PUBLISHED: 23:53, 7 January 2014 | UPDATED: 00:07, 8 January 2014
My father was an angry, troubled man who was deaf in one ear — the result, my mother confided to me one day, of a vicious beating by a Japanese soldier.
Daddy, who was called Douglas Mitchell, was also an alcoholic who lived entirely for the moment. Not once did he concern himself with the future. Indeed, our household finances were irrelevant to him.
My mother, Peggy, who died in 1999, had to manage all the bills so we weren’t thrown out of our home in South London, or plunged into cold and darkness when the electricity was cut off.
Bryher Scudamore, pictured with her father Douglas Mitchell. She said a new film, The Railway Man, which is released nationwide this Friday, made her realise her father was a hero, not a cruel drunk
Many memories of my father still sting me to this day. The sheer mortification I felt when I was a child and he would turn up drunk at school open days.
The time I discovered he’d sold my precious Christening gifts — a sapphire brooch and a beautiful antique silver spoon — to buy himself alcohol.
My mother had always promised that these gifts would be released from their hiding place and given to me on my 21st birthday.
On the morning of my birthday, I discovered what my father had done.
My poor mother had to break the news that they were gone: that Daddy had sold them because he needed the money ‘for drink’.
He died in 1991 from a massive stroke. He was 75. And although I arranged his funeral, I shed no tears. After so many years of neglect, I simply had no feelings left.
What I didn’t realise then was that my flawed father’s life was utterly defined by his experiences as a ‘railway man’ in World War II. He was one of the many British prisoners of war put to work by their Japanese captors to build a railway — it became known as the Death Railway — from Burma to Thailand.
Some 13,000 Allied troops and 100,000 native labourers died building it, and prisoners of war were routinely starved and beaten in the most horrific manner.
But it’s only recently that I came to realise that what happened to my father had marked him — and me — for life, in the darkest and most indelible of ways.
This revelation was down to a most remarkable film, The Railway Man, which is released nationwide this Friday.
Douglas as a young man. He scarred by his experiences as a 'railway man' in World War¿¿II
Colin Firth plays Eric Lomax, a British Army officer sent to a Japanese prisoner-of-war camp in 1942, who wrote an award-winning book about his experiences, on which the film is based.
It is a compelling story of brutality, courage and reconciliation. The prisoners’ daily work to construct the railway involved lugging huge stones, and carving through solid rock by hand — a form of torture in itself.
During his time in the camp, Lomax is brutalised by the Japanese, suffering ferocious beatings before being almost water-boarded to death.
Years later, and still suffering the trauma of his wartime experiences, Lomax, with the help of his wife Patti — played by Nicole Kidman — and best friend Finlay, decides to find and confront one of his captors.
He returns to the scene of his torture and manages to track down his tormentor, intending to kill him. I won’t give away the ending — but it certainly moved me to tears when I watched a preview of The Railway Man recently.
I entered the cinema with some considerable fear and trepidation, but also with hope that it might reveal to me something of what my father went through. I thought it might even allow me a greater understanding of the complex man he was.
For until I saw it, I simply had no idea that this was the reality of my father’s life. Daddy never talked about his experiences. Although I knew he’d been a PoW, he simply never revealed the sheer brutality of what he had endured.
The only time he came even close to unburdening his soul was when we watched Bridge Over The River Kwai on television one Christmas when I was a child.
As the film showed scenes depicting the building of the very railway he had shed blood and sweat over, my father flew into a rage. He turned the TV off, shouting: ‘It wasn’t like that! You have no idea.’
While I may have discovered he was a ‘railway man’ — whatever that was — I was young, scared, and unwilling to explore his terrifying rages with him. I never asked him what being a railway man actually was like. It’s something I regret so much now.
But as I grew up, it was impossible to have a sensible conversation with Daddy because of his alcoholism.
He preferred the male camaraderie he found inside a pub to conversations at home.
And my mother rarely discussed his ordeal. Indeed, despite my closeness to her, I have no idea exactly how much she knew of his past.
For most of my life I both feared and despised Daddy. Even now, I live with the scars of his volatile, angry behaviour.
He insisted, for example, that I always cleared my plate, no matter what was on it or how much I insisted I’d had enough to eat — a legacy, no doubt, of his own starvation in the PoW camp.
If there was a disgusting piece of gristle left on my plate, he’d say: ‘I’d have been so grateful for that.
If you don’t eat it now, you will eat it tomorrow. It will stay on your plate every day until you eat it.’
The fear his presence alone caused was palpable. Unease would ripple through the whole house the moment his key went into the lock.
My mother and I would sit in the front room at night listening for his return, never knowing if it was Daddy the ebullient drunk, or Daddy the angry drunk who would walk through the door.
What made his rage and self-pity all the more frustrating was that life had dealt him a good hand. He could have given me so much.
Jeremy Irvine and Colin Firth play Eric Lomax, a British Army officer sent to a Japanese prisoner-of-war camp in 1942, who wrote an award-winning book about his experiences, on which the film is based
More than that, he could have been so much.
He had been brought up as an impeccably mannered, rather well-to-do young man.
His mother, Rosa, was terribly elegant; his father owned a fine china and glass import company.
The family lived in a pleasant home in Wallington, Surrey, and my father attended a good public school, Dulwich College, before studying at the prestigious Wye Agricultural College.
For all his myopic self-pity in later years, he was a man who had tasted some of the world’s most exotic sights and experiences.
He had become a tea planter in the Assam hills of India when war broke out.
'Daddy never talked about his experiences. Although I knew he’d been a PoW, he simply never revealed the sheer brutality of what he had endured.'
In 1941, after Japan’s entry into the war, my father immediately enlisted while still in India. I have no idea which part of the Army he served in — his drunken rages and unpredictable silences saw to that — but he did tell me that he was captured almost straightaway.
He then spent four years as a prisoner of war in South-East Asia.
The very fact he survived his toil on the infamous Death Railway was a miracle; nothing in his comfortable upbringing could have prepared him for the horrors that awaited him.
As I watched the unbelievable brutality of the Japanese soldiers on the big screen, and the constant terror of the PoWs, I wept.
Here was what my silent, angry father had endured.
History books tell us that for my father and his imprisoned comrades, starvation was the norm.
Healthy soldiers rapidly became like skeletons.
Some even resorted to eating maggots to survive.
Casual cruelty and humiliation was a daily occurrence.
The Japanese would shove ailing soldiers into latrines for fun.
Executions by sword were commonplace, and many were bayoneted to death.
Some soldiers were beheaded on a whim.
Men like my father buried their friends in makeshift graves.
My father’s silence about his ordeal was reflected in the film, too.
The PoWs in the film are similarly taciturn about their experiences — a fact picked up on by Lomax’s friend, Finlay, who says that the PoWs don’t talk about what happened because no one would believe the horrors they endured.
During his time in the camp, Lomax is brutalised by the Japanese, suffering ferocious beatings before being almost water-boarded to death. Years later, with the help of his wife Patti - played by Nicole Kidman - and best friend Finlay, decides to find and confront one of his captors
It’s a wonder, considering how silent he was, that my father ever managed to woo my mother.
They met shortly after he was repatriated to the UK in 1946. They married and went to live in Fowey, Cornwall, where my father became an antiques dealer. I was born five years after the war ended, in 1950.
Watching The Railway Man, I felt only too sharply how my own childhood and relationship with my father had been profoundly affected by his despair.
So many painful memories of my own childhood were excavated in that darkened cinema, as Colin Firth acted out the story of my father’s post-war existence: his unexplained rages, for example, and his inability to show any affection.
After dabbling unsuccessfully in antiques, my father became a motoring journalist.
In the Sixties, when Japan started to infiltrate the car market in Britain, he found it impossible to attend launches and press conferences if any Japanese people were present. Quite simply, he just couldn’t bear to be in the same room as them.
'... 20 years after his death, I finally feel I have some understanding of why Daddy was as he was. He had seen the worst of humanity, living for years on a knife edge that, at any moment, could have seen him beaten to death.'
His attitude softened a little over the years, but he never forgave the Japanese for not apologising for what had happened in the war.
And he remained furious that, unlike German children, Japanese children were not taught about their nation’s role in World War II.
My father’s war didn’t just leave him deaf in one ear, it left lifelong scars on his psyche and his soul. He survived the experience physically, but at enormous mental cost.
I’ll never know whether my father might have found some peace in his life had he, like Eric Lomax in the film, the courage or the opportunity to meet the men who were his torturers.
But 20 years after his death, I finally feel I have some understanding of why Daddy was as he was.
He had seen the worst of humanity, living for years on a knife edge that, at any moment, could have seen him beaten to death.
And he lived the rest of his life consumed with hatred for the people who had treated him so terribly.
I don’t think anyone could survive that experience undamaged, and I see now why he turned to drink to dull the pain of his memories. So many men like my father became forgotten soldiers, whose experiences and memories went unrecorded.
Untold numbers of Japanese prisoners of war have disappeared from the history books, their personal stories of extraordinary bravery forgotten.
My biggest regret is not finding out more about Daddy’s life.
So, at the age of 60, I started a business helping people to write their life stories.
From the many emails I receive, I know how much families come to treasure these unique books of memories.
Sadly, the one book I will never read is my own father’s autobiography.
Watching The Railway Man has opened a well of grief and emotion within me. For the first time, I have wept for my father — and I have even found in my heart some compassion for what he went through.
I have come to see him as a brave man, a war hero.
Thanks to this film, I know I can find it in my heart to forgive him for all those years of cruelty and violence.
- The Railway Man is released on Friday. Bryher Scudamore is the creator of autodotbiography.com
Read more: http://www.dailymail.co.uk/femail/article-2535528/Haunting-film-Dad-hero-not-just-cruel-drunk-I-despised-How-seeing-The-Railway-Man-healed-lifelong-rift-father-daughter.html#ixzz2pmhbUikM
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