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Part three of an edited oral history interview with Mrs. Patricia Olney and Mrs. Ann Hurley about their father Mr. Arthur Ronald ‘Ron’ Staveley’s wartime experiences as a P.O.W. on the Thailand/Burma railway.

Memories of Mrs. Patricia Olney
“The reason why we were in London and had had moved from Kent — when my father was ‘captured presumed dead’ in 1942 my mother then wasn’t a widow but also hadn’t got a serving soldier so they gave them 16 shillings a week and her rent was 12 shillings a week. But of course in Kent, I was there as well before we moved back to my grandparents. As my mother said, I was born in July 1940, the ‘Battle of Britain’ raged over my pram and then we went to live near Waterloo Station. When my brother was born in June 1942 people from South America were sending layettes to British families and it had everything there that a baby could possibly need and my mother had one of these layettes and my mother kept in touch with this lady from South America. She wrote a thank you letter and they kept in touch all during the war and after the war. That’s something you never hear about. Mum appreciated it because people were being bombed out and you couldn’t get things.

Mum had got me and she was pregnant with my brother so really the only solution was to go back and live with her parents which is what she did. They lived in London very close to Waterloo Station. My grandfather became dad! I gather my grandfather, I was his little girl, I was taken everywhere with him and then he died. He was run over actually by a taxi and that was the February 1945. I started school in the February so I started six months early, at four and a half because then it would take it off the fact that the my grandpa wasn’t there anymore. One of the lovely stories there was at the end of the war in Europe and to the school they sent a lot of fruit like peaches and bananas and oranges and grapes and things like that and we went home with a little parcel. But of course we children had never seen anything like that so we wouldn’t eat it so the parents had a lovely time, eating fruit that they hadn’t seen for years. My father actually in his kit bag brought home huge bunches of bananas and of course again we were very tentative about eating them because children are like that aren't they? Dad brought me home a little wooden elephant, it was quite something.

I know he was only 6 stones weight because my mother was always saying. My mother said, well I think every woman that was a wife of a Japanese Prisoner of War he just came back so different from the man she knew. She said, he was such fun. Strangely enough Ted Sherring when I was seeing him the other week he said the first time he met dad was in Singapore and he said this lovely funny man came up to me and said, ‘I think you need some help here’ and he said that’s how he was. That’s what my mother said and anybody who knew him before the war, he was great fun to be with and you saw that in him lots of times but then of course the traumatism was not good. My mother bore the brunt of it because if he came in and she saw that he was in a mood she’d say, ‘Just go up to your room’ to keep out of the way until he calmed down, so she bore the brunt of it. The wives of ex P.O.W. could talk to one another but that was about it. But we had lots of fun together, it wasn’t all doom and gloom but you always knew when things were bad and to keep out of the way. You always had the things like you must eat your dinner because he knew about starvation of course, he’d lived with.

After the war men returned to their previous jobs and dad’s job was safe in Kent so he was travelling on the Monday or Sunday night down to his job. Being a baker you have to start the dough and coming back on the Friday evening for the weekend - his boss did the bread for the weekends — back to London until a couple of friends he met out there found him a job in London. He was then head of a bakery combine and went round to various bakeries, I think there were about eight bakeries in that and he did that. But to think that you went straight back into work and baking isn't easy, it’s a heavy job. So things were a bit better then because it was a tied house so we went to live in a tied house, that was good, that was still in London. We moved up to Bedfordshire, because dad and mum wanted to get back to the country. We moved up to Bedfordshire when I was ten.

I think one of the reasons is they wouldn’t talk about it. Perhaps if they’d been able to talk about it - it may have been easier. He went back twice to Thailand with the Far East Prisoners of War, used to go back in November and then they’d have a special service and everything. I think he must have been brave the first time particularly — it was easier the second time because he’d been back and seen it and got through. I must admit when I went up to Kanchanaburi it was a very emotional day that day but it laid a lot of ghosts when you saw what they achieved, you were thinking, WOW, there was a pride in what they had done. But as he said, because he was older when he went into the war, he said when they were first captured it was all the 18 year olds who died first because they’d got no inner strength and physically they weren’t as strong. I think most of them that came back they were all very strong personalities so as far as I know most of them did do well.

The most terrible thing to me was my father died last year, I went into Kettering Hospital, that was two days before he died and the Sister came up to me and she said, ‘Oh, we can’t understand your father, he’s talking in this foreign language.’ And I said, ‘Oh, I know what he’ll being saying, it will be Japanese.’ And I went in there and said, ‘Dad, stop it, you are not in Malaya now, you are in Britain you are in hospital, you are OK, stop the Japanese, no one can understand you.’ And he stopped but even then he was still having nightmares right until the end of his life about it. And I think one of the problems was of course they never got any counselling or anything. Obviously you can understand why, one they didn’t know about counselling but secondly so many people coming back and of course you went back straight to work.

Anyway my two daughters have been over to Japan as part of the Japanese Government reparations. The grandchildren can go over, in fact four of the six grandchildren have been over to Japan and had a lovely time and that’s good because they come back with different memories, building bridges. Because going over like that it’s not like visiting as a tourist. Two people who have been actually met the Prime Minister of Japan, they went into the schools and they actually stayed with a family for about three days and saw the sights of course but they had much more insight into Japanese society as you would as a mere tourist. I will see how I cope with that if I get there, I’m sure that I’ll be alright.�

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