my own life, the drawing, The Artist from Essex has served this purpose (see Figure 10, p. 175). Throughout our lives, we enter into increasingly complex and interdependent relationships with objects. We require many of these to meet our basic physical needs; others, however, integrate much more intimately with our sense of self. As anthropologist David Parkin expresses it: ‘a person lacks a fixed, decontextualized

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essence but is made through social interaction and by taking on the meanings of things standing in a special relationship to him or her.’16 Each of us feels closely connected to certain of our memory objects, especially during periods of reverie or contemplation, such as occur on anniversaries, or at remembrance events. Tim Ingold employs actor network theory (ANT) to explain how material objects lie within a relational field that comprises the living and non-living, both of which are constitutive of our sense of self.17 Material objects in themselves have no intrinsic meaning. But when brought into alignment with particular individuals (or groups in some circumstances), they may take on attributed meanings, mediated by the memories and experiences of the individuals concerned. More than that, under certain conditions people and objects may form fresh entities, human–object networks, sets of relationships that can hold memories and meanings. A basic premise of ANT is that the social sciences have neglected the influence of material objects in how humans establish, maintain and change meanings, identities, and manage relationships: If human beings form a social network it is not because they interact with other human beings. It is because they interact with human beings and endless other materials too.18

Physical objects are essential components of heterogeneous networks that connect individuals, families and groups. The material elements have a tangible, present reality, but also a psychic one through their presence in the ‘object relations’ world of a person’s inner life.19 Individuals go to exceptional lengths to protect and preserve objects they value. Many FEPOWs managed to hide diaries, drawings and other items, knowing that their discovery could lead to severe punishments. My father succeeded in preserving his Voigtländer camera for six months in Java, and then for a further three years in Japan, by wrapping and burying it in the different camps.20 In some instances, artefacts associated with a father’s traumatic past became so saturated  – so overdetermined – with personal meaning as to be considered ‘sacred’,21 or ‘transformational’.22 Even so, their meaning and significance may only become apparent many years later, when they are discovered or rediscovered, and re-evaluated. Margaret Gibson makes the affecting observation that it can take the death of a loved one before we ‘truly notice’ their personal belongings.23 The FEPOW-related memory objects I was shown during interviews possessed a unique piquancy and resonance for a plethora of reasons, not least because so many of them had survived extreme conditions and had outlived their owners.

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Memory objects in practice Far East prisoners of war who were liberated from captivity at the war’s end returned with a great variety of objects: flags, swords, tins, badges, documents … some received or taken from the Japanese, others exchanged with fellow POWs, or acquired as gifts from well-wishers during repatriation. Although the psychosocial rationales behind the assemblages of objects brought back to this country are impossible to unravel with any certainty, undoubtedly some had a personal meaning when they were acquired, while for subsequent generations they attained greater significance with the passage of time. Many of these objects were witnesses to wartime suffering, but also to courage and survival – transitional objects that were ‘more like ancestral memorials encoding continuity between and across the generations’.24 The meanings attached to an artefact may be transformed in quite remarkable and unexpected ways. Derek prized a Japanese flag brought home by his father. It was inscribed with handwritten Japanese characters that I was able to get translated by Japanese friends: Yes, this is one of the flags, which when a young man was conscripted and register in a military unit, his family, relatives and friends give their signatures on a Japanese flag, with some encouraging message for a young soldier. Now I can read the young man’s first name, which is Kenichirou. KEN means wise: ICHI means one: ROU is a suffix for boys names. He must have been the eldest son.25

Two families, two cultures and two histories fortuitously brought together through a single artefact: a ‘sacred’ object to both sides yet one whose full cultural and personal meanings only became manifest seven decades after the end of hostilities.26 Carol Kidron asks whether material objects might be an alternative means by which survivors can ‘transmit emotive and corporeal traces of difficult and “unknowable” pasts’, and so breach the ‘wall of silence’.27 Louise’s father didn’t speak about the war, but when she was seven or eight she would creep into his bedroom and look through the horde of letters and artefacts he had secreted in an old Red Cross box at the bottom of the wardrobe: ‘It was like trying to find something I suppose. You know, the things that just happened that weren’t talked about.’28 Not for the first time, we are invited to see the wardrobe as a ‘veritable organ of the secret psychological life’.29 Not such a fanciful speculation, if we envisage the excitement flooding through young Louise when she first

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came across this magical hiding place.30 She remembers the box contained a ration card, documents from the War Office and letters between her father and his sister. ‘I don’t know if he ever looked at it, but I used to.’31 Kidron also notes how survivors’ artefacts were integrated into ‘mundane and habitual domestic practice’.32 As a boy, Derek was regularly reminded of his father’s time as a prisoner of war because his father wore a ‘Japanese hat that he used to use for painting the ceilings to keep the paint off his head’.33 Many years later he began to see the hat, the flag and other artefacts as constituting a unique group of objects with personal and historical significance. Overwhelmingly, families cling on to their old family documents, even when they are rarely looked at. This urge is particularly tenacious in the case of war artefacts and records associated with the father. Jacqui described clearing out the family home after both her parents had died: It was a nightmare to clear out because they were demented … cups and saucers in the wrong parts of the house. All sorts of weird and wonderful things flung in carrier bags … a mishmash. I just gathered it all together.34

After this initial tidying up, there followed a series of house moves during which her father’s things – in boxes but still unsorted – travelled from loft to loft. There was a suitcase containing clothes, boots and log books, and several boxes, one of which held her mother and father’s diaries. ‘And I just thought, that’s Dad’s stuff. I’ll get round to sorting that.’35 In the year before our interview, sixteen years after her father’s death, when she was sixty years of age, Jacqui finally thought it was time to have a look. ‘Oh, my God! These letters, literally hundred of letters. From Dad … wooing Mum. I mean he’s a different person.’36 She didn’t begin to read the letters immediately, but waited several months. Eventually, she took them all out and organized them on the kitchen table. Some had been written a few weeks before his capture. ‘And they just upset me so much. I mean, it was like re-living it for him.’ Jacqui’s husband had questioned whether she should read the letters at all because they were so personal. ‘I said, well I am trying to find out who my Dad was. And to try to identify anything that makes me think that I’m a … part of him.’37 The theme of identification runs irresistibly through Jacqui’s account, highlighting the psychic challenge that these letters presented her with. During childhood she was dealing with a ‘badly damaged’ and emotionally remote father, living in a home full of tension … and so she adjusted accordingly. As an adult, she needed to wait until the time was right before she could face up to the father she never knew, the one who was beginning to emerge from these letters.

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Wartime diaries have a unique resonance amongst the objects left for future generations. In Chapter 3, I described how Carol Cooper, the founder of the Children of Far East POWs (COFEPOW) charity, discovered her father’s diary by chance. This revelation inspired her to start a campaign for greater recognition of the victims of the war in the Far East, which led to COFEPOW and then the development of the FEPOW Building at the National Memorial Arboretum. Carol’s charitable work acquired an extra intensity because her father had died in 1943 in Burma from multiple tropical diseases. She had never known him in person. The identities of the fathers are fused with these diaries. The objects are a material link with the father, they blur the boundaries between generations, and accrue symbolic wealth through the emotional work individuals put in to preserve their ‘inalienability’. These diaries might be considered ‘inalienable’ because they are a part of family history, possess a ‘wealth’ that is not commodifiable, and therefore should be kept out of normal circulation.38 Here Stella introduces her dad’s diary: He was very determined, my dad. When he came back from war, he visited all of the families, men from his regiment, who’d been killed. And he actually went to the families and talked to them. They were all written in the back of his diary. I can remember seeing this, when I was a little girl, and I was fascinated by it. I used to look through the things … Where was it? It was in a bureau upstairs in the bedroom, his bedroom. Nosey bugger I was! Used to go poking around! I used to look through it. His writing’s very small and a lot of it was in pencil. So you couldn’t really read it. And I just was fascinated by it. But … I don’t think I ever asked him. And he never offered any information. Which I think is very strange, you know … Why didn’t I ask him?39

In POW camps, writing materials were scarce and, in any case, items had to be hidden, hence diaries were small. To exploit the limited space, the men frequently wrote in very small handwriting, often in pencil. The fact that I got the diary is quite a … was a big event. Because initially it went across to America. Oh, really? What was the story of that then? Well, to my knowledge I was the only one that showed any interest in it, as a girl. However, having said that, my sister’s daughter decided she wanted to take the diary. So she took it away to America. When was this? This was just after my dad died.

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No parents alive at that point then. So, you were deciding what to do with things? Yes, and so she took it, and … they went to her, you know. Anyway, she transcribed it, and that was great. But then I thought well, it was inappropriate I felt for her to have it. I was very keen that we offered it to either the Arboretum or Alnyck which is where they have the fusiliers.40 That’s their museum up there. So it took a long time before I was able to get my hands on it. I wanted it back, in England. And I wanted it looked after, as well. I still feel very much we need to put it somewhere where it’ll be kept safe for the future. So, I got it in the end. So, I’ve got some of my dad’s stubbornness as well. Just kept at it. Come on … it belongs here!41

Feelings through photographs The power of photography to reflect and shape personal and political memories and meanings is widely recognized and discussed within the fields of social and cultural history. Authors such as Marianne Hirsch,42 Roland Barthes,43 Raphael Samuel44 and Annette Kuhn45 have all addressed the interaction between memory, photography and historiography. I had invited every participant to show me any photographs that had particular meaning for them. When they introduced photographs into the interviews, their narratives often shifted direction, complementing, or colliding with, their earlier recollections. Memories were revived, narrowing the gap between past and present, and – as Carol Smart says – enabling ‘personal meanings [to] iterate with social and cultural meanings’.46 My interview with Isla illustrates this well. Two family photographs in particular fuelled the intersubjective dynamics of the interview, as well as connecting with the broader social context. Midway through the interview, Isla brought out a group of family photographs from one of her many folders. The first showed her father sitting on a bench in the grounds of the hospital where he was receiving treatment for the effects of captivity: That’s a photo of my father and my sister. And if you look at … I didn’t want this to be on there, but that’s Jonathan my son.47

At first glance the scene looked rather mundane. In Roland Barthes’ terminology it seemed to be an example of ‘studium’48 – the word he used to denote an unremarkable photograph that we can comfortably understand because we share the photographer’s cultural frame of reference. However, as I examined the photograph further, I noticed that Jonathan was black. This awareness

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interrupted – or ‘punctuated’ – my rather casual inspection of the photograph. I was not sure how to react, or if I should at all. Barthes describes this sensation as a photograph’s ‘punctum’. The photo contained an element of surprise, ‘an element that arises from the scene … shoots out of it like an arrow … bruises me, is poignant.’49 Given Isla’s cautionary and ambiguous words (‘I didn’t want this to be on there’), this exposure was probably ‘bruising’ to her at that moment. The image had certainly sparked my curiosity, but I stayed silent about what I had noticed. A silent collusion perhaps. Half-an-hour later she brought out another photo, which again included Jonathan, this time at a family occasion. By now my relationship with Isla had moved on, and trust was growing. ‘This is my mother and father’, she explained, ‘… and Jonathan.’ At that point, I felt she was inviting me to enquire further, so I asked ‘Jonathan’s erm … he’s of mixed heritage isn’t he?’ ‘Yes’, she replied: I remember that my father … my father was in a terrible state about it because this was a small village and I was a big scandal. … they were planning all these things and what was to happen to me. You know what it was like in the late sixties, and I was only sixteen. They were going to send me away and I was going to have the baby adopted or … you know, have an abortion. … It was a terrible time. My father said to my mother, take her to the doctor’s and say she’s got to have a termination. And the doctor said, no, she’s a healthy young girl. I didn’t realize, you know, my father had such issues. And even when I gave birth, on my own, I had nobody with me. I was barely seventeen. And they said, we’ll see you at visiting time.50 … And my mother and father came in and the first thing that they said to me was, ‘Oh, oh, he’s coloured. Are you keeping him?’ ’Cos they didn’t know whether to give him to me to hold. And I remember them saying, ‘Are you keeping him love?’ And I remember saying to them, ‘You must be bloody mad.’ I remember swearing. And saying, ‘After all I’ve been through, do you think I’d give my son up?’ And then one of them said – because there’s so few black people around here. But they weren’t gonna give me him until I said I was keeping him, you know. … And I was stubborn … nobody’s going to stop me having my baby … Then after I had Jonathan, it was as though we got closer. ’Cos he got close to Jonathan.51

She managed to win her father round to the idea of her keeping the baby, and in fact Jonathan and her father formed a close bond over the next few years. Although relationships within the family were repaired, Isla had to put up with a great deal of overt racism from local people. Racism was rife in the

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local area during the 1960s, and attitudes towards ‘illegitimacy’ remained very conservative. ‘I had awful abuse. … One boy that used to continually stand in the door with his mother, and she’d just let him call him a wog.’52 These two photographs enabled Isla to speak more freely about her past and memories of her father.53 His time as a prisoner of war formed the emotional backdrop to much of Isla’s life, providing her with a cause to fight for, an injustice to put right. He had joined the merchant navy at fourteen years of age, then at the outbreak of war became a gunner in the Royal Artillery. Taken captive in Singapore like so many others, he spent most of his time as a POW on the Thai–Burma Railway. In autumn 1945, when Isla’s father returned home from the Far East, the neighbours put up flags to greet him. But it was his dog that first recognized him. Three-and-a-half years in a prisoner of war camp had laid waste to his body and, as it turned out, to his family also. His parents had received a telegram informing them that their son was ‘missing believed dead’. Soon afterwards, his mother had died. His father remarried quite quickly and moved away from what had been the family home. Isla’s father knew nothing of these changes until he came home. Captivity had been particularly unkind to her father. As well as having to deal with the practical and emotional consequences of the family breakdown, he returned with a clutch of medical problems. Family life was seriously blighted by his illnesses and by the need for regular visits to specialist hospitals. For the next thirty years, he struggled physically, getting increasingly tired, and finding it difficult to carry out jobs around the house. He kept in work, however, but died in his fifties. Isla showed great determination and resilience when fighting to get her father the medical help he needed, and also later when – against the odds – she won a widow’s pension for her mother. I took photographs of each person at the end of the interview. These allowed me to more easily recreate the interview in my mind’s eye, take myself back into that place and time, and feel more acutely into the dynamics of the relationship. The immersive physicality of the interview environment in Isla’s small lounge created a rather intense and claustrophobic atmosphere (see Figure 7). The avalanche of books that threatened to burst from the alcove echoed the unfettered way in which Isla spoke about her feelings. No staging here, just a reflection of an unadulterated outpouring of passionate involvement and affective commitment to a cause.54 While firmly rooted in the ambiguities of everyday life, family photos embody qualities that extend well beyond the meaning they have for the individual owner. At one level they are about social and emotional communication within the family, but they also connect with the psychosocial processes of each family member, and with the subjectivities of other observers (including oral historians).

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Figure 7  Isla’s bookshelves.

Beyond this, photos trigger discussion of cultural and social conditions in the community, as occurred during my conversation with Isla. The broader point is that photos are ‘not merely images but social objects’,55 and we need to attend to what a photograph does as well as what it is.56

Domestic memorials During my research, I was welcomed into many different homes. I quickly became intrigued by the degree to which memories of the father maintained a visible, material and individual presence in the home. In some cases, this

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took the form of a few framed photographs of the father hung randomly; in others, formal studio portraits – often taken just prior to departure for the Far East – took pride of place on the mantelpiece. Elsewhere, considerable care had been taken to assemble valued photographs and objects within a carefully chosen setting. These more formal memorials conveyed a sense of reverence. Memorials are a traditional means by which we remember people or events; they may be physical in nature or, increasingly, occupy various digital spaces. Whatever the genre, memorial practices are shaped by the cultural and religious systems prevailing in wider society, a local community or within an individual family. In most of British society, once funeral rituals have been completed, the distribution of an individual’s estate is handled through a will, but there remain other items unspecified in most wills whose fate is left to negotiations between family members. As time passes, individuals have free rein as to how they will, or will not, continue to mark the life of the deceased person. For many families, this entails preserving photographs and letters, and items of particular significance. Their fate is often unpredictable. Some become the inevitable detritus of everyday life, but others will enjoy a higher status. The most organized of the children had photos and documents already assembled into albums or wallets, and had set them out before I arrived; these were also the people who tended to point out various images and objects displayed on the living room walls: photos of the father (pre- or post-war and occasionally taken in the camps), drawings made in captivity (by the father, or received as gifts), and less familiar artefacts such as posters made to advertise camp entertainments. Perhaps most compelling were the occasions when items had clearly been arranged to form a discrete group, configured in such a way as to intimate a religious shrine. The choice and conjunction of objects often provided a context for the father’s captivity: general images of the war, books and videos about the war (or wars more generally), clustered around a focal point – the image of the father, accompanied by those of other family members. This was not the case in every home by any means; items were frequently very carefully preserved yet not displayed. When items were on display, however, they had performative potential; family members could incorporate them into their interior and exterior memory practices, placing flowers alongside, or reminiscing while carrying out the dusting. Working with second-generation Holocaust survivors, Kidron raised an interesting issue by distinguishing between memory objects located in a ‘family living room display’ (akin to a museum display) – where meanings were constrained by the displayed narrative – and those that remained ‘interwoven in

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the social milieu of everyday life’ thus retaining a lively interaction between the object (such as a spoon) and individual family members.57 For obvious reasons, when interviewing in a person’s own home the researcher will generally only get to see the ‘public’ parts of the house. In more private areas, such as the bedroom, it has been common to use a dressing table to display family photos and other memory objects.58 Similarly, items of clothing of the deceased are often preserved, but rarely displayed publicly. Although rarely evidenced during oral history research, the bereaved often cleave to clothing when dealing with the loss of a loved one.59 It is a topic that I wish I had raised with my participants but, for the moment, a personal example will serve the purpose. After my father’s death in December 1995, I found a red pullover that I had bought him the previous Christmas. Rather than give it to charity, I decided to keep it. I am still wearing it, despite the stitching visibly giving way. Faced at the time with the reality of a cupboard full of my own jumpers, I rationalize my behaviour by saying that ‘it would have been a shame to have got rid of it’, ‘it was nearly new’, and so on. Other pullovers have come and gone, but this one stubbornly remains. As I described earlier I had a difficult relationship with my father, and we were never close emotionally. Yet, by wearing this item of clothing ‘in secrecy’, I suspect I am quietly acknowledging his continuing presence – his worth – in a way I found difficult in his lifetime: a shared experience, and one that assuages my lingering sense of guilt. Although writing from a very different emotional perspective, Peter Stallybrass describes how, when wearing his dead friend’s jacket, he became ‘inhabited by his presence, taken over. If I wore the jacket, Allon wore me,’ to such a degree that he could not speak when giving a lecture, ‘I was quite literally overcome. I could not read, and an embarrassing silence ensued.’60 How relatives choose to grieve and memorialize a loved one depends very much on how they perceive the death. Recent work on ‘bad deaths’ due to Covid-19 highlights this issue very poignantly.61 In pandemic terms, bad deaths are hard to deal with because: they challenge notions of an idealized death, they prevent family members from having meaningful conversations and resolving ‘unfinished business’, they trigger pain in seeing a loved one suffer, and they may make family members feel guilty that they could not protect their loved one from the devastating situation.62

Not being able to say ‘good bye’ face-to-face has applied to many Covid-19 deaths and to all deaths that occurred in captivity. In both cases we can appreciate how a bad death might complicate the children’s ability to grieve and memorialize their fathers. The deaths of FEPOWs – whether they fell during the

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war or afterwards – were rarely uncomplicated, and emotional ambivalence was often a feature. Many families believed that the father’s captivity contributed in important ways to his death, even when that death occurred many years after the war. In Chapter 2, Derek commented on the difficulty of proving his father’s ill-health and death was due to the war. While this belief is often unverifiable in objective terms, it served to strengthen the ‘continuing bonds’63 that the children created with their fathers through their memory practices. While only a few homes had identifiable religious symbols prominently on display alongside memory objects of the father, these assemblages can sometimes resemble home ‘shrines’. Although commonplace in many cultures in east Asia, such as Japan and Vietnam, examples are few and far between in the majority of post-industrial Western cultures. An exception is the Netherlands. Writing in 2009, Wojtkowiak and Venbrux claim that domestic shrines had largely disappeared from Dutch homes, but that a 2005 survey had shown a third of respondents possessed a ‘memorial place, a gedenkplek in their home’: Home memorials are constructed for the dead, and they represent these persons’ postself in a material sense. The use of their personal belongings, together with symbols of grief (flowers and candles), gives the home memorial an important place in a private ritual of mourning, memorialising the dead and also communicating with them.64

The relationship between the primarily religious shrine and one devoted to keeping alive the memory of an ancestor is complex, and in Asia the two functions are often integrated within a single artefact. The Japanese butsudan – family altar – is a case in point, but the exact balance between ancestor worship and a specifically religious focus depends on the Buddhist sect being followed. The butsudan has been described as ‘mediating between the worldly and transcendental realms, to the perpetuation and well-being of both.’65 Objects observed in the homes of some FEPOW families may embody comparable sentiments, and meet equivalent psychic needs, but their presence is rarely substantiated by a similarly articulated rationale.

Doug and a ‘home shrine’ I took this photograph in Doug’s living room (Figure 8); this group of objects formed a dominant centrepiece along one wall. The arrangement caught my eye that day, and he agreed to let me take a photograph. I am sharing my personal

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Figure 8  Doug’s ‘shrine’.

responses to this because it was a seminal moment in the research, in fact the point at which I became most conscious of the psychosocial implications of material features within the interview setting. Contemplation, writes philosopher John Armstrong in The Intimate Philosophy of Art, ‘is given over to scrutiny of what there is to be seen. It is, literally, spending time with the object – not just time around it or standing before it, but time devoted to looking at it.’66 I hadn’t appreciated this sufficiently until I began transcribing and analysing this particular interview. At that point I began to ‘contemplate’ this photograph. On my arrival, Doug had ushered me to a chair at one side of a table up against the living room wall. I sat at one corner, Doug sat directly opposite me at the other. As I looked at Doug, I could see this ‘shrine’ clearly visible on the wall to his right-hand side. I began the interview, then, with a photograph of Doug’s father glancing diagonally across at me, with Doug straight ahead: an emotionally charged scalene triangle that, in retrospect, seemed an apt setting for the interview. The group of artefacts we see in the photograph was not put together with the intention of being viewed as art, of course. But Doug did not position the items randomly either. He actively curated them in response to not only his conscious preferences, but also to unconscious factors. A small shelf holds thirteen items, including four photographs. Above the shelf, we see his father’s three war medals

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mounted in a frame, and on the left a striking photo of the ruins of a Cornish tin mine.67 This photo resonates with our knowledge of what many FEPOWs were forced to endure when mining for coal or copper. At a deeper psychic level, this photo evokes a lost past. The dramatic silhouette, although something of a cliché from a photographic perspective, embodies ambiguity: the visible element contrasts starkly with the dark shadows. What are they hiding? The father’s war medals are top and centre, their positioning matching the esteem with which Doug wishes the viewer to judge his relationship with his father. On the left-hand side of the shelf, there is a photo of the Changi cross,68 partially obscured by a silver jug. In the centre, we have the photograph of his father, in pride of place, flanked by photos of family members he was unable to meet in life. Immediately in front of the father’s photograph Doug has placed a small cross. The remaining artefacts on the shelf are elegant and functional, and noticeably food related: a small collection of silver salt and pepper shakers, a sauce boat and a jug. Food had a powerful and reverberating presence in the minds and fantasies of the FEPOWs during their incarceration. The framed medals and the photo of the tin mine are of similar size and at the same height on the wall. They invite us to see them as a pair, on a par physically and psychically. What connects them is the father’s war story which is both dramatic – in many ways heroic – yet shrouded in mystery (see Chapter 2). Now, well down the decades, it seems entirely appropriate that, together, these disparate items should concoct a miniature yet multi-layered drama that summons memories of personal loss set within a world war. By looking beyond the boundaries of the recording and transcript of the interview, we open up space for a further level of analysis, in this case to consider how the interview setting interacts with the spoken testimony. Doug has arranged these objects on the basis of conscious and unconscious factors and, in doing so, has offered the viewer a route to deeper levels of understanding, inaccessible through words alone. In short, Doug has created his father anew, given him a ‘life’ in the present, while implicitly acknowledging the pain, uncertainties and ambiguities surrounding his death.

Digital memorialization and commemoration Memorialization through online platforms has grown exponentially in recent years, radically changing the nature of personal and institutional remembrance. Now that personal computers, laptops, tablets and smartphones are practically

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ubiquitous, access to the internet is near universal. While physical memorials are generally stable over the long term, distance and cost can make accessibility a problem for many people. Memorials in the online sphere are much less stable, due to the vagaries of website hosting, site management and connectivity, but are globally accessible and usually easy to modify. They also offer different levels of interactivity, but that can be a double-edged sword. Although memorial web pages are established by loved ones, some can be added to by others who may not necessarily share the same views of the deceased. Online memorials began to appear in the 1990s.69 Since then they have diversified considerably, expanding from the personal to the public realm, and reinforcing the notion of ‘continuing bonds’: the recognition that mourners ‘could move on in life with, rather than without, the deceased’.70 Avril Maddrell writes that these online versions have become the ‘new vernacular’,71 leading to the creation of internationalized ‘networks of belonging’ that are not based in any specific geographical place, and which otherwise might be difficult to establish and sustain.72 In the FEPOW world, this feature has helped strengthen the sense of solidarity that binds many of the children into virtual and real relational communities. Compared with face-to-face encounters, online interactions within dedicated websites mitigate the impact of social differences because the communication channels are naturally narrower in scope, and rely either on the written word (e.g. ‘comments’ boxes) or more tightly focused visual information (e.g. uploaded images). Activity across the FEPOW social media communities is tied closely to the UK’s annual remembrance cycle: the commemoration of war-related anniversaries, e.g. VJ Day (15 August); Remembrance Day (‘Poppy Day’, 11 November); and Remembrance Sunday (the second Sunday in November) which includes a national remembrance event and march past at the Cenotaph in Whitehall, London that includes members of the FEPOW community. Other dates may hold significance for particular families, such as the surrender of Singapore (15 February). Many in the FEPOW community feel aggrieved that the British government over decades has failed to adequately recognize the sacrifices made in the Far East, and social media platforms offer some corrective to this neglect by enabling alternative forms of commemorative event to be shared and personalized. The most-active commemorative websites often feature passionate debates on controversial topics, in the course of which ‘expert’ voices from within the community are able to share historical insights. Activity on these sites also allows members to draw in less-familiar but related commemorative events,

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such as The Indo Project that celebrates the wartime struggles of people of mixed European and Indonesian descent, and also the Bataan Memorial Death March.73 By sharing memories online, the second and third generations of Indo-Europeans originating in the ‘Dutch East Indies’ (now Indonesia) reinforce their common identity.74 Engaging in these ways keeps alive a form of ‘communitas’ between individuals around the globe, while controlling access enables a degree of privacy and confidentiality. In August 2020, a new website was launched by the families of Dutch POWs held in Nagasaki 14b. The site describes the collaboration between the Dutch and Japanese people that resulted in a memorial consecrated and unveiled in 2021. What is distinctive about this initiative is that the website has a hybrid and transnational purpose; it aims to incorporate individual profiles of all 548 POWs held at Nagasaki 14b, regardless of nationality.75 Personal memorial websites are proliferating and their design and hosting have become increasingly commercialized in recent years.76 Academics, too, have begun to take an interest in the topic.77 Muzaini and Yeoh researched memorymaking in the digital era amongst the FEPOW community.78 They examined the content of interactions on the dedicated website fepow-community.org.uk, and conducted an online survey of its members. These authors drew attention to how online memorials and online communities breathe life into the veterans’ stories, promote and sustain friendships across the community, and also act as an interactive information resource. They observed that online sites have a twin function – as a substitute for physical memorials or places of pilgrimage for those family members whose circumstances prevent them visiting; and to enable others who are able to travel to prepare for, or to reflect on, a visit. Muzaini and Yeoh based their research on the FEPOW Community site,79 but there are a number of other active memorial sites. The principal FEPOW website is that of the Children of Far East POWs (COFEPOW), a registered charity which operates as a ‘hub’ for much of the UK’s FEPOW activity.80 COFEPOW was inaugurated in 1997, and the website has been active since 2000. The site embraces events, research and the sale of COFEPOW-branded merchandise. Information available on the site includes links to individuals and organizations that can offer relatives information about specific aspects of POW history, together with a ‘research database’ including images of thousands of Liberation Questionnaires. Members can also access lists of POWs. A Facebook page and Twitter account provide further opportunities for interaction. FEPOW (Far East Prisoner of War), FEPOW Family, VJ Day FEPOW’s Gallery and Descendants of Thai–Burma Railway WWII POWs are four further Facebook groups.81 Cross-

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membership of these websites is common. Taken together with the personal websites below, they provide a unique insight into the interests and concerns of the children, and how memory practices are evolving.

Examples of personal memorial websites The following list evidences the range and diversity of memorial sites that have appeared in recent years. They were all accessible on 27 January 2022. Ron Taylor’s Roll of Honour: www.roll-of-honour.org.uk/ Kevin Snowdon: http://ksnowdon.co.uk/ Paul Morrell – Albert’s War: www.britain-at-war.org.uk/WW2/Alberts_War/ Captain George Duffy’s POW Page: www.usmm.org/duffy.html An American on the Death Railway. Terence Kelly – Far East Prisoner of War 1942–1945: www.ient.org.uk/index.php?page=terence-kelly—fepow The Changi Murals: www.petrowilliamus.co.uk/murals/murals.htm Diary of a POW – Herman Beaber: http://ithascome.bravehost.com/ Prisoner of War – Frank Larkin: http://pow.larkin.net.au/ An outstanding example of a wide-ranging memorial site. Signalman Wadler’s Diary: www.britain-at-war.org.uk/WW2/Signalman_ Waders_Diary/ The Changi POW Artwork of Des Bettany: https://changipowart.com/ Rev. John Wanless: www.britain-at-war.org.uk/WW2/John_Wanless/ Staff Sergeant Harry Stogden of the RAOC and the Changi Cross – www.fepowcommunity.org.uk/religion/html/harry_stogden_and_the_changi_c.htm A POW perspective on the Nagasaki bombing: www3.nhk.or.jp/nhkworld/en/ news/backstories/826/

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The search for military family histories

The urge to learn the details of what happened to their fathers in the camps is very common amongst the children of FEPOWs. But the process often starts later in life than might be imagined, and may not make its presence felt until after the death of one or even both parents. As my research progressed, I came to recognize a group of participants whose choice of memory practice was remarkably distinctive, and for whom the search for information evoked the connection they felt between the individual histories of their fathers and the military history of war in the Far East.1 For convenience, I refer to this group as the ‘COFEPOW researchers’.2 Their ‘knowledge-driven’ efforts to systematically research and meticulously document the father’s military history, by exploring (and often expanding) existing archives, was their route into making sense of the past. By doing so, they were forging intimate and dynamic links between what sociologist C. Wright Mills referred to as ‘personal troubles’ and ‘public issues’.3 The COFEPOW researchers have narrower aims than mainstream genealogists or family historians, because their principal focus is on a single person and a single generation.4 While quite evidently located within the genre of family history, their work also falls within the discipline of military history. For that reason, I have settled on the hybrid term ‘military family history’5 to cover the activities undertaken by the COFEPOW researchers. Unlike family history in general, the purpose of military family history is not to ‘move on’ to the next link in the genealogical chain, but to ‘drill in’, to discover the precise movements of one man over a specific time period and set of locations, and to extricate the minutiae of his day-to-day life. Given the dearth of research in the field, this chapter begins by exploring the motivational spectrum behind family history in general, before demonstrating how these drives manifested themselves through the lives of individual participants. Explanations of the current burgeoning popularity of family history range from social dislocation and deeper existential and ontological anxieties

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to psychoanalytic interpretations involving obsessive–compulsive tendencies. Whatever the underlying motivations, these participants’ pursuit of military family history as a ‘social practice’ often had far-reaching implications for both self identity and for the emergence of new social roles.

The practice of military family history and the psychosocial As we try to understand what drives the COFEPOW researchers, we should keep in mind the words of Michael Roper on how historians of the Great War have tended to neglect the emotional dimensions of their subject: ‘faced with scenes of psychic dissolution, it is safer for the historian to stay in the realms of the rational … to try to make safe the unconscious residues of violence and terror, dispatching them to a kind of cultural strongbox from which they cannot burst out.’6 How far do the COFEPOW researchers conform to Roper’s characterization? Do they use their particular form of memory practices – consciously situated in the ‘realms of the rational’ – as a ‘strongbox’ to protect more vulnerable parts of the psyche? The sociology of family history is a good place to start to address such questions. The widespread and growing interest in family history begs the fundamental question of why people strive so assiduously to uncover the fine grain of their family histories. Is this merely a hobby whose popularity is entirely fathomable, or a more subtle process of self-making? More fundamentally, some argue that rapid social change, social dislocation and other existential concerns have created fertile conditions for practices that strengthen identity, an enhanced sense of self, or greater ‘ontological security’.7 Emotional reasons may dominate the picture, such as the search for meaning when responding to ‘grief, depression and a lack of self esteem’.8 For others, the desire to create a ‘compelling family history’ for future generations is the foremost drive,9 perhaps with the aim of satisfying the ‘ultimate human fantasy, the pursuit of immortality’.10 At a more mundane end of the spectrum, the wish for social contact may be the principal concern, satisfied by becoming ‘a member of a club’.11 Finally, anthropologist Jeanette Edwards observed how family historians in her study described ‘the obsessive nature of their research and how it is like detective work with clues leading to other clues’,12 thus introducing the possibility of a link with personality type. The breadth of possible explanations serves to remind us that, in contrast to the rather dusty image sometimes portrayed, genealogy can be a ‘creative and imaginative memory practice which produces kinship, auto/

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biographical selves and interiorities’.13 Based on extensive experience working with family historians, Tanya Evans has recently authored an innovative book – Family History, Historical Consciousness and Citizenship – which shows how the pursuit of family histories has critical implications for personal identity within a global context, and broadens our conceptions of historical knowledge itself. Her book is also part of the Bloomsbury New Directions in Social and Cultural History series.14 Constructing family histories enables people to manage kinship, by allowing in, or excluding from view, particular ancestors, behaviours or events. By definition, however, those who research their fathers’ military histories have deliberately narrowed their choices in advance. With so much resource and emotion being invested in one significant figure, small differences between expectations and reality become magnified, with the inevitable frustrations if, and usually when, the research heads down a blind alley. As their involvement intensifies, the COFEPOW researchers become more familiar with mainstream practices of archive-based research, and start to borrow practices from professional historians. In Tanya Evans’ terms, they are becoming ‘social historians’ and, in so doing, adding to their ‘cultural capital’.15 Alongside this they continue to gather information from the veterans and from their peers, that is they are drawing on the autobiographical and communicative memory spheres.16 Carolyn Steedman compares the archive to memory. The archive may ‘take in stuff, heterogeneous, undifferentiated stuff … texts, documents, data … and order them by the principles of unification and classification’, which can give the impression of being analogous to human memory. Unlike memory, however, ‘The Archive is not potentially made up of everything … and it is not the fathomless and timeless place in which nothing goes away.’ While human memory is constantly called upon to provide the raw material we use to narrate meaning into our lives, in the archive, this ‘stuff ’ – some chosen, some there ‘as mad fragmentations that no one intended to preserve’17 – waits around for someone to read, respond to and then integrate into a story to suit their particular purpose. Louise Boscacci suggests that the archival impulse represents a ‘desire to find or locate or possess the moment of origin or the beginnings of things’ – the urge to take control, that itself may arise from an unconscious compulsion to repeat.18 The inherent and paradoxical randomness of the archive has caused COFEPOW researchers great consternation over the years, but the archive still retains its ‘allure’, compounded by a whiff of ‘romance, as in the sense of the quest: endurance of all kinds of trial and tribulation, in pursuit of some goal or

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grail’.19 Although tucked away from public gaze, the emotional potency of the archive should never be underestimated. I vividly recall the psychological impact of looking through my first batch of documents in the National Archives at Kew, materials that covered the period when the British military high command were planning how to repatriate the FEPOWs.20 I was trying to narrow the psychosocial gap between myself in the present on a bright November morning, and the reality many thousands of miles away of the struggle to get the FEPOWs home some seventy years earlier. But I was unprepared for how these ‘heaped fragments of the past’21 would untie previously tightly bound emotions in quite the way they did on that particular day. Despite the impersonal environment of the archive, that morning heralded a sudden very personal collapse of the past into the present. This response was enhanced by the mundane bureaucratic minutiae and ‘throwaway’ comments contained in letters and telegrams, as well as by the ‘incongruous’ humour that, in truth, was completely congruent with the emotional circumstances of the times. For me, this tactile and weighty (in every sense) experience – and the smells wafting from these ageing fragile papers – released feelings that could not have been summoned from secondary sources alone. Handling original documents generates a unique relational ‘presence’ and, despite the formal tone conveyed by these papers, I could sense the persistent drive and determination to create practical solutions within what must have been, at times, a confusing and confused military hierarchy. Yet, occasionally, in amongst the musty plans and reports, a discordant note jumps off the page, such as ‘Requests have been numerous and we regret the flower vase and walking shoes were not of the correct colour’, evidence of a ‘real person’ pushing aside the curtain of bureaucracy. Flower vases? Walking shoes? What could have been the basis of such a specific request? Again, but more cryptically, at the end of a terribly dry piece of correspondence there appears this seemingly over-familiar reply: ‘I’m sorry to hear your leg is being so slow in mending. I don’t think I have any particularly clever methods for negotiating trucks etc., but I do find my bottom extremely useful now-a-days.’ What a sudden switch of tone – a light-hearted personal exchange piggy-backing on official correspondence, with I feel sure neither party expecting eavesdropping to occur seven decades later. Finally, we have an emotional reaction to the sight of HMS Speaker, the first British repatriation ship, departing Tokyo Bay on 2 September 1945: ‘The liberation and evacuation of prisoners of war during this last few days has witnessed scenes which will live long in the memory of those of the British Pacific Fleet who are here in Tokyo Bay … with, in addition,

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these hundreds of ex prisoners of war ranged on the flight deck cheering like mad and being cheered, brought tears to the eyes.’

Pete … and list making Born in 1948, Pete was the third of four children. His father joined the army as a military bandsman before becoming a quartermaster sergeant, responsible for stores and supplies, and was therefore comfortable with detail, logistics and the workings of military bureaucracy. Despite his father being a professional soldier, Pete claimed no special interest in military history as such. Early in the interview, he began to lay out his father’s army career with characteristic gusto and fluency: Dad joined the Regiment in 1927. And from Germany he went to Northern Ireland, and from Northern Ireland he went to India in 1936. He was in a place called Jabalpur for a few years. He had a year on the north west frontier trying to keep the feuding tribes apart. … Before the two battalions merged, he was the quartermaster sergeant for D company. And then, after the merger, he was a quartermaster sergeant in HQ company. When he was in Changi, I don’t think he actually got posted away to a work party camp in River Valley or Adam Park, or Sime Road or anywhere like that. He was in Changi for a few months, from February ’til October 1942. Then he went up onto the railway. And he was on the railway quite far north until February ’44. … and all ended up in the Chungkai erm … Tha Markam, Kanchanaburi area. From there men started getting nominated for parties to go down to Singapore and off to Japan. Fortunately dad wasn’t.22

Pete’s mastery of detail and his joy in its communication typified the prowess and persistence of the COFEPOW researchers. The macro history of the war in the Far East provided critical points of anchorage for his father’s story, adding significance to the family stories and providing a rich geopolitical backdrop against which to locate the actions of otherwise marginal actors. Famous intermediaries, such as Weary Dunlop23 or Lady Mountbatten,24 provided Pete with historical references to facilitate his narrative transitions between personal, local, national, international and global perspectives. Where evidence was missing, Pete made educated guesses – working hypotheses – that, in accordance with sound scientific method, he exposed to challenge as his meticulous researches flushed out fresh data. The efforts of the prisoners of war to sabotage the building of the ‘railway’ have become something of a trope,25 but

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Pete’s pleasure in telling the story of his father ‘leaving bolts in the cylinders’26 of boilers they were working on suggested that a strong sense of pride was driving his extensive inquiries. Other than occasional diversions into more conventional family history, Pete directed his energies firmly onto the task of uncovering an accurate depiction of his father’s POW life. Pete began researching his father’s history in the mid 2000s, after his retirement from a senior position in industry. He had little to go on at the start: How conscious were you of the POW part of your father’s life? Well I think I was aware that he had been associated with the bridge on the river Kwai. And that was probably the limit. You know, I didn’t have any details of where he’d worked, what he’d been doing, which camps he’d been in. Had he ever spoken to you about it? No … no. No. At any stage. So, when you were doing your research, and you were starting off … Well, it was his army records. His army records. But you had to get those, didn’t you? Oh, yeah. Before then did you have anything around the house? Well, I just started looking online. Oh, okay, so you didn’t have any concrete material [no] that had come through the family or [no] after your mum [no, nothing]. Nothing at all? No, no … No, I mean, it’s only subsequently that I have found things that have been left behind, like diaries. Not diaries erm … address books … and mum’s address book with contacts in them.27

Serendipity came to Pete’s aid. A family wedding on the other side of the world was the catalyst that led to the discovery of unexpected material, and gave extra momentum to his research. During the wedding visit, he had been shown numerous family photographs that proved invaluable. Other than scans of these photos, and the documents he had tracked down from official sources, he had no artefacts of his own to handle, or to display. His father’s medals, his clarinet, and a ceremonial dagger (of uncertain provenance) were all located many miles away with the photographs. He was missing what Susan Pearce calls the ‘power of the real thing’, its sheer facticity, as well as its ‘message-bearing’ potential.28 When trying to reconstruct the past, Lowenthal suggests that there are three interconnected ‘routes’ essential to achieve ‘full awareness’: sensory elements (‘relics’); ‘history’; and ‘memory’.29 Given the very meagre contribution of relics, Pete was obliged to pursue the history and memory strands with particular determination:

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Were you always interested in military history? No. No, no. I realized that I knew so little about dad’s military career that I thought, well, it would be quite interesting to find out what he did. And I just started with an A4 sheet and a table, and I just put key dates that I knew and I started putting bits of information in that I knew about dad. And then I thought, right well let’s get his army records. I got his army records and that enabled me to put a few more dates in. And this table started getting bigger and bigger and bigger. I did realize dad had a photo collection but it had never occurred to me where it had gone. It turned out he had given it to my brother, and he brought out all these photographs. And so he was sort of the custodian of dad’s photograph collection. Did he have all of your dad’s papers then, effectively, connected to the war? Well, no. No. Just the photos. There were no other papers as such.30

What marked out Pete’s research from the other COFEPOW researchers was his decision to expand his realm of interest beyond his father’s individual story. Remarkably, while maintaining his primary focus, he turned his attention to the battalion as a whole, conducting detailed tracking work on all 934 men. At the close of the interview, Pete showed me his spreadsheets detailing the movements of the men of the battalion. Laid out end-to-end, they threatened to extend halfway across his living room. Pete is the brother of Brenda whose interview featured in Chapter 2. My interviews with Pete and Brenda were quite different, both in content and in affective tone. Pete was the more outgoing, whereas Brenda was more cautious and circumspect in her responses. The significant episode that Brenda raised about her father retreating into the front room for several days at a time was never mentioned by Pete. The level of detail revealed in Pete’s researches invites questions about the dynamics of ‘list making’. The Dutch scholar, Ernst van Alphen, described a phenomenon he called ‘list mania’: the growing propensity to create lists.31 In this way ‘all victims can be acknowledged and represented. Not by means of one symbol or allegory that is supposed to represent all victims.’32 But as he points out, the genre is potentially ‘contaminated by its history, as the Nazis had particularly excelled in listing.’33 However, the Nazi’s fanatical dedication to record keeping  – numbers tattooed on arms, transforming detainees into ‘archived objects’34 – was not followed by the Japanese. Although they were obsessive about counting the prisoners (for example, during ‘tenko’ or roll call), their attitude to other aspects of record keeping was less assiduous. Nonetheless, the records they did keep were still thought sufficiently incriminating to be worthy of deliberate destruction at the end of the war.35

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At huge personal risk, certain far-sighted POWs took personal responsibility for creating their own lists of the movements and deaths of their peers.36 In the Far East, therefore, it was the victims, rather than the perpetrators, who exploited the power of lists to bear witness to their suffering, to resist the devaluation or the obliteration of individual lives, and to preserve for history and humanity (and later war trials) a record of those destructive forces. While acknowledging the ‘driven’ nature of Pete’s list keeping – perhaps even ‘list mania’ – we must also recognize the altruistic, value-driven dimension underpinning his activities. Through his choice of memory practice, Pete established a degree of continuity with the past which followed in the proud tradition of list making in the camps.

Jeff … and creating networks Forming networks of the like-minded is a valuable skill for any COFEPOW researcher, but few could match Jeff ’s energy and sheer doggedness when it came to making and growing personal connections. His expanding and increasingly diverse network encompassed not just the people he wanted to talk to but also the ideas, practices and artefacts that were needed to throw further light on his father’s past. These included the portraits that his father drew in the camps, his personal reflections on ‘hierarchies of suffering’, and the activities that grew out of the memory practice itself, such as collaboratively transcribing ten hours of tape recordings that the group had tracked down. Jeff was born in 1948 and raised in New Zealand. I have included his testimony because he was instrumental in instigating and nurturing an international network of ‘about sixteen “relatives of ” scattered around the world’,37 several based in the UK. Jeff had worked in the steel industry, had a strong technical bent and was comfortable exploiting digital media. He had emailed me in response to my original call for research participants: There was a prominent Broadcaster in NZ – Paul Holmes – now deceased, who coined a phrase that ‘Our generation lived in the shadow of the war.’ I can think of no better description and certainly for those whose parents were captives of the Japanese. In my case my late Father was a Naval POW in Palembang, Sumatra after the fall of Singapore. From a very young age I knew about ‘the camp’ but also knew that he did not like to talk about it much, except for some of the funny things that happened.38

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Jeff ’s father had worked as a draughtsman and stonemason before joining the Naval Volunteer Reserve in 1940. He was captured by Japanese forces in February 1942 at the end of the Battle of Singapore, then held at three camps in Indonesia before being liberated. He was a talented amateur artist, and put his talents to good use in the camps. Jeff ’s interest in his father’s time as a POW took some years to mature, but accelerated after first coming across a FEPOW website, then being deeply affected by reading Russell Braddon’s now classic account of life as a POW, The Naked Island39: My Father has been deceased for many years but there was always my lingering fascination of what actually went on, promulgated by reading various books by ex-POWs. Suffice to say I knew the camp was bad but I didn’t know how bad until relatively recently. Ron Taylor’s FEPOW website was the trigger to finding out more and gradually I was able to start building up a better picture, added to by incredibly, two books that were published in the mid 1990s by fellow POWs.40 I think I really became interested in earnest after reading Russell Braddon’s book The Naked Island. Braddon was captured during the Malayan campaign and as he put his hands up in surrender he realised it was his twenty-first birthday. I was twenty-one at the time and wondered how I would have reacted. This was the first book I read about Japanese POWs and I set out to read more. … All went quiet for a number of years, then one day my Mother phoned to say she had read an article in an English magazine about a book on JAP POWs in Palembang and ‘Wasn’t that Dad’s camp?’41

Ray Stubbs, an Englishman, was imprisoned with Jeff ’s father. In 1995, Stubbs published a memoir of his time in captivity.42 After his mother’s phone call, Jeff searched for the book but couldn’t get hold of a copy. After winkling the telephone number out of the publishers, he rang Ray Stubbs directly who promptly sent him a copy. This was the first concrete information about the camp to reach his hands. Later he discovered a portrait of Ray amongst his father’s collection and sent it to his family (Ray had died by then). I conducted my interview with Jeff by email over several months, and was rewarded immediately yet taken aback by the freedom and ebullience with which he responded to this opportunity. Year by year, Jeff grew his network of contacts, exclusive to the sons and daughters of fathers who had also been in Palembang. His researches began in earnest after he had acquired ‘meticulous records’ from the son of another New Zealander who had been the camp adjutant: I managed to get hold of these from the son, copied them electronically and then was able to start corresponding with people who had posted on FEPOW re ‘My

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Father was a POW in Palembang but I don’t know much about it’ sort of thing. My father had done formal portraits of several and I was able to provide them copies – highly emotional as you can imagine.43

The sharing of these portraits, made during captivity, established an immediate emotional bond between erstwhile strangers. By making these visual records during a period of prolonged suffering, Jeff ’s father had captured moments from the past that enabled later generations to reflect afresh on their fathers’ daily lives as POWs and, no doubt, to speculate on the psychological ramifications of having sat for a portrait under such hazardous conditions. By bringing such artwork into the public domain, the COFEPOW researchers have revealed artefacts that enable the children to enter imaginatively into the subjective and psychic spheres of their fathers’ captivity, and enrich their postmemories. As Clare Makepeace has written, art work enables us to: ‘learn much about the conditions of captivity, the cruelty endured, the emotions the artist experienced, the ways in which these men and women defied their captors, and the relationships they formed with fellow inmates’.44 Aided by Jonathan Moffat of the Malayan Volunteers Group,45 Jeff pressed on with his research: with the help of two UK-based ‘children of ’ that I had found we started to really bore in, particularly with the help of Jonathan Moffat who had a good stash of material ex the NA [the National Archives] at Kew. Very recently this included finally getting hold of the transcripts of the post-war trial of the guards in Singapore in 1946 and a 10 hour (!) oral history by one Lt Brewer that was lurking at the IWM [Imperial War Museum]. We are still slowly digesting the latter, including funding the transfer of the 1980s tapes to digital for the IWM to put on their website.46

This extract illustrates how, step by step, the COFEPOW researchers were able to further their work by forming constructive relationships with mainstream institutions, such as the National Archives and the Imperial War Museum. One member of Jeff ’s network was Rex.47 Jeff had contacted him: via another ‘relative of ’ who with his son trolled through the UK phone book. He was quite taken aback with [my] call, particularly as I had some caricatures of his father which I have since sent to him.48

Behind Jeff ’s blend of military family research and proselytizing lay a sense of injustice that has been reflected in many aspects of the public discourse surrounding Far East POWs:

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The thing about all this Japanese POW stuff, Terry, is that much of what has been published is about Changi and the railway and until relatively recently, very little on other camps. It’s a bit like Spitfires winning the Battle of Britain. Well actually Hurricanes shot down more German aircraft but Spitfires got all the glory. This is not to denigrate the suffering that went on in Changi and particularly the railway. There were thousands of POWs involved versus about 1,200 in Palembang or other outlying camps in the then Japanese domain. In truth, conditions in these other camps were just as dire as those on the railway – possibly worse in some cases – but the railway and Changi gained the most notoriety.49

Jeff ’s forthright views on Changi were shared by a number of other participants, and have been confirmed by academic analysis.50 As Jeff made clear, these comparisons are not intended to diminish the ill-treatment experienced by POWs in Changi; their purpose is to convey a more balanced picture of the captivity regimes in what were widely dispersed camps. The general public is unaware of much of this history, and few will have heard of Palembang (in Sumatra), Bangka Island, Rabaul (in New Guinea), Ambon or the Solomon Islands. Many of the children of these marginalized ex-POWs felt a justifiable sense of grievance when their fathers failed to receive public or state recognition commensurate with their hardships. One beneficiary of Jeff ’s passion for fact finding and dissemination was Kevin Snowdon, whose father had also been a POW in Palembang. Kevin tells his father’s story by means of a self-created website – From Percy Main to Sumatra via France – packed with photos and hyperlinks whose pages testify to the dedication needed to put together an online family archive.51 When his niece asked him about his father’s time as a POW, he was made abruptly aware of the yawning gap in his knowledge.52 The website he went on to create is framed chronologically and traces his father’s individual journey through the war. It is richly contextualized through images and texts from a variety of web sources, supplemented by Kevin’s ‘imaginative investment, projection, and creation’.53 In the introduction to his website, Kevin pays fulsome tribute to Jeff: ‘Jeff supplied me with a vast amount of information and pointed me in the right direction for my research. Jeff also supplied me with information that confirmed my father’s final prisoner of war camp.’54 Discovering the identity of ‘the last camp’ was an important stage for many of the children. As the place where the POWs first heard news of the war’s end, and from where they began their psychological and physical transitions from captivity to freedom, it harboured lasting emotional significance. Pragmatically, it was the critical step in the search for the father’s route of repatriation. As is usual in these ‘knowledge-driven’

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accounts, overt emotional factors were expressed only implicitly. However, while the balance of Kevin’s website content is heavily weighted towards historical data, the sheer volume of ‘facts’ in itself pays homage to the resilience of both his father and the family. The caricature of the family history researcher is often of someone who typically works alone in front of the computer or in a library.55 However, the gregariousness of the COFEPOW researchers whose work is discussed in these pages challenges this stereotype. By making a concerted effort to form research networks that were both collaborative and productive, they were also embodying and replicating the spirit of ‘mateship’ they imagined (or hoped) was part of their fathers’ social world in the camps.56

Identity and reworking the self However disparate the reasons why individuals undertake family history work, Wendy Bottero maintains that the process invariably metamorphoses into ‘identity-work’.57 By recreating the lives of their forebears, they activate ‘traces of the past’ which allow them to reframe their own sense of identity.58 The practice of military family history is the search for something missing or lost, but it too possesses the capacity to challenge our resilience and sense of self. Carolyn Steedman neatly captures the psychosocial essence of this process: ‘The very search for what is lost and gone (in an individual past or a public historical past) alters it, as it goes along, so that every search becomes an impossible one.’59 James’ approach to his father’s POW past shows how psychic factors could complicate an individual’s flirtation with historical knowledge. Although he began as an enthusiastic collector of facts, this soon faded, and he came to doubt their value to him. It was no coincidence then that the core of James’ testimony centred on his emotions, and revealed the continuing impact of the psychic pain he was obliged to bear during his childhood and adolescence: I’m not sure how important the actual facts are. I mean, I was tremendously interested in the actual facts, but … more important really for me to get to the  … the feelings really and make sense of it for me. Because I know at the time, I know as a small child … I didn’t, I didn’t know any of it. I just knew bits and pieces, but I didn’t know … So, I mean, my-my experience in a way is more important … than the actual facts of what was.60

During his difficult childhood years James was aware that the family had ‘secrets’, one of which was the time his father spent as a POW. James’ ambivalence

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towards seeking out the details of his father’s wartime captivity in any sustained or systematic way separates him from the COFEPOW researchers: I don’t really need to know any of it. I was kind of drawn fairly recently to know. I really wanted to know. And I kept looking, and looking, and looking. But I don’t feel that so much now. I don’t really need to know it at all. It would be nice to know. But, I mean, I know I won’t know. There’s so much I won’t know. It’s impossible to know. And I know some of the things they went through. But I can’t possibly know what it was like for them. Can’t possibly. And I know some of the effects it had on him.61

For James the desire to know arrived unbidden, but then waned, as the psychic urge quickly met the limits of the archives and his emotional capacity to pursue the task. More significantly, he realized that merely knowing the facts would not satisfy his psychic needs. Instead he contented himself with a partial account, and spliced-in details from generic sources to fill the narrative gaps (‘And I know some of the things they went through’). Alongside the interior and emotional changes that family-history work may bring about, the practices embedded in military family history provided opportunities to expand social roles. As a consequence of accessing new information or gaining increased understanding, many COFEPOW researchers have discovered or created new roles that enable them to share expertise. These ‘practices’ include competence in archival work, initiating online communities that enable researchers to further specific goals, and acquiring the conventions and confidence that afford authority and status in the field. In Wendy Bottero’s words, this leads to the acquisition of ‘a set of practices and discourses of expertise’ [in which] ‘accounts of the research process are prominent’.62 However, these embodied ‘skills’ do not evolve independently but become entwined with the material they reveal: the outcome is a complex psychosocial matrix that contains unconscious and conscious identifications, transferences and projections. These emerging skills and psychic changes feed the narratives that researchers wish to create. As the storytelling proceeds, typically in knight’s-move fashion, the social practices entailed in building a family history themselves become a ‘form of identity-work’.63 This more complex perspective deepens our understanding of the work of the COFEPOW researchers and invites us to examine how their practices might have consequences for their lives, identities, and roles in the community. To illustrate, since beginning his research Pete has elaborated his practice in several ways. He makes his findings available to others, and has provided information and advice for families not in a position to do this work for themselves. He has written

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reports and given talks to different groups. Drawing on his extensive, specialist ‘archive’, he has compiled a comprehensive report on his father’s regiment that he subsequently made available online. His expertise has been acknowledged on the regiment’s official website, and he has expanded his activities by organizing a public event in association with the regimental association and COFEPOW that was attended by ninety delegates and covered by the local press. In this way, he has carved out a new and continually evolving social role and identity.

Is there an end game? Ronald Bishop reminds us that family history work lacks an ending.64 Pete concurred emphatically: ‘My research into the Regiment during the Malayan Campaign, and as POWs, is never-ending it seems. I’m continuing to uncover further information and it is this that drives me on. I don’t think I’ll ever complete this jigsaw.’65 Other participants involved in military family history mostly shared this assumption, and this remained the case in spite of much FEPOW research being characterized by tightly circumscribed temporal and spatial boundaries. Despite the narrower focus, there remained uncertainty about what might still lie in national or local archives, in attics or elsewhere, and certainly no shortage of speculation about what is yet be discovered. A question I asked all participants in my research was ‘what next?’ What did they anticipate happening to their painstakingly collected historical findings, to their personal archives? Where was it all leading? Pierre Nora commented on the growing importance of the archive in contemporary society: Modern memory is, above all, archival. It relies entirely on the materiality of the trace, the immediacy of the recording, the visibility of the image. What began as writing ends as high fidelity and tape recording. The less memory is experienced from the inside the more it exists only through its exterior scaffolding and outward signs – hence the obsession with the archive that marks our age, attempting at once the complete conservation of the present as well as the total preservation of the past.66

Nora’s claim is that the rush to archive is founded on a ‘fear of a rapid and final disappearance’,67 and as a consequence we find comfort in this ‘materiality of the trace’. Pete’s pleasure in the sheer physicality of his abundant spreadsheets spoke volumes to this longing for conservation/preservation. Like archaeologists sifting soil at an excavation site, Pete and his peers sift through the archives for

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fragments of information that help shape how subsequent generations will come to ‘remember’ these events. The pervasive ‘fear’ to which Nora refers, hints at the dynamic unconscious. Control, regimentation and orderliness are required to create and maintain these particular archival forms of memory that are needed to keep in check the ‘unconscious residues of violence and terror’.68 But deciding quite what to do with the accumulated material can prove problematic. Jeff struggled with the prospect: I have commented to a number of my ‘correspondents’ that researching this is rather like the Pink Floyd song ‘All in All its Just Another Brick in the Wall’. You pick up the odd brick here and there and then suddenly a whole truckload arrives. So now we have a whole bundle of stuff – a brickyard full as it were. My son in law – the ‘Family Ferret’ – has a keen interest in our respective family’s military histories and last year scuttled off with my collection: to deliver on Xmas day an 86-page manuscript, all carefully annotated, cross referenced, etc. What we do now remains to be seen. A private publication perhaps – Rex is quite keen to publish something – including some of my father’s drawings and personal reminiscences I can remember – plus of course stuff that has just arrived. Dunno. We’ll see.69

As we have seen already, collaboration and altruism featured strongly in Jeff ’s case, and figured highly in the work of all the COFEPOW researchers. At this level of cooperation between individuals, Assmann’s concept of ‘communicative memory’ comes into its own.70 Patchworks of small peer groups have evolved into more extensive online networks, forming ‘communities of practice’71 that strengthen the ‘commonality and connectedness’ between members.72 However, the research activities undertaken by Pete and Jeff are not comfortably contained in their entirety within communicative memory; more appropriately, they operate in the ‘floating gap’ between communicative and cultural memories. As discussed in Chapter 3, this ‘gap’ is the period during which the transition between communicative and cultural memory takes place, and inevitably recedes as those memories that can be shared ‘live’ disappear and have to be ‘fixed’ in some way within cultural products and practices.73 Not only did they acquire and share memories with peers but, as their body of work grew in internal coherence, they began to imbue it with an institutional quality more characteristic of cultural memory. At intervals in this chapter I have touched on the idea that participants with a primary interest in the military family history of their fathers may be less comfortable with the emotional dimensions of memory work. Occasionally,

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however, chance events may bring emotional issues closer to the surface. I had been trying to arrange an interview with a prominent COFEPOW researcher, but the logistics had defeated us. However, I bumped into him one day during a FEPOW event. I introduced myself and reminded him that we had been in email correspondence. He immediately responded with ‘I owe you an email’, then quickly threw doubt on whether an interview would be of any value. ‘There were no horror stories’, he said, assuming wrongly that this was what I was after. Given the context, and his comments, I decided to drop the idea of an interview. A few months later, I unearthed a post on a FEPOW website from ten years earlier in which he had shared a poignant story of his own. He recalled how as a child he had contracted tuberculosis, and was hospitalized for nine months. Yet his father had never visited. He wondered why his dad never came to see him, then went on to surmise that this was because of the appearance of the hospital’s perimeter fence, that was topped with barbed wire. ‘Understanding seems to come so late!’ he concluded.

Gender and military history When I began work on this chapter, I adopted ‘the history boys’ as a jokey working title, a lazy way of reflecting the fact that the overwhelming majority of COFEPOW researchers I met were men. It was the men who displayed the most intense interest in the specifics of military history, who wanted to accumulate and document the ‘facts’, who were most committed to recounting the detailed chronology of their fathers’ POW histories, and who identified most strongly with the military backgrounds of their fathers and the culture that service life had instilled. In a recent paper, Lucy Noakes asks whether the practice of family history is gendered. She concludes that while women have tended to take responsibility for transmitting family stories, and for preserving family objects, such as ‘recipes, photo albums, commonplace books, christening robes’, it is the men who have prepared ‘formal family histories, writing autobiographies and family biographies’.74 That men should dominate the membership of the COFEPOW researcher group should come as no great surprise because the male soldier – someone who has braved the risks of war and faced the ultimate sacrifice – has become a compelling identification figure for many men. Noakes’ analysis of women’s contributions to the Mass Observation project on the First World War confirms the deep-seated gendered norm within British society that ‘Knowledge

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of military history, strategy and tactics was largely understood as a male preserve.’75 Unsurprisingly, then, this division is visible in the gender balance of academics working in the field of military history. Back in 2007, Joanna Bourke vented her frustrations in no uncertain terms: When I started writing military history, it was said to my face, many times: ‘How can you write about combat when you’ve never seen combat?’ Well, most male academics who write about combat have never got anywhere near the field either. I wasn’t going to let them say, ‘How can a nice girl like you write on such terrible subjects?’76

At long last, many more younger female historians have begun to turn their gaze towards military history, and are opening up fresh interdisciplinary perspectives and debates, while building on the groundbreaking work of established historians like Joanna Bourke, Joy Damousi, Diana Lary and Lucy Noakes.77 Much contention remains, however, as Nadejda Williams’ words reveal: This is a controversial assertion to make, perhaps, but I believe that for a variety of reasons, including perhaps that women are socialized differently … Put simply, women tend to ask different research questions about the nature of war than men have done, and tend to be more interested in the human experience and the reality of suffering in war for all who experience military conflicts.78

The gender issue also made its presence felt during the interviews. In her muchcited 1981 paper, Ann Oakley distinguished between ‘proper’ (‘legitimate’) interviewing that she equated with a masculine stress on the scientific method, rationality and objectivity, and ‘improper’ (‘illegitimate’) interviewing that was reflexive and intersubjective, attended to emotional matters, and minimized power relationships.79 Most of the men I interviewed were more inclined to align themselves with Oakley’s ‘proper’ paradigm; that is, they anticipated I would adopt a traditional, directive model of oral history interviewing. They saw their role as providing ‘data’ which, after all, was the chosen paradigm of the COFEPOW researchers. By failing to conform to their initial expectations, I introduced an unsettling, albeit transient, element into the relationship. Although I have focused on the memory practices of the ‘COFEPOW researchers’ in this chapter, it would be wrong to suggest that there is complete coterminosity between this group of participants and the practice of military family history. Every child of a FEPOW is curious about their father’s POW background, but it was the ‘COFEPOW researchers’ who chased the detail with greatest rigour and determination, and stayed most firmly ‘in the realms of the rational’.80

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Place and pilgrimage

For the FEPOW children, visiting the sites of their fathers’ captivity added hugely to their store of knowledge and understanding of the war in the Pacific, and of their fathers’ place in it. But, more profoundly, these journeys were often critical turning points in their personal development – crucibles for psychic transformations that had been long in the making. Enacted within physical and emotional landscapes of exquisite individual and historical significance, the dynamic combination of disparate memories, emotional legacies, visceral experiences and unique blends of planned and serendipitous activities created conditions within which the children were able to confront the legacies of childhood. This chapter features the pilgrimage experiences of four participants whose journeys took them to very different locations across South East Asia: Singapore, Japan, Ambon (then in the ‘Dutch East Indies’) and the Thai–Burma Railway. Their stories reveal spontaneous emotional associations with the past, and show how pilgrimage offered unique opportunities to address ‘the father within’. The use of the label ‘pilgrim’ can be contentious. Not all travellers to FEPOW sites self-identify as pilgrims, or see themselves as ‘on a pilgrimage’. Only a minority of my participants chose to describe themselves in this way. While the idea of a secular pilgrimage was broadly accepted, most considered themselves travellers with a very particular and personal aim in mind. Cultural factors play a part in this. Travellers interviewed in Bruce Scates’ study of Australian families visiting ‘traumascapes of war’ were rather more uniform in their adoption of the term ‘pilgrimage’ to describe their journey.1

Placing pilgrimage Pilgrimage is perhaps the most comprehensive and intense expression of an immersive and self-reflective memory practice. However, the concept can easily become unhelpfully diffuse, as shown in a delightfully meandering

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essay by Jean Watson in which she suffuses everyday life with the spirit of pilgrimage, gently aligning herself with Scates’ contention that ‘alongside these actual journeys is a journey of the mind’.2 Fundamental to pilgrimage is ‘a journey to a non-substitutable site embodying the highly valued, the deeply meaningful, or a source of core identity for the traveller.’3 Such a journey involves investment in an ‘emotional geography … a sense of quest, a journey through landscapes saturated with meaning’,4 which together hold out the potential to transform lives.5 While the purpose of pilgrimage always remains unique to the individual, historically the practice has been closely allied with religious institutions. Christianity, Hinduism, Islam, Judaism and Buddhism, for example, all encourage journeys to holy sites. In recent years, however, scholars in secularized societies have begun to reflect on the relationship between tourism and pilgrimage. Some have proposed a derivative link between the two, arguing that ‘the origins of tourism are rooted in pilgrimage’,6 moreover suggesting that the gap between the two is closing and the boundaries becoming increasingly blurred.7 Certainly, some convergence appears to have taken place between pilgrimage and tourism, and is especially visible in the commercial field. Visits to sites of war-related trauma are now often linked with mainstream tourist destinations. Travel operators offer ‘optional excursions’ to Auschwitz on package tours to Poland, and to civil-war battlefield sites on holidays to the east coast of America. Conversely, in trips to sites of trauma, tour operators will often include general site-seeing. Foley and Lennon launched the term ‘dark tourism’ into the pilgrimage lexicon in 1996, setting off a new train of enquiry into a phenomenon of great antiquity. As Stone and Sharpley point out, the practice of ‘travel to and experience of places associated with death’8 has been occurring for as long as people have travelled. Furthermore, they suggest that one of its purposes in contemporary societies is to desensitize individuals to the idea of death, by allowing it to be ‘brought back into the public realm and discourse, thus acting as a de-sequester that allows absent death to be made present’.9 While the concept of dark tourism may lack as yet a strong theoretical basis, there is no doubt about its pulling power, and its continued attraction to scholars.10 However, this chapter focuses largely on the empirical aspects of dark tourism, and might be best seen as a meditation on the underlying psychological motivations. Given the complex distribution of POW camp sites across the former Japanese territories, most pilgrims needed to undertake extensive preliminary research, first investigating the precise locations of the POW camps, and then

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organizing a workable itinerary. Journeying to POW sites in the Far East is often a more complicated and expensive exercise than with European destinations11; it is also a region where state-sponsored commemoration by the British state makes minimal impact. For some children, the task of discovering exactly where their fathers had been held could be a tortuous process. Camp names were often changed, according to the whims of the Japanese military bureaucracy, and the addresses found on letters sent by relatives to the POWs were for postal logistics only and did not indicate the precise camp location. Participants whose fathers worked on the Thai–Burma Railway faced a dual challenge. Firstly, they had to plan the travel between the home country and Thailand, and secondly determine the route the POWs took as they built the railway. This often required assistance from those with special expertise, such as Rod Beattie and his colleagues at the Thai–Burma Railway Centre in Kanchanaburi.12 Visiting POW sites on mainland Japan needs the support of local networks or an intrepid sense of adventure to reach the remote rural sites. The only organization offering customized pilgrimages from the UK is the Agape World charity, founded by Mrs Keiko Holmes.13 Her ‘pilgrimages of reconciliation’ are based on a close engagement between the ‘pilgrims’ and local Japanese hosts, including visits to schools and universities during which ex-FEPOWs and their families speak directly with students, most of whom demonstrated a very sketchy knowledge of the circumstances surrounding the Allied prisoners of war. Pilgrimage detaches travellers from their familiar environments and places them in unknown situations, a process that heightens reflection, intensifies the overall experience, and facilitates self-transformation.14 Pilgrimages typically include a stage of liminality, similar to that observed in the ‘ritual process,’15 in which novices find themselves in a transitional stage (or ‘threshold’) between two different statuses. From this perspective, we might view those children who undertook pilgrimages as passing through a series of liminal stages, during which they addressed their pasts, their memories of those pasts, and the evolving relationship with their internalized fathers. Because connections with everyday reality are loosened, liminality has the potential to be a transcendental stage offering fresh perspectives on the past. The physical approach to a pilgrimage site can be formative in creating the conditions for liminality.16 If we take the Taj Mahal, Uluru, Lourdes or Petra as quintessential pilgrimage destinations with clearly demarcated and welltrodden physical approaches, then the sites visited by the children of FEPOWs (with the exception of the official war cemeteries such as Yokohama in Japan or Kranji in Singapore) are often much less well defined and certainly less

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institutionally managed. Indeed, many pilgrimage sites are quite prosaic and only reveal their secrets through the work of local activists or the knowledge that pilgrims bring with them.17 Complementing the physical approach to a site of pilgrimage is an ‘emotional approach’, that is the inner psychological preparation for the journey. My own emotional approach began when I discovered the exact name and location of my father’s POW camp, a year or two before my first trip to Japan in 2010. My responses unspooled progressively: meeting members of the pilgrimage group, the journey from the UK to Japan, the various stages en route through Japan, finally culminating at the site of my father’s POW camp in an out-of-the-way rural location near Mine City, in Yamaguchi Prefecture.

Narratives of ‘return’ Memories of childhood often dictate why we choose to travel to particular places later in life, places where we used to live, or where we spent our holidays. For the children of FEPOWs, however, the memories most closely associated with pilgrimage destinations are not their own but their fathers’, transmitted during childhood as postmemories. Hirsch and Miller argue that: While the idea of postmemory can account for the lure of second-generation ‘return’, it also underscores the radical distance that separates the past from the present and the risks of projection, appropriation, and overidentification occasioned by second- and third-generation desires and needs.18

Why do people decide to visit sites they know may upset them, given that memories and postmemories in these families are lightly tinged or heavily freighted with trauma? In the words of Marianne Hirsch the emotional demands entailed in these ‘embodied journeys of return, corporeal encounters with place’, have the potential to ‘create sparks of connection that activate remembrance and thus activate the trauma of loss.’19 The reasons are rarely simple or fully evident, even (or perhaps especially) to the pilgrims themselves. Writing about ‘tourist pilgrimage’, Sturken draws attention to its psychic potential, ‘people make pilgrimages to sites of tragedy not simply to pay tribute to the dead but also to feel transformed in some way in relation to those places.’20 This transformation may be achieved through participating in ritualized memory practices on site, such as reading the names of the dead, participating in religious services, or leaving behind items of significance, such as a cross or a photograph.

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Psychoanalyst Warren Poland explored the dynamic and intergenerational aspects of self-transformation in pilgrimage, describing modern secular pilgrimage optimistically as ‘a pattern of action that can serve as an organizer for resolving conflict and for psychic growth … resulting from identifications passed down through the generations.’21 Many of the children did indeed experience a sense of transformation although not exclusively related to the destination but as a result of the journey which provided a protracted opportunity to revisit and reflect upon memories of their father, and with their own sense of self.22 That is not to diminish the importance of the material ‘presence’ of the pilgrimage destinations themselves, their histories, ethos and aesthetics, which offered ready settings for reverie and projections. Indeed these characteristics were often immensely powerful in provoking emotional responses. To form a comprehensive and dynamic conception of pilgrimage, ‘place’ and ‘journey’ need to be seen as complementary and mutually catalytic. Sacralized landscapes provide the settings in which participants could work through painful and unresolved traumas in an intense and embodied way. Time spent in these pilgrimage sites (typically anything from a few hours to several weeks) enabled participants ‘to work over in the mind some overpowering experience so as to make oneself master of it’.23 However, pilgrimage could also be used as a defensive manoeuvre, to avoid anxiety and emotionally difficult work; undertaken in this way, out of a sense of duty, it might not act as a harbinger of greater psychic composure.24 Participants described how pilgrimage changed and deepened relationships: between members of the pilgrimage group itself (some of whom were from the same family), and between the group members and their helpers or guides.25 In her Holocaust research, Carol Kidron notes the paucity of research into ‘family tourism’, and presents findings from her interviews with descendants who had participated in ‘roots trips’.26 Some of her interviewees travelled with their Holocaust survivor parent(s), others went alone.27 What emerged most strongly from Kidron’s interviews was how visiting sites of trauma could trigger changes in the way family members related to one another, thus enabling ‘family members to “perform” emotions that, at home, were more tacitly expressed’.28 Although the pilgrimages considered in my research did not have the family group as its focus, the testimonies and my own fieldwork observations confirmed that members of groups who started out as strangers soon felt comfortable sharing personal experiences and emotions, and that this in turn promoted greater trust between members of the group.

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The following extract from an account by Linda Nicholls gives a sense of the complexity of emotions at play on a visit to a largely unrecognized site of pilgrimage, in this case the factory where her father worked but where the precise location of the camp site could not be determined. It spotlights the need for silence and contemplation in these circumstances, as well as evidencing the humanizing impact of sensitive interactions between local people and the pilgrims themselves, under conditions of a shared traumatic history. Over the following few years, Linda and her husband Kevin initiated a successful campaign to urge Denka, the Japanese owners of the factory, to erect a memorial on the site (see Chapter 3). A visit that began as poignant yet low key ended with Linda and Kevin determined to correct an injustice. This is from Linda’s written account of the visit: The two men from the Denka factory told us they were not sure exactly where the P.O.W. camp site was, but they could show us the approximate place it was thought to be, this was only a short distance in the mini bus. The area was an industrial site in a mountainous region down a narrow dirt track. It looked bleak on a warm sunny day so I think it must have been quite awful in 1943 when the prisoners arrived there. We all got out of the mini bus and walked together to get a feel about the place. I felt very emotional at that point and Kevin said afterwards he had felt the same. We stood and posed for the photographers a couple of times; they were polite and seemed to be happy with the pictures. We stopped for a while and had a little time to ourselves to reflect. We were then taken to another building in the quarry area where another Japanese gentleman … produced a photograph taken in approximately 1939 that showed what it may have been like when Dad was there. We were told we could not keep the picture so Kevin took some photographs of it that came out OK. As we were leaving the room one of the Denka employees noticed that Kevin had an insect bite on his forehead, from when we had been in the quarry area, and offered him some lotion to dab on it. He was very pleased to be offered this remedy as he had more bites on his legs and ankle. I was also pleased as I had received an insect bite to my arm so we applied some of the lotion to that. We both appreciated this gesture as the lotion soon soothed the bites.29

Landscape and place Why do some places become sites of pilgrimages and others do not? Bruce Scates sets the scene:

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Complex and intriguing questions surround the issue of which sites have come to be remembered and why. Clearly, though, it was not just the size of the battle or the number of fatalities. For reasons that range from domestic politics to climate and geography, some sites became places of pilgrimage whereas others did not.30

Stone and Sharpley make a distinction between ‘purposefully constructed attractions or experiences that interpret or recreate events or acts associated with death’, and sites such as cemeteries or memorials that became attractions ‘by accident’.31 Many of the sites visited by FEPOWs and their families fall into one or other of these categories. For example, the Changi museum in Singapore32 was established with a clear purpose, whereas ‘Hellfire Pass’ would be considered ‘accidental’.33 That said, some sites do not slot comfortably into one category or another. One such is the ‘Iruku boys’ memorial in Kiwa-Cho in Japan,34 whose focus is local, and specific to the village and to the FEPOWs who were held nearby, but is not in any sense a conventional tourist attraction.35 Starting life as a small memorial garden that local villagers created and maintained to recognize the sixteen POWs who died in the copper mine, its significance has grown over the years, to become a focal point of pilgrimage for many UK ex-POWs and their families. ‘No place is intrinsically sacred’36 but must await the process of ‘sacralization’ to make it so.37 For more than a quarter of a century, Keiko Holmes has been taking groups of ‘Iruka boys’ to Japan, supported by groups of local Japanese helpers.38 Over the years, a succession of well-publicized visits have co-created this place as ‘sacred’. Needless to say, however, many less-frequented sites remain quite fragile, and are subject to ‘desacralization’ through the activities of local or national vested interests, simple neglect or diminishing numbers of visitors.39 Pilgrimage sites may rise to prominence through sheer force of personality. Committed and charismatic individuals have adopted, or developed, specific sites as their personal projects, and often invested many years of arduous research (sometimes literally ‘in the field’), struggling against the odds, to track down the material minutiae and the stories of wartime captivity. Some are widely recognized in the FEPOW community, such as Rod Beattie, MBE40 (Thai–Burma Railway),41 John Cooper (Adams Park)42 and Keiko Holmes, OBE (Kiwa-Cho).43 The work of activists like Rod Beattie has done more than simply reveal history. In many senses it has extracted and constructed history from a much-modified and constantly changing landscape. By developing museums and interpretive centres alongside excavations, history is both shaped and preserved for the pilgrims, despite the political and financial constraints that limit what is accessible or recoverable.

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Once at the place of pilgrimage, responses will be unique and unpredictable. Dylan Trigg points to the ‘tension between place and trauma’,44 which gives rise to disorientation in the visitor. At sites of trauma, we experience a disjunction between our postmemories and the ‘banality of the daylight’, and a sense that we have ‘come to a scene too late’.45 The materiality of the place resists and disrupts our imagined narratives of past events that took place here – all that is left is a ‘murmur of the place where that narrative once existed’.46 The traumatic event, as Trigg puts it, ‘trembles as an incommensurable void is given a voice between the viewer and the place.’47 In other words, what was previously unreal (the reality of the trauma, the unthinkable) is now felt as ‘becoming real’. ‘The spectre becomes visible as the scene establishes a portal between the past and the present.’48 The ways in which participants responded to sites of trauma were mediated by their own life histories, their psychic singularities, and past and prevailing social discourses. The case studies that follow demonstrate how the children crafted their own individual forms of psychic response.

‘I went back to Ambon’ … juxtaposing beauty and butchery In 2012, Kim travelled out to Ambon for the first time, in a small party that included a former prisoner of war. Ambon was where her father had been imprisoned, and where the coral beaches and bright sunshine conspired to trigger a painful and disabling eye condition known as ‘coral blindness’.49 ‘I was honoured … I went back to Ambon … I went over to Ambon. I’ve always wanted to go. Ever since I learnt about it.’50 Kim initially framed her visit in terms of a ‘return’, but then quickly ‘corrected’ her ‘error’. Her words tell of a symbolic ‘return’ as well as a physical journey to the site where her father had been held prisoner. Through this parapraxis – her slip of the tongue – she unconsciously revealed the pervasive influence of ‘postmemory’.51 The psychic presence of her father was never far from the surface in Kim’s testimony and, as she described her experiences, the deep connections between her physical pilgrimage and her psychic journey emerged more clearly. The embodied emotional power of pilgrimage can be seen from this extract: And we went back with one FEPOW who was actually on Ambon as well. And he was fabulous because he’d stop the minibus and he’d say, oh, stop-stop-stop! And he’d try to start demonstrating how they used to climb the coconut trees. But it was a very emotional tour …

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I went because I wanted to see where my dad was and I wanted to honour his friends that didn’t come back. I don’t know what I expected. But you don’t know until you’re actually there, how you’re going to feel, how you experience it. But I remember when we stopped where the runway is, is two hundred yards from the beach, so we all stripped off and ran into the sea. And I know the FEPOWs, when they were lucky, were able to bathe there. And I went in and I looked around and thought, my goodness, my dad actually saw these sites that I’m seeing. That wouldn’t have changed in seventy years. You know, like the island over there … and things like that, and the colour of the sea, and it was very, very, very magical, and very beautiful.52

The stark juxtaposition between the natural beauty of the place and the knowledge of the man-made suffering that had occurred there, and which had affected her so personally, enabled Kim to achieve greater empathy with her father.53 Kim’s words vividly conveyed an almost mystical impression that prompted in my mind a range of psychological and spiritual associations: the physical immersion in the sea evoked baptism which in turn pointed to psychic regeneration, purification or reparation, and a moment of epiphanic awareness. She went on: When we got to their camp site, we found the airfield that they built. Because obviously being on coral, there’s not much grown there. And you could see where the trees had been cut away. They’d had to cut away the palm trees and then build it, so you could see the line of palm trees from where they’d cut them away. And there was very little grown up, even in seventy odd years, on the site. And we walked around and we managed to find where they’d built up to hide planes – little dug outs I think …. So that was quite magical.54

Sacred sites present in many forms, and in varying states of visibility or disrepair. In Kim’s case, the traces of the airfield emerged like a palimpsest, apparent only to those who had the knowledge, insight and persistence to see beneath the surface layers. The impact of the pilgrimage made an enduring impression on Kim’s memories of her father: We were in a house between when I was two to when I left home at twenty-one. And in that house, I suppose it was the fashion in those days, in the 60s and 70s, he had a mural on the wall which was a beach scene, with palm trees sideways, and it was sort of the thing that you see everywhere in the Far East. But I often wonder if he had that and he used to look at and think of his friends. And the fact that when we went to Ambon, that’s exactly what it looked like … really, really touched me. In his own way, he probably honoured his friends by doing that. But he was the type who would have honoured them quietly, and not … he didn’t join any clubs, or anything like that.55

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While I was transcribing this section of the recording, I found myself recalling my own childhood. The counter-transference triggered a personal memory, connecting Kim’s memories with mine. My father also had a large mural on the wall of our ‘front room’, the room where he spent so much time on his own, listening to music. Our mural represented a hilly landscape. As I discovered in 2010, my father’s POW camp was located in a hilly, rural environment. Could this be one of the ways in which our fathers unconsciously tried to reclaim, tame or domesticate the landscapes previously associated with humiliation and hunger by symbolically and unconsciously establishing a degree of ‘mastery’ or control over memories of distressing events?56

‘The father inside of me’ … a pilgrimage to the Thai–Burma Railway Louise’s father died suddenly and unexpectedly when she was only fifteen years of age. He had always been a very distant, ‘absent’ figure in her life. In middle age, she began to investigate his time as a POW in parallel with training to be a psychotherapist. The two experiences became intertwined: a lot of my analysis was discovering my dad’s experience. I couldn’t have done that without my analyst, because it was so painful. My own choice of going to analysis was knowing that there was a lot more to do, I think, and that was really when I started, you know. And I went to Kew,57 and I read the books and I had that picture framed [she was pointing to a painting of the Chapel at Changi which hung on the wall].58

Louise began to explore her feelings about a forthcoming trip to Thailand, its purpose, her preparations and her expectations: what I referred to earlier as the ‘emotional approach’ to a place of pilgrimage. I think that going to Singapore and Thailand, for me, will be the culmination of it. I couldn’t have done that years ago, either because it wouldn’t have meant anything, you know. I’d have gone, ‘oh, yeah, oh, that happened, that happened to them over there, y-you know. There would have been no … [deep intake of breath] it wouldn’t have had any p-personal erm … connection for me. So, what has given it meaning now, in particular? Well, I guess m-my analysis, really. Y-you know and doing all the groundwork, of being able to sort of bear it. As I said to you earlier, I invited my brother and he said, ‘No, it’s too sad, I can’t do it.’ So … i-i, i-i-it’s … it is a pilgrimage for me, t-to go where my dad was, to go to Changi, to go to erm … erm … to the museum

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there, and then to go up the railroad. I mean, it’s going to be really tough but i-it is a erm … I am doing it for me and I’m doing it for my dad. That’s how I se- … I-I-I think I see it. So that he exists, actually. Because he was … erm … he just erm … he was a shell … He was a … he was a shell of a man. And this sort of fleshes him out and gives him life, so … Yeah, that’s the way I am looking at it.59

Hesitations and stammers were not typical of her everyday speech pattern, but emerged only when she was working hard to extract and elucidate the possible psychological implications of her forthcoming pilgrimage. As far as she was able, Louise wanted to experience the pilgrimage without extraneous emotional demands or distractions, so she refused her husband’s offer to accompany her. But she did want her daughter by her side. In Louise’s eyes, as the granddaughter of a FEPOW, she was a legitimate pilgrim in her own right: my husband said he would come with me. I said I didn’t want him to. I have … I have to be able to just do this …. I didn’t want to have to think about him, you know, are you all right? What do you thi-? I just … I don’t wanna have to … think … about anybody else. And my … my daughter, she’s very erm … erm … sensitive – that’s not to say my husband isn’t – but she will just, she won’t … she w- … I won’t have to … think about her. Y-you know, she’ll do it with me … And, and it’s her granddad too. … Erm … we’ll take a lot of tissues, I guess. I guess that’s how we’ll get through it.60

I wanted to understand more about how Louise felt about her father now that she had committed herself to visiting Thailand. He-he’s been huge … erm … his experiences as a prisoner of war have been huge in my life. But I hadn’t known it. Erm … and it’s by going to do this now … It’s not out of idle curiosity or even un-idle curiosity. It’s about going because … this man that I knew for fifteen years … and then wasn’t there for a long time, is so huge in my life. It’s … very strange. So … I’m sad, it’s … it’s a sad thing what happened. … But I’ve done my best to … to repair … what I can for him, I think. So, it’s part of … er … er … you know, this is as much for him as for me. Not that he’ll know, I don’t suppose … I think that … I hope … what I’d like to go is, I’ve done that now. Let him rest in peace really. Hm. … … Yeah, I … i- … you know, I don’t … I don’t have … you know, I’m not thinking he’s watching and … wants me … I don’t, you know, I don’t s-see it as sort of … a-a … It is for me. But it is to repair the dad that I had inside of me, I think. Hmm.61

Louise’s fractured narrative, together with her planned actions, expressed unmistakably the significance she attached to making reparation with her father, which she implied was associated with his early death. Compounding this early

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loss was the fact that after his death her mother had practically erased him from family life: ‘by the time he died, and after he died, nobody ever mentioned him. It was like he just wasn’t there.’62 After her return from Thailand, I contacted Louise again. The following extracts are from our email exchanges. Her words revealed how the pilgrimage had met many of her expectations: the importance of acquiring historical facts, the psychic and emotional significance of place, the embodied quality of the journey, the sensitive presence of the guides (they ‘made me feel safe’), and her acute awareness of the father ‘inside of me’: The biggest impact was that the experiences of those on the railway were talked about. There was so much knowledge, and all the things that I had wanted to ask had answers … I understand now how the railway was built, and how it joined up along the way, the train ride to Ban Pong, and what the prisoners would have seen and maybe felt when they got off the train. The jungle, the rain, but for my dad, surviving it, at some cost to himself of course … Some of the trip was very emotional, particularly when I stood on a bridge near the Burma border and Rod pointed out the camp, and where the bridge that the prisoners built, and where the cookhouse was and the men’s quarters. My dad had spent eight plus months as part of ‘F force’ in what was considered the worst camp, and the furthest march … We literally followed my father’s footsteps at some points, and what had always been an unmentionable nightmare became something different to that – it became much more real, and awful, but survivable … One of the first things that Terry and Andrew said to me was ‘you don’t have to tell us, we know’.63 That made a big impression, and made me feel safe. I have done the trip now, and have done it for my dad. Whether he knows or not, I can’t know. But the father inside of me knows, and that gives me a lot of peace. I am going to Burma next February and on the way will take my husband to Kanchanaburi, and maybe my son too, and I will be able to show them some of the things I saw, without fearing being overwhelmed.64

By using expert guides, and focusing on those sites along the railway route that had specific relevance for her father, Louise was able to avoid being subjected to the influence of competing war narratives that have emerged in Kanchanaburi in recent decades.65 For many FEPOW visitors, the way in which key elements of the POW story have been appropriated, reframed and mythologized to fit the commercial needs of international tourism can be distressing, even felt as personally disrespectful.66 Personal transformation held a dominant place in Louise’s testimony (‘the father inside of me knows, and that gives me a lot of peace’). Although Louise’s own therapy was at the core of this lengthy process,

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the visits to Thailand enabled her to take her personal psychic work to a deeper level. She was able to embody and historicize the memories and fantasies surrounding her father, and to externalize and work through the traumatic aspects of his psychic presence, thus enabling what remained internally to be a more benign, more balanced and more ‘survivable’ influence.

John … a pilgrimage to rural Japan John travelled with his wife to the site of his father’s POW camp in Japan. His father had been forced to work as a miner in the nearby coal mine which, by the time of his visit, had been closed for some years. I conducted my interview with John by email: My wife and I visited the site by ourselves. … The actual site is derelict and is surrounded by low hills, I took a small panoramic movie of the area. As you can imagine it was very moving for me to stand in the actual place where all the misery occurred. The POWs walked from there through a ‘gap’ in the valley to the mine entrance. It all was surreal especially the fact that the entrance has not been altered, blocked of course some way in, and the mine buildings are also mostly the same (appear to be very large tin sheds!). Locally very poor and neglected, perhaps why it has stayed similar for so many years. … The people were very nice: I was in tears with the lovely interpreter lady, a Buddhist who abhors war and feels very sad about the Japanese war mongering. Interesting that her parents ran a brewery (Sake) and at the end some prisoners went to the brewery and had a few. Like to think my dad was in that! All in all I am so glad we did the trip. It could not have happened earlier in my life because of the obvious sensitivities. It gives me a little satisfaction that perhaps I have honoured my father’s memory in some small way.67

Before visiting the camp site, John and his wife had been on a nine-day walking tour in Japan with a group of friends. Later, en route to the POW camp site, they visited Hiroshima. ‘What a sobering experience to go to the actual bomb site and to see the many memorials to children, the mound for those dead who are unknown.’ Eventually, they reach their destination: So at last we travel to the POW camp site, a place that I have thought about for so long. I had spent some time writing and rewriting a speech that I thought might be necessary as we were advised by Koshi that we possibly would be met by local dignitaries and the press.68 We travelled with Koshi on the Shinkansen bullet train, and then took a local JR train. Nice trip and talking to Koshi was

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interesting. Suddenly we are at the tiny station and we are met by a small contingent of the local press, TV, school children and the local councillor, as well as a young Buddhist man who runs a local Kindergarten, another elderly Buddhist man who I understand was instrumental in establishing the memorial at the POW site, and a man who worked at the mine as a driver for many years, and a lady interpreter. In addition a number of young children, and a big sign welcoming us. How special.69

His first words suggested he had undergone an extensive psychological ‘approach’ to this place (‘that I have thought about for so long’), which also included his trip to Hiroshima. On the day of the visit, the journey offered further opportunities for reflection by talking to Koshi and meeting a group from the local community. Although John gave no explicit indication in his testimony that he viewed the lengthy and strenuous ‘walking tour’ as anything other than a leisure activity, I  was fascinated by his decision to introduce such a traditional pilgrimage activity into his visit.70 For John, ‘walking reflexively’ in this way engendered a shift from ‘material things’ to ‘spiritual themes’ and facilitated a shift in focus from the destination to the rhythm of the journey itself.71 Although John had organized the trip himself with the help of volunteers from the POW Research Network Japan (POWRNJ),72 the local itinerary resembled those organized by Keiko Holmes for her groups. Local school children (and university students) often played a critical role in these pilgrimages to Japan, being accepted as ‘innocents’ by both ‘sides’. As we noted earlier, meetings between FEPOWs, their families and the students have contributed productively to the wider discourse surrounding Japan’s failure to teach their young people about the full reality of the Second World War.73 Being present at the site of his father’s POW camp made a profound impact on John. While in that landscape, he took an empathic leap, forging emotional connections with an imagined past which, for him, at that time, felt immanent. Also evident in John’s testimony were feelings of ‘disorientation’ and of ‘coming … too late’74: Much discussion, and flower presentations, at the memorial. I walked around a bit being filmed all the time, very emotional for me actually. There is nothing left to indicate what transpired here. It is an area of flat land surrounded by hills and I imagine that the prisoners would have thought they were in the middle of nowhere and completely deserted by their compatriots. This memorial was stated as being the first for a POW camp in Japan and the older Buddhist man who I believe made it happen should be celebrated and applauded. Standing in an area where so much suffering occurred brings many tears.

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From there we travelled by car to the mine entrance about 2–3kms away. Of course the POWs would have marched, the old roads and a high wire used for transporting coal are now all gone. A lot of the mine buildings are still the same according to Shiziko who knows the area intimately. The roads then were dirt with wooden carts for transport. We ended up teary eyed together as she still feels so bad about war, treatment of prisoners, etc. I tried to console her by stating that people do very bad things on both sides in war and that war is the problem not ordinary people … Very strange to stand there, I believe that the entrance is identical apart from being a bit overgrown.75

John gave a short speech in the open air at the site of the camp. A declaration of thanks to individuals and to the ‘Japanese people’, a few words about his father’s personal background, then rather more about the hardships he experienced as a POW. He stressed his father’s resilience, a quality likely to resonate with Japanese national self-image, as evidenced by Japan’s responses to tsunamis and earthquakes. At one point, he took a risk, allowing his emotions to subvert the social and cultural expectations of a ‘speech’ delivered in such a sensitive setting. He said: ‘He told me many stories that cannot be repeated here.’76 However, the nuanced ambiguity rescued these words from being perceived as confrontational or disrespectful,77 and he promptly shifted direction, continuing: ‘But he did overcome and lived a very fruitful life.’78 Although fewer relatives of FEPOWs now visit this area, the positive tone of John’s speech may have encouraged local people to register the significance of this memorial within their community, to protect and maintain its fabric, and to welcome future visitors whose presence would help to sustain the ‘sacred’ nature of the site. What might have seemed a fleeting and ritualized event, with only personal consequences, may now be seen to have wider ramifications.

A Pilgrimage to Singapore As Chapter 2 revealed, Joanna’s childhood had been blighted by fear of her father. As an army officer he had been evacuated from the beaches of Dunkirk in 1940, captured in Singapore without firing a shot, finally meeting his personal nadir labouring on the Thai–Burma Railway. He had had ‘a very, very long war’.79 In her thirties, Joanna had been seriously traumatized at the time of her mother’s death from cancer, when her father’s captivity experiences dramatically ‘burst through’ into their shared present. During this ‘traumatic revival’80 he had accelerated his wife’s death by increasing her painkillers. While this was a pivotal moment in Joanna’s relationship with her father, her entire adult life

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had been scarred by recollections of his violent temper when she was a child. In his early eighties, however, he developed dementia and this heralded a period during which, unexpectedly, father and daughter began to repair their damaged relationship and, for the first time, he began to speak of being a prisoner of war. After his death, she undertook a pilgrimage to Singapore with an old friend whose father had also been a prisoner there. And it so happened the hotel we were staying in, which used to be the British administrative headquarters, is set in the middle of a national park. And the week we were there, they were doing tree planting for anybody who wanted to plant a tree in memory of somebody. … So, we just couldn’t resist it. And, of course the hotel thought this was brilliant PR because the first two people planting trees were doing it in memory of their fathers who had been taken prisoner in Singapore. … They chose trees that were endangered species like our fathers. They will be the tallest trees in the park. So, they said, it will be like your fathers are overlooking the whole of Singapore. They’re very hardy, as obviously our fathers were. And I found it really quite spooky. I did feel that my father was somehow lurking. And also, I suppose, because it’s only two years since I put his ashes in my mother’s grave – I mean, his ashes in a casket interred in her grave. And I was in there digging … Well the gardeners had dug the hole but I was planting this tree, and it was earth again, you know, it was all sort of, I’m back down, grave digging again. So, I mean, I just thought, yeah, he really would be proud of this.81

At that moment, Joanna felt a connection with her father, and expressed its meaning at psychic (‘I did feel that my father was somehow lurking’) and primal levels (‘I was planting this tree, and it was earth again’). Bennett and Bennett note that sensing the presence of the dead may last much longer than previously thought; they suggest that people who have had projective experiences (such as Joanna had during the tree-planting ceremony) may use various discourses to rationalize their phenomenal world,82 which might then support a ‘more fluid ongoing relationality between the bereaved and the dead.’83 For Joanna, the sequence of first burying her father’s ashes in her mother’s grave, followed by the pilgrimage and the tree planting in Singapore, provided the means through which she was able to start putting things to rest. Establishing the tree as a living symbol of her father – as a ‘continuing bond’84 – represented the  culmination of a process of redemption and psychic reconstruction that drew on her fluent use of symbolism, for example the notion of ‘endangered species’ and ‘hardiness’ that she applied both to the trees and to the ex-FEPOWs, and the fact that the trees will be ‘the tallest in the park’. We might infer that the tree represented her ideal father, devoid of flaws: a commanding presence

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that was tall, hardy, upright, reliable, yet unthreatening. Not content to leave her interpretation of events at an external symbolic level, however, she pushed her narrative firmly in the direction of internal personal resolution, claiming the validation and the emotional response from her father she had yearned for as a child, and indeed as an adult (‘I just thought, yeah, he would be really proud of this’).85 She had reached a stage in her life when she could contemplate living alongside the memories of her troubled past: ‘I suppose I’ve always wanted him to be proud of me. And he never was, I don’t think … I think he was in the end. In the end, he was.’86 We can see from Joanna’s testimony how memory and consciousness, postmemories and fantasies intersect at places of trauma, giving rise to phenomenological sensations of ‘ghostly hauntings’87 and providing the psychic energy to carry out acts of remembrance. Against the background of repeated traumas in her life, the pilgrimage to Singapore enabled Joanna to reflect on her memories and family relationships. Through the embodied practice of pilgrimage, the impact of place and ritual, and travelling with a friend who shared some features of her history, she was able to secure a measure of psychic resolution and composure that proved sufficient to construct a redemption narrative out of a heterogeneous network of ‘people, places and practices’.88

Off the beaten track in Japan … reflections on a group pilgrimage In 2010, I visited the site of my father’s POW camp in rural Japan, as a member of a pilgrimage group organized by Keiko Holmes (see Figure 9). What, as a child, I had imagined in black and white, I now saw in colour. Once there, the ‘internal catalysts’ (‘faith … a deeply felt value suggestive of things held in high regard’) and ‘external catalysts’ (‘the sensuous and symbolic environment and landscapes’)89 combined to create an experience that I described in my field notes as a ‘fragile and fragmented self-conscious sense of awe’. ‘Fragile and fragmented’ because of the circumstances under which the visit took place: a brief visit, accompanied by the local press and TV. Despite the ephemeral nature of the experience, within minutes it began to coalesce into something more tangible, as other members of the group invited me to tell them ‘how I had felt’. That evening in the hotel, we gathered in the lobby to watch the news item on local TV, and to pool our memories of the event. From the jumble of inchoate impressions, I gradually put together a semi-coherent narrative that

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Figure 9  The author at the entrance to the mine near the Hiroshima 6B POW camp.

I felt able to share with others on my return home.90 Still lingering and drifting within, nonetheless, were ambivalent feelings towards my father, distressing childhood memories, and a swathe of confusing postmemories. Yet I also sensed that the combination of concrete action, social engagement with a group of pilgrims, together with untamed reflections, had created a fresh opportunity to recontextualize the still-unsettled psychic matters. With so many FEPOW destinations in Japan off the beaten track, located in remote areas that see few foreign tourists, pilgrims soon find themselves immersed in the local culture. As a form of ritual, pilgrimages offer planned, and more unplanned, opportunities to engage in what Victor Turner referred to as ‘the reflexivity of the social process’.91 During pilgrimages to Japan, the children of FEPOWs are guaranteed to be brought face-to-face with descendants of their fathers’ ‘perpetrators’, and physical reminders of the material culture of the time. This is a less-discussed consequence of pilgrimages connected with war. The most overt encounters are the visits to the sites of the camps, and meetings with individuals whose forebears may have been responsible for the father’s traumas.92 But pilgrims are also exposed to physical and social landscapes, and aspects of traditional Japanese culture, that their fathers would have recognized. Gazing out of the window from the comfort of the Hiroshima to Onomichi shinkansen (‘bullet train’), I found that fantasy quickly took over, and I sank into a reverie that stripped away the gloss of contemporary Japanese life to

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reveal images of past events, coloured by childhood conversations and troubling postmemories. Thoughts and images that make fleeting appearances during train-ride reveries are not always charitable or fair. Fantasies summoned by our fathers’ stories can provoke primitive emotions, especially in the midst of historically hostile territory. Moreover, we would be naïve to believe we can fend off such primitive retaliatory and aggressive impulses entirely, even during pilgrimages organized for reconciliation. In the end perhaps it would be counterproductive to do so; we may need to let these feelings run their course. For my own part, I found the harsh version of the male Japanese voice very difficult to adjust to. Every time I heard it, I reacted viscerally, thrown back into my stock of violent imagery, immersed in the postmemories I had drawn on for so long, accompanied by the sound of my father’s jaw being smashed by a rifle butt wielded by a camp guard.93 In pilgrimage groups, participants mostly travel together, exchange memories of childhood, and swap personal stories of the war passed down by their fathers. In Japan, this could even extend to sharing the rituals of communal bathing – and doing so in the company of Japanese people of different generations. Framing the pilgrimage as a type of rite of passage incorporating liminal moments does open up new lines of thought: What is interesting about liminal phenomena for our present purposes is the blend they offer of lowliness and sacredness, of homogeneity and comradeship. We are presented, in such rites, with a ‘moment in and out of time,’ and in and out of secular social structure, which reveals, however fleetingly, some recognition (in symbol if not always in language) of a generalized social bond that has ceased to be and has simultaneously yet to be fragmented into a multiplicity of structural ties.94

Victor Turner’s subjects followed formal and traditional rites of passage, whereas those undertaken by the people I interviewed were more idiosyncratic, their purposes less detailed or explicit, and the outcomes left open to individual interpretation. How should we interpret ‘lowliness’ within the pilgrimage experience? Perhaps the idea of humility gets closest, displayed through a willingness to set aside hardened attitudes or preconceptions, and to submit to the external or internal ‘other’: to the internal psychic objects that require attention, to the landscape, and to the immanence of the past. And to loosen those long-held beliefs and stereotypes embedded in discourses of the Second World War, including the roles ascribed to the FEPOWs, the Japanese people or to the British government. For some pilgrims, ‘submitting’ to these psychic shifts promoted a connection between cultures that can be a precondition for

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reconciliation based on a sense of shared humanity. On one of Keiko Holmes’ early pilgrimages, an incident occurred that subsequently became a seminal ‘circulating reference’ in the FEPOW community.95 What happened at the riverside changed the life of ex-FEPOW, Roy Blackler: I felt a little hand slide into mine. I looked down and saw the smiling face of one of the daughters – it was seven-year-old Rika. In that instant, more than 50 years of hatred vanished. I felt great warmth flow through me. I felt so at peace. I thought that I couldn’t go on with such bitterness in my heart. These are not the people who tortured us.96

Pilgrimage as a genre of memory practice functions as a psychosocial milieu within which children of prisoners of war have been able to address the legacies of war, to revisit, review and reconstruct their memories of childhood, and the evolving relationship with their fathers, in the company of others facing similar challenges. My emphasis on the biographical and the individual psychosocial dimensions complements other research in this field that tends to focus on the public, cultural, global and political facets of remembering war in the Far East. Many participants keenly felt the ‘guilt of not knowing’ and, as we have seen in Chapter 6, some prioritized the acquisition of facts about their fathers’ POW lives, using pilgrimages to gather further detail. The children featured in this chapter, however, were focused largely on the emotional dimensions of pilgrimage, and used the pilgrimage experience to restore a new psychic equilibrium with their pasts. Religion has made only fleeting appearances in this chapter. The question of how significant organized religion might have been in facilitating pilgrimages by British families to FEPOW sites resists any simple answer. Keiko Holmes, the driving force behind the Agape World ‘pilgrimages of reconciliation’ is a committed Christian, although she welcomes pilgrims who come from any faith or none. Her trips to Japan depend heavily on a network of volunteer supporters many of whom are also members of the tiny Japanese Christian minority (estimated to be around 1 per cent of the population).97 What was more discernible was the diffuse spirituality seen in the testimonies of many participants, whether or not they claimed membership of any particular religion. The process of pilgrimage is complex, multifaceted and simultaneously both embodied and psychic in nature. Pilgrimages may be transformative in their impact, and occasionally transcendental, as we saw from the testimonies of Kim, Louise, John and Joanna. While change always belongs to the individual, the pilgrimage experience can facilitate and deepen the sense of ‘communitas’ offered as part of a group.98

Afterword: A reflective coda

I began this research with nagging questions. How did other children of FEPOWs experience their childhoods? What was their family like? Did they know much about their father’s wartime experiences? Did their fathers talk about it? How did my experiences compare with theirs? My purpose in writing this book, then, is to show how the children of FEPOWs have remembered and commemorated their fathers’ lives, and how their different memory practices have been rooted in the POW experience. Equally importantly, I wanted to share my research findings with readers whose academic, professional or personal interests lay in the long-term effects of war trauma, or were curious about the psychosocial research methodology. I have drawn on my own personal experiences when they complemented or extended the research. In doing so, I have felt an integral part of the research process, more a partner and less of an observer. Inevitably, many words have been left unsaid in the main body of the text. Loose ends abound, as do voids that couldn’t be filled along the way. This Afterword is my response. In three discrete sections, I reflect on the personal source of this research, the exciting unpredictability of fieldwork, and the discomfort implicit in acknowledging the humanity of the ‘other’. My aim is to keep the door ajar and to smooth the path for empathy, imagination and further research.

Afterword I … the roots of my remembrance Childhood in the immediate post-war years was a peculiar time. I was born in 1947, just weeks before Indian independence and the mass slaughter that accompanied Partition.1 The Cold War was still in its formative years. Although the Second World War was not long over, I remained oblivious to that fact for some while, despite the smog of war still hanging thickly over my home town.

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The legacy of the Far East war cast its shadow across my consciousness only slowly, as the spats between my father and mother grew. As my father advanced, so I retreated. But now, sixty-three years later, here I am standing on Japanese soil at the place my father was incarcerated. Trees loaded with rain, Red lilies mark every edge. A flower of death. Abandoned coal mine, Redundant, its voice silent. My father greets me.2

No physical reminders of the camp remain. Red Spider Lilies (Lycoris radiata) skirt the fields adding colour to the hilly green landscape. In Japanese mythology, this is the flower of death, often planted in and around graveyards, its bright colours guiding souls into the afterlife. I am interviewed by a young Japanese reporter from the local TV station. A few minutes after the interview has been completed, he approaches me again, close to the coal mine entrance. He is looking serious. ‘I am Japanese,’ he says, in faltering English, ‘I am so sorry for what we did to your father.’ He seems as close to tears as I am. *** December 20 1995, and my father has just died. He was eighty-one. My mother had died thirteen years earlier and, as an only child, the task of settling his affairs and dealing with the accumulation of clutter and confusion falls to me. There is much physical and emotional work to do, including dealing with his signwriter’s workshop – stuffed with brushes, paints, completed and half-finished sign boards, tins of gold leaf, books of typeface, and flimsy brown envelopes filled with old receipts: the trappings of a master craftsman, accumulated over a lifetime. All untouched since my mother’s death. The house is to be sold, but first has to be cleaned. The ‘front room’ is still pristine, befitting a room whose use was restricted to my father’s musical interests, special guests (of whom there were very few) and Christmas meals. Cleaning the rest of the house takes days and days of elbow grease. My father had been too stubborn and too proud to let anyone help him. Once the house has been cleaned and tidied, I turn to his workshop. There are many documents in various states of disrepair, stretching back decades. Items that might be important

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or meaningful to me are strewn amongst what look like random ephemera. From a small wooden box, I retrieve the contents of an aged brown envelope, and carefully unfold a fragile piece of paper. I realize I have seen it before. Many years ago. It’s a drawing by Leonard L. Rogers, an American marine, a fellow prisoner of war, who drew it for my father in September 1945 after liberation by the Americans, when they were hospitalized together in Japan. By that time, my father had survived three-and-a-half years as a ‘guest’ of the Imperial Japanese Army, in Java and on mainland Japan. I can trace the source of my research to this particular document (Figure 10). Although vaguely aware of its existence since childhood, I had seen it only very rarely and never given it the attention it warranted. The eighteen months that Leonard and my father spent together in the Omine Machi (Hiroshima 6B) POW camp led to a close friendship. Leonard was a professional artist who went on to work for the Disney Corporation. I hadn’t understood the potential significance of this drawing until a few years ago when I made contact with Leonard’s only living relatives. I scanned the drawing and emailed it to them. It was the first time they had seen any of his work.

Figure 10  The Artist from Essex: drawn for my father by Leonard L. Rogers, an American Marine also in my father’s POW camp.

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Afterword II … the wayward nature of fieldwork On the page, fieldwork may appear tidy, tightly circumscribed, coherent even. On the street, it’s a different story. For most of the time, oral historians focus on the outcomes of their research, and write up their work accordingly. However, the psychosocial method demands that researchers consider process, and be willing to reflect on the confusing situations we come across, how they made an impact on the research and on the self. Several memorable experiences could not find their way into the main text, at least not explicitly, but I can share a few here. These extracts from my field notes highlight the emotional fluctuations and practical challenges that popped up ‘behind the scenes’. My experiences may resonate with others who have also experienced this ‘spill of distinct moments, fractured but vivid’3: I am interviewing Ed this morning, a contact made through his partner Susan, an ex-student of mine now living many miles away. It is 7am and I take a shower, followed by a couple of homemade sandwiches and a cup of coffee, breakfast in a budget hotel room. I feel both excited and apprehensive. In her reliably enigmatic way, Susan has emailed me to say that Ed is ‘curious’. Curious about what … my research, me, both? These overnight journeys present distinct problems. The first of this trip’s two interviews took place yesterday afternoon and at that time I was suffering from post-driving lethargy; for this one I expect to feel anxious about the long drive home (‘When can I get away?’). I hope I can get through the interview with proper focus and concentration. Will Susan sit in I wonder? Will I be given the choice? And will I recognize her – it’s been a long time, perhaps thirty years. I notice that I am still writing notes at 8.30am, I think to distract from the interview to come. Must stop now and get dressed! … Eventually I reach the house, but take three attempts to achieve a safe berth in what is a very narrow road. I am getting out of the car when Susan emerges from the front door calling out my name. She looks very much the same as when I last saw her. Although she was always forthright, I am still taken aback when she ushers me through to the narrow kitchen, then sits me down on a wooden chair at the far end before taking her seat directly facing me. She says she wants to go through the ‘ground rules’, then quickly retracts that statement, before going on to explain that Ed is ‘vulnerable’, and she will be sitting in on the interview.

*** I approach the interview with Pat in downbeat mood. The weather is ghastly, dumping rain from the banks of heavy black clouds congregating above north

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Essex rooftops. While the weather alone dampens inspiration, I am also uneasy about how he might respond. My caution is due largely to the contrast in our communication styles, all so far by email. I generally adopt quite a conventional, ‘letter-like’ approach when writing online, trying to strike a safe balance, avoiding excessive informality. Pat’s responses have always been minimal, always from an iPhone. Despite recognizing the limitations of small-screen technology, I still felt his replies to be curt, even impolite. I had not spoken to him on the phone. I am about to ring the doorbell when I have a last-minute panic. Is ‘Pat’ a man or a woman?

*** It’s a sweltering hot July day. The door opens and there he is standing in the doorway, blue and white checked shirt, white shorts, long black socks and sandals. We lock gazes. ‘I was expecting a twenty-one year old!’ he says, with no hint of a smile, the effect heightened by the severity of his black-rimmed spectacles. A little deflated, I soothe his disappointment with a grin and minimal shrug of the shoulders.

*** It is dark and spitting with rain when I arrive; and pouring with rain when I leave. The house is awkward to find: the satnav can’t cope with the postcode, so I drive around looking for a road with a roughly similar name. After twenty minutes or so, I park near to a likely property and phone her to check. Luckily the house next door is for sale and so, with a sigh of relief, I can pinpoint where I am. Once inside, I am ushered to the large settee that occupies most of the front room. A fifteen-year-old cat of kitten-like proportions takes its time scrutinizing my leg.

*** The trains are all delayed this morning and the timetable is a sorry mess. The rail company invites passengers with bookings to take an earlier train, which I do. I arrive in London early and go for a cup of coffee in Southwark Cathedral refectory, upgraded since the last time I visited. I head off to the nearby office where we are to meet, close to a public house notorious for the occasional police raid. While in the waiting area, I pick up a book about how to deal with being over sixty. There’s no mention at all of education. Maybe I took a wrong turn in life! … The interview is ended rather abruptly after just over the hour mark when his secretary comes in to announce his next appointment. There has been

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a communication error. The stand-in secretary assumed I had booked a onehour meeting slot (I always booked two hours). He apologizes and we fix up a second interview. Not my day, except for the interview which went beautifully.

*** I leave home at 09.00. The drive goes smoothly until I hit the M25/M11 junction. Traffic news on the radio suggests police have halted traffic to clear a brokendown lorry. I decide to skip onto the M11 and see if the satnav can compute a better route. Up the M11, then down the road to Epping. The road is very quiet, just a few cars and walkers looking as if they are en route to something special. Then it hits me – ‘Tour de France’. Small yellow signs start appearing: ‘Road closed ahead’. By the time I find myself back on the M25, the traffic has largely cleared and is moving again. I still manage to arrive fifteen minutes early, mildly flustered, and with a full bladder. I ring the doorbell, and Doreen gives me a friendly welcome. I ask to use the toilet and get directed through a narrow utility room, where I am forced to manoeuvre over large piles of dirty washing strewn across the floor in front of the washing machine and tumble drier. ‘I don’t work on a Monday – it’s when the washing gets done!’ Job done in the tiny toilet – surviving a toilet-seat lid that refuses to stay up – I stretch back over the laundry piles and meet Doreen in the kitchen. She makes tea. I continue to feel oddly discomforted by the presence of the washing on the floor. She’s clearly busy. Does she really want me there? Is she telling me not to hang around too long? When I leave, the washing hasn’t budged an inch, despite other family members being in the house. Has she left it there for me to see? I was forced to cross it – awkwardly, and at no small risk to myself. The metaphor is so graphic. In retrospect, I am surprised she didn’t jokily mention it during our interview. Was it an invitation to join her in her ‘mess’? Doreen is a psychotherapist but her clients use a separate route to her consulting room.

*** I arrive at 10.40 for our 11.00 appointment. I ring the bell, and knock, but there is no reply. I feed the parking meter and sit in the car opposite the house until 11.00. I try again – still no reply. I go back to the car, ring her mobile and leave a message. Have I made a basic error? Although everything had been agreed, perhaps I should have emailed or rung the day before to confirm our appointment. It’s now 11.20 and still no response, but I am beginning to feel a little calmer. I start to drive back home. Ten minutes later, I get a call from her explaining that she has been in town shopping

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with her sister and had forgotten all about our interview! Now I don’t know how to feel. Thankful? Angry? Interested, because her forgetting might have been unconsciously motivated? The interview goes well, despite an unstable kitchen bench that threatens to upend itself and take me with it. Concentration is tricky as I try to avoid serious embarrassment. As I go to leave the house, her husband asks me to wait a moment. By way of an apology he fetches a bottle of wine from the cupboard under the stairs. I appreciate the gesture, despite my being teetotal.

Afterword III … ambiguity is the stuff of war I don’t think we can understand ourselves without understanding the other side. (Dr Steven Bullard, Senior Military Historian at the Australian War Memorial)4

Feelings towards Japan and the Japanese people remain complex and problematic, both for individual FEPOWs and their children, and geopolitically across east Asia. I have met one or two people whose hatred of the Japanese still runs very deep. Uncomfortable though that might be to many, myself included, such responses need to be acknowledged because they may have emerged from a dark well of personal trauma. Then there are those whose antipathy is much looser, surfacing in public only rarely. Yet others have turned their backs on hatred entirely, a position often reinforced by religious beliefs. This last group, whilst never forgetting what happened, and continuing to mourn the damaging consequences, has concluded nevertheless that forgiveness and reconciliation are goals worth pursuing. The anger directed at Japan by children of FEPOWs cannot be denied or rationalized away. But anger is not the only legitimate response, as we can see from various FEPOW memoirs. Stripped right down, two sets of people were in intimate conflict in the Far East: British captives and their Japanese captors. In a POW camp, it is impossible to keep your adversary at a distance. Just as the POWs did not emerge from a vacuum prior to their appearance in the camps, so their Japanese captors were individuals with personal histories and social networks. For entirely understandable reasons, though, our telling of the FEPOW story generally depicts enemy personnel as two-dimensional characters lacking any domestic or social hinterland. While allowing this discourse to persist may be comforting, it is not based in reality. Until recently, challenging or modifying this simplistic Western-centric stance has been difficult because non-Japanese speakers have had little access to the words of individual Japanese soldiers: what their feelings

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were about the war, what they saw, or what actions they took. Few memoirs by ordinary Japanese soldiers have been published in English, but a little bit of digging does reveal a few.5 There are hazards for us all in treating the ‘other’ as fundamentally different from ourselves. Despite this, the narrative surrounding British FEPOWs too easily splits into dysfunctional binary positions, underpinned by old antipathies linked to lingering controversies that smoulder and occasionally burst into flame. Prominent amongst these disputes are the ‘comfort women’ controversies,6 the matter of financial compensation for the POWs,7 and the belief that Japan has failed to apologize adequately for its wartime atrocities.8 In the course of my research, and in my personal life, I have become acquainted with Japanese people who have come to recognize the sufferings imposed upon the FEPOWs during the war, and who are committed to furthering greater understanding and reconciliation between the peoples of Britain and Japan. Many pursue their own researches into the history of the camps and offer much-needed practical support for visits to Japan by exFEPOWs and their families. The principal activist group of this type based in Japan is the POW Research Network Japan (POWRNJ). Established in 2002, it undertakes research into the camps but also offers a portal between former enemies through which individuals might recognize the humanity in the other, with the purpose of preventing future tragedies.9 However, the group has always had an uphill struggle within the prevailing social, cultural and political climate in Japan: the narrative of Allied POW experiences is subordinated to discourses on Japanese and Asian suffering within the process of contestation of war memory in Japan, and probably will continue to be so for the foreseeable future.10

Periodically over the past few years, I have supported a friend and prominent Japanese peace activist, Yukako Ibuki (‘Yuka’), in her task of translating letters and memoirs written by Japanese soldiers during the war. I should make clear that my contribution to her work has been minimal, merely to ‘smooth out’ some of the English phraseology. The often poignant words of these young men express the essential humanity of all combatants in war.11 Although these brief, but reflective, extracts speak largely for themselves,12 they also voice the turmoil affecting many young Japanese men as they struggled to establish a degree of selfhood amid the demands of a militarized state on the one hand, and their direct and visceral experiences of war on the other:

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My War Experiences by Hoken Shiraishi: All through my Elementary and Junior High School days, I received an education based on militarism. With my firm belief in the invincible Divine State of Japan, I enlisted in the Naval Preparatory Course. As soon as we registered, the fierce training started without any day off. Moreover, we were continuously beaten from morning till night. We were forced the to do ‘Grasshopper-Jumping’ if we got poor results.13 There was no common sense: it was a mad world of imagined phenomena, which neglected all reasoning and logic, in a world of war where man killed man. However, they are experiences I can never forget all through my life.

Letter from Nakazawa Kaoru to his wife, from a battlefield in China. Written in 1943: Indeed, life is something in which we might unexpectedly encounter really cruel fates, and especially when we are in this particular situation of the world now. Whatever may happen, the true individual religious life starts here: to live through courageously, remembering our own responsibility, to stay in this life, and not to flee into the life beyond, even when you might think it would be preferable if I died a hundred times. All that is noble flows out of this point. … You know the painting on the wall of my study, the replica of ‘Hope’, a painting by an English painter called Watts.14 I am impressed by the image of a woman, playing a broken harp, sitting on the earth blind-folded, in the increasing darkness of dusk. Her image of praising God never stopping with the only remaining string seems to me to contain a lot of deep thoughts.

Letter from Kouichi Itao to his father dated 5 October 1943 when he was still a student completing a preparatory course at the Tokyo University of Commerce. He became a 1st Lieutenant in the navy, and was killed in action in the Eastern Pacific. He was twenty-one: You might already know the gist by the telegram I sent you. But let me write in more detail about the student conscription that is happening. By the Imperial Ordinance issued on October 2, all students who have reached the appropriate age have to go through the physical examination for conscript between October 25 to November 5, and register on December 1. As I’ve mentioned, through the past two months or less, we have literally come to throw away our pens, close our books and take our guns. Since the beginning of the Greater East Asia War,15 taking such a step had already been regarded as something inevitable. Also when we see the fact that the same thing is happening in all the countries we are at war with … nothing to be shocked at.

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It makes me feel so sad to wonder when I’d be able to come back and sit in front of my books. We are students to the last, who hold our studies as our own lives, and have strong determination to serve our country with our studies. However, at this moment when the demand of our country is so urgent, we have to proceed to the front line of the defence of our country, leaving behind our various thoughts on our studies and our nation.

My Stolen Youth by Yoshio Nakamura: On December 8, we were ordered to assemble. It was to receive binta beatings given by our senior soldiers. We were told the reason for the beating, ‘You are the soldiers of the Divine State. From now on we’ll train you strictly.’ What a strange group. ‘Your life is worth 1.5 cents. Your substitutes are limitless.’ Some buddies of mine were beaten with room shoes or wooden guns till they fell unconscious. Such behavior of our seniors made me lose faith in the military life.16

The War and I by Takashi Inoue: I was in Harbin when the War ended. Our unit was forced to march 320kms to Mudanjiang.17 In the muddy field, sometimes my foot stumbled on something with a thump. As I stared at the object, I would see that it was either the rotten body of a soldier or a military horse. Indeed, I was forced to stare at such scenes from the hell of war. The eleventh to nineteenth year of Showa, i.e. 1936 to 1944, was a period of madness.18 In order to satisfy the wild desires of the nation state and its rulers, even human beings were used and abandoned like garbage.

***

The last word … Thoughts on ‘Unfinished Watercolour of the Canteen’ by Bill Norways Whether you have ploughed through this book methodically or skipped your way along, please do return to the cover. I find the symbolism in this unfinished watercolour profoundly moving. The ambiguity of the image crystallizes so many of the emotions woven into the POW experience. At a personal level, it mirrors the switch from my black-and-white postmemories to the Technicolor of my first visit to Japan. The spectral figures set against the vibrancy and vivid colours of nature evoke the resilience of the POWs as they sought hope and inspiration in the natural world around them. Many outside the FEPOW world might find

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this surprising, but responses to nature appear regularly in the memoirs of Far East prisoners of war. The ghostlike rendering of the figures reflects how the FEPOWs became materially and psychologically diminished during captivity, and also hints at the many stories yet to be recovered from the Far East war. Even after the war, the men were kept ‘hidden’ by being officially discouraged from telling their stories. Bill Norways’ ‘unfinished’ painting is a reminder of how easily oppressive regimes can dehumanize and efface an individual’s identity, with ramifications that unfold over generations. - THE END -

Notes Prologue Carl Friedman, Nightfather (New York: Persea Books, 1994), 135. This is the story of a young girl who is drawn emotionally into her father’s time as a Nazi concentration-camp victim. 2 My father was an anti-aircraft gunner in the British Army. He was not a regular soldier but a volunteer who joined the Royal Artillery in September 1939, the same month in which he married my mother. He was captured in Java in February 1942, and spent six months there before being transported to Japan on a ‘hell ship’. Once in Japan, he was taken to Hiroshima 6B POW camp, about 100km from Hiroshima city, where, for the next three years, he laboured in the coal mines. He returned to England in November 1945, and continued his career as a sign writer. I was born in 1947, and I am an only child. 3 Hiroshima 6B is located near to Mine City in Yamaguchi Prefecture, and is described on the Mansell website. http://mansell.com/pow_resources/camplists/hiroshima/ hiro-6-omine-yamaguchi/hiro_6_sanyo.html (Accessed 14 February 2021). 4 See www.facebook.com/TwoweeksinJapan/ (Accessed 14 February 2021). 5 While ungainly, the acronym ‘FEPOW’ is widely used both informally and in academic publications. 6 By and large I use the terms ‘children’ and ‘participants’ interchangeably. The context makes it clear that I am referring to the adult children who were my research participants. Using ‘children’ even when it is clear I am referring to adults is a means of reinforcing the significance of the relationship between father and child that lay at the core of this research, and of maintaining the readers’ awareness of the continuing psychic presence of the child. 1

Introduction 1 2

This centre is still active, see www.harryedwardshealingsanctuary.org.uk/ (accessed 13 January 2022). My father occasionally summarized MacCarthy’s text, as was the case here. The book version is as follows: ‘I noticed that many people who had been caught in the open had lost their hair.’ From Aidan MacCarthy, A Doctor’s War (London: Collins, 2005), 131.

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3 The doctors responsible for conducting the war pension medical examinations had offered this to him in May 1958. A history of Queen Mary’s Hospital can be found here: https://archives.friendsqmh.com/a-history-of-queen-marys/ (accessed 6 January 2022). 4 See Henry Irving’s 2020 interview with Penny Summerfield on her election as a Fellow of the British Academy https://youtu.be/IzmBC4bmq0A (accessed 1 May 2021). This is not a literal transcription but an edited selection of extracts. 5 Sasha Handley, Rohan McWilliam and Lucy Noakes, ‘Introduction: towards new social and cultural histories’, in New Directions in Social and Cultural History, eds Sasha Handley, Rohan McWilliam and Lucy Noakes (London: Bloomsbury Academic, 2018), 6–8. 6 Rob Perks, ‘The roots of oral history: exploring contrasting attitudes to elite, corporate, and business oral history in Britain and the U.S.’, The Oral History Review 37, 2 (2010): 215–24, here 220. 7 See Alistair Thomson, ‘The memory and history debates: some international perspectives’, Oral History 22, 2 (1994): 33–43. Nan Alamilla Boyd, ‘Who is the subject? Queer theory meets oral history’, Journal of the History of Sexuality 17, 2 (2008): 177–89. 8 The following papers contain a range of perspectives on digital developments in oral history: Simon Bradley, ‘History to go: oral history, audiowalks and mobile media’, Oral History 40, 1 (2012): 99–110. Alexander Freund, ‘From.wav to.text: why we still need transcripts in the digital age’, Oral History 45, 1 (2017): 33–42. Stacey Zembrzycki, ‘Bringing stories to life: using new media to disseminate and critically engage with oral history interviews’, Oral History 41, 1 (2013): 98–107. 9 Penny Summerfield, Histories of the Self: Personal Narratives and Historical Practice (London: Routledge, 2019). 10 These reflective accounts by two eminent oral historians express well the energy, humanity and sheer passion concentrated within the oral history interview. Luisa Passerini, ‘A passion for memory’, History Workshop Journal 72, 1 (2011): 241–50. Alessandro Portelli, ‘Living voices: the oral history interview as dialogue and experience’, The Oral History Review 45, 2 (2018): 239–48. 11 Summerfield, Histories of the Self, 108. 12 Paul Thompson, The Voice of the Past (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2017), 135. 13 Michael Roper, ‘Analysing the analysed: transference and counter-transference in the oral history encounter’, Oral History 31, 2 (2003): 20–32, here 21. 14 Ibid. 15 See Valerie Yow, ‘What can oral historians learn from psychotherapists?’, Oral History 46, 1 (2018): 33–41. Emma L. Vickers, ‘Unexpected trauma in oral interviewing’, The Oral History Review 46, 1 (2019): 134–41. 16 See Wendy Hollway and Tony Jefferson, Doing Qualitative Research Differently: a Psychosocial Approach (London: Sage Publications Ltd, 2013).

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17 The word captive is from the Latin captivus, from capere ‘take, seize’. The related verb captivate dates from the early sixteenth century and is from the late Latin verb captivare ‘take captive’ (from captivus). Glynnis Chantrell, The Oxford Dictionary of Word Histories (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004). 18 I conducted thirty-four face-to-face interviews (sixteen women and eighteen men). In addition I also had email responses from seventeen participants (eight men and nine women). Many of the latter were very detailed, and equivalent in content to the face-to-face interviews, others were more sketchy but could be remarkably insightful. With one exception all face-to-face interviews took place in the participant’s own home. 19 By allowing the collective memories of the Holocaust and colonialism to collide, Rothberg shows how remembering them together can create new perspectives on histories of victimization. Michael Rothberg, Multidirectional Memory: Remembering the Holocaust in the Age of Decolonization (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2009), 3. 20 Carol Kidron, ‘Surviving a distant past: a case study of the cultural construction of trauma descendant identity’, Ethos 31, 4 (2004): 513–44, here 514. 21 Santanu Das, India, Empire, and First World War Culture: Writings, Images, and Songs (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2018), 25. 22 Eva Hoffman, After Such Knowledge: Memory, History, and the Legacy of the Holocaust (London: Secker and Warburg, 2006), 6. 23 Jeffrey Prager, ‘Danger and deformation: a social theory of trauma Part I: contemporary psychoanalysis, contemporary social theory, and healthy selves’, American Imago 68, 3, (2011): 425–48, here 425. 24 Interview with James, 30 November 2014. 25 For example, Rachel Dekel and Hadass Goldblatt, ‘Is there intergenerational transmission of trauma? The case of combat veterans’ children’, American Journal of Orthopsychiatry 78, 34, (2008): 281–9. 26 M. Gerard Fromm (ed.), Lost in Transmission: Studies of Trauma Across the Generations (London: Karnac Books Ltd, 2012). 27 Carol A. Kidron, ‘Toward an ethnography of silence: the lived presence of the past in the everyday life of Holocaust trauma survivors and their descendants in Israel’, Current Anthropology 50, 1, (2009): 5–27. 28 Interview with Brenda, 19 November 2014. 29 Marianne Hirsch, The Generation of Postmemory: Writing and Visual Culture after the Holocaust (New York: Columbia University Press, 2012), 4. 30 www.cofepow.org.uk/ (accessed 14 February 2021). 31 See www.gov.uk/government/news/vj-day-70-plans-announced and www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-33936830 (accessed 3 February 2021). 32 www.thejavafepowclub42.org/ (accessed 3 February 2021).

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33 https://nationalfepowfellowship.org.uk/ (accessed 14 February 2021). 34 See www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-53786610 (accessed 14 February 2021). 35 ‘VJ Day: amazing story of British PoW who survived having legs sawn off without anaesthetic’ www.mirror.co.uk/news/uk-news/vj-day-amazing-storybritish-6253954 (accessed 3 February 2021). Villagers prepare to mark the day the Second World War finally ended for Belford www.chroniclelive.co.uk/news/northeast-news/villagers-prepare-mark-day-second-9832707 (accessed 3 February 2021). York family mark VJ Day with harrowing memoir of dad’s time as Japanese POW www.yorkpress.co.uk/news/13590336.York_family_mark_VJ_Day_with_ harrowing_memoir_of_dad_s_time_as_Japanese_POW/ (accessed 3 February 2021). 36 https://nationalfepowfellowship.org.uk/2011/10/16/unveiling-of-the-fepow-plaquein-liverpool/ (accessed 3 February 2021). 37 https://nationalfepowfellowship.org.uk/2013/10/27/unveiling-the-southamptonfepow-plaque-27th-october-2013/ (accessed 3 February 2021). 38 Meg Parkes, Chair of the Researching FEPOW History Group. https://fepowhistory. wordpress.com/ (accessed 14 February 2021). 39 For example, The FEPOW Family (UK) www.facebook.com/ groups/1248087371902974/ (accessed 14 February 2021). 40 Rosenwein contrasts ‘emotional communities’, which ‘prescribe the dominant norms of emotional life’, with ‘emotional refuges’ that offer ‘safe release from prevailing emotional norms’. Barbara Rosenwein, ‘Problems and methods in the history of emotions’, Passions in Context 1, 1 (2010): 1–32. 41 Andrew Abbott, ‘Against narrative: a preface to lyrical sociology’, Sociological Theory 25, 1 (2007): 67–99, here 72. 42 Daniel Bar-On, Fear and Hope: Three Generations of the Holocaust (London: Harvard University Press, 1995), 20. 43 We should recognize the risks of homogenizing the circumstances of the baby boomers. Not all enjoy high income, and those on low incomes and from deprived areas have fewer options in respect of their retirement prospects. Amongst my participants, some would not have been able to afford expensive commemorative activities such as pilgrimages. 44 For example, Jay Winter, War beyond Words: Languages of Remembrance from the Great War to the Present (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2017). 45 Hollway and Jefferson, Doing Qualitative Research Differently. 46 Wendy Hollway and Lynn Froggett, ‘Researching in-between subjective experience and reality’, Historical Social Research/Historische Sozialforschung 38, 2 (2013): 140–57, here 140–1. 47 Although I have a sound working knowledge of the historical context, I am a sociologist and not an historian in the sense that some participants expected.

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48 Penny Summerfield, ‘Oral history as an autobiographical practice’, Miranda, 12 (2016): 1–13, here 10. 49 Sasha Roseneil, ‘The vicissitudes of postcolonial citizenship and belonging in late liberalism’, in Beyond citizenship? Feminism and the Transformation of Belonging, ed. Sasha Roseneil (Houndmills: Palgrave Macmillan, 2013), 231–65, here 233. 50 Sools is developing an interesting strand of research examining ‘imagined futures’ and ‘future-oriented practices’. Anneke Sools, ‘Back from the future: a narrative approach to study the imagination of personal futures’, International Journal of Social Research Methodology 23, 4 (2020): 451–65. 51 I have borrowed this expression from Art Bochner (2012). But, of course, it has a close association with the ‘object relations’ strand of psychoanalysis. Art P. Bochner, ‘Bird on the wire: freeing the father within me’, Qualitative Inquiry 18, 2 (2012): 168–73, here 172. 52 Paul Thompson, The Voice of the Past: Oral History (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2017), 393. Valerie R. Yow, Recording Oral History: a Guide for the Humanities and Social Sciences (London: Rownam and Littlefield, 2015). 53 Yow, ‘What can oral historians learn’, 33–41. 54 Alistair Thomson (2013) ‘“Tied to the kitchen sink”? Women’s lives and women’s history in mid-twentieth century Britain and Australia’, Women’s History Review 22, 1 (2013):126–47, here 128. 55 Tracy E. K’Meyer and A. Glenn Crothers, ‘“If I see some of this in writing, I’m going to shoot you”: reluctant narrators, taboo topics, and the ethical dilemmas of the oral historian’, The Oral History Review 34, 1 (2007): 71–93, here 92. 56 Peter Fonagy, ‘The transgenerational transmission of holocaust trauma’, Attachment & Human Development 1, 1 (1999): 92–114, here 95. 57 Stephen Frosh, Psychoanalysis Outside the Clinic: Interventions in Psychosocial Studies (Houndmills: Palgrave Macmillan, 2010), 3. 58 For example, Ian Craib, Psychoanalysis: a Critical Introduction (Cambridge: Polity Press, 2001). 59 Matt Ffytche, ‘Sigmund Freud: psychoanalysis and the unconscious’, in The Routledge Handbook of Psychoanalysis in the Social Sciences and Humanities, eds Anthony Elliott and Jeffrey Prager (London: Routledge, 2016), 19. 60 Paula Heimann, ‘On counter-transference’, International Journal of Psycho-Analysis 31, (1950): 81–4. 61 Claudia Lapping, Psychoanalysis in Social Research: Shifting Theories and Reframing Concepts (London: Routledge, 2011), 4. 62 Roper, ‘Analysing the Analysed’, here 29. 63 ‘Like a theatrical scene, it taps into a different mode of understanding – scenic understanding – that is more holistic, closer to tacit, unconscious knowing and capable of accessing societal-cultural unconscious knowledge.’ Wendy Hollway,

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‘Psycho-social writing from data’, Journal of Psycho-Social Studies 5, 1 (2011): 92–101, here 94. 64 All participants agreed that I could take their ‘portraits’ (as a memory aid for me); they also permitted me to photograph artefacts, images and documents as appropriate. 65 Field notes from interview with Esther, 23 October 2014. 66 Ibid. 67 Daniel Miller, Stuff (Cambridge: Polity Press, 2010), 137. Winnicott’s (1991) notions of the ‘transitional object’ and ‘transitional phenomena’ are clear and significant exceptions. Donald Woods Winnicott, Playing and Reality (London: Routledge, 1991). 68 Bruno Latour, Reassembling the Social: an Introduction to Actor-Network-Theory (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2007). Robert McGrail, ‘Working with substance: actor–network theory and the modal weight of the material’, Techné 12, 1 (2008): unpaged. 69 Interview with Rex, 18 July 2014. 70 Purposive sampling strategies are ‘non-random ways of ensuring that particular categories of cases within a sampling universe are represented in the final sample of a project.’ Snowball sampling ‘involves asking participants for recommendations of acquaintances who might qualify for participation, leading to “referral chains”.’ Oliver C. Robinson, ‘Sampling in interview-based qualitative research: a theoretical and practical guide’, Qualitative Research in Psychology 11, 1 (2014): 25–41, here 32 and 37. 71 Alan Bryman, Social Research Methods (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2012), 419. 72 I anticipated that other variables might emerge as significant during the analysis, for example the rank of the father, whether the child was born before or after the war, family size and structure, social background and occupation, education, and the age at which the child first became aware of his/her father’s ex-POW status and experience. But I did not contemplate using these as selection criteria because I wished to ensure the cohort represented a wide spread of experience. 73 Gabriele Rosenthal (ed.), The Holocaust in three generations (London: Cassell, 1998), 3. 74 I was inspired by Carol Kidron’s work in which she quotes one of her interviewees as saying that ‘the Holocaust was present in my home’. Carol A. Kidron, ‘Toward an ethnography of silence: the lived presence of the past in the everyday life of Holocaust trauma survivors and their descendants in Israel’, Current Anthropology 50, 1 (2009): 5–27, here 5. 75 Interview with Rex, 18 July 2014. 76 Field notes on my interview with Deirdre, 27 July 2014.

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77 Sara Ahmed, The Cultural Politics of Emotion (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2014), 210. 78 Anne Karpf, ‘The human voice and the texture of experience’, Oral History 42, 2 (2014): 50–5, here 51. 79 I used NVivo for Mac to analyse the text, and adopted stages 1–3 of the ‘Framework Analysis’ variant. NVivo proved valuable in managing all the written elements of the research: the written transcripts, field notes and academic papers. However, through trial and error, and after consulting one of its originators, Liz Spencer, I soon realized that the Framework Analysis method could not handle complex and fluctuating themes with origins in different parts of the text. (Liz Spencer, personal communication, and see also Jane Ritchie and Liz Spencer ‘Qualitative data analysis for applied policy research’, in The Qualitative Researcher’s Companion, eds Michael Huberman and Matthew B. Miles (Thousand Oaks, SAGE Publications Inc., 2002), 305–29. 80 Dan P. McAdams, ‘Exploring psychological themes through life-narrative accounts’, in Varieties of Narrative Analysis, eds James A. Holstein and Jaber F. Gubrium (London: Sage Publications Limited, 2012), 18. 81 Andrew C. Sparkes and Brett Smith, ‘Narrative analysis as embodied engagement with the lives of others’, in Varieties of Narrative Analysis, eds James A. Holstein and Jaber F. Gubrium (London: Sage Publications Limited, 2012), 60. 82 Thomas Ogden, Reverie and Interpretation: Sensing Something Human (Northvale, NJ: Jason Aronson Inc., 1997). 83 Hollway and Jefferson, Doing Qualitative Research Differently, 72. Alexandrov discusses ethics and the psychosocial method: Haralan Alexandrov, ‘Experiencing knowledge: the vicissitudes of a research journey’, in Researching Beneath the Surface: Psycho-social Research Methods in Practice, eds Simon Clarke and Paul Hoggett (London: Karnac, 2009), 41–4. 84 I borrowed this expression from Denise Riley’s wonderful little book in which she describes her struggle to articulate how grief shapes our subjective sense of time. Denise Riley, Time Lived, Without its Flow (London: Picador, 2019), 31. 85 Charles C. Ragin and Lisa M. Amoroso, Constructing Social Research (London: Sage Publications Limited, 2011), 37. See also Andrew Abbott, Methods of Discovery: Heuristics for the Social Sciences (New York: W. W. Norton & Company, 2004). 86 Carol Kidron, ‘Survivor family memory work at sites of Holocaust remembrance: institutional enlistment or family agency?’ History & Memory 27, 2 (2015): 45–73. Kyoko Murakami and David Middleton, ‘Grave matters: emergent networks and summation in remembering and reconciliation’, Ethos – Journal of the Society for Psychological Anthropology 34, 2 (2006): 273–96. Bruce Scates, Anzac Journeys: Returning to the Battlefields of World War II (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2013).

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87 Interview with Isla, 11 November 2014. Her father had died twenty years earlier. 88 Edward S. Casey, Remembering: a Phenomenological Study (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2000), 149.

Chapter 1 1 Rosemary Anderson, ‘Frontiers in transpersonal research methods: historical overview and renewed visions’, The Journal of Transpersonal Psychology 50, 2 (2018): 129–51, here 135. 2 Richard Flanagan, The Narrow Road to the Deep North (London: Chatto & Windus, 2013), 250. 3 Ronald Hastain, White Coolie (London: Hodder and Stoughton Ltd, 1947), 75–6. 4 Ibid., 113. 5 Amir refers to this as the ‘first testimonial mode’ that allows shifts between firstand third-person perspectives. Dana Amir, ‘The inner witness’, The International Journal of Psychoanalysis 93 (2012), 879–96, here 879. 6 Hong Kong had fallen on 25 December 1941, Singapore on 15 February 1942. Then, on 9 March 1942, the Dutch East Indies fell, leading rapidly to the capture of all the remaining British servicemen. In March and April 1942, the Japanese overran the Philippines resulting in the capture of many thousands of American troops. In all, some 190,000 Allied troops were held as POWs. The website created by the late Roger Mansell is the unchallenged source of information about individual FEPOW camps. Now run by Wes Injerd, the content is regularly updated: available at www.mansell.com/pow-index.html (accessed 20 July 2020). 7 Java FEPOW 1942 Club, Prisoners in Java: Accounts by Allied Prisoners of War in the Far East 1942–1945 Captured in Java (Southampton: Hamwic Publishers, 2007), 71. The quotation is from Joe Fitzgerald’s testimony. 8 Utsumi Aiko, ‘Japan’s World War II POW Policy: Indifference and Irresponsibility’, The Asia-Pacific Journal 3, 5 (2005), 1–4. 9 Utsumi Aiko, ‘The Japanese army and its prisoners – relevant documents and bureaucratic institutions’, in Australia–Japan Research Project (1999), unpaged. Available at http://ajrp.awm.gov.au/ajrp/ajrp2.nsf/ aa9b3f3247a3c8ae4a25676300078dee/d2e5732b8749d2e04a2567a8007b490c?Open Document (accessed 21July2020). 10 Utsumi, ‘Japan’s World War II’, 2. 11 For a detailed discussion of how the concept of ‘bushido’ evolved to become a significant force behind the rise of militarism in twentieth-century Japan, see Oleg Benesch, Inventing the Way of the Samurai: Nationalism, Internationalism, and Bushido in Modern Japan (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2014).

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12 Rosalind Hearder, ‘More than a stereotype: Australian POW doctors and the Japanese in captivity’, Health and History 6, 2 (2004): 75–91, here 77. 13 Edgar Jones and Simon Wessely, ‘British prisoners-of-war: from resilience to psychological vulnerability: reality or perception’, Twentieth Century British History 21, 2 (2010): 163–83, here 178. 14 For a near contemporary account see A. P. Curtin, ‘Imprisonment under the Japanese’, The British Medical Journal 2, 4476 (1946): 585–6. 15 Meg Parkes and Geoff Gill from the Liverpool School of Tropical Medicine have written a series of three very impressive books that cover much of the medical ground, as well as other topics. Geoff Gill and Meg Parkes, Burma Railway Medicine: Disease, Death and Survival on the Thai–Burma Railway, 1942–1945 (Lancaster: Palatine Books, 2017). Meg Parkes and Geoff Gill, Captive Memories (Lancaster: Palatine Books, 2015). Meg Parkes, Geoff Gill and Jenny Wood, Captive Artists: the Unseen Art of British Far East Prisoners of War (Lancaster: Palatine Books, 2019). 16 Charles G. Roland, Long Night’s Journey into Day: Prisoners of War in Hong Kong and Japan, 1941–1945 (Waterloo: Wilfred Laurier University Press, 2001), 228. 17 International Military Tribunal for the Far East, Judgement, Volume II, Part B, Chapter VIII, 1002–3. Available at www.ibiblio.org/hyperwar/PTO/IMTFE/ IMTFE-8.html (accessed 20 July2020). 18 Gavan Daws, Prisoners of the Japanese (London: Robson Books, 1995), 220. 19 See Elena Bosch, The Role of Red Cross Aid in the Prisoner of War Camps on the Siam–Burma Railway (London: Defence Studies Department, King’s College London, 2012). Available at https://britishempireatwar.org/research-papers/ (accessed 14July2020). 20 Hastain, White Coolie, 162. 21 John Dower, War Without Mercy: Race and Power in the Pacific War (New York: Pantheon Books, 1986), 4. Note that racial prejudice was widespread in British society at this time. For example, the results of one study found that ‘Chinese and Japanese are disliked because of their slit eyes and yellow skin; because they move “stealthily,” and because they have an “unhealthy look”.’ Kenneth Lindsay Little, ‘The psychological background of white-coloured contacts in Britain’, The Sociological Review 35, 1–2 (1943): 12–28, here 15. 22 Japanese forces had been in military conflict with China since the early 1930s. See Mikiso Hane, Japan: a Short History (London: Oneworld Publications, 2013), 137–66. 23 Douglas Ford, ‘British Intelligence on Japanese army morale during the Pacific War: logical analysis or racial stereotyping?’ The Journal of Military History 69, 2 (2005): 439–74, here 446.

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24 Hiroshi Fukurai and Alice Yang, ‘The history of Japanese racism, Japanese American redress, and the dangers associated with government regulation of hate speech’, Hastings Constitutional Law Quarterly 45, 3 (2018): 533–76. 25 Hastain, White Coolie, 65–6. 26 Ibid., 92–3. 27 Simon Harrison, ‘Skull trophies of the Pacific War: transgressive objectives of remembrance’, Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute 12, 4 (2006): 817–36, here 818. 28 Richard J. Aldrich, The Faraway War: Personal Diaries of the Second World War in Asia and the Pacific (London: Doubleday, 2005), 16. 29 Dower, War Without Mercy, 18. 30 US National Archives, Know Your Enemy: Japan (2016). Available at www.youtube. com/watch?v=pG7puijZOWU (accessed 22 January 2022). 31 Ken Attiwill, The Rising Sunset (Manchester: Robert Hale Ltd, 1958), 50. 32 Drew Leder, The Absent Body (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1990), 1. 33 Shaun Gallagher, ‘Philosophical conceptions of the self: implications for cognitive science’, Trends in Cognitive Sciences 4, 1 (2000): 14–21. 34 Elizabeth Lewis, ‘A mixed method investigation of embodiment using the Rubber Hand Illusion’ (PhD thesis, University of Manchester, 2015), 14–15. 35 William James, The Principles of Psychology (New York: Henry Holt, 1890), 242. 36 Gallagher refers to this as ‘a disequilibrium between body and environment, i.e. a failure of the body schema to maintain equilibrium’ and the ‘spontaneous appearance of the body in consciousness’. Shaun Gallagher, ‘Body image and body schema: a conceptual clarification’, The Journal of Mind and Behaviour 7, 4 (1986), 550. 37 Due to a deficiency of thiamine (vitamin B1). 38 Interview with Eric Osboldstone. Available at https://nzhistory.govt.nz/media/ sound/pow-camp-conditions-in-burma (accessed 5 July 2020). 39 Attiwill, The Rising Sunset, 35. 40 Caused by a deficiency of riboflavin (vitamin B2). 41 Geoff Gill and Meg Parkes, Burma Railway Medicine: Disease, Death and Survival on the Thai–Burma Railway, 1942–1945 (Lancaster: Palatine Books, 2017), 24. 42 Hastain, White Coolie, 97. 43 Arthur William Frankland, ‘Scrotal dermatitis in P.O.W.s in the Far East’, British Medical Journal 1, 4560 (1948): 1023–6, here 1023. 44 Esther Bick, ‘The experience of the skin in early object-relations’, International Journal of Psycho-analysis 49 (1968), 484–6, here 484. 45 Jay Prosser, ‘Skin memories’, in Thinking Through the Skin, eds Sara Ahmed and Jackie Stacey (London: Routledge, 2001), 53.

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46 Sheila L. Cavanagh, Angela Failler and Rachel Alpha Johnston Hurst, ‘Enfolded: skin, culture and psychoanalysis’, in Skin, Culture and Psychoanalysis, eds Sheila L. Cavanagh, Angela Failler and Rachel Alpha Johnston Hurst (Houndmills: Palgrave Macmillan, 2013), 2. 47 Tarryn Handcock, ‘Transgressing Boundaries: Skin in the Construction of Bodily Interior’, in Proceedings of 2012 IDEA Symposium, ed. S. Attiwill, 6–9 September 2012, Perth, Australia, pp. 1–8. Available at http://idea-edu.com/wp-content/ uploads/2013/05/P28.pdf (accessed 25 February 2021). 48 Alessandra Lemma, ‘Being seen or being watched? A psychoanalytic perspective on body dysmorphia’, International Journal of Psychoanalysis 90 (2009): 753–71, here 756. 49 Didier Anzieu, The Skin-ego (London: Karnac, 2016), 112. 50 John Coast, Railroad of Death (Newcastle upon Tyne: Myrmidon, 2014), 265. 51 Prosser, ‘Skin memories’, 52. 52 Attiwill, The Rising Sunset, 52–3. 53 Ibid., 53. 54 Gill and Parkes, Burma Railway Medicine. 55 Strongyloides stercoralis is a parasitic roundworm. As recently as 2017, official health advice to ex-FEPOWs continued to highlight this problem. Now archived, the document was entitled ‘Leaflet -7, Notes for Ex-Far East and Korean Prisoners of War’. Gill et al. provide a definitive account: Geoffrey V. Gill, Ellen Welch, Wendy J. Bailey, Dion R. Bell and Nicholas J. Beeching, ‘Chronic Strongyloides Stercoralis Infection in Former British Far East Prisoners of War’, QJM 97 (2004): 789–95. 56 Parkes and Gill, Captive Memories, 193. 57 Ibid., 194. 58 Clare Makepeace and Meg Parkes, ‘VJ Day: surviving the horrors of Japan’s WW2 camps’ (BBC News, Magazine, 15 August 2015). Available at www.bbc.co.uk/news/ magazine-33931660 (accessed 8 July 2020). 59 Attiwill, The Rising Sunset, 46. 60 Ibid., 55. 61 See the extensive extracts from the diary and letters of Frederick Noel Taylor, available at www.far-eastern-heroes.org.uk/private_5776807/html/railway_of_ death.htm (accessed 6 July 2020). 62 Interview with Eric Osboldstone. Available at https://nzhistory.govt.nz/media/ sound/pow-camp-conditions-in-burma (accessed 5 July 2020). 63 Hastain, White Coolie, 98. 64 Max Hastings, Retribution: the Battle for Japan, 1944–45 (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2008), 351. 65 Laurence Rees, Their Darkest Hour (London: Ebury Press, 2007), 97. 66 Attiwill, The Rising Sunset, 50.

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67 Gavan Daws, Prisoners of the Japanese: POWs of World War II in the Pacific – the Powerful Untold Story (London: Robson Books, 1995), 98. 68 For a less familiar perspective written by a Japanese academic, see Tachikawa Kyoichi, ‘The treatment of prisoners of war by the Imperial Japanese Army and Navy focusing on the Pacific War’, National Institute for Defence Studies Security Reports No. 9 (2008). Available at: www.nids.mod.go.jp/english/publication/kiyo/ pdf/2008/bulletin_e2008_5.pdf (accessed 22 January 2022). 69 Hastain, White Coolie, 90. 70 Ibid., 92. 71 From the unpublished memoir of Norman Burrows. A copy is in the possession of the author. 72 Vamık D. Volkan and William F. Greer, Jr, ‘Transgenerational transmission and deposited representations: psychological burdens visited by one generation upon another’, in Vieraiden Aaania: Suomen Nuoripsykiatrisen Yhdistyken, eds Irja Kantanen and Veikko Aalverg (Helsinki: Finnish Youth Psychiatric Association, 2007), unpaged. 73 Interview with George Cooper. Available at https://ww2today.com/12th-october1942-brutal-treatment-in-japanese-pow-camp (accessed 6 July 2020). 74 Brian MacArthur, Surviving the Sword: Prisoners of the Japanese in the Far East, 1942–45 (New York: Random House, 2005), xxvii. 75 David Beard, ‘How can you not shout, now that the whispering is done? Accounts of the enemy in US, Hmong, and Vietnamese Soldiers’ literary reflections on the war’, Humanities 8, 4 (2019). Available at https://doi.org/10.3390/h8040172 (accessed 22 January 2022). 76 Justin McCurry, ‘Families of British prisoner and Japanese guard united by poem 70 years on’, The Guardian (16 August 2015). Available at www.theguardian.com/ world/2015/aug/16/families-of-british-prisoner-and-japanese-guard-are-unitedby-poem-70-years-on (accessed 6 July 2020). 77 Hastain, White Coolie, 111 and 112. 78 Gregory F. Michno, Death on the Hellships: Prisoners at Sea in the Pacific War (Barnsley: Leo Cooper, 2001). 79 Attiwill, The Rising Sunset, 77. 80 Ibid., 79. 81 Ibid., 194. 82 Ibid., 200. 83 Ibid., 207. 84 Ibid. 85 Ibid., 211. 86 The more usual spelling is ‘Yoshida Maru’. 87 Meg Parkes, ‘Notify Alec Rattray …’ (Hoylake UK: Kranji Publications, 2002), 97.

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88 Makepeace and Parkes, ‘VJ Day’. 89 Hastain, White Coolie, 155. 90 Ernest Gordon, To End All Wars (Grand Rapids: Zondervan, 2002), 89–91. 91 Hastain, White Coolie, 157. 92 Midge Gillies, The Barbed-Wire University: The Real Lives of Prisoners of War in the Second World War (London: Aurum Press, 2011). 93 Sears Eldredge, ‘Captive Audiences, Captive Performers – Complete Text’, Book Chapters, Book 24 (2014), here 2. Available at http://digitalcommons.macalester. edu/thdabooks/24/ (accessed 20 June 2020). 94 Sears Eldredge, ‘Captive Audiences, Captive Performers’, 2. 95 Coast, Railroad of Death, 135. 96 Parkes, ‘Notify Alec Rattray …’, 76–7. 97 Hastain, White Coolie, 16. 98 Hastain, White Coolie, 89. 99 The following are recommended: Meg Parkes, Geoff Gill and Jenny Wood, Captive Artists: the Unseen Art of the British Far East Prisoners of War (Lancaster: Palatine Books, 2019); Jack Bridger Chalker, Burma Railway Images of War: the Original War Drawings of Japanese POW Jack Walker (Mells: Mercer Books, 2007); Leo Rawlings, And the Dawn Came Up Like Thunder. Leo Rawlings: Prisoner of Japan and War Artist 1941–1945 (Newcastle upon Tyne: Myrmidon, 2015); Ronald Searle, To the Kwai – and Back: War Drawings 1939–1945 (London: Souvenir Press, 1986). 100 Searle, To the Kwai – and Back, 94. 101 Interview with Arthena by email, 20 August 2015. 102 Jones and Wessely, ‘British prisoners-of-war’, 10–11. 103 The British Red Cross and the Order of St John joined forces at the start of the war, as they had done in the First World War. 104 The Prisoner of War, 2, 14 (June 1943), 1. 105 The Prisoner of War, 2, 20 (December 1943), 13. 106 Harold P. Blum, ‘Psychic trauma and traumatic object loss’, Journal of the American Psychoanalytic Association 51 (2003): 415–31, here 415. 107 Dana Amir, ‘The inner witness’, The International Journal of Psychoanalysis 93 (2012): 879–96, here 884. 108 Judith Herman, Trauma and Recovery: the Aftermath of Violence – from Domestic Abuse to Political Terror (Philadelphia: Basic Books, 2015), 83–4. 109 See Yuki Tanaka, Hidden Horrors: Japanese War Crimes in World War II (Boulder: Westview Press, 1998), and Mark Felton ‘The perfect storm: Japanese military brutality during World War Two’, in The Routledge History of Genocide, eds Cathie Carmichael and Richard C. Maguire (London: Routledge, 2015), 105–21. 110 Tenko is the Japanese word for ‘roll call’. 111 Interview with Isla, 11 November 2014.

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112 Paul Renn, The Silent Past and the Invisible Present: Memory, Trauma, and Representation in Psychotherapy (New York, Routledge, 2012). 113 Françoise Davoine and Jean-Max Gaudillière, History Beyond Trauma (New York: Other Press, 2004), 25. 114 Dori Laub, ‘Traumatic shutdown of narrative and symbolization: a death instinct derivative?’, in Lost in Transmission: Studies of Trauma Across the Generations, ed. M. Gerard Fromm (London: Karnac Books Ltd., 2012), 31. 115 Helen Epstein, Children of the Holocaust: Conversations with Sons and Daughters of Survivors (Harmondsworth: Penguin Books, 1979), 9. 116 Interview with Graham, 29 November 2014. 117 Service Personnel and Veterans Agency Leaflet – 7, Notes for Ex-Far East and Korean Prisoners of War, www.gov.uk/government/uploads/system/uploads/ attachment_data/file/504504/VeteransUK_Leaflet7.pdf (accessed 11 July 2016, but now archived). 118 For example, Gill and Parkes, Burma Railway Medicine; and D. Robson, Ellen Welch, Nicholas J. Beeching and Geoffrey V. Gill, ‘Consequences of captivity: health effects of Far East imprisonment in World War II, QJM 102 (2009): 87–96. 119 Jones and Wessely, British Prisoners-of-War, 164. 120 Robert J. Ursano and David M. Benedek, ‘Prisoners of war: long-term health outcomes’, The Lancet 362 (2003), 22–3. 121 For example, Cynthia Lindman Port, Brian Engdahl and Patricia Frazier, ‘A longitudinal and retrospective study of PTSD among older prisoners of war’, American Journal of Psychiatry 158, 9 (2001), 1474–9. 122 Edward D. Berkowitz and Mark J. Santangelo, The Medical Follow-up Agency: the First Fifty Years, 1946–1996 (Washington, D.C.: National Academy Press, 1999). 123 See https://navymedicine.navylive.dodlive.mil/archives/10453 (accessed 18 July 2020). 124 Francine Segovia, Jeffrey L. Moore, Steven E. Linnville, Robert E. Hoyt and Robert E. Hain, ‘Optimism predicts resilience in repatriated prisoners of war: a 37-year longitudinal study’, Journal of Traumatic Stress 25, (2012): 330–6. 125 Crystal L. Park, Anica Pless Kaiser, Avron Spiro III, Daniel W. King and Lynda A. King, ‘Does wartime captivity affect late-life mental health? A study of Vietnamera repatriated prisoners of war’, Research in Human Development 9, 3 (2012): 191–209. 126 Most excess deaths were due to accidents, tuberculosis and cirrhosis of the liver. See M. Dean Nefzger, ‘Follow-up studies of World War II and Korean War prisoners: 1. Study plan and mortality findings’, American Journal of Epidemiology 91, 2 (1970): 123–38, here 123. 127 Julius Segal, Long-term Psychological and Physical Effects of the POW Experience: a Review of the Literature, Report no.74-2 (San Diego: Naval Health Research Center, 1974), 24.

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128 Such as the ‘FEPOW Unit’ established in Queen Mary’s Hospital, Roehampton which saw 4,686 former FEPOWs between 1946 and 1968 when it closed. This specialist role was taken over by the Liverpool School of Tropical Medicine from 1968 to 1999. Referrals peaked in the 1980s and other centres had to be used, such as military hospitals in Woolwich, Plymouth, Ely and Catterick, and the London School of Tropical Medicine. See Parkes and Gill, Captive Memories, 187–203. 129 Robson et al., ‘Consequences of captivity’, 90. 130 Gill and Parkes, Burma Railway Medicine, 137–60. 131 To illustrate: concerns expressed by the FEPOW National Association over the seven years rule led to a debate in the House of Commons in 1972. The rule stated that for claims made within seven years after service in the forces, the benefit of the doubt would be given to the claimant. After seven years, claimants had no such advantage. In the course of the debate MPs made several unfavourable comparisons with other countries. For example ‘the absence of personal records and the lack of check-up on prisoners when they return to this country, unlike the case in Australia and in the United States’, and ‘the long-term effects of stress and starvation, is not officially recognised in Britain as it is in the Scandinavian countries’. See http://hansard.millbanksystems.com/commons/1972/mar/09/fareast-prisoners-of-war-pensions (accessed 22 January 2022). 132 Interview with Derek, 8 July 2014. 133 Rachel Dekel, Hadass Goldblatt and Zahava Soloman, ‘Trapped in captivity: marital perceptions of former prisoners of war’, Women and Health 42, 3 (2005): 6. 134 For example, Adriel Boals and Darnell Schuettler, ‘A double-edged sword: event centrality, PTSD and post-traumatic growth’, Applied Cognitive Psychology 25 (2011): 817–22; Ciara Downes, Elaine Harrison, David Curran and Michele Kavanagh, ‘The trauma still goes on …: The multigenerational legacy of Northern Ireland’s conflict’, Clinical Child Psychology and Psychiatry 18, 4 (2012): 583–603; Viktor Emil Frankl, Man’s Search for Meaning (Boston, MA: Beacon Press, 2006). 135 Julius Segal, Edna J. Hunter and Zelda Segal, ‘Universal consequences of captivity: stress reactions among divergent populations of prisoners of war and their families’, International Social Science Journal 28, 3 (1976): 593–609. The quotation is from the abstract, available at https://apps.dtic.mil/sti/citations/ADA031554 (accessed 22 July 2020). 136 Segal et al., Universal consequences of captivity, 605. 137 ‘Existential trust is a way of being in a fundamental existential relationship with the world as a whole such that we feel at home in the world and in affective accord with it.’ Jeffrey M. Courtright, ‘Is trust like an “atmosphere”? Understanding the phenomenon of existential trust’, Philosophy in the Contemporary World 20, 1 (2013): 39–51, here 50. 138 Available at www.far-eastern-heroes.org.uk/private_5776807/html/railway_of_ death.htm (accessed 26 February 2021).

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Chapter 2 1 Hansard, HC Deb 28 January 1944 vol. 396 cc1029-35 available at https://api. parliament.uk/historic-hansard/commons/1944/jan/28/japanese-treatment (accessed 18 May 2021). 2 Barbara Hately-Broad, ‘Coping in Britain and France: a comparison of family issues affecting the homecoming of prisoners of war following World War II’, in Prisoners of War, Prisoners of Peace, eds Bob Moore and Barbara Hately-Broad (Oxford: Berg, 2005), 148. 3 Rüdiger Overmans, ‘The repatriation of prisoners of war once hostilities are over: a matter of course?’, in Prisoners of War, Prisoners of Peace, eds Bob Moore and Barbara Hately-Broad (Oxford: Berg, 2005), 18. 4 Michael McKernan, This War Never Ends: the Pain of Separation and Return (St Lucia, Queensland: University of Queensland Press, 2001), 62. 5 Wes Injerd and Mindy Kotler, ‘POW and civilian camps throughout Imperial Japan’, Center for Research – Allied POWs under the Japanese, available at www.mansell. com/pow-index.html (accessed 3 March 2021). Via hyperlink marked ‘POW and INTERNEE CAMP STATISTICS’. 6 Stanley Woodburn Kirby, The War Against JAPAN, Volume 5: the Surrender of Japan (London: Her Majesty’s Stationery Office, 1969), 243–50. 7 Charles Andrew Willoughby, Reports of General McArthur, Chapter IV – Relief of prisoners of war and internees, available at https://history.army.mil/books/wwii/ MacArthur%20Reports/MacArthur%20V1%20Sup/ch4.htm 90-92 (accessed 3 March 2021). 8 The recovery and repatriation of Far East POWs is an under-researched topic. But see Chesworth’s recent unpublished PhD thesis, Andrew Chesworth, ‘Planning and realities: the recovery of Britain’s Far East prisoners of war 1941–1945’ (PhD thesis, University of Sheffield, 2017). 9 Parkes and Gill provide a useful summary of the repatriation process. See Meg Parkes and Geoff Gill, Captive Memories (Lancaster: Palatine Books, 2015), 156–69. 10 From the private, unpublished papers of Norman Burrows (died 23 July 2016 aged 98). 11 Norman Burrows, unpublished papers. 12 Ibid. 13 War Office, A Handbook for the Information of Relatives and Friends of Prisoners of War and Civilians in Japanese or Japanese Occupied Territories (London: His Majesty’s Stationery Office, 1944), 2–3. 14 Charles S. Myers, ‘A contribution to the study of shell shock’, The Lancet 185, 4772 (1915): 316–20. 15 Tracey Loughran, ‘A crisis of masculinity? Re-writing the history of shell-shock and gender in First World War Britain’, History Compass 11, 9 (2013): 727–38, here 727.

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16 Edgar Jones and Simon Wessely, ‘Battle for the mind: World War 1 and the birth of military psychiatry’, The Lancet 384 (2014): 1708–14, here 1711. 17 Loughran, ‘A crisis of masculinity’, 733. 18 Philip Harker Newman, ‘The prisoner-of-war mentality: its effect after repatriation’, British Medical Journal 1, 4330 (1944): 8–10, here 10. 19 Allan William Vaughan Eley, ‘The prisoner-of-war mentality’, The British Medical Journal 1, 4341 (1944): 403–4, here 404. 20 B. Richardson Billings, ‘The prisoner-of-war mentality’, The British Medical Journal 1, 4336 (1944): 90. 21 John Harkness, ‘The prisoner-of-war mentality’, The British Medical Journal 1, 4346 (1944): 568. Horner describes a narrative in mid-1940s America that pictured the returning soldier as ‘contaminated and dangerous’, and his reintegration as a serious social threat. See Jennifer R. Horner, ‘Betty Crocker’s picture cookbook: a gendered ritual response to social crises of the postwar era’, Journal of Communication Inquiry 24 (2000): 332–45, here 335. Allport also suggests that fear of the ex-servicemen was at play in the minds of the British civilian population. See Alan Allport, Demobbed (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2009), 185. 22 See Clare Makepeace, Captives of War (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2017), 192–223. 23 See Adam Curle, ‘Social healing of the wounds of war’, Committee for Conflict Transformation and Support Newsletter 14, Autumn (2001): 3–6. 24 [no named author] ‘Bridging the Gap’, Far East Companion Journal to ‘The Prisoner of War’ 1, 11 (November 1945): 9 & 12. 25 Ben Shephard, ‘A clouded homecoming’, History Today 46, 8 (1996): 10–13. 26 See Curle ‘Social healing’, 3. 27 Parkes and Gill, Captive Memories,164. 28 The full text is available at www.fepow-community.org.uk/html/guard_your_ tongue.htm (accessed 23 January 2022). 29 Julie Summers, Stranger in the House: Women’s Stories of Men Returning from the Second World War (London: Pocket Books, 2009), 211–12. 30 Swallow reported no guilt amongst his sample of Cambridgeshire ex-FEPOWs. Rather, and without exception, they felt ‘let down by politicians and the Army high command’. See Peter Swallow, ‘The rehabilitation and readjustment of Cambridgeshire’s Far Eastern prisoners of war’, Far Eastern Heroes (compiled by Ron Taylor), available at www.fepow-community.org.uk/fepow_rehabilitation/ html/formal_rehabilitation.htm (accessed 1 March 2021). 31 Margaret Bavin, ‘A contribution towards the understanding of the repatriated prisoner of war’, British Journal of Psychiatric Social Work 1, 1 (1947): 29–35. 32 Alfred Torrie, ‘The return of Odysseus: the problem of marital infidelity for the repatriate’, The British Medical Journal 2, 4414 (1945): 192–3, here 192.

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33 Sears Eldredge, ‘Captive Audiences, Captive Performers – Complete Text’, Book Chapters, Book 24 (2014), here 139. Available at http://digitalcommons.macalester. edu/thdabooks/24/ (accessed 20 June 2020). 34 For an analysis of how women were expected to take responsibility for the ‘management of other people’s emotions’, most critically the ‘feelings of returning servicemen’, see Claire Langhamer, ‘Feelings, women and work in the long 1950s’, Women’s History Review 26, 1 (2017): 77–92, here 78. 35 Barry Turner and Tony Rennell, When Daddy Came Home: How Family Life Changed Forever in 1945 (London: Hutchinson, 1995). 36 Red Cross and St John War Organisation, ‘Planning their food – some useful hints on diet for repatriates’, Far East: Companion Journal to ‘The Prisoner of War’, 6. 37 Turner and Rennell, When Daddy Came Home, 136. 38 Charles G. Roland, Long Night’s Journey into Day: Prisoners of War in Hong Kong and Japan, 1941–1945 (Waterloo, Ontario: Wilfred Laurier University Press, 2001), 327. 39 Ben Highmore, ‘Playgrounds and bombsites: postwar Britain’s ruined landscapes’, Cultural Politics 9, 3 (2013): 323–36. 40 Interview with James, 30 November 2014. 41 Roland Quinault, ‘Britain 1950’, History Today 51, 4 (2001): 14–21, here 14. 42 Claire Langhamer, ‘Love, selfhood and authenticity in post-war Britain’, Cultural and Social History 9, 2 (2012): 277–97, here 279. 43 This ‘suppression’ was a joint undertaking between the state discourse of ‘getting the country back on its feet’ and the individual ex-POW who suppressed his personal emotions to restore normality in the family. These active suppressions were entangled with the unconscious repressions that derived from ‘unthinkable’ experiences in the camps. 44 Stephen Atherton, ‘Domesticating military masculinities: home, performance and the negotiation of identity’, Social and Cultural Geography 10, 8 (2009): 821–36, here 829. 45 Laura King, ‘Hidden fathers? The significance of fatherhood in mid-twentieth century Britain’, Contemporary British History 26, 1 (2012): 25–46, here 27. 46 Martin Francis, ‘A flight from commitment? Domesticity, adventure and the masculine imaginary in Britain after the Second World War’, Gender and History 19, 1 (2007): 163–85, here 164. 47 Stephen Atherton, ‘Domesticating’, 831. 48 Lucy Noakes, ‘Gender, grief, and bereavement in Second World War Britain’, Journal of War and Culture Studies 8, 1 (2015): 72–85, here 77. 49 Langhamer, ‘Feelings, women and work’, 78. 50 Roger Kennedy, The Psychic Home: Psychoanalysis, Consciousness and the Human Soul (Hove: Routledge, 2014), 26.

202 51 52 53 54 55 56 57 58

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Interview with Isla, 11 November 2014. Interview with Selena by email, 20 August 2015. Interview with Louise, 7 July 2014. Carolyn Steedman, Landscape For a Good Woman (London: Virago Press, 2005), 28. Carol Smart, ‘Families, secrets and memories’, Sociology 45, 4 (2011): 539–53, here 540. Interview with Deirdre, 27 July 2014. Interview with Lorna by email, 20 January 2015. Geoffrey V. Gill and Dion R. Bell, ‘Persisting nutritional neuropathy amongst former war prisoners’, Journal of Neurology, Neurosurgery, and Psychiatry 45 (1982): 861–5. 59 Interview with Derek, 8 July 2014. The journey was a round trip of seventy miles by public transport. 60 Psychoanalyst Julie Walsh describes patients who came to sessions ‘with their first lines prepared’. See Julie Walsh, ‘On the seductions of psychoanalytic story-telling: Narcissism and the problems of narrative’, Frontiers of Narrative Studies 3, 1 (2017): 71–88, here 72. 61 Interview with Derek, 8 July 2014. 62 Ibid. 63 Also known as ‘larva currens’. Geoffrey V. Gill, Ellen Welch, Wendy J. Bailey, Dion R. Bell and Nicholas J. Beeching. ‘Chronic strongyloides stercoralis infection in former British Far East prisoners of war’, QJM 97 (2004): 789–95. 64 He was employed as an overseas telegraphist, and eligible to be cared for in a sanatorium owned by the Post Office. Derek’s family had a lengthy journey to visit his father at the sanatorium. 65 Interview with Derek, 8 July 2014. 66 Ibid. 67 See www2today.com/27th-march-1941-the-morrison-shelter-is-introduced which shows the indoor shelter in use, in a middle-class domestic environment that would have been very familiar to Angie (accessed 2 March 2021). 68 Interview with Angie by email, 18 October 2014. 69 Ibid. 70 Turner and Rennell, When Daddy Came Home, 89. 71 Most letters didn’t reach the FEPOWs, at least not for many months if at all, but the families would not have known this when they wrote. 72 Interview with Graham, 29 November 2014. 73 Ibid. 74 Ibid. Margaret Bavin spent a year working as a ‘civil liaison officer’ in a C.R.U. where she interviewed more than 600 POWs from Europe. Evoking the classic Oedipal triangle, she describes the men’s particular ‘resentment and jealousy’ where ‘a small son had occupied the father’s place in the mother’s bed.’ See Bavin, ‘A contribution’, 33–4.

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75 David Kynaston, Austerity Britain:1945–1951 (London: Bloomsbury Publishing, 2007), 595. 76 Interview with Robert, 23 July 2014. 77 Ben Shephard, A War of Nerves: Soldiers and Psychiatrists in the Twentieth Century (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2000), 315. 78 Interview with Joanna, 1 July 2014. 79 Ibid. 80 Interview with Isla, 11 November 2014. 81 Interview with Robert, 23 July 2014. 82 Ibid. 83 See Kevin Blackburn, ‘Recalling war trauma of the Pacific war and the Japanese occupation in the oral history of Malaysia and Singapore’, Oral History Review 36, 2 (2009): 231–52, here 233. 84 Interview with Isla, 11 November 2014. 85 Interview with Louise, 7 July 2014. 86 Ibid. 87 Interview with Brenda, 19 November 2014. 88 Ibid. 89 For example, M. Masud R. Khan, ‘The concept of cumulative trauma’, The Psychoanalytic Study of the Child 18 (1963): 286–306; Judith Lewis Herman, ‘Complex PTSD: a syndrome in survivors of prolonged and repeated trauma’, Journal of Traumatic Stress 5, 3 (1992) 377–91; Marylene Cloitre, Bradley C. Stolbach, Judith L. Herman, Bessel van der Kolk, Robert Pynoos, Jing Wang and Eva Petkova, ‘A developmental approach to complex PTSD: childhood and adult cumulative trauma as predictors of symptom complexity’, Journal of Traumatic Stress 22, 5 (2009): 399–408. 90 Julie Summers, Stranger in the House: Women’s Stories of Men Returning from the Second World War (London: Pocket Books, 2009), here 216. 91 The following extract – presented as received – shows this fracturing more explicitly, seeming to disintegrate towards the end:

I talk better than writing I cannot spot my errors When iget triggered into the fear state I cannot write an essay I cant seem to hold a structure well Sorry this has been a ramble I was having a difficult time with some of these issuesat the time and could not write about this stuff as I amplifys the state when I am in it. I unfortunately have started symptoms from my childhood I have been diagnosed with PTSD As I get older it seems to be worse I very quickly get fliped into fear states But i still can remain clam in an emergency my capacity to remain hypervigelent to keep thing safe and people alive is overworked. 92 Although ‘raged’ was a ‘slip of the finger’ I have decided to leave it in. 93 Interview with Lorna by email, 20 January 2015.

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94 On other occasions her emails were quite correct in grammar, structure and spelling. Elsewhere she told me she had been diagnosed with PTSD and that, from time to time, this suddenly ‘flipped’ her into a state of relative incoherence. Although she lives in Australia, I had the opportunity to meet her in the UK. The conclusions I have drawn here are grounded in her written testimony and the conversations I was able to have with her. 95 Interview with Joanna, 1 July 2014. 96 Janoff-Bulman describes the latter as ‘characterological self-blame’. Janoff-Bulman, ‘Characterological versus behavioral self-blame: inquiries into depression and rape’, Journal of Personality and Social Psychology 37, 10 (1979): 1799. 97 Joanna’s mother had been fitted with a ‘syringe driver’ to ensure a reliable dose of morphine. 98 Interview with Joanna, 1 July 2014. 99 Ibid. 100 Ibid. 101 Françoise Davoine and Jean-Max Gaudillière, History Beyond Trauma (New York: Other Press, 2004), 124. 102 Dori Laub, ‘Traumatic Shutdown of Narrative and Symbolization: A Death Instinct Derivative?’, in Lost in Transmission: Studies of Trauma across the Generations, ed. M. Gerard Fromm (London: Karnac Books Ltd, 2012), 35. 103 Judith Herman, Trauma and Recovery: the Aftermath of Violence – from Domestic Abuse to Political Terror (New York: Basic Books, 2015), 86. 104 From Salman Akhtar’s endorsement of M. Gerald Fromm (ed.), Lost in Transmission (London: Karnac Books, 2012). 105 Rachel Dekel and Hadass Goldblatt, ‘Is there intergenerational transmission of trauma? The case of combat veterans’ children’, American Journal of Orthopsychiatry, 78, 34 (2008): 281–9, here 281. 106 Dekel and Goldblatt, ‘Is there’, 283. 107 Ibid., 284. 108 Natan P. F. Kellermann, ‘Psychopathology in children of Holocaust survivors: a review of the research literature’, Israel Journal of Psychiatry & Related Sciences 38, 1 (2001): 36–46, here 43. 109 Enmeshment refers to ‘Family patterns that facilitate psychological and emotional fusion among family members, potentially inhibiting the individuation process and the development and maintenance of psychosocial maturity’. See Brian K. Barber and Cheryl Buehler, ‘Family cohesion and enmeshment: different constructs, different effects’, Journal of Marriage and the Family 58 (1996): 433–41, here 433. 110 Kellerman, ‘Psychopathology’, 43. 111 Dan Bar-On, Jeanette Eland, Rolf J. Kleber, Robert Krell, Yael Moore, Abraham Sagi, Erin Soriano, Peter Suedfeld, Peter G. van der Velden and Marinus H. van IJzendoorn, ‘Multigenerational perspectives on coping with the Holocaust

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experience: an attachment perspective for understanding the developmental sequelae of trauma across generations’, International Journal of Behavioral Development 22, 2 (1998): 315–38. 112 John Bowlby, A Secure Base: Parent–Child Attachment and Healthy Human Development (New York: Basic Books, 1988). 113 See Peter Fonagy, ‘The transgenerational transmission of holocaust trauma’, Attachment & Human Development 1, 1 (1999): 92–114; and David Howe, Attachment Across the Lifecourse: a Brief Introduction (London: Palgrave, 2011). 114 See Jacob Y. Stein, Avigal Snir and Zahava Soloman, ‘When man harms man: the interpersonal ramifications of war captivity’, in Traumatic Stress and Long-Term Recovery, ed. Katie E. Cherry (New York: Springer, 2015), 120. 115 Bar-On, ‘Multigenerational perspectives’, 332. 116 Bar-On, Fear and Hope, 27. 117 Ibid. 118 Ibid., 31. 119 Michelle R. Ancharoff, James F. Munroe and Lisa M. Fisher, ‘The legacy of combat trauma: clinical implications of intergenerational transmission’, in The International Handbook of Multigenerational Legacies of Trauma, ed. Yael Danieli (New York: Plenum Press, 1998), 263–5. 120 Ancharoff, ‘The legacy’, 263. 121 Hadas Wiseman, Einat Metzl and Jaques P. Barber, ‘Anger, guilt, and intergenerational communication of trauma in the interpersonal narratives of second generation Holocaust survivors’, American Journal of Orthopsychiatry 76, 2 (2006): 176–84, here 183. 122 Ancharoff, ‘The legacy’, 264. 123 While the term identification has been widely adopted in popular discourse, it has its origins in psychoanalysis. For an interesting example of father–son identification, see Erik Erikson, Childhood and Society (St Albans: Triad/Paladin, 1977), 214–17. 124 Robert Jay Lifton ‘From Hiroshima to the Nazi doctors: the evolution of psychoformative approaches to understanding traumatic stress syndromes’, in International Handbook of Traumatic Stress Syndromes, eds John P. Wilson and Beverley Raphael (New York: Plenum Press, 1993), 18. 125 Interview with Charles, 31 October 2014. 126 Ancharoff, ‘The legacy’, 265. 127 Interview with James, 30 November 2014. 128 Ibid. 129 Augustin Lefebvre, ‘The Pacific philosophy of Aikido: an interactional approach’, Martial Arts Studies 2 (2016): 91–109. 130 ‘Identification with the aggressor’ is a difficult, controversial and rather emotive concept, in part because it has been applied in diverse contexts, and embraces a

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range of psychological processes that different authors have chosen to prioritize differently. The following paper includes a brief overview of these processes, albeit in the context of child abuse rather than war captivity: Yael Lahav, Anat Talmon and Karni Ginzburg ‘Knowing the abuser inside and out: the development and psychometric evaluation of the identification with the aggressor scale’, Journal of Interpersonal Violence 36, 19–20 (2019): 9725–48, here 9725–9. 131 Ancharoff, ‘The legacy’, 265. 132 Carol A. Kidron, ‘Toward an ethnography of silence: the lived presence of the past in everyday life of Holocaust trauma survivors and their descendants in Israel’, Current Anthropology 50, 1 (2009): 5–27, here 6. 133 Ibid., 15. 134 Ibid., 5. 135 Ibid. 136 Françoise Davoine and Jean-Max Gaudillière, History Beyond Trauma (New York: Other Press, 2004). 137 Valerie Walkerdine, Aina Olsvold and Monica Rudberg, ‘Researching embodiment and intergenerational trauma using the work of Davoine and Gaudillière: history walked through the door’, Subjectivity 6, 3 (2013): 272–97, here 294. 138 ‘Therefore, to perceive, grasp, or participate in reality, the process of symbolization needs to be in place.’ Typically, symbolization occurs through the translation of experience into words. Dori Laub, ‘Traumatic shutdown of narrative and symbolization: a death instinct derivative?’ Contemporary Psychoanalysis 41, (2005): 307–26, here 314. 139 Walkerdine, ‘Researching embodiment’, 272. 140 I borrowed this colloquial expression from Adam Phillips’ biography of Freud. Although he uses it in a different context, it seemed appropriate here. Adam Phillips, Becoming Freud: the Making of a Psychoanalyst, (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2014), 47. 141 Interview with Doug, 16 July 2014. 142 Unpublished written account by Doug. See also www.cofepow.org.uk/armedforces-stories-list/balalae-island-gunners (accessed 3 March 2021). 143 Interview with Doug, 16 July 2014. 144 Interview with Doug by email, 17 July 2014.

Chapter 3 1 Winfried Georg Sebald, Austerlitz (London: Penguin Books, 2002), 30–1. 2 Eva Hoffman, After Such Knowledge: Memory, History, and the Legacy of the Holocaust (London: Secker and Warburg, 2004), xv.

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3 Frayn and Phillips provide a concise guide through this conceptual whirl in the context of war studies. Andrew Frayn and Terry Phillips, ‘Introduction: war and memory’, Journal of War and Culture Studies 11, 3 (2018): 181–91. 4 David Middleton and Steven D. Brown, The Social Psychology of Experience: Studies in Remembering and Forgetting (London: Sage Publications, 2005), xii. 5 Jeffrey K. Olick and Joyce Robbins, ‘Social memory studies: from “collective memory” to the historical sociology of mnemonic practices’, Annual Review of Sociology 24, (1998): 105–40. 6 In Halbwachs’ terms, a shared memory that promotes a collective identity. Maurice Halbwachs, On Collective Memory (edited and translated by Lewis Coser) (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1992). Available at http://web.mit.edu/allanmc/www/ hawlbachsspace.pdf (accessed 25 April 2021). 7 James Young resists the notion of ‘collective memory’ altogether, preferring the term ‘collected memories’. He also chooses to speak of the ‘collective meaning’ that is passed on to successive generations. James E. Young, The Texture of Memory: Holocaust Memorials and their Meaning (New Haven: Yale University, 1993), xi. 8 Zachary Beckstead, Gabriel Twose, Emily Levesque-Gottlieb and Julia Rizzo, ‘Collective remembering through the materiality and organization of war memorials’, Journal of Material Culture 16, 2 (2011): 193–213, here 194–5. 9 Halbwachs, The Collective Memory, Chapter 4. 10 Hamzah Muzaini, ‘The state of Malaysian war memory: “postcolonializing” museums in Perak’, in Remembering Asia’s World War Two, eds Mark R. Frost, Daniel Schumacher and Edward Vickers (London: Routledge, 2019), 108. 11 Susann Ullberg, Watermarks: Urban Flooding and Memoryscape in Argentina (Stockholm: Stockholm University, 2013), 14. 12 Christine Lohmeier and Rieke Bohling, ‘Communicating family memory in a changing media environment’, Communications 42, 3 (2017): 277–92, here 288. 13 Jenny Wüstenberg, ‘Locating transnational memory’, International Journal of Politics, Culture, and Society 32 (2019): 371–82, here 371. 14 Jan Assmann, ‘Communicative and cultural memory’, in Cultural Memory Studies. An International and Interdisciplinary Handbook, eds Astrid Erll and Ansgar Nünning (Berlin: Walter de Gruyter, 2008), 109. 15 Assmann, ‘Communicative and cultural memory’, 111. 16 Ibid. 17 Marianne Hirsch, The Generation of Postmemory: Writing and Visual Culture after the Holocaust (New York: Columbia University Press, 2012), 36. 18 Clare Makepeace, ‘For “ALL who were captured”? The evolution of national exprisoner of war associations in Britain after the Second World War’, Journal of War & Culture Studies 7, 3 (2014): 253–68.

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19 Jan Vansina, Oral Tradition as History (Madison: The University of Wisconsin Press, 1985), 23. 20 For instance, the Imperial War Museum holds thousands of recorded interviews, including the testimonies of ex-FEPOWs, many of which are available online. See www.iwm.org.uk/collections/sound. Social media such as Facebook are also contributing to this blurring. Virtual reality technologies will no doubt blur this distinction still further. 21 Assmann, ‘Communicative and cultural memory’, 114. 22 In the final part of his paper, Assmann does make some reference to the need for flexibility in analysing the ‘dynamics of cultural memory’, referring to ‘the transition from autobiographical and communicative memory into cultural memory’, but this remains undeveloped and is not reflected in either of the figures within the paper. Assmann, ‘Communicative and cultural memory’, 109 and 117. 23 Paul Connerton, ‘Seven types of forgetting’, Memory Studies 1, 1 (2008): 59–71, here 59. 24 Gavriel D. Rosenfeld, ‘A looming crash or a soft landing? Forecasting the future of the memory “industry”’, History Faculty Publications. Paper 11 (2009), 156. Available at http://digitalcommons.fairfield.edu/history-facultypubs/11 (accessed 12 March 2021). 25 Friedrich Nietzsche, Untimely Meditations (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997), 62. 26 Aleida Assmann ‘Forms of forgetting’, text of public lecture held at Stichting Herengracht 401, Amsterdam, on 1 October 2014. Available online at https://h401. org/2014/10/forms-of-forgetting/ Section 1 (accessed 12 March 2021). 27 Ibid., Section 1. 28 Ibid., Conclusion. 29 Ibid. 30 Connerton, ‘Seven types of forgetting’, 62–4. 31 Hoffman, After Such Knowledge, 233. 32 The motto of the FEPOW Family Facebook page is ‘Keep the candle burning’. Members of this and other similar websites often end their contribution with the words ‘lest we forget’. Anniversaries are marked by a rush of contributions expressing similar sentiments. 33 Interview with Doug, 16 July 2014. 34 Interview with Louise, 7 July 2014. 35 Ibid. 36 Charlotte Delbo, Days and Memory (Evanston, ILL: The Marlboro Press/ Northwestern University Press, 2001), 3. 37 Ibid., 4. 38 Ibid., 25.

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39 Jill Bennett, Empathic Vision: Affect, Trauma, and Contemporary Art (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2005), 38. 40 Endel Tulving, ‘Episodic and semantic memory’, in Organization of memory, eds Endel Tulving and Wayne Donaldson (New York: Academic Press, 1972), 40. 41 Michael C. Corballis, ‘The wandering mind: mental time travel, theory of mind, and language’, Análise Social 47, 4 (2012), 870–93, here 874. 42 Ibid. 43 Ibid., 875. 44 Ibid., 888. 45 Assmann, ‘Communicative and cultural memory’, 117. 46 Recent brain research suggests that there may be biological correlates to this psychic process: the ‘default network’ that is activated ‘when individuals are left to think to themselves undisturbed [and] increases activity during mental explorations referenced to oneself including remembering, considering hypothetical social interactions, and thinking about one’s own future … that provide a means to prepare for upcoming, self-relevant events before they happen.’ Randy L. Buckner, Jessica R. Andrews-Hanna and Daniel L. Schachter, ‘The brain’s default network: anatomy, function, and relevance to disease’, Annals of the New York Academy of Sciences 1124 (2008): 1–38, here 30. 47 Hirsch, The Generation of Postmemory, 4. 48 Hirsch uses this phrase in an interview with Columbia University Press (undated). Available online at https://cup.columbia.edu/author-interviews/hirsch-generationpostmemory (accessed 12 March 2021). 49 Hirsch, The Generation of Postmemory, 5. 50 Ibid. 51 Ibid. 52 Interview with Selena by email, 20 August 2015. There is a similar example of naïve confusion in Carl Friedman’s ‘Nightfather’ in which the children of a Holocaust survivor stretch the meaning of ‘camp’. 53 Interview with Joanna, 1 July 2014. 54 Hirsch, The Generation of Postmemory, 15. 55 Ibid., 1. 56 Such as COFEPOW (Children and Families of the Far East Prisoners of War) www. facebook.com/groups/19329213839/ (accessed 12 March 2021); FEPOW (Far East Prisoner of War) www.facebook.com/groups/13965904326/ (accessed 12 March 2021); The FEPOW Family www.facebook.com/groups/FEPOW.Family (accessed 12 March 2021); RFHG (Researching FEPOW History Group) has an explicit research focus https://fepowhistory.com/ (accessed 12 March 2021). 57 Jannis Kallinikos, ‘On shadows and ghosts: constructing life out of digital records’, Sprouts: Working Papers on Information Systems 9, 6 (2009): 1–8, here 2.

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58 Caterina Albano, ‘Moving emotions: affect, the archive and the moving image’, Cultural History 7, 2 (2018): 187–204, here 190. 59 Hirsch, The generation of postmemory, 103–24 (Chapter 4: ‘Surviving images’). 60 Bridge on the River Kwai (1957) [Film], Dir. David Lean, Horizon Pictures (II) Distributed by Colombia Pictures. 61 The Railway Man (2013) [Film], Dir. Jonathan Teplitzky, Toronto, ON: Distributed by Entertainment One Films Canada. 62 Unbroken (2014) [Film], Dir. Angelina Jolie, USA: Universal Pictures. This film challenged Japan’s narrative of wartime responsibility and accountability, and provoked accusations of racism from right-wing politicians in Japan, who tried to have it banned. Available online at www.theguardian.com/film/2014/dec/09/angelinajolies-unbroken-is-racist-say-japanese-nationalists (accessed 12 March 2021). 63 See www.imdb.com/title/tt0050212/ (accessed 11 May 2022). 64 Interview with Anna by email, 24 July 2015. 65 Interview with Sally, 15 July 2015. 66 See www.imdb.com/title/tt0081944/ (accessed 12 March 2021). 67 Now a highly contentious TV series – see David Owen Jones, ‘A Critical Analysis of the Portrayal of “Race” in It Ain’t Half Hot Mum’, Journal of British Cinema and Television 6, 3 (2009): 370–86. 68 Interview with Mark by email, 18 August 2020. 69 See Ian Craib, Psychoanalysis: a Critical Introduction (Cambridge: Polity Press, 2001), 44. 70 Interview with Doug, 16 July 2014. 71 Jack B. Chalker, Burma Railway: Images of War (Mells, Somerset: Mercer Books, 2007). 72 Ronald Searle, To the Kwai – and Back: War Drawings 1939–1945 (London: Souvenir Press, 1986). 73 Leo Rawlings, And the Dawn Came Up Like Thunder. Leo Rawlings: Prisoner of Japan and War Artist 1941–1945 (Newcastle upon Tyne: Myrmidon, 2015). 74 Lizzie Oliver, ‘“What our Sons went through”: The Connective Memories of Far Eastern Captivity in the Charles Thrale Exhibition, 1946–1964’, Journal of War & Culture Studies 7, 3 (2014): 236–52. 75 Charles Thrale, The Valleys of the Shadow of Death (eleventh year of touring), (Bridlington: Woodhouse Printing, 1957), front cover. 76 Ibid., ‘About the Exhibition’, unpaged. 77 Marianne Hirsch and Leo Spitzer, ‘Testimonial Objects: Memory, Gender, and Transmission’, Poetics Today 27, 2 (2006): 353–83. 78 Thrale, The Valleys, 1957. Unpaged, but this quotation is taken from the second page – effectively the Introduction. 79 Alison Landsberg, ‘Memory, empathy, and the politics of identification’, International Journal of Politics, Culture, and Society 22, 2 (2009): 221–9, here 222.

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80 Ibid. Perhaps the most creative and evocative example in recent times took place on Friday 1 July 2016 on the 100th anniversary of the Battle of the Somme: Turner Prize-winning artist Jeremy Deller’s project ‘we’re here because we’re here’ – a living memorial that brought the past into the present in a way that was both hauntingly intense and affecting. Available online at https://becausewearehere.co.uk/ (accessed 12 March 2021). 81 Juliet Koss, ‘On the limits of empathy’, The Art Bulletin 88, 1 (2006): 139–57, here 139. 82 Although purely anecdotal, my informal meetings with university and highschool students in Japan suggested their knowledge was very limited. For a recent background to the teaching of history, see Kazuya Fukuoka, ‘Japanese history textbook controversy at a crossroads?: joint history research, politicization of textbook adoption process, and apology fatigue in Japan’, Global Change, Peace and Security 30, 3 (2018): 313–34. 83 Nava Semel, And the Rat Laughed (Melbourne: Hybrid Publishers, 2008).The novel has also been adapted as an opera, see https://youtu.be/EMSJi8zaum4 (accessed 10 March 2021). 84 Carl Friedman, Nightfather (New York: Persea Books, 1994). 85 Art Spiegelman, The Complete Maus (London: Penguin, 2003). 86 These paintings were first exhibited on 11 May 2006, the centenary of his birth. 87 She has been told the symbol is the Japanese for ‘prisoner’. Interview with Louise, 16 July 2015. 88 ‘In Memoriam’ is unpublished, but the author very kindly let me have a copy. Toby’s intention is to develop the short story into a full-length novel. 89 Ronald Fraser, In Search of a Past (London: Verso Editions and NLB, 1984). 90 Chris Weedon and Glenn Jordan, ‘Collective memory: theory and politics’, Social Semiotics 22, 2 (2012): 143–53, here 143. 91 Richard Johnson, ‘What is cultural studies anyway?’, Social Text 16 (1986): 38–80. 92 Makepeace, ‘For ALL?’, 253–68. 93 Hamzah Muzaini and Brenda S. A. Yeoh, ‘An exploration of memory-making in the digital era: remembering the FEPOW story online’, Tijdschrift voor Economische en Sociale Geografie, Royal Dutch Geographical Society KNAG 106, 1 (2015): 53–64. 94 Christina Twomey, ‘Prisoners of war of the Japanese: war and memory in Australia’, Memory Studies 6, 3, (2013): 321–30, here 323. 95 Aleida Assmann, ‘From collective violence to a common future: four models for dealing with a traumatic past’, in Conflict, Memory Transfers and the Reshaping of Europe, eds Helena Gonçalves da Silva, Adriana Alves de Paula Martins, Filomena Viana Guarda and José Miguel Sardica (Newcastle upon Tyne: Cambridge Scholars Publishing, 2010), 12. 96 Dan Bar-On, Fear and Hope: Three Generations of the Holocaust (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1995), 19.

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97 Roots (1977) [TV mini-series] BBC1. The viewing figure in the USA for the final episode was 100 million. See www.bbc.com/culture/article/20160602-roots-themost-important-tv-show-ever (accessed 3 December 2021). 98 After the 1979 rebroadcast it was estimated that 220 million people had watched this series in USA and Europe (including 15 million in West Germany – half the adult population). After the 1979 broadcast, the West German government ‘promptly cancelled the statute of limitations for Nazi war crimes, formerly scheduled to expire at the end of 1979.’ See Robert A. Monson, ‘The West German statute of limitations on murder: a political, legal, and historical exposition’, The American Journal of Comparative Law 30, 4 (1982): 605–25, here 619. 99 Jay Winter expands on each of these explanations. See Jay Winter, ‘The generation of memory: reflections on the “memory boom” in contemporary historical studies’, Archives & Social Studies: A Journal of Interdisciplinary Research 1 (2000): 363–97. 100 Bar-On, Fear and Hope, 333. 101 Dorthe Refslund Christensen and Stine Gotved, ‘Online memorial culture: an introduction’, New Review of Hypermedia and Multimedia 21, 1–2 (2015): 1–9. 102 Hoffman, After Such Knowledge, 6. 103 Hoffman, After Such Knowledge, 9. 104 For example, Ronald Hastain, White Coolie (London: Hodder and Stoughton Ltd, 1947); Russell Braddon, The Naked Island (London: Werner Laurie, 1952); and Ken Attiwill, The Rising Sunset (Manchester: Robert Hale Ltd, 1958). 105 For example, John Baxter, Missing, Believed Killed: the Remarkable Story of a Japanese POW Camp Survivor (London: Aurum Press Ltd, 2010); Irene Chisnall and Chris Maddocks, Fred’s Letters: a Collection of Letters to and from a FEPOW During the Second World War (Self published: Lulu.com, 2014); William C Rose, You Shook my Hand: Extracts from the Diaries of Sergeant William C. Rose R.A.F.V.R. Japanese P.O.W. (Grantham: Barny Books, 2012). 106 Meg Parkes and Geoff Gill, Captive Memories (Lancaster: Palatine Books, 2015). 107 Kyoko Murakami and David Middleton, ‘Grave matters: emergent networks and summation in remembering and reconciliation’, Ethos – Journal of the Society for Psychological Anthropology 34, 2 (2006): 273–96, here 274. 108 Bar-On, Fear and Hope, 20. 109 See Bonney for an interesting account of how the Cenotaph rituals have evolved: Norman Bonney, The Cenotaph: A Consensual and Contested Monument of Remembrance (London: National Secular Society, 2013). Available online at www. secularism.org.uk/uploads/cenotaph-a-consensual-and-contested-monumentof-remembrance.pdf (accessed 12 March 2021). For a more architectural slant see Allan Greenberg, ‘Lutyens’s Cenotaph’, Journal of the Society of Architectural Historians 48, 1 (1989): 5–23.

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110 See the BBC initiative ‘The People’s War’, www.bbc.co.uk/history/ww2peopleswar/ categories/c1204/index.shtml (accessed 23 September 2020). 111 Greenberg, ‘Lutyens’ Cenotaph’, 6. 112 Ben Gook, ‘Being there is everything!’, Memory Studies 4, 1 (2011): 13–22, here 16. 113 Interview with Joanna, 1 July 2014. 114 Ibid. 115 Makepeace, ‘For ALL?’, 258. 116 Francesca Cappelletto, ‘Introduction’, in Memory and World War II: an Ethnographic Approach, ed. Francesca Cappelletto (Oxford: Berg, 2005), 4. 117 Between 1952 and 1956, derisory sums were paid in three instalments. It was not until the end of the millennium that the British government finally agreed to make a single ex-gratia payment of £10,000, ‘In recognition of the unique circumstances of their captivity’, by which time of course many of the veterans and their widows had already died. See https://api.parliament.uk/historic-hansard/ lords/2000/nov/07/far-east-prisoners-ex-gratia-payment (accessed 12 March 2021). For a detailed account of the early struggles for compensation see Clare Makepeace, ‘Compensating the railway men’, History Today 64, 4 (2014): 51–7. 118 See Janis Lomas, ‘“So I married again”: letters from British widows of the First and Second World Wars’, History Workshop Journal, 38 (1994): 218–27. Note the account on page 224 which exemplifies the lack of compassion regularly meted out to these women. 119 The few remaining FEPOWs have become lionized, a phenomenon that is now apparent at many of the events at which ex-FEPOWs were honoured guests, and at which other guests ‘bask in the reflected glory’. At one high-profile event I witnessed how the Japanese Ambassador to London plus his minders manoeuvred himself into a photo opportunity with one of the veterans. As these men have become frailer and rarer, what they represent discursively has begun to outweigh who they are as people. 120 Interview with Isla, 11 November 2014. 121 Interview with Deirdre, 29 July 2014. 122 Erik H. Erikson and Joan M. Erikson, The Life Cycle Completed (Extended Version with New Chapters on the Ninth Stage by Joan M. Erikson) (New York: W. W. Norton, 1998), 66–72. 123 Charles L. Slater, ‘Generativity versus stagnation: an elaboration of Erikson’s adult stage of human development’, Journal of Adult Development 10 (2003): 53–65. 124 In 2014, the 100th anniversary of the start of the First World War, followed in 2015 by the 70th anniversary of the end of the Second World War. 125 The project began in the early 1990s with ‘no money, no land, no staff and no trees’. See www.thenma.org.uk/about-us/who-we-are/ (accessed 12 March 2021). See also David Childs, Growing Remembrance: the Story of the National Memorial Arboretum (Barnsley: Pen and Sword, 2011), 84.

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126 For the story behind the birth of COFEPOW, see www.cofepow.org.uk/cofepowhistory (accessed 12 March 2021). Carol Cooper explains the origins of the building in this video: www.youtube.com/watch?v=g3oxFyMoVro (accessed 12 March 2021). 127 The COFEPOW organization has provided a virtual tour of the building on their website. Available at www.cofepow.org.uk/fepow-memorial-building-virtual-tour (accessed 12 March 2021). 128 Karl Figlio, ‘Psychoanalysis, reparation, and historical memory’, American Imago 71, 4 (2014): 417–43, here 420. 129 Young, The Texture of Memory, 1993, 4. 130 Jay Winter, Sites of Memory, Sites of Mourning: the Great War in European Cultural History (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2014), 78. 131 The term ‘memory entrepreneurs’ appears to have been coined by the Argentinian sociologist Elizabeth Jelin. See Elizabeth Jelin, State Repression and the Labors of Memory (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2003). 132 See http://wasurenagusa.org.uk/en/interview/keiko-holmes/ (accessed 12 March 2021) and www.agapeworldreconciliation.org/ (accessed 12 March 2021). 133 The location of the Denka plant is 2209, Omi, Itoigawa-shi, Niigata 949-0393. For details of the Omi POW camp, see: www.mansell.com/pow_resources/camplists/ tokyo/tok-13b-omi/tok_13b_omi_main.html (accessed 6 February 2022). 134 Linda and Kevin Nicholls, ‘Unveiling the OMI memorial in Japan’, 15 September 2014, COFEPOW Quarterly (July 2014): 6. 135 Other key collaborators included the POW Research Network Japan. (See www. powresearch.jp/en/ accessed 12 March 2021), and Mrs Keiko Holmes. 136 See www.denka.com.sg/denka-japan.html (accessed 12 March 2021). 137 See www.bbc.com/worklife/article/20200211-why-are-so-many-old-companiesin-japan (accessed 12 March 2021). 138 See www.loc.gov/law/help/pow-compensation/japan.php (accessed 12 March 2021). 139 The UK government reported on the occasion, see ‘Omi prisoner of war memorial brings remembrance and reconciliation’ www.gov.uk/government/news/omiprisoners-of-war-memorial-brings-remembrance-and-reconciliation (accessed 12 March 2021). Attendees included the British Ambassador, the President of Denka, a high-ranking official from the Japanese Ministry of Foreign affairs, families of the POWs from Britain, Australia, New Zealand and USA. 140 Young, The Texture of Memory, 1993, xi. 141 Ibid. 142 Ibid. 143 Personal communication from Tim Hitchens, the British Ambassador to Tokyo (now Sir Tim Hitchens), by email, 24 October 2014. 144 Hoffman, After Such Knowledge, 233.

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Chapter 4 1 Yael Danieli, ‘The treatment and prevention of long-term effects and intergenerational transmission of victimization: a lesson from holocaust survivors and their children’, in Trauma and Its Wake, ed. Charles R. Figley (New York: Brunner/Mazel, 1985), 306. 2 For example Jeffrey K. Olick, ‘Genre memories and memory genres: a dialogical analysis of May 8, 1945 commemorations in the Federal Republic of Germany’, American Sociological Review 64, 3 (1999): 381–402; and Arlene Stein, ‘Trauma and origins: post-Holocaust genealogists and the work of memory’, Qualitative Sociology 32 (2009): 293–309. 3 Ori Schwarz, ‘The past next door: neighbourly relations with digital memoryartefacts’, Memory Studies 7, 1 (2014): 7–21, here 18. 4 Marita Sturken, ‘Memory, consumerism and media: reflections on the emergence of the field’, Memory Studies 1, 1 (2008): 73–8, here 74. 5 Sturken, ‘Memory’, 74. 6 Valerie Walkerdine, Aina Olsvoldb and Monica Rudberg, ‘Researching embodiment and intergenerational trauma using the work of Davoine and Gaudillière: history walked in the door’, Subjectivity 6 (2013): 272–97, here 276. 7 Karl Figlio, ‘Psychoanalysis’, American Imago 71, 4 (2014): 417–43, here 422. 8 Arthur W. Frank, ‘Just listening: narrative and deep illness’, Families Systems and Health 16, 3 (1998): 21–40, here 25. 9 See www.uk.emb-japan.go.jp/itpr_en/180618award.html (accessed 25 January 2022). 10 See http://researchbriefings.files.parliament.uk/documents/SN05063/SN05063.pdf (accessed 25 January 2022). 11 Avery F. Gordon, Ghostly Matters: Haunting and the Sociological Imagination (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2008), xvi. 12 Robert George Collingwood, The Idea of History (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004), 296. 13 Ibid. 14 Ibid., 303. 15 Collingwood, History, 302. 16 Jens Brockmeier, ‘Remembering and forgetting: narrative as cultural memory’, Culture and Psychology 8, 15 (2002): 15–43, here 20. 17 Brockmeier, ‘Remembering’, 26. 18 Nigel Hunt and Sue McHale, ‘Memory and meaning: individual and social aspects of memory narratives’, Journal of Loss and Trauma 13 (2008): 42–58. 19 Maurice Halbwachs, On Collective Memory (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1992), 39–40.

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20 Penny Summerfield, ‘Culture and composure: creating narratives of the gendered self on oral history interviews’, Cultural and Social History 1 (2004): 65–93. 21 Interview with Robert, 23 July 2014. 22 For example Dan P. McAdams and Jen Guo, ‘Narrating the generative life’, Psychological Science 26, 4 (2015): 475–83. 23 Lynn Abrams, ‘Liberating the female self: epiphanies, conflict and coherence in the life stories of post-war British women’, Social History 39, 1 (2014): 14–35, here 14. 24 McAdams, ‘Narrating’, 2. 25 Dan P. McAdams and Jonathan M. Adler, ‘Autobiographical memory and the construction of a narrative identity’, in Social Psychological Foundations of Clinical Psychology, eds James E. Maddux and June Price Tangney (New York: The Guilford Press, 2010), 40. 26 See Erik Erikson, Childhood and Society (St Albans: Triad/Paladin, 1977); and Erik H. Erikson and Joan M. Erikson, The Life Cycle Completed (New York: W. W. Norton & Company, 1998). 27 Erikson, The Life Cycle, 55. 28 McAdams, ‘Narrating’, 1. 29 Dan P. McAdams, ‘The life narrative at midlife’, in Rereading Personal Narrative and the Life Course: New Directions for Child and Adolescent Development, ed. Brian Schiff (New York: John Wiley, 2014), 63. 30 Abrams, ‘Liberating’, 23. 31 Interview with Deirdre, 27 July 2014. 32 Interview with Selena by email, 20 August 2015. 33 A respect I was able to witness personally when I met the family at a 70th anniversary memorial event in 2015. 34 Interview with Kim, 21 August 2014. N.B. In April 1944, Louis Mountbatten moved his headquarters from Delhi to Kandy. 35 Janet Landman, ‘Regret: a theoretical and conceptual analysis’, Journal for the Theory of Social Behaviour 17, 2 (1987): 135–60. 36 Interview with Stephen by email, November 2014. 37 Melanie Klein and Joan Riviere, Love, Hate and Reparation (London: The Hogarth Press, 1937), 66. 38 Klein, Love, 68. 39 C. Fred Alford, Psychology and the Natural Law of Reparation (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006), 101. 40 Diana Diamond, ‘Attachment disorganization: the reunion of attachment theory and psychoanalysis’, Psychoanalytic Psychology 21, 2 (2004): 276–99, here 288. 41 Karl Figlio, Remembering as Reparation: Psychoanalysis and Historical Memory (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2017), 201. 42 Figlio, Remembering as Reparation, 186.

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43 Michael Roper, ‘Psychoanalysis and the making of history’, in The Sage Handbook of Historical Theory, eds Nancy Partner and Sarah Foot (London: Sage Publications Limited, 2013), 317. 44 Alford, Psychology, 101. 45 Figlio, ‘Psychoanalysis’, 424. 46 For example, the following four titles show the breadth of application: Tamara K. Harevenand Kanji Masaoka, ‘Turning points and transitions: perceptions of the life course’, Journal of Family History 13, 3 (1988): 271–89; Michael Rutter, ‘Transitions and turning points in developmental psychopathology: as applied to the age span between childhood and mid-adulthood’, International Journal of Behavioural Development 19, 3 (1996): 603–26; Dan P. McAdams and Philip J. Bowman, ‘Narrating life’s turning points: redemption and contamination’, in Turns in the Road: Narrative Studies of Lives in Transition, eds Dan P. McAdams, Ruthellen Josselson and Amia Lieblich (Washington: American Psychological Association, 2001), 3–34; Deborah Schiffrin, ‘We knew that’s it: retelling the turning point of a narrative’, Discourse Studies 5, 4 (2003): 535–61. 47 Dan P. McAdams, Jack J. Bauer, April R. Sakaeda, Nana Akua Anyidoho, Mary Anne Machado, Katie Magrino-Failla, Katie W. White and Jennifer L. Pals, ‘Continuity and change in the life story: a longitudinal study of autobiographical memories in emerging adulthood’, Journal of Personality 74, 5 (2006), 1379. 48 Elizabeth D. Hutchinson, ‘A life course perspective’, in Dimensions of Human Behaviour: the Changing Life Course, ed. Elizabeth D. Hutchinson (London: Sage Publications Limited, 2007), 18. 49 Interview with Jacqui, 16 October 2014. 50 Ibid. 51 Ibid. The following year, she was commissioned by a national newspaper to write a feature about her experiences of having a FEPOW father. 52 Interview with Joanna, 1 July 2014. 53 Joanna’s father had been helped by Australian POWs when he was seriously ill, and had kept many Australian friends. 54 Interview with Joanna, 1 July 2014. 55 Ibid. 56 Ibid. 57 Ibid. 58 Ibid. 59 Interview with Deirdre, 27 July 2014. 60 Ibid. 61 Ibid. 62 Ibid. 63 Ibid.

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64 Ibid. 65 DSM is the Distinguished Service Medal. The official citation speaks of Deirdre’s father ‘as a member of the volunteer 4 inch gun crew, [who] fought with courage and effect in the last action.’ 66 Interview with Deirdre, 27 July 2014. Her father was an able seaman on a lightly armed patrol boat that took on a Japanese convoy of fifteen ships. They rammed and sunk one of the merchant ships. The result was inevitable, of course, but a few men survived and managed to reach a nearby island. There they were captured by the Japanese, and spent the rest of the war in prisoner of war camps. 67 Ibid. 68 ‘For practical reasons ashes must not be literally scattered at sea. The ashes should be stored in a weighted, vented and unmarked container/casket. The Naval Base chaplaincy CTL will be able to provide current regulations regarding the casket required. The casket is to be treated as a coffin and is to be covered by a small Union Flag. The White Ensign is not to be used.’ www.royalnavy.mod.uk/referencelibrary/br3vol1/contents/part-5 See Chapter 31 – Religion and Belief (accessed 25 January 2022). 69 Interview with Deirdre, 27 July 2014. 70 He never abused his son. As she wrote in her initial response to my invitation to be involved in this research: ‘My brother 7 years younger escaped the wrath of our father.’ 71 Interview with Deirdre, 27 July 2014: follow-up email correspondence (30 July 2020).

Chapter 5 1 Jay Winter, Sites of Memory, Sites of Mourning: the Great War in European Cultural History (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2014), 51. 2 Sasha Handley’s paper on the social history of a bed sheet is a master-class in how to conduct a close analysis of a domestic object and its relationship to ‘affective states across temporal boundaries’. Sasha Handley, ‘Objects, emotions and an early modern bed-sheet’, History Workshop Journal 85, (2018): 169–94, here 188. 3 Roger Kennedy (2014) The Psychic Home: Psychoanalysis, Consciousness and the Human Soul (Hove: Routledge, 2014), 26. 4 Daniel Miller, Stuff (Cambridge: Polity Press, 2010), 59. 5 Daniel Stevens, Paul M. Camic and Rob Solway, ‘Maintaining the self: meanings of material objects after a residential transition later in life’, Educational Gerontology 45, 3 (2019): 214–26, here 217. 6 Kate Mitchell, History and Cultural Memory in Neo-Victorian Fiction (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2010), 159.

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7 Russell W. Belk, ‘Possessions and the extended self ’, Journal of Consumer Research 15 (1988): 139–68, here 149. 8 Tim Ingold, Being Alive: Essays on Movement, Knowledge and Description (London: Routledge, 2011), 213. 9 Sarah De Nardi, ‘An embodied approach to Second World War storytelling mementoes: probing beyond the archival into the corporeality of memories of the resistance’, Journal of Material Culture 19, 4 (2014): 443–64, here 443. 10 Sabine Marschall, ‘“Memory objects”: material objects and memories of home in the context of intra-African mobility’, Journal of Material Culture 24, 1 (2019): 2. 11 Sherry Turkle, Evocative Objects: Things We Think With (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2007). 12 Donald Winnicott, ‘Transitional objects and transitional phenomena – a study of the first not-me possession’, The International Journal of Psychoanalysis 34 (1953): 89–97. 13 Winnicott, ‘Transitional objects’, 90. 14 Hollway applies this concept to identity transition in adulthood: Wendy Hollway, ‘In between external and internal worlds: imagination in transitional space’, Methodological Innovations Online 6, 3 (2011): 50–60. 15 Sheila Loboprabhu, Victor Molinari and James Lomax, ‘The transitional object in dementia: clinical implications’, International Journal of Applied Psychoanalytic Studies 4, 2 (2007): 144–69, here 144. 16 David J. Parkin, ‘Mementoes as transitional objects in human displacement’, Journal of Material Culture 4, 3 (1999): 303–20, here 314. 17 Ingold, Being Alive, 68. Perhaps the most powerful of Ingold’s insights on the topic of the blurring between living and non-living is his contention that the ‘animacy of the lifeworld’ is ‘ontologically prior to their differentiation’. As he amusingly points out, we are all ‘closet animists’ for sound evolutionary reasons: ‘Those who take rocks to be crocodiles have greater chances of survival than those who mistake crocodiles for rocks.’ 18 John Law, ‘Notes on the theory of the actor network: ordering, strategy and heterogeneity’, Systems Practice 5, 4 (1992): 379–93, here 382. 19 Thomas Ogden describes ‘object-relations theory’ as follows: ‘I use the term object-relations theory to refer to a group of psychoanalytic theories holding in common a loosely knit set of metaphors that address the intrapsychic and interpersonal effects of relationships among unconscious “internal” objects (i.e. among unconscious split-off parts of the personality). This group of theories coexists in Freudian psychoanalytic theory as a whole with many other overlapping, complementary, often contradictory lines of thought (each utilising somewhat different sets of metaphors).’ Thomas H. Ogden, ‘A new reading of the origins of object-relations theory’, International Journal of Psychoanalysis 83 (2002): 767–82, here 768.

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20 Although taking photos in the camps was completely impossible, he did use it on his journey of repatriation across USA and Canada. I still have the camera and some of the photos. 21 Through the process of ‘sacralization’. See Russell W. Belk, Melanie Wallendorf and John F. Sherry, ‘The sacred and the profane in consumer behavior: theodicy on the Odyssey’, The Journal of Consumer Research 16, 1 (1989): 1–38. 22 Christopher Bollas, The Shadow of the Object: Psychoanalysis of the Unknown Thought (London: Free Association Books, 1987). 23 Margaret Gibson, Objects of the Dead: Mourning and Memory in Everyday Life (Melbourne: Melbourne University Press, 2008). 24 Parkin, ‘Mementoes’, 318. 25 Translated by Yuka and Juji Ibuki (unedited). 26 The website of the Obon Society explains the cultural significance of these yosegaki hinomaru – https://obonsociety.org/eng/page/yosegaki-hinomaru (accessed 22 March 2021). 27 Carol A. Kidron, ‘Breaching the wall of traumatic silence: Holocaust survivor and descendant person–object relations and the material transmission of the genocidal past’, Journal of Material Culture 17, 1 (2012): 3–21, here 6. 28 Interview with Louise, 7 July 2014. 29 Gaston Bachelard, The Poetics of Space (Boston, MA: Beacon Press, 1994), 78. 30 Cwerner writes of ‘dreaming wardrobes’ in Saulo B. Cwerner, ‘Clothes at rest: elements for a sociology of the wardrobe’, Fashion Theory 5, 1 (2001): 79–92, here 88–9. 31 Interview with Louise, 7 July 2014. 32 Kidron, ‘Breaching’, 9. 33 Interview with Derek, 8 July 2014. 34 Interview with Liz, 16 October 2014. 35 Ibid. 36 Ibid. 37 Ibid. 38 See Julie Valk, ‘The alienating inalienable: rethinking Annette Weiner’s concept of inalienable wealth through Japan’s “sleeping kimono”’, Journal of Ethnographic Theory 10, 1 (2020): 147–65. 39 Interview with Stella, 16 August 2014. 40 See www.northumberlandfusiliers.org.uk/ (accessed 25 January 2022). 41 Interview with Stella, 16 August 2014. 42 Marianne Hirsch, Family Frames: Photography, Narrative, and Postmemory (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2012). 43 Roland Barthes, Camera Lucida: Reflections on Photography (London: Vintage Books, 2000).

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44 Raphael Samuel, Theatres of Memory (London: Verso, 1994), 315–77. 45 Annette Kuhn, Family Secrets: Acts of Memory and Imagination (London: Verso, 2002). 46 Carol Smart, Personal Life: New Directions in Sociological Thinking (Cambridge: Polity Press, 2007), 158. 47 Interview with Isla, 11 November 2014. 48 Barthes, ‘Camera’, 26. Barthes uses this term to describe photographs that we feel we can understand because we share the photographer’s cultural frame of reference; this response ‘derives from an average affect’, that is, what we have become accustomed to feeling when viewing such photographs. 49 Ibid., 27. 50 Interview with Isla, 11 November 2014. 51 Ibid. 52 Ibid. 53 The role of photographs in oral history is beautifully explored across a wide range of settings in Alexander Freund and Alistair Thomson, eds Oral History and Photography (Houndmills, Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2012). 54 The composition of this photograph was determined as much by chance as by deliberation. First and foremost it was a portrait of Isla (not shown here because of confidentiality). However, the camera I was using (a Ricoh GRII with a fixed 28mm wide angle lens) easily took in much of the background, and this provided a deeper context for the analysis of the interviews, a feature that proved useful in other interviews as well. 55 Elizabeth Edwards, ‘Photographs and the sound of history’, Visual Anthropology Review 21, 1 & 2 (2006): 27–46, here 27. 56 Mette Sandbye, ‘Looking at the family photo album: a resumed theoretical discussion of why and how’, Journal of Aesthetics and Culture 6, 1 (2014), available at www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.3402/jac.v6.25419 (accessed 11 May 2022). 57 Kidron, ‘Breaching’, 18. 58 Hecht describes one such example, referring to it as a ‘memory shrine’. Anat Hecht, ‘Home sweet home: tangible memories of an uprooted childhood’, in Home Possessions: Material Culture Behind Closed Doors, ed. Daniel Miller (Oxford: Berg, 2001), 143. 59 There are exceptions, e.g. Alison Slater, ‘Wearing in memory: materiality and oral histories of dress’, Critical Studies in Fashion and Beauty 5, 1 (2014): 125–39. 60 Peter Stallybrass, ‘Worn worlds: clothes, mourning, and the life of things’, in Cultural Memory and the Construction of Identity, eds Dan Ben-Amos and Liliane Weissberg (Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 1999), 27–8. 61 Deborah Carr, Kathrin Boerner and Sara Moorman, ‘Bereavement in the time of coronavirus: unprecedented challenges demand novel interventions’, Journal of Ageing and Social Policy 32, 4–5 (2020): 425–31.

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62 Carr et al., ‘Bereavement’, 427. 63 Christine Valentine, ‘Identity and post-mortem relationships in the narratives of British and Japanese mourners’, The Sociological Review 61 (2013): 383–401. An interesting development of this concept of ‘continuing bonds’ is proposed in Brenda Mathijssen, ‘Transforming bonds: ritualising post-mortem relationships in the Netherlands’, Mortality 23, 3 (2018): 215–30. 64 Joanna Wojtkowiak and Eric Venbrux, ‘From soul to postself: home memorials in the Netherlands’, Mortality 14, 2 (2009): 147–58, here 147. 65 In a recent paper, Hannah Gould explores these ideas using Buddhism in Western culture (Australia) as a case study. See Hannah Gould, ‘Domesticating Budha: making a place for Japanese Buddhist altars (Butsudan) in Western Homes’, Material Religion: The Journal of Objects, Art and Belief 15, 4 (2019): 488–510, here 491. 66 John Armstrong, The Intimate Philosophy of Art, (London: Allen Lane, The Penguin Press, 2001), 81. Armstrong describes the five components of contemplation: ‘noticing details’, ‘seeing relations between parts’, ‘seizing the whole as a whole’, ‘the lingering caress’ (i.e. what makes us return to the object), and ‘mutual absorption’ in the object. 67 The sky is a graduated bright blue, and there is a band of yellow just above the horizon. The silhouette is solid black. 68 While this chapter is concerned with artefacts in the home, we should not overlook the role of ‘celebrity relics’ in FEPOW discourse. One such is ‘The Changi Cross’ which has its own Facebook page – www.facebook.com/thechangicross/ – and has featured in publications, e.g. Louise Cordingly, The Changi Cross: A Symbol of Hope in the Shadow of Death (Norwich: Art Angels Publishing, 2015).Images of this cross permeate the FEPOW imaginary, and commonly surface in the domestic environment. 69 Avril Maddrell, ‘Online memorials: the virtual as the new vernacular’, Bereavement Care 31 (2012): 46–54, here 47. 70 Tony Walter, ‘The pervasive dead’, Mortality 24, 4 (2019): 389–404, here 394. 71 Maddrell, ‘Online memorials’. 72 Ibid., 46. 73 See https://bataanmarch.com/ (accessed 7 December 2020). 74 Members of the Indo diaspora can add their stories about this and other aspects of Indo life on the site. https://theindoproject.org/stories/ (accessed 7 December 2020). 75 See http://fukuoka14b.org (accessed 4 April 2021). 76 At the time of writing (March 2021), these sites tended to dominate Google searches: www.forevermissed.com; www.muchloved.com; www.fittingfarewell.com; www.theremembrancegardens.org

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77 For example, Wendy Moncur and David Kirk, ‘An emergent framework for digital memorials’, Proceedings of the Conference on Designing Interactive Systems: Processes, Practices, Methods, and Techniques (Designing Interactive Systems, 2014): 965–74. 78 Hamzah Muzaini and Brenda S. A. Yeoh, ‘An exploration of memory-making in the digital era: remembering the FEPOW story online’, Tijdschrift voor Economische en Sociale Geografie, Royal Dutch Geographical Society KNAG 106, 1 (2015): 53–64. 79 See https://fepow-community.org.uk/ (accessed 25 January 2022). This remains a live link but the interactive aspects have migrated to the FEPOW Family Facebook page. 80 See www.cofepow.org.uk/ (accessed 25 January 2022). 81 See www.facebook.com/groups/13965904326, www.facebook.com/ groups/1248087371902974, www.facebook.com/groups/511536153140001 and www.facebook.com/groups/descendantsthaiburmarailway/about (all accessed 25 January 2022).

Chapter 6 1 Winter comments on how history is able to locate ‘family stories in bigger, more universal, narratives’. Jay Winter, Remembering War: the Great War between Memory and History in the Twentieth Century (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2006), 40. 2 For purposes of clarity, I have decided to use the term ‘COFEPOW researchers’ to describe participants whose self-declared aim is to research their father’s FEPOW history. This designation is not intended to imply that they have no interest in other aspects of the fathers’ experiences, just that this is the most prominent feature. 3 C. Wright Mills, The Sociological Imagination (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000), 8. 4 A few participants extended their research to include grandfathers with military backgrounds, or their fathers’ military peers. 5 In this context, I am using the term to describe a very specific branch of family history whose primary purpose is to uncover information about a particular FEPOW, to trace and document his movements through the war, including the details of the POW camps where he was held, the ‘hell ships’ on which he was transported, and his route of repatriation. 6 Michael Roper, The Secret Battle: Emotional Survival in the Great War (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2009), 266. 7 See for example: Les Back, ‘Researching community and its moral projects, 21st century society’, Journal of the Academy of Social Sciences 4, 2 (2009): 201–14. Paul

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Basu, ‘My own island home: the Orkney homecoming’, Journal of Material Culture 9, 1 (2004): 27–42. Ronald Bishop, ‘“The essential force of the clan”: developing a collecting-inspired ideology of genealogy through textual analysis’, The Journal of Popular Culture 38, 6 (2005): 990–1010. Wendy Bottero, ‘Practising family history: “identity” as a category of social practice’, The British Journal of Sociology 66, 3 (2015): 1–23. 8 Anne-Marie Kramer, ‘Kinship, affinity and connectedness: exploring the role of genealogy in personal lives’, Sociology 45, 3 (2011): 379–95, here 380. 9 Ronald Bishop, ‘In the grand scheme of things: an exploration of the meaning of genealogical research’, The Journal of Popular Culture 41, 3 (2008): 393–412, here 408. 10 Claire Lynch, ‘Who do you think you are? Intimate pasts made public’, Biography 34, 1 (2011): 108–18, here 116. 11 Michael Erben, ‘Genealogy and sociology: a preliminary set of statements and speculations’, Sociology 25, 2 (1991): 275–92, here 280. 12 Jeanette Edwards, ‘A feel for genealogy: “family treeing” in the North of England’, Ethnos: Journal of Ethnography 83, 4 (2018): 724–43, here 730. 13 Kramer, ‘Kinship’, 381. 14 Tanya Evans, Family History, Historical Consciousness and Citizenship (London: Bloomsbury Academic, 2022). 15 Tanya Evans, ‘The emotions of family history and the development of historical knowledge’, Rethinking History 24, 3–4 (2020): 310–31, here 318. 16 Jan Assmann, ‘Communicative and cultural memory’, in Cultural Memory Studies. An International and Interdisciplinary Handbook, eds Astrid Erll and Ansgar Nünning (Berlin: Walter de Gruyter, 2008), 117. 17 Carolyn Steedman, Dust (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2001), 68. 18 Louise Boscacci, ‘The archive in contemporary art: a literature review’, International Journal of Liberal Arts and Social Science 3, 8 (2015): 1–8, here 3. 19 Carolyn Steedman, Romance in the Archive, The Ontology of the Archive Symposium, ESRC Centre for Research on Socio-Cultural Change, Manchester, April 2008. Available at www.restore.ac.uk/archiving_qualitative_data/projects/ archive_series/documents/Steedman.pdf (accessed 26 March 2021). 20 There is growing awareness of how ‘traumatic records’ may have an impact on the psychological state of historians working in the archives. Sloan et al. explore these ideas: Katie Sloan, Jennifer Vanderfluit and Jennifer Douglas, ‘Not “just my problem to handle”: emerging themes on secondary trauma and archivists’, Journal of Contemporary Archival Studies 6, article 20 (2019) available at https://elischolar. library.yale.edu/jcas/vol6/iss1/20 (accessed 11 May 2022). 21 Steedman, Dust, 78. 22 Interview with Pete, 1 October 2014.

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23 The famous Australian surgeon who has become an iconic figure in POW discourse. See Edward E. Dunlop, The War Diaries of Weary Dunlop: Java and the Burma–Thailand Railway 1942–1945 (Harmondsworth: Penguin Books, 1990). 24 See www.britishpathe.com/video/VLVA3J8ACTMMJU9B87IV3FAFOBDEOLORD-AND-LADY-MOUNTBATTEN-VIST-POW-CAMPS-IN-SINGAPORE/ query/LORD+LADY (accessed 6 February 2022). 25 Alistair Urquhart provided convincing detail in a 2010 article for the Daily Mail. Available at www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-1254168/Monsters-River-KwaiOne-British-POW-tells-horrifying-story.html (accessed 26 March 2021). 26 Interview with Pete, 1 October 2014. 27 Ibid. 28 Susan Pearce, ‘Objects as meaning; or narrating the past’, in Interpreting Objects and Collections, ed. Susan Pearce (London: Routledge, 1994), 20. 29 David Lowenthal, The Past is a Foreign Country – Revisited (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2015), 398. 30 Interview with Pete, 1 October 2014. 31 Ernst van Alphen, ‘List mania in Holocaust commemoration’, in Revisiting Holocaust Representation in the Post-Witness Era, ed. Tanja Schult and Diana I. Popescu (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2015), 11–27. 32 van Alphen, ‘List mania’, 12. 33 Ibid. Erben notes the impossible emotional bind faced by Jews when tracing their relatives’ fates during the Holocaust. Firstly, the emotional impact of discovering that ‘line after line of ancestry’ ended in the concentration camps; secondly, the knowledge that Nazis had used family trees to trace individual Jews in the first place. Michael Erben, ‘Genealogy and sociology: a preliminary set of statements and speculations’, Sociology 25, 2 (1991): 275–92, here 280. 34 van Alphen, ‘List mania’, 13. 35 See Edward Drea, ‘Introduction’, in Researching Japanese War Crime Records: Introductory Essays, eds Edward Drea, Greg Bradsher, Robert Hanyok, James Lide, Michael Petersen and Daqing Yang (Washington, DC: National Archives and Records Administration for the Nazi War Crimes and Japanese Imperial Government Records Interagency Working Group 2006), 9. 36 For example Richard Kandler, The Prisoner List: a True Story of Defeat, Captivity and Salvation in the Far East: 1941–45 (UK: Marsworth Publishing, 2010). Michael Godfrey, The Years That the Locusts Have Eaten: War Diary and Sermons of Rupert Godfrey 1941–45 (Suffolk: privately published, 2003). The COFEPOW website gives contact details: www.cofepow.org.uk/books/the-years-that-the-locusts-have-eaten (accessed 26 March 2021). The appended list of POWs in Java includes the names of both my father and my uncle. 37 Interview with Jeff, 12 June 2014, by email.

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38 Ibid. 39 Russell Braddon, The Naked Island (London: Werner Laurie, 1952). 40 Interview with Jeff, 12 June 2014, by email. 41 Interview with Jeff, 30 June 2014, by email. 42 Raymond S. Stubbs, Prisoner of Nippon (Upton upon Severn: Square One Publications, 1995). 43 Interview with Jeff, 12 June 2014, by email. Jeff estimated that his father had made around 150 drawings in the camp. 44 Clare Makepeace, ‘Drawn in blood and bone: the art of captives of war’, in War and Art: a Visual History of Modern Conflict, ed. Joanna Bourke (London: Reaktion Books, 2017), 303. 45 See www.malayanvolunteersgroup.org.uk/ (accessed 26 March 2021). 46 Interview with Jeff, 12 June 2014, by email. 47 See Introduction and Chapter 4 for further references to Rex. 48 Interview with Jeff, 30 June 2014, by email. 49 Ibid. 50 Rob Havers challenged the widespread assumption that Changi POW camp was particularly harsh, a view unequivocally confirmed by the Australian War Memorial: www.awm.gov.au/encyclopedia/pow/changi/ (accessed 26 March 2021). See Robin Paul Whittick Havers, Reassessing the Japanese Prisoner of War Experience: the Changi Prisoner of War Camp in Singapore, 1942–45 (Abingdon, Oxon: Taylor & Francis, 2003). 51 Available at http://ksnowdon.co.uk/ (accessed 27 January 2022). 52 See http://ksnowdon.co.uk/wp-content/uploads/introduction.html (accessed 27 January 2022). 53 Marianne Hirsch, The Generation of Postmemory: Writing and Visual Culture After the Holocaust (New York: Columbia University Press, 2012), 5. 54 Available at http://ksnowdon.co.uk/wp-content/uploads/introduction.html (accessed 27 January 2022). 55 Bishop, ‘In the grand scheme of things’, 399. 56 Christina Twomey, ‘Prisoners of war of the Japanese: war and memory in Australia’, Memory Studies 6, 3, (2013): 321–30. 57 Bottero, ‘Practising family history’, 3. 58 Anne-Marie Kramer, ‘Mediatizing memory: history, affect and identity in Who Do You Think You Are?’ European Journal of Cultural Studies 14, 4, (2011): 428–45, here 429. 59 Steedman, Dust, 77. 60 Interview with James, 30 November 2014. 61 Ibid. 62 Wendy Bottero, ‘Who do you think they were? How family historians make sense of social position and inequality in the past’, The British Journal of Sociology 63, 1 (2012): 54–74, here 68.

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Bottero, ‘Practising’, 2. Bishop, ‘In the grand scheme of things’. Interview with Pete, 1 October 2014. Pierre Nora, ‘Between memory and history: les lieux de memoire’, Representations 26, Special Issue: Memory and Counter-Memory (1989): 7–24, here 13. 67 Nora, ‘Between memory’, 13. 68 Roper, The Secret Battle, 266. 69 Interview with Jeff, 30 June 2014, by email. 70 Assmann, ‘Communicative and cultural memory’, 111. 71 ‘Communities of practice are formed by people who engage in a process of collective learning in a shared domain of human endeavor.’ See Etienne and Beverly Wenger-Trayner, ‘Introduction to communities of practice: a brief overview of the concept and its uses’ (2015) Available at https://wenger-trayner.com/introductionto-communities-of-practice/ (accessed 26 March 2021). 72 Bottero, ‘Practising’, 2. 73 This term was coined by Vansina. See Jan Vansina, Oral Tradition as History (Madison: The University of Wisconsin Press, 1985), 23. 74 Lucy Noakes, ‘My husband is interested in war generally: gender, family history and the emotional legacies of total war’, Women’s History Review 27, 4 (2018): 610–16, here 614. 75 Noakes, ‘My husband’, 618. 76 Joanna Bourke, ‘Why aren’t we more outraged?’ The Guardian – Gender (2007) Available at www.theguardian.com/world/2007/oct/05/gender.uk (accessed 26 March 2021). 77 See, for example, the work of Lara Feigel, Rosie Kennedy, Clare Makepeace, Jessica Meyer, Lizzie Oliver and Helen Parr. 78 Najedja Williams, ‘There are more women military historians than ever before. Why hasn’t the field noticed?’ Eidolo: Classics Without Fragility (2018). Available at https://eidolon.pub/there-are-more-women-military-historians-than-ever-beforewhy-hasnt-the-field-noticed-1c26f62f2d4 (accessed 26 March 2021). 79 Ann Oakley, ‘Interviewing women: a contradiction in terms’, in Doing Feminist Research, ed. Helen Roberts (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1981), 38. See also the following on the topic of gender and interviewing: John L. Oliffe and Lawrence W. Mróz, ‘Men interviewing men about health and illness: ten lessons learned’, Journal of Men’s Health and Gender 2, (2005): 257–60. Barbara Pini, ‘Interviewing men: gender and the collection and interpretation of qualitative data’, Journal of Sociology 41, 2 (2005): 201–16.James A. Smith and Annette BraunackMayer, ‘Men interviewing men: the benefits and challenges of using constructed mateship as a tool to build rapport when interviewing Anglo-Australian men about their health’, International Journal of Men’s Health 13, 3 (2014): 143–55. 80 Roper, The Secret Battle, 266.

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Chapter 7 1 See Bruce Scates, Anzac Journeys: Returning to the Battlefields of World War II (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2013), 3. 2 Jean Watson, ‘Continuing caritas journey – reflections upon a shared private pilgrimage’, Journal of Holistic Nursing 32, 3 (2014): 140–6, and Scates, Anzac Journeys, 9. 3 Kenneth F. Hydeand Serhat Harman, ‘Motives for a secular pilgrimage to the Gallipoli battlefields’, Tourism Management 32 (2011): 1343. 4 Scates, Anzac Journeys, 78. 5 Chris Devereux and Elizabeth Carnegie, ‘Pilgrimage: journeying beyond self ’, Tourism Recreation Research 31,1 (2006): 47–56. William S. Schmidt, ‘Transformative pilgrimage’, Journal of Spirituality in Mental Health 11 (2009): 66–77. 6 Noga Collins-Kreiner, ‘Researching pilgrimage: continuity and transformations’, Annals of Tourism Research 37, 2 (2010): 440–56, here 444. 7 Noga Collins-Kreiner, ‘Religion and tourism: a diverse and fragmented field in need of a holistic agenda’, Annals of Tourism Research 82, 102892 (2020): 1–21, here 18–21. 8 Philip Stone and Richard Sharpley, ‘Consuming dark tourism: a thanatological perspective’, Annals of Tourism Research 35, 2 (2008): 574–95, here 574. 9 Stone and Sharpley, ‘Consuming dark tourism’, 589. 10 Witness the establishment of the Institute for Dark Tourism Research (iDTR) at the University of Central Lancashire in the UK. See www.uclan.ac.uk/research/activity/ dark-tourism (accessed 28 January 2022). 11 Connelly and Groeber describe how ‘battlefield tourism’ took off in Europe in the 1970s, and over subsequent decades significant sites like Ypres have gradually accreted extensive infrastructures around them. This has not taken place in the Far East with the exception perhaps of the Thai–Burma Railway, and that is not without controversy (see page 14 of their chapter 6). See Mark Connelly and Stephan Goeber, Ypres: Great Battles (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2018), Chapter 6. 12 Rod Beattie opened up the area as a pilgrimage destination. See www.tbrconline. com/index.htm (accessed 20 January 2021). 13 Keiko Holmes described the background to her work in this videoed interview from 2015: https://wasurenagusa.org.uk/en/interview/keiko-holmes/ (accessed 28 January 2022). See also the website for her charity ‘Agape World’ at www. agapeworldreconciliation.org/ (accessed 28 January 2022). 14 Zachary Beckstead, ‘Liminality in acculturation and pilgrimage: when movement becomes meaningful’, Culture Psychology 16, 3 (2010): 383–93, here 384.

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15 Collins-Kreiner, ‘Researching Pilgrimage’, 446. 16 Beckstead, ‘Liminality’, 388. 17 For example, the original memorial board in Mukaishima was attached to the side of a factory where FEPOWs worked, located in a very unprepossessing neighbourhood. With the demolition of the factory, the memorial was relocated to the side of a newly built supermarket. See this article by American journalist and photographer Sydney Solis that gives the background to this memorial: https:// sydneyinosaka.wordpress.com/2020/02/07/mukaishima-pow-camp-memorialhiroshima-with-haiku-and-photos/ (accessed 28 January 2022). 18 Marianne Hirsch and Nancy K. Miller, Rites of Return: Diaspora Poetics and the Politics of Memory (New York: Columbia University Press, 2011), 4–5. 19 Marianne Hirsch, The Generation of Postmemory: Writing and Visual Culture After the Holocaust (New York: Columbia University Press, 2012), 212. 20 Marita Sturken, ‘Pilgrimages, reenactment and souvenirs: modes of memory tourism’, in Rites of Return: Diaspora Poetics and the Politics of Memory, eds Marianne Hirsch and Nancy K. Miller (New York: Columbia University Press, 2011), 285. 21 Warren S. Poland, ‘Pilgrimage: action and tradition in self-analysis’, Journal of the American Psychoanalytic Association 25 (1977): 399–416, here 399. 22 See Chris Devereux and Elizabeth Carnegie, ‘Pilgrimage: journeying beyond self ’, Tourism Recreation Research 31, 1 (2006): 47–56; and William S. Schmidt, ‘Transformative pilgrimage’, Journal of Spirituality in Mental Health 11, 1–2 (2009): 66–77. 23 Sigmund Freud, Beyond the Pleasure Principle (New York: Dover Publications, 2015), 10. 24 Poland, ‘Pilgrimage’, 399–416. 25 In earlier years, groups often comprised survivors and their spouses and/or children. With few survivors and their spouses now alive, it is the children of exFEPOWs and their spouses and/or their children who undertake pilgrimages. See McRae for examples of how relationships between participants can unfold during a pilgrimage – Heather McRae, ‘The point of pilgrimage: Parit Sulong 2007’, CIRCA The Journal of Professional Historians 1 (2007): 64–73. 26 Carol A. Kidron, ‘Being there together: dark family tourism and the emotive experience of co-presence in the Holocaust past’, Annals of Tourism Research 41 (2013): 175–94. 27 As the child of a survivor, I would argue that the idea of being ‘alone’ on a pilgrimage is problematic. Given the emotional work entailed in preparing for and living through such pilgrimages, should we not acknowledge that, in a psychic sense, we have no choice but to carry the survivor within? 28 Kidron, ‘Being there’, 188.

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29 From www.agapeworldreconciliation.org/who-we-are/testimonies/kevin-linda/ (accessed 19 January 2021). 30 Scates, Anzac Journeys, 7. 31 Stone and Sharpley, ‘Consuming dark tourism’, 577. 32 See www.nhb.gov.sg/changichapelmuseum (accessed 28 January 2022). 33 Hellfire Pass is the largest railway cutting on the Thai–Burma Railway, and the site of numerous POW deaths. Although now an established part of the FEPOW ‘tourist’ itinerary, it was self evidently not constructed with memorialization in mind. See www.dva.gov.au/recognition/commemorating-all-who-served/ memorials/memorials-asia-pacific/thailand (accessed 28 January 2022). See also Bruce Scates, with Catherine Tiernan and Rebecca Wheatley, ‘The railway men: prisoner journeys through the traumascapes of World War II’, Journal of War & Culture Studies 7, 3 (2014): 206–22. 34 Known as Iruka during the Second World War. 35 Kyoko Murakami and David Middleton, ‘Grave matters: emergent networks and summation in remembering and reconciliation’, Ethos – Journal of the Society for Psychological Anthropology 34, 2 (2006): 273–96. 36 Collins-Kreiner, ‘Researching Pilgrimage’, 444. 37 Insa Eschebach, ‘Soil, ashes, commemoration processes of sacralization at the Ravensbrück former concentration camp’, History & Memory 23, 1 (2011): 131–56. 38 The first pilgrimage took place in October 1991 with twenty-six veterans. See www. agapeworldreconciliation.org/who-we-are/ (accessed 28 January 2022). 39 The memorial established by local village people in the 1990s at the site of my father’s POW camp was under threat for a number of months. This rural area had been designated for a large solar farm, and it took much time and effort working with local volunteers, supported by the British Embassy in Tokyo, to ensure its relocation to a suitable alternative site. For details of the camp, see www.mansell. com/pow_resources/camplists/hiroshima/hiro-6-omine-yamaguchi/hiro_6_sanyo. html (accessed 28 January 2022). 40 www.kokoda.com.au/rod-beattie/ (accessed 28 January 2022). 41 www.tbrconline.com/ (accessed 28 January 2022). 42 www.adamparkproject.com/ (accessed 28 January 2022). 43 www.agapeworldreconciliation.org/ (accessed 28 January 2022). 44 Trigg, ‘The place of trauma’, 88. 45 Ibid., 98. 46 Ibid., 99. 47 Ibid. 48 Ibid. 49 A problem ‘localized to the coral beaches of some of the Southeast Asian beaches, where POWs were set to work constructing aircraft runways, was painful

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blepharospasm and blepharitis, lacrimation and photophobia. Probably analogous to snow blindness, it became known as “coral blindness”.’ See D. Robson, Ellen Welch, Nicholas J. Beeching and Geoffrey V. Gill. ‘Consequences of captivity: health effects of Far East imprisonment in World War II’, QJM 102 (2009): 87–96, here 89. 50 Interview with Kim, 21 August 2014. 51 A parapraxis is ‘a faulty action due to the interference of some unconscious wish, conflict, or train of thought. Slips of the tongue and pen are the classic parapraxes.’ Charles Rycroft, A Critical Dictionary of Psychoanalysis (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1972), 112. 52 Interview with Kim, 21 August 2014. 53 The FEPOWs themselves were not immune to the beauty of their natural surroundings, e.g. Jack B. Chalker, Burma Railway: Images of War (Mells, Somerset: Mercer Books, 2007). 54 Interview with Kim, 21 August 2014. 55 Ibid. 56 Freud, Beyond the Pleasure Principle, 10. 57 The UK National Archives. See www.nationalarchives.gov.uk/ (assessed 28 January 2022). 58 Interview with Louise, 7 July 2014. 59 Ibid. 60 Ibid. 61 Ibid. 62 Ibid. 63 Terry Manttan and Andrew Snow were both staff members at the Thailand–Burma Railway Centre in Kanchanaburi, established by Rod Beattie. 64 Interview with Louise, 19 October 2014, by email. 65 See John Lennon, ‘Kanchanaburi and the Thai–Burma railway: disputed narratives in the interpretation of war’, International Journal of Tourism Cities 4, 1 (2018): 140–55. 66 Some of the issues around Kanchanaburi and its evolving role in tourism are picked up in a series of short films made by Dr Mark Frost and his colleagues, available at www.warinasia.com/kanchanaburi (accessed 28 January 2022). 67 Interview with John, 6 August 2015, by email. 68 Koshi, a retired engineer who had excellent contacts and often assisted with organizing visits to the area, even though he lived some 250km away. 69 Extract from John’s travel diary. Personal communication. 70 I learned later that they had taken the Kumano Kodo pilgrimage trail, immersing themselves in traditional Japanese culture. In his notes on the walk, he writes about thinking of his father during this part of the pilgrimage.

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71 Sean Slavin, ‘Walking as a spiritual practice: the pilgrimage to Santiago de Compostela’, Body and Society 9, 3 (2003): 1–18, here 5–6. 72 The POW Research Network Japan supports the ‘official’ FEPOW groups from USA and Australia, and also offers help to families of POWs travelling independently. See www.powresearch.jp/en/ (accessed 28 January 2022). 73 Japan’s chequered history of colonization and her actions in the Second World War have ensured a prolonged and contentious debate about the contents of school history textbooks. See Mark Seldon and Yoshiko Nazaki, ‘Japanese textbook controversies, nationalism, and historical memory: intra- and inter-national conflicts’, The Asia-Pacific Journal 7, 24, 5 (2009): 1–26. 74 Trigg, ‘The place of trauma’, 87–101. 75 Extract from John’s travel diary. Personal communication. 76 From the text of John’s speech. By email, 6 August 2015. 77 Of course much depended on how his words were translated. 78 From the text of John’s speech. By email, 6 August 2015. 79 Interview with Joanna, 1 July 2014. 80 Francoise Davoine and Jean-Max Gaudillière, History Beyond Trauma (New York: Other Press, 2004), 124. 81 Interview with Joanna, 1 July 2014. 82 Gillian Bennett and Kate Mary Bennett, ‘The presence of the dead: an empirical study’, Mortality 5, 2 (2000): 139–57. 83 Avril Maddrell, ‘Mapping grief. A conceptual framework for understanding the spatial dimensions of bereavement, mourning and remembrance’, Social and Cultural Geography 17, 2 (2016): 172. 84 For a discussion of how disengagement versus continuing connections influences ‘bereavement adaptation’, see Kathrin Boemer and Jutta Heckhausen, ‘To have and have not: adaptive bereavement by transforming mental ties to the deceased’, Death Studies 27 (2003): 199–226, and Margaret Stroebe, Henk Schut and Kathrin Boemer, ‘Continuing bonds in adaptation to bereavement: toward theoretical integration’, Clinical Psychology Review 30 (2010): 259–68. 85 In East and South East Asian cultures, the role of ghosts and spirits is embedded in contemporary social and domestic rituals, and responsibilities towards the dead are often taken seriously and more literally than in the West. It is difficult to judge whether – if at all – this specific cultural context had any bearing on the actions of individuals while on their pilgrimages. Nelson, and Uriu and Odom show how the memorialization of ancestors is being blended into contemporary living. See John Nelson, ‘Household altars in contemporary Japan: rectifying Buddhist “ancestor worship” with home décor and consumer choice’, Japanese Journal of Religious Studies 35, 2 (2008): 305–30; and Daisuke Uriu and William Odom, ‘Designing for domestic memorialization and remembrance: a field study of fenestra in Japan’, in Proceedings of the 2016 CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems (2016): 5945–57.

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86 Interview with Joanna, 1 July 2014. 87 Siobhan Kattago, Encountering the Past within the Present: Modern Experiences of Time (London: Routledge, 2020), 10. 88 Murakami and Middleton, ‘Grave matters’, 292. 89 Beckstead, ‘Liminality’, 390. 90 Laub describes a similar transmutative process by which ‘fragments’ are put together ‘creating a whole, making such a whole a part of one’s experiential landscape in a temporal, historical sequence, historicizing it, restoring the narrative flow, and associatively linking it to other experiences and to the experiencing “I”.’ Dori Laub, ‘Reestablishing the internal “thou” in testimony of trauma’, Psychoanalysis, Culture & Society 18, 2 (2013): 187. 91 Victor W. Turner, The Ritual Process: Structure and Anti-structure (Ithaca: Cornell Paperbacks, Cornell University Press, 1977), vii. 92 Ofra Bloch describes how she journeyed to Germany to satisfy her ‘urgent need’ to learn about the perpetrators’ descendants. Ofra Bloch, ‘Dialogues in No Man’s Land’, Contemporary Psychoanalysis 51, 2 (2015): 314. 93 This is not a metaphor but was a real assault, as a result of which my father had a small but permanent facial scar. 94 Turner, The Ritual Process, 96. 95 Murakami and Middleton, ‘Grave matters’, 284. 96 Patrick Murphy, ‘Lessons in love’, Church Times 2 November (2006), available at www.churchtimes.co.uk/articles/2004/15-october/features/lessons-in-love (accessed 28 January 2022). 97 Despite this, some Christian customs have become absorbed into Japanese popular culture. ‘Christian’ wedding ceremonies have become popular amongst nonChristians, with the bride in a white wedding dress plus all the accoutrements, and are often conducted by a ‘rent-a-priest’ employed specifically for the purpose. See Jesse LeFebvre, ‘Christian wedding ceremonies: “non-religiousness” in contemporary Japan’, Japanese Journal of Religious Studies 42, 2 (2015): 185–203. More fundamentally, many top Japanese universities had their origins in Christian missionary institutions, and their influence is disproportionate to the number of Christians in the country. 98 Turner, The Ritual Process, 96–7.

Afterword 1 2 3

The division of British India into two separate states – India and Pakistan. I wrote these haiku during my first visit to Japan in 2010. Doireann ní Ghríofa, A Ghost in the Throat (Dublin: Tramp Press, 2020), 70.

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4 See www.awm.gov.au/articles/blog/dr-steven-bullard (accessed 10 April 2021). 5 The following provide interesting perspectives on the Japanese war psyche, mostly in their own words. Frank Gibney, Senso: the Japanese Remember the Pacific War, Letters to the Editor of Asahi Shimbun (Armonk, New York: An East Gate Book, 1995); Nagase Takashi, Crosses and Tigers and The Double-Edged Dagger: the Cowra Incident of 1944 (Sheffield: Paulownia Press, 2010); Kazuo Tamayama and John Nunneley, Tales by Japanese Soldiers (London: Cassell Military Paperbacks, 2001); Midori Yamanouchi Rynn and Joseph L. Quinn, Listen to the Voices from the Sea: Writings of the Fallen Japanese Students (Scranton, PA: University of Scranton Press, 2000). First published in 1946, the final book is a best-selling novel, written originally for a young audience, and provides an insight into the minds of Japanese soldiers in Burma. Michio Takeyama, Harp of Burma (North Clarendon, VT: Tuttle Publishing, 1966). 6 See www.asianstudies.org/publications/eaa/archives/teaching-about-the-comfortwomen-during-world-war-ii-and-the-use-of-personal-stories-of-the-victims/ (accessed 6 February 2022). 7 Clare Makepeace, ‘Compensating the railway men’, History Today 64, 4 (2014): 51–7. 8 The unflattering comparison is generally made with how Germany has managed its Nazi past. House and Kádár provide a much less ideological analysis of the issue than is normally the case. See Juliane House and Dániel Kádár, ‘German and Japanese war crime apologies: a contrastive pragmatic study’, Journal of Pragmatics 177 (2021): 109–21. For a more conventional media representation of the debate, see www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-asia-33902065 (accessed 6 February 2022). 9 See www.powresearch.jp/en/ (accessed 6 February 2022). On 30 May 2006, Mrs Yoshiko Tamura and MrsTaeko Sasamoto (both members of the POWRNJ) were awarded an MBE (Member of the Order of the British Empire) for their work on reconciliation between the peoples of Britain and Japan. The ceremony was held at the British Embassy in Tokyo. 10 Kamila Szczeanska, ‘Addressing the Allied POW issue in Japan: the case of POW Research Network Japan’, Japan Forum 26, 1 (2014): 88–112, here 107. 11 These extracts should be considered alongside the compulsory diary-keeping required of Japanese soldiers. As Aaron Moore explains, diary-keeping became part of military training, which resulted in an ‘internal linguistic order’ being ‘enforced both horizontally by one’s comrades and vertically by commanding officers’. Aaron William Moore, ‘The chimera of privacy: reading self-discipline in Japanese diaries from the Second World War (1937–1945)’, The Journal of Asian Studies 68, 1 (2009): 165–98, here 176. Summerfield comments that in writing diaries, these young soldiers ‘told themselves how to behave and what to think.’ Penny Summerfield, Histories of the Self: Personal Narratives and Historical Practice (London: Routledge, 2019), 68–9.

Notes

235

12 All extracts were provided by Yuka Ibuki in a personal communication. 13 A punishment for soldiers in the Japanese Military, in which they were ordered to squat with their hands on the floor and were then forced to jump. 14 See www.tate.org.uk/art/artworks/watts-hope-n01640 (accessed 6 February 2022). Reproductions of this popular painting were widely distributed internationally, including Japan. Although Watts’ sentimental style declined in popularity in the first half of the twentieth century, the symbolism touched a number of important figures including Martin Luther King Jr and Barack Obama. 15 The term introduced by the Japanese government in 1941 to describe both the war with the Western Allies and the continuing war with China. The aim was to wrap both wars into a narrative in which neighbouring Asian countries would achieve their independence through the auspices of a benevolent Japanese Empire. 16 Binta means face slapping, and was a standard form of military discipline. See Niti Pawakapan, ‘“Almost a love story”: Japanese soldiers in north-west Thailand’, South East Asia Research 9, 2 (2001): 149–71, here 163–4. This is an interesting paper that broadens our understanding of the Japanese military in Thailand. 17 Harbin and Mudanjiang are cities in north-east China. 18 The Japanese Modern Showa period corresponds to the reign of Emperor Hirohito (1926–89).

Select bibliography Lynn Abrams, Oral History Theory (London: Routledge, 2016). Ken Attiwill, The Rising Sunset (Manchester: Robert Hale Ltd, 1958). Kevin Blackburn and Karl Hack (eds) Forgotten Captives in Japanese Occupied Asia (London: Routledge, 2008). Mark R. Frost, Daniel Schumacher and Edward Vickers (eds), Remembering Asia’s World War Two (London: Routledge, 2019). Sasha Handley, Rohan McWilliam and Lucy Noakes (eds) New Directions in Social and Cultural History (London: Bloomsbury Academic, 2018). Marianne Hirsch, The Generation of Postmemory: Writing and Visual Culture after the Holocaust (New York: Columbia University Press, 2012). Eva Hoffman, After Such Knowledge: Memory, History, and the Legacy of the Holocaust (London: Secker and Warburg, 2006). Wendy Hollway and Tony Jefferson, Doing Qualitative Research Differently: a Psychosocial Approach (London: Sage Publications Ltd, 2013). Lucy Noakes and Juliette Pattinson (eds), British Cultural Memory and the Second World War (London: Bloomsbury Academic, 2014). Lizzie Oliver, Prisoners of the Sumatra Railway (London: Bloomsbury Academic, 2019). Meg Parkes and Geoff Gill, Captive Memories (Lancaster: Palatine Books, 2015). Leo Rawlings, And the Dawn Came up like Thunder. Leo Rawlings: Prisoner of Japan and War Artist 1941–1945 (Newcastle upon Tyne: Myrmidon, 2015). Michael Roper, The Secret Battle: Emotional Survival in the Great War (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2009). Bruce Scates, Anzac Journeys: Returning to the Battlefields of World War II (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2013). Art Spiegelman, The Complete Maus (London: Penguin, 2003). Kalina Stamenova and R. D. Hinshelwood (eds) Methods of Research into the Unconscious: Applying Psychoanalytic Ideas to Social Science (London: Routledge, 2018). Penny Summerfield, Histories of the Self: Personal Narratives and Historical Practice (London: Routledge, 2019). Julie Summers, Stranger in the House: Women’s Stories of Men Returning From the Second World War (London: Pocket Books, 2009). Paul Thompson, The Voice of the Past: Oral History (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2017). Jay Winter, Remembering War: the Great War Between Memory and History in the Twentieth Century (London: Yale University Press, 2006).

Index Abbott, Andrew 10 Abrams, Lynn 100 Absent Body (Leader) 27 Actor Network Theory (ANT) 15, 118 Adams Park 159 Agape World 155, 172 Ahmed, Sara 19 Akhtar, Salman 64, 68 Akihito (Emperor of Japan) 84 altruism 43, 142, 149 Ambon (Indonesia) 145, 153, 160–1 ancestor worship 128 Ancharoff, Michelle 66 And the Rat Laughed (Semel) 80 Anzieu, Didier 28 archives 77, 96, 135, 144–5 compared to memory 137–8 emotional impact 138–9 Armstrong, John 129 Assmann, Aleida 74–5, 83 Assmann, Jan 73–4 atomic bomb 2, 93 attachment theory 28, 41, 62, 65, 99 attachment injury 65 evocative objects 117 insecure attachment 57, 65 internal working model 65 secure attachment 28, 57, 97, 105 Attiwill, Kenneth 26–7, 29–31, 34 Austerlitz (Sebald) 71 autobiographical memory 76 baby boomer generation 10, 84, 187n.43 Bangka Island (Indonesia) 145 Bar-On, Daniel 10, 65–6, 83–4 Barrett, Lt. M. E. 30 Barthes, Roland 122–3, 221n.48 Bataan Memorial Death March 132 Beattie, Rod 155, 159 Bennett, Jill 76 Bishop, Ronald 148

body 22, 34, 68, 76 appearance in captivity 27–9 self and the body 27–30 Boscacci, Louise 137 Bottero, Wendy 146–7 Bourke, Joanna 151 Bowlby, John 65 Braddon, Russell 143 Bridge on the River Kwai (film) 78, 140 British Ambassador to Japan 90 Brockmeier, Jens 98 Burrows, Norman 32, 46 butsudan (Japanese family altar) 128 Cadogan, Sir Alexander 26 Capra, Frank 26 captivity activities in the camps 37, 39 ‘captive’ vs. ‘captivated’ 6, 68 caring for each other 36 compassion from guards 33–4 comradeship 35 impact of 2, 28 life in the camps 24–5 managing time in the camps 36–7 responses to the natural environment 37–9 theft amongst POWs 36 Casey, Edward 22 Catalina flying boat 39 Catlin, Brian 39 Cenotaph 84–5, 131 Ceylon (Sri Lanka) 39, 101 Chalker, Jack 79 Changi museum 107, 159 Changi prison camp 39, 133, 139, 145, 162 childhood memories 6–7, 10, 18, 21, 54–63 Children of Far East Prisoners of War (COFEPOW) 9–10, 78, 85, 132, 148 Carol Cooper 87–8, 121 FEPOW memorial building 87

238

Index

Childs, David 87 Chitral 44 Christianity 36, 55, 154, 172, 233n.97 Chungkai 30, 36, 139 circulating references 172 Civil Resettlement Units (CRUs) 2, 49–50, 62 Coast, John 28, 37 COFEPOW researchers 135–7, 139, 141, 144, 146–51 collaboration 149 networks 142–6 collected memories 72, 89 collective memory 3, 6, 82, 89–90, 186n.19 collective trauma 68 Collingwood, Robin George 97–8 thinking historically vs. thinking psychologically 98 colonialism 6, 186n.19 comfort women 180 commemorative activities 6 communication with home 39–40 letters and parcels 39–40 postcards 45 communicative memory 73–4, 137, 149, 208n.22 communitas 132, 172 communities of practice 149 compensation for FEPOWs 84–5, 89, 180 composure 51, 86, 99,108, 157, 169 Connerton, Paul 75 contemplation 118, 129, 158 continuing bonds 128, 131, 168 Cooper, Carol 87–8, 121 Cooper, George 32 Cooper, John 159 Corballis, Michael 76 countertransference 13–5, 60 cultural circuits 82 cultural memory 73–4, 98, 149 cultural strongbox 136 Damousi, Joy 151 dark tourism 154 Das, Santanu 7 data analysis 14, 20 Davoine, Francoise 63, 68, 70 De Nardi, Sarah 117

death 130, 135, 154, 168, 174 after the war 128 in captivity 23, 25, 69, 127, 142, 163–4 consequences of the father’s death 67, 69, 97, 118 encounters with death 30, 32, 34, 62 of my father 2, 127 on the Thai-Burma railway 25 Dekel, Rachel 64 Delbo, Charlotte 76 depersonalization 35, 63 deposited representation 32 derealization 63 diseases in captivity beriberi 1, 27, 29, 35 cholera 29, 58, 63 cirrhosis of the liver 42 diphtheria 30, 36 dysaesthetic neuropathy (‘electric feet’) 29 malaria 1, 29, 35, 55, 108 malnutrition 27, 29, 42, 46, 50, 58 scrotal dermatitis (‘strawberry balls’) 27–8 strongyloidiasis 29–30, 43, 54–6 tropical ulcers 29–30, 36 tuberculosis 42, 56, 109, 150 vitamin deficiencies 27, 58, 61 dissociation 63 Doing Qualitative Research Differently (Hollway) 11 domestic memorials 125–30 Dr Barnardo’s 109–10 Duncan, Captain Atholl 35, 38 Dunlop, Weary 139 Dutch POW memorial 132 Eden, Anthony 45, 47 Eldredge, Sears 37 emotions 1, 6–13, 15–17 avoidance by war historians 136 ‘emotional refuges’ 10, 187n.40 empathy 22, 80, 107, 144, 161, 182 fieldwork 176 managing in captivity 31–2, 37, 39 memory practice 21, 95–6, 98 objects and objectification 115–17 pilgrimages 153–4, 156, 160–4, 166–7, 171–2

Index relationship with father 3, 127, 169, 174 repatriation 47 returning to civilian life 51–2 sense of ‘absence’ 52, 59, 60, 97 turning points 104, 110 epiphanic moments 100 epiphanic awareness 161 episodic memory 76 Epstein, Helen 41 Erikson, Erik 86, 99 generativity vs. stagnation 86 model of the life cycle 99 psychosocial strengths 99 ethical and moral issues atomic bomb and ethical conflict 93 ethics and memory 74, 78 ethics and reconciliation 80, 96 memory and moral purpose 77 violating moral principles 41 Executed for No Apparent Reason (image, Thrale) 33 experiential matrix 68 Facebook 78, 82, 132 family history 96, 110, 121, 135–7, 140, 146–51 Family History, Historical Consciousness and Citizenship (Evans) 137 Far East prisoners of war (FEPOW) comparisons with European POWs 25, 39, 47–9 legal status 24 postwar follow-up 42–3 postwar health of the father 40–44 father, relationship with 40, 60–3, 164 absences and silences 60, 66 as a ‘stranger’ 56–7 attachment injury 65 empathy towards 22, 39 overdisclosure 67 reconsidering 104–8, 110–12 Fear and Hope (Bar-on) 65 FEPOW Memorial Building (National Memorial Arboretum) 87–9 fieldwork 15, 17, 21, 157, 173, 176 Figlio, Karl 88, 102–3 Flanagan, Richard 23 food attitude to waste 61, 100

239

during captivity 7, 25, 34–5, 130 postwar mealtimes 50, 58 forgetting 71–6, 83 defensive 94, 103 forced forgetting 75 seven types of forgetting 75 Fraser, Ronald 81–2 free association interview 18, 76 narrative 11 Friedman, Carl 80 Gaudillière, Jean-Max 63, 68, 70 gender 4 gendered domestic roles 52 military historians 150–1 women’s postwar roles and responsibilities 50, 52 genealogy 96, 136 generativity 21, 86, 98–100 Generation of Postmemory (Hirsch) 8 Geneva Convention 24 Gibson, Margaret 118 Gillies, Midge 37 Goldblatt, Hadass 64 Gook, Ben 85 Gordon, Avery 97 Grumbridge, Sally 38, 80–2 Harrison, Simon 26 Hastain, Ronald 23, 25–6, 28, 30, 32, 34–8 Hastings, Max 30 hell ships 16, 30, 34–5, 41 Asaka Maru 35 Singapore Maru 34 Yashida Maru 35 Hellfire Pass 159, 230n.33 Heroes Return programme 97 heuristic framework 21, 94–6 Hirohito (Emperor of Japan) 84 Hiroshima 2, 6, 8, 71, 93, 165–6 Hiroshima 6B POW camp (Omine Machi) 170, 175, 184n.2, n.3 role of local villagers 94 Hirsch, Marianne 8, 73, 76–7, 79, 122, 156 Hoffman, Eva 8, 71, 75, 83, 91 Hollway, Wendy 11, 20 Holmes, Keiko 88, 155, 159, 166, 169, 172

240

Index

Holocaust 6–8, 10, 71, 75, 77, 80 intergenerational transmission 6, 64–6, 68, 126–7 postwar ‘silence’ 10, 83 Holocaust (TV Mini series) 83 home memorials 128 butsudan 128 gedenkplek 128 memory ‘shrines’ 126, 128–9, 21n.58 Ibuki, Yukako 180 identification 53, 66–7, 99, 120, 157 with the aggressor 68, 205-6n.130 identity 13, 27, 53, 72–4, 93, 99 FEPOW collective identity 37, 85, 154, 183 identity work 7, 68, 76, 116, 136–7, 146–8 narrative identity 99 Ile de France 47 imagined communities 82 Imperial War Museum (IWM) 84, 144, 208n.20 Indo Project 132 Ingold, Tim 118 Injerd, Wes 46, 191n.6 In Search of a Past (Fraser) 82 insider status 12, 20 intergenerational transmission of trauma 7, 8, 56, 64–70, 79–80 theoretical approaches 8 intersubjectivity 5, 20, 59, 76, 151 interviewing 18 handling time 20 in-depth 6 preparations 18 psychosocial 15, 20, 41, 76, 129, 176 questioning 13, 18 role of photographs 69, 71, 98, 122–5 scenic memory technique 18 theme of movement 16 timing of research 10 Intimate Philosophy of Art (Armstrong), 81. 129 Iruka boys 46, 159 It Ain’t Half Hot Mum (TV comedy series) 78 James, William 27 Japan’s official apologies 84, 180, 234n.8

Japanese military acts of cruelty 41 attitude to POWs 24–6 bushido 24 cannibalism 41 compassionate actions by guards 33–4 punishments 31–2 soldiers’ memoirs 179–80 Japanese people, antipathy towards 179 Java 1, 27, 30 Java Club 9, 96 Jefferson, Tony 11, 20 Jones, Edgar 42 Kellermann, Natan 65 Kennedy, Roger 53 Kidron, Carol 7–8, 21, 68, 119–20, 126, 157 King, Laura 52 Kiwa-Cho 159 Klein, Melanie 102 Know Your Enemy – Japan (film – dir. Capra) 26 Kotler, Mindy 46 Kuhn, Annette 122 Landsberg, Alison 79 Langhamer, Claire 51 Lary, Diana 151 Latour, Bruno 15 Lichfield Cathedral 9 liminality 155, 171 list making 139–42 list mania 141 Long Road to the Deep North (Flanagan), 250. 23 Lourdes 155 Lowenthal, David 140 MacArthur, Brian 33 MacArthur, General Douglas General Order No. 1 46 Maddrell, Avril 131 Makepeace, Clare 144 manic reparation 14, 100, 102–3 Marschall, Sabine 117 Mass Observation Project 150 Maus (Spiegelman) 80 McAdams, Dan 99–100, 103

Index memorials affective resonance 88 located in Japan 88–91, 94, 158, 175 online memorials 82, 133 war memorials 84 memory 6–7, 71–2 activism 86–88 autobiographical 76, 99, 137 collected 72, 90 collective 72, 82, 90 communicative 21, 73–4, 137, 149 entrepreneurs 88–91 episodic 76 floating gap 73, 149 global tragedies 6 meaning in memories 93–97 memories of childhood 54–63 memory boom 82, 84, 86 semantic 76 three level framework 73 memory practices 94–7 domestic 115–6, 126, 128 emotion-driven 21, 95–6, 98 genres 6, 21, 135 knowledge-driven 21, 95–6, 98, 135, 145 narrative 98, 108 socio-cultural factors 95–96 values-driven 21 memoryscapes 21, 72, 115–16 methodology, see research methodology Merry Christmas Mr Lawrence (film) 101 Middleton, David 21 military family history 6, 135–6, 146–9, 151 military history 150–1 military rank of the father 18, 84–5 Miller, Daniel 15, 115 Mills, Charles Wright 135 personal troubles and public issues 135 Mine City (Japan) 156 mnemonic communities 85 mock reparation 102 monuments and memorials 88 morale 30, 36–7, 48 mother, relationship with 15–16, 28, 57, 102, 164, 167–8, erasing memory of the father 75 overprotective 57 stories related by 59

241

Mountbatten, Lady Edwina 139 Murakami, Kyoko 21 Muzaini, Hamzah 72, 82, 132 Nagasaki 2, 6, 12, 46, 71, 93 Nagasaki POW Camp 14B 132 Naked Island (Braddon) 143 narrative 41, 61, 76, 98 gaps 147 identity 99 narratives of return 156 National Archives, Kew 138, 144 National Federation of Far East Prisoner of War Clubs and Associations 85 National FEPOW Fellowship Welfare Remembrance Association 9, 96 National Memorial Arboretum (NMA) 9, 87, 89, 96, 121–2 natural environment 37–9 New Directions in Social and Cultural History (Handley et al) 137 Newman, Major P. H. 48–9 Nicholls, Linda and Kevin 88–91, 158 Nietzsche, Friedrich 74 Nightfather (Friedman) 80 nightmares 1, 59, 68 Noakes, Lucy 150–1 Nora, Pierre 148–9 normalization of trauma 32, 51, 54, 62 Norways, Bill 33, 182 Norways, Toby 34, 81–2 Oakley, Ann 151 proper vs. improper interviewing 151 objectification 115 objects 3, 15–6, 72, 115–25 evocative objects 117 materiality of the trace 148 memory objects 126–127 personal identity 116 sites of feeling 117 testimonial 79 transitional 16 obsessive-compulsive traits 136 Ogden, Thomas 20 Oliver, Lizzie 79 Omi camp and memorial 88–91 online communities 132, 147 ontological security 135–6

242

Index

oral history 4–5, 11 digital technology 4 links to ideological and intellectual trends 4 recovery history 12 recuperative urge 14 overdisclosure 66–7 Palembang (Sumatra) 145 palimpsest 29, 161 parapraxis 160 Parkin, David 117 Passerini, Luisa 5 Pearce, Susan 140 personal memorial websites 132–3 Petra 155 photographs 15, 116, 122–5 pilgrimage 153–6 Agape World 155, 172 association with religion 154 dark tourism 154 desacralized sites 159 emotional approach to the site 156, 162 emotional demands 156 groups 153–4, 156 Holmes, Keiko 88, 155, 159, 166, 169, 172 identifying as ‘pilgrims’ 153 internal and external catalysts 169 liminality 155, 171 nature of pilgrimage 153–4 physical approach to the site 155–6 pilgrimages of reconciliation 91, 95–6, 155, 171–2, 179–80 place 72, 157–61, 164, 169 role of guides 157, 164 sacralized sites 157 secular pilgrimage 153, 157 self transformation 154–5 traumascapes of war 153 Poland, Warren 157 political sensitivities 94 Portelli, Alessandro 5 positionality 5 postcards and letters 45, 39–40 postmemory 8, 21, 32, 59, 77–82 affiliative 73, 99 familial 73, 99 moral purpose 77 role of cultural products 8, 80, 149

post traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) 8, 42, 83 postwar Britain and social change 50 postwar follow-up of FEPOWs British vs American approach 42 Liverpool School of Tropical Medicine (LSTM) 42–3 POW Research Network Japan (POWRNJ) 166, 180 Prisoner of War (magazine) 39–40, 50 projection 77, 145, 147, 156–7 Prosser, Jay 28–9 prosthetic memory 79–80 psychic home 53, 115 psychic needs 6, 128, 147 psychic resolution 169 psychoanalysis 3–5, 8, 12–13 psychoanalyst 13–14 psychosocial approach 3–5, 11, 22–3, 64, 146, 172–3 impact on researcher 20 limitations of thematic analysis 19 punctum 123 punishments in captivity 31–2, 39–40, 118 executions 31 face-slapping 31, 40, 182 witnessing violence 31 Quinault, Roland 51 Rabaul (Papua New Guinea) 145 racism 25–6, 123 Rawlings, Leo 79 reconciliation 91, 95–6, 155, 171–2, 179–80 recuperative urge 14 Red Cross and St. John War Organisation 25, 39, 119 redemption sequences 100 red spider lilies 174 re-enactment 63, 66–8, 97–8 Rees, Laurence 31 reflexivity 5, 11, 99, 151, 166, 170 regret 22, 101–2, 105, 112 religion 36–7, 172 remembrance 4, 6–7, 9–11, 21, 71, 173 online 82, 130–1 pilgrimage 156, 169 promoting 83–4 remembrance gap 84 remembrance in the home 115, 117–8

Index Remembrance Sunday 84–5 Remembrance Day parade 84–5, 102–3 reparation 21, 105, 112, 161, 163 manic 14, 100, 103 mock 102 repatriation and return 7, 46–7, 138 advice for relatives 47, 50 changes in the men 42, 59, 101 controversies over ex-POW mentality 47–8 difficulties in readjustment 49–50 dispersed camp locations 46 leaflet: Guard Your Tongue 49 memorial plaques (Liverpool and Southampton) 9 process of repatriation 16, 22, 44, 46–7, 119, 145 research methodology, see also interviewing 5, 13, 15 analysis 14, 17, 20, 95 interpretation 13–14, 20 maximum variation sample 17 participants 4, 10, 17, 101, 186n.18 patterns and relationships 21 psychosocial research 11–12, 20–1 purposive sampling 17 snowball sampling 17 thematic analysis 19 transcribing interviews 19 research relationship 11–13, 16–17, 19, 116 reverie 20, 82, 118, 157, 170–1 rite of passage 171 Robert E. Mitchell Centre for POW Studies 42 Rogers, Leonard L. 175 Roots (TV mini series) 83 Roper, Michael 5, 14, 103, 136 Rosenthal, Gabriele 18 Rosenwein, Barbara 10, 187n.40 sacralized landscapes 157 sacred sites 161 Samuel, Raphael 122 Scates, Bruce 21, 153, 158 scenic compositions 14 Schwarz, Ori 94 Searle, Ronald 39, 79 Sebald, W. G. 71 secure attachments 28, 57, 97, 105, 117

243

Segal, Julius 42 self 99, 102, 117–8, 136, 146–8, 176 extended self 116 self awareness 5 self-identity 61, 76, 136 self-transformation 155, 157 semantic memory 76 Semel, Nava 80 sense of coherence 61, 98–99 shame 7–8, 54, 99 Sharpley, Richard 159 shinkansen (‘bullet train’) 170 siblings, relationship with 16, 62, 104, 141, 162 silence 7, 10–11, 14, 66–8, 83, 119 Singapore 25–6, 32, 34 Pilgrimage 107, 153, 155, 159, 167–9 Surrender 131, 143 skin 27–30 skin-ego 28 slavery 6 Smart, Carol 122 social and cultural history 3, 20, 122, 137 contributions to British society 3 social class 4, 85 social practice 136, 147 social roles 136, 147–8 Soloman Islands 145 Sparkes, Andrew 19 Spiegelman, Art 80 Stallybrass, Peter 127 Steedman, Carolyn 53, 137, 146 Stone, Philip 159 Strongyloides stercoralis 29–30, 43, 53 Thai-Burma railway 29 Stubbs, Ray 143 studium 122 Sturken, Marita 94, 156 subjectivity 28, 61, 85 Summerfield, Penny 3 the role of social and cultural history 3 Taj Mahal 155 Tandjong Priok (Indonesia) 38 Taylor, Frederick Noel 30, 44 tenko 41, 141 Tenko (TV drama series) 78 Texture of Memory (Young) 88 Thai-Burma railway 80, 87, 124, 155, 162–5 camp activities 37

244 construction 34, 140 death and disease 25, 29–30, 55 Descendants of Thai-Burma Railway WWII POWs (Facebook group) 132 Thailand 30, 34, 47, 87, 155 Thailand-Burma Railway Centre 155 Thompson, Paul 5 life history vs. life story 5 Thrale, Charles 32–3, 79 time 20 manipulating time through art 81 biographical 20 historical time 20 in the research process 20, 76 liminality 171 managing time in the camps 36–7 pooling 20 skin inscribes 28–9 time and (post)memory 73, 76, 80 Tojo, General Hideki 24, 31 transcripts 19, 130 embodied responses 19 emotional impact 19–20 transference 13, 15, 60, 147 transformation 118, 153, 155–7, 164 transitional objects 16, 117, 119 transitional space 117 transmission of trauma, see intergenerational transmission of trauma trauma 7–8 acute and long term 41 altruism 43–4 collective 68–9 complex 61

Index consequences 64 cumulative 61 genealogy of 48 post-traumatic growth 43 psychic 6 re-appraise lives and values 43 sequential 61 traumatic revival 63, 167 Trigg, Dylan 160 Turner, Victor 170–1 turning points 21, 94, 99, 100, 103–113 Twitter 132 Uluru 155 Valleys of the Shadows of Death – the Immortal Memory (painting exhibition – Thrale) 79 van Alphen, Ernst 141 Venbrux, Eric 128 VJ Day 131 war memorials 84, 115 Watson, Jean 154 websites 6, 78, 82, 96, 131–2 personal tributes 6, 132–3 Wessely, Simon 42 White Coolie (Hastain) 24 Williams, Nadejda 151 Wilson, Lieutenant Colonel Tommy 49 Winnicott, Donald 117 wives 7, 40, 43, 50–2, 73, 97 Wojtkowiak, Joanna 128 Yamanaka, Kameo 33–4 Yeoh, Brenda 82, 132 Young, James 88

245

246

247

248