The Forgotten Highlander - Alistair Urquhart [109]
Happily among the 256 Japanese war criminals to be executed were a loathsome duo from the Death Railway. The Black Prince had failed to fall on his samurai sword and revealed himself to be the coward that most swaggering bullies are. He was hanged, as was the Mad Mongrel. Inexplicably, Dr Death received only ten years.
One day in July 1946 there came a knock at the door and Dossie shouted on to me to get up and come down as I had visitors. I came downstairs, opened the door and almost fell over. Freddie Brind stood there, with his trademark grin and his ever-present buddy, brother Jim. It was just great to see them. I hadn’t heard of them since leaving Chungkai on the other side of the world. Until they had turned up I didn’t even know if they had made it.
We shook hands and embraced. In the finest British tradition I asked them in for a cup of tea. As Jim stayed silent Freddie recounted their story. After their father had been taken prisoner by the Japanese and taken to Changi at around the same time as us, they hadn’t seen him. He was kept in the prison where he had previously been a warden. Freddie remained stoutly calm as he said that his father died there in that jail. He had never spoken about the man much. His mother, who had escaped, was obviously much closer to the brothers.
I refilled the teapot and Freddie continued updating me in great detail. He was now working as a plumber’s mate. Jim had a job at the Selo film factory in Brentwood, which he would work at all his days.
After a while Freddie got around to why they were in Aberdeen. They had arrived for a reunion of the Gordon Highlanders. Once he raised that topic he wanted to talk only about the prison camps. No matter how I tried to divert the subject he would always bring it back, recalling his comical moments, the characters and the scams, but also the horrors and the unspeakable. It was as if he were trying to make sense of it. I got the impression that he was also struggling to readjust to civilian or British life. In the camps we all knew him as a man, or boy really, who could acquire things, get things done. But back in Blighty he was just another veteran despite being still in his teens. In his own eyes he wasn’t special any more.
I invited them to stay with the family while they were in Aberdeen but they insisted that they would not impose and had booked digs in Crown Street. The next day I went with them to the reunion at the Station Hotel in Aberdeen. It was an emotional affair but one that indeed was necessary. I relaxed finally in the company of others who had suffered as much as I had. They knew my pain. They didn’t ask awkward questions or stare at me as if I were a leper.
For the rest of his life Freddie would phone me every night, no matter what was happening in either of our lives. He just wanted to talk – always about the camps, which had left a fatal impression on him. He had to be checked in to Roehampton hospital several times, for a month or more at a time, and had even been granted a twenty-four-hour telephone line to a psychologist. Yet he preferred to phone me and chew my ear for an hour every night, sometimes two hours at a time.
He got married to an Essex girl, Nora, whom he met through his church. But Freddie never came out of the camps. And he drank heavily to forget. Given his experience and his character it should not have been a shock that he became an alcoholic. Despite the love he received from his wife, his family, and me and my family, he would die within ten years of returning to the UK of cirrhosis of the liver – still a young man.
The reunion had been a cathartic experience for me and by August 1946 I felt fitter both mentally and physically. My thoughts returned to work. I could still hear Mr Grassie in his inimitable tone saying he would always have a job for me, one of ‘his boys’. But I knew that I would never manage the physical job I had done before the war. I paid him a visit