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TITLE: MIRACULOUS JOURNEY HOME

EXTRACT FROM LETTERS WRITTEN BY L .W. KNOTT, Pte RAMC 7519888, (British Royal Amy Medical Corps)TO HIS FUTURE WIFE FOLLOWING HIS RELEASE FROM JAPANESE POW CAMP, THAILAND, WWII

INTRO: My father worked in the Alexandria Hospital in Singapore and was captured by the Japanese and sent to work on the Burma Railway in Thailand. The following are extracts from several handwritten letters found after my parents passed away. They were married for 50 years and died within 6 weeks of each other.

Edited by: Kathy Knott

LETTER 1
Thailand
13 September 1945

Darling Joan
On Sunday we leave this frightful dump and go to Bangkok ā€” the first step on our eventual journey home. We go by plane to Rangoon and then to India and then home and then 6 weeks leave pending discharge. And thank God for that.

The first tumultuous feeling we had when we heard the war had finished gradually left us owing to the lengthening time before we tasted freedom, we were disappointed in not getting out of here quickly and our ecstasy turned to grumbling but now with the news about moving, the old initial feeling is returning ā€” and itā€™s terrific.

God, the hundreds of things to see and do, the re-acquaintance (the difficulty I had in spelling that word) with things we always took for granted, newspapers and needles, soap and socks, beds and bread, in fact with everything we call civilisation ā€” although I know things are radically different ā€” and you Joan. Soon we will see each other ā€” everything must wait until then and Iā€™ll tell you how every day Iā€™ve thought of you and hoped you were safe and happy, Many of your letters came and they meant a lot in the weeks which never seemed to end and we had no contact with outside. I wait for a letter from you welcoming me back into the world but I doubt if I shall get it. I shall, I believe, travel home so quickly once we are started that I will hear you welcome me, and then I know I shall be home.

There are so many things to decide now. Positively I wonā€™t go back to XXXXX, the monotony would drive me crackers. I want to get a job here somewhere, where the sun shines and where there is a something which once experienced, never leaves one. Heavens the thought of an English winter after these years of sunshine freezes me and I have less fat now than I ever had before ā€” and you know how little I had!

We will talk and talk and look and look, and, dear God, if you havenā€™t changed, we will have that happiness we promised ourselves, and if fortune is benevolent and grants me my wishes the past 6 years would have served some purpose.

With all my love , Len

LETTER 2:
Thailand 23/9/45

Dear Joan
We are on the way to Bangkok. This is being written in a bombed Thai town, very little remains of it except an odd tin erection ā€” itā€™s a pity for the Thais have been very good to us on the trip.

Here they are all gathered around me as I write, looking with fascinated eyes at this awful illegible letter.

We go from Bangkok to Rangoon by air, perhaps tomorrow, and then home.

Iā€™m quite safe. Love , Len

LETTER 3:
Rangoon (Thailand) 25 Sept ā€˜45

My darling Joan
This is the second stage of this miraculous journey homeā€¦remember? The event I used to write to you about 5 years ago and have dreamt about ever since, particularly the past 3 years, and now itā€™s happening ā€” I think about you incessantly because coming home means you, and always has.

At short notice we left Ubon? Thailand and went to Bangkok, 2 days of hilarious travel, waving cheering Thais, boisterous boozy troops looking like nothing on earth with their ill fitting clothes & bald nuts. (Iā€™ve got no hair, mine was the only camp where those Bā€™s the Nips made us crop it off like themselves)

From Bangkok to Rangoon by Dakota, a pleasant smooth trip. Facetious half comic remarks about ā€œnot leaving the plane whilst in motionā€ and then when it was over ā€œWhat about a whip round for the driverā€.

Now in hospital, a routine procedure and I shanā€™t be here very long for Iā€™m absolutely OK, then to another camp for the boat home.

Iā€™m reveling in the comfort of civilisation; I look round and wonder, feel awed when I strike a match and amazed that I havenā€™t lost the knack of using a fork and knife. But I tell myself that I shouldnā€™t write about these things for it could be boring and like a walk round a hardware store. I savour all these things with profound pleasure, especially the cleanliness, dear God, everythingā€™s clean, clean ā€¦ā€¦.. All my love, Len

LETTER 4:
SS Chitral
Oct 3rd ā€˜45

My darling Joan,
You know of course from the letter I sent home from Rangoon that Iā€™m on the way home. This is being written on the way to Columbo. Itā€™s an incredible feeling this, this thought and fact of coming home after so long ā€” and I do believe that now for the first time, in writing this letter to you, that I realize just what it means. I get a queer feeling in my spine and something grips my stomach ā€” I sent a letter to your old Harrogate address as soon as I arrived in Rangoon from Bangkok but then the next day I went to the PO in town and found a letter from you coming from Leytonstone, the first I knew that you had changed your address. Your letter was very sweet and I read of your love with immense thanksgiving. You do know, although so little correspondence has come from me that I have never ceased to keep you very close to me and those countless months were made happier and lighter by thoughts of you.

Do you remember those perfect days before I went away? But I tell myself that although they were perfect they were and are in the past, and the only thing which matters now is the future, and my plans about that are infinite. I know youā€™ll disagree with some of them and label them hair brained (and youā€™re probably right). My only regret about coming home is that Iā€™ll land in Blighty in the approaching winter and spend my leave in vain attempts to keep warm. If only it would be summer time ā€” weā€™d go away somewhere for weeks & laze and get you as black as I am. Instead I suppose Iā€™ll have to eat plates of porridge & sugar to thicken my watery blood. And at the moment my hair is 1 inch long. It sticks up like a porcupine ā€” I whack Bay-Rxxxx - a patent American hair growth called ā€œsomething rootā€ on it and assiduously reapply it every morning but it defies my frantic efforts to make my head fit for humans to look at. More than ever I need some of yours, that very lovely hair you have ā€” is it still the same and you do part it in the centre?

But nothing can stop me coming home, 28 more days at the most, and no complaints, no word of warning or remonstrance.
With all my love Len

LETTER 5:
SS (Steam Ship) Chitral Friday Oct 12 1945

My darling Joan
This will come to you from Port Suez. We are four days from Colombo in a sea which is like glass. The journey is perfect, peerless weather, a breeze all day long which prevents sweating and a mild benevolent sun. How different from the trip out so very long ago when my thick blood made me sweat and fret and I was going away from you. Bit it is all different now. Every thud of the comforting sound which the engines down below make brings me nearer to you. Iā€™m very well and very happy and I love you ā€” you know didnā€™t you? Dear God that life after this will have no difficulties or perplexities. We must make it so.

The days pass, with little incident. I fit into an easy routine, so far having escaped any irksome fatigues. My foot is healed. I potter about, read, sleep, drink tea, watch the sea and write purple passages about it in my diary, and think of you. I see you, watch your movements, the flow of your skirt, you comb your hair, you smile at me, you walk by my side your hand in my pocket and my mind gets more fervid & heated as the hours bring you nearer. The clocks go back an hour. Every four minutes puts another mile between the East and this boat and my feelings are mixed about it. The past three and a half years doesnā€™t count, but there is most definitely something about the East. I ponder on the fact that Iā€™ve left the poverty of a Nip camp but Iā€™m going home to a slum, Iā€™m changing one type of barrack for another but at least the amenities for keeping clean are better in one, and that is the one I should hate and avoid. At the moment I feel very strongly about starting afresh but Iā€™ve got a sin of weakness taking the easiest path and Iā€™m scared that if I do this Iā€™ll miss everything completely. If only the Gods are kind a little longer to me. What a useless letter this is, why do I never say the things that are deepest in me, that I want you, that everything will be alright if I have you and that I long to kiss your kips again.

With all my love, Len

LETTER 6:
SS. Chitral 14.10.45

Darling Joan

Today I realized with a great stock that your birthday had passed and I havenā€™t wished you many happy returns in my last letter. You mustnā€™t think anything about this, for years I havenā€™t known the day or the date, the days have passed in a miasma, one similar to the other. And so youā€™re 25, my, my Joan, how does it feel, awful isnā€™t it? This frightful passing of the years, with their indecent haste is horrible. You realise I shall be 30 next year! I donā€™t know whether to laugh or cry when I think of that memento I have in my wallet given me when we were of a tenderer age. You were 18. Itā€™s that curl of hair you were very loath to give me. Doesnā€™t it seem childish now, doesnā€™t it?

So many things Iā€™ve been forced to relinquish in the change from camp to camp, the interminable Japanese searches, and the ravages of time. Your letters burst from the box in which I keep them, became torn, dirty, indecipherable, and I had to burn them. But I still have some pages with a few stained photographs, and they are all you; you at Eynsford, Tunbrigdge, that very sweet one of you at Brighton beneath the Black Rock and a very dim misty one of you standing on a bank of a river somewhere. I always had to hide these in bamboo in the ground, the Japs had an incredible desire to get hold of photos of English girls and they would have inevitably stolen them. Theyā€™ve been with me everywhere. For months things would become very dim in my mind, I couldnā€™t think about them. It was all too distant and impossible until I had to remind myself of sanity, and the very depths of hopelessness and despair forced me to resurrect these things and instill into myself the hope of better things, of being free, of the English countryside and you with your love and sweetness to me. It itā€™s finished now, and weā€™ve had our quota of misery) and repression. I used to think that when I was free again Iā€™d burst myself with frantic endeavour to catch the last delights of 3 Ā½ years, hardly stop to breathe, to defeat the insidious onset of time, but I now see that itā€™s those very years which have taught me to stop, to go easy, to breathe steadily, else the grave will be about me because now Iā€™m 30 and you, lovely sweet Joan are 25.

My love Len.

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