I was not alive on the first VJ Day, but I used to know a man who was. His name was Arthur and I knew him back in the 1980s when he was an elderly man.
Arthur was the caretaker, security guard and odd job man at the little business estate in Surrey where I was working for a publishing company - one of my first jobs. Arthur was well past retirement age, but he had taken the post to keep himself busy. He was often pottering about touching up paintwork, caring for the bedding plants or helping with some task or other. When he wasn't busy, he was always to be found in his "Tool Room" reading a newspaper while drinking tea or smoking some foul smelling cigarette. He was always friendly in a reserved sort of a way, happy to gossip about people he knew. I remember that rain or shine he always wore a flat cap.
Anyway, one lunchtime I set off to walk into Guildford to get a sandwich - it was only about a ten minute stroll. Arthur came with me. We chatted about this and that - I can't really recall what but perhaps a recent football match, Arthur loved football.
A car pulled up alongside us and the passenger window was rolled down. A man with obviously Far Eastern features poked his head out asked in strongly accented English "Excuse me. Could you tell us the way to Guildford?"
Now, as it happens the road on which the car was driving led straight to Guildford High Street, it was about 400 yards away round a corner. I was about to say so, when Arthur bent down to peer in through the open car window at the three men inside.
"Are you Japanese?" he asked.
"Yes," replied the man. "We are from Japan. We go to Guildford for business."
"Right," said Arthur standing and glaring at the man. "Well, you found your f***ing way to Singapore. So you can find your f***ing way to Guildford. Now p*** off." He stared at the man until the car drove off. Then Arthur spat into the road. "Bastards!" he said with great savagery, turned and stalked off back the way he had come. When I got back he was not in his Tool Room, nor did he show up until the following day.
I learned from speaking to some of the older hands at the little estate about Arthur's history. He had been in the Royal Navy and had been captured by the Japanese at the Fall of Singapore in 1942. After being held in a prison in Singapore for a while, Arthur and others were put on a ship and taken to an island somewhere to work as slave labour. The savage treatment handed out by the Japanese led to numerous deaths from hunger, disease and casual violence. Summary executions were common. Month after month passed, with no word from the outside world. Suffering and death were constant companions for Arthur and his dwindling group of comrades. One by one they died in agony.
Then the tempo of violence suddenly increased. Food rations fell, brutality increased and executions became more common. The work ceased, and the survivors were locked into the prison camp for days on end. Arthur and his comrades were convinced that the Japanese guards were going to kill them all.
But one bright morning a truck load of men arrived at the prison gates. They were American soldiers who had come to announce that Japan had surrendered.
It took Arthur months to recover from the mistreatment handed out to him by the Japanese. When it was recovered, he rejoined the navy. He later got married, took a job ashore and ended up in Guildford so that he could live close to his son and his family. But he never forgot his wartime experiences.
As I found out that summer's day on a walk into Guildford to buy a sandwich.
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