Memorial Service for FEPOW and Civilian Internees 2021
The address written by Michael Ipgrave, the Anglican Bishop of Litchfield, whose father was a prisoner of war captured in Singapore.
I am very grateful to Canon Patrick Cleary for inviting me to share a few reflections at your annual memorial service, and I salute the commitment of the Catholic Parish of Our Lady & St Thomas of Canterbury, and of the Far East Prisoners of War Committee, in keeping before us every year the memory of those brave men and women, military and civilian, who experienced such suffering in the Far East.
It is as the child of a former Far East Prisoner of War that I offer these reflections, which are very personal. My sisters and I are grateful to Peter Wiseman for ensuring that the name of our father, Geoff Ipgrave, is now inscribed in the book at the FEPOW church; we feel truly honoured by that.
My dad’s story can be simply told. Captured at Singapore, and put to hard labour on the railway, he experienced terrible conditions of deprivation, overwork and brutality there; he was fortunate to survive, but his health was permanently damaged, and I believe that what he went through deeply scarred him – how could it not? He did not talk to us often or at length about his years as a PoW, but we do have, as one of our family’s most treasured possessions, a sweat-stained battered little volume, stamped with the seal of the Kempeitai, the Japanese military police. It is my dad’s copy of A E Housman’s cycle of poetry A Shropshire Lad; unlike the few other books he had (including, I regret to say, his Bible!) he kept this one from being turned into roll-ups for cigarettes, because it meant so much to him.
If you know Housman’s poetry, you might be surprised by the idea of it comforting anybody – it is unrelentingly bleak and gloomy, with streaks of black humour. But I think there were two things in it which sustained my dad’s spirit in those dark days. One was precisely its unflinching honesty and realism, which mirrored the terrible situation in which he and his mates found themselves. He was not looking for false comfort; and certainly he would not find that in Housman. And the other thing A Shropshire Lad offered was the beauty of its language, evoking the dreamy pleasures of the English countryside; I think that fed dad inwardly with the vision and memory of places that he loved – and so it gave him a kind of hope, as he longed to go back to visit familiar scenes.
Somehow or other, then, he survived his years as a FEPOW; he returned to England, met my mum, married and started a family, and lived out an admirable life as a much loved village headteacher. But what he had seen and known was lodged deep within him, too deep for him to speak of it freely for most of his life. There were two occasions, though, when he opened up about his experiences.
One was when my nephew, one of his nine grandchildren, was doing a school project about the Second World War, and interviewed his grandfather to ask him about his memories. While he found it very difficult to talk to his children, my dad opened up much more freely to his grandchildren, to the next generation. I think that in that conversation he could have more confidence, because there was a security in knowing that life went on: ‘May you see your children’s children’ is one of the blessings spoken in the Bible.
The other time my dad really opened up about his experiences was a bit more unusual. When he was 65, my family and I went to live and work for a few years in Japan. During this time, my mum died, and after the funeral dad returned with me to spend a few weeks in Japan. It was a remarkable act of courage and imagination on the part of a recently bereaved man, to come to a country which in the past had caused such damage to him and his friends.
Dad had never, as far as I know, harboured any particular resentment against Japanese people, but nor had he any notably warm feelings towards them, and it must have been with a certain amount of anxiety that he came out to stay with us, and to meet the members of the small Japanese Anglican church with whom I was working then.
The welcome and the hospitality that community of Japanese Christians extended to him was truly remarkable, and it brought about a deep shift in his way of seeing things. He met with people of his own generation who had experienced in their own country the brutality of the Kempeitai which he had encountered as a PoW – Anglicans in wartime Japan had been regarded with great suspicion as fifth columnists for the Allies, and the church and its priests had been persecuted as a result. He heard of the hardship and devastation which ordinary families had undergone in the fire bombing of Tokyo. He was deeply moved by a visit to Hiroshima – and deeply conflicted, for, as he said to me, has it not been for that terrible nuclear bomb, he might not have been liberated, and I might never have existed. Time and time again, with heartfelt sincerity, his hosts apologised for all that he had experienced during his wartime years.
Over the few weeks that he was with us in Japan, it felt to me almost as though I could see the mental furniture being shifted around in my father’s mind, as a new way of thinking began in him. He would never forget what he and his mates had been through, but he was committed to reconciliation with Japan and Japanese people, and the tangible proof of that was the many new friendships he had formed and which he sustained in the last years of his life.
Of course, what happened to my father was personal to him, and other Far East Prisoners of War would have different stories to tell; the effect it had on us as a family is personal to us, and other Children of FEPOWs will have different stories to share too. All I can say is that I and my sisters are proud of our father, not only because of his bravery and endurance during the war years, but also because of the way that he found a voice to tell his story to a new generation, and to turn it into a force for good. And that is a choice which we can all make in life, whatever our experiences and however hurt we are. By God’s grace, we can choose to follow the path of forgiveness, peace and hope, costly as that may be.
That is the costly but life-giving way which Jesus Christ opened up to us through his death on the cross and through his resurrection: as the Letter to the Ephesians says, ‘He is our peace; in his flesh he has made both into one and has broken down the hostility between us’. I thank you from my heart for remembering all who suffered so terribly as Prisoners in the War in the Far East, my father among them; and with you I pray that we who succeed them in our generation may honour them through working for peace in the name of Jesus Christ. Amen.