VJ - and the men who came back

There are rightly many articles devoted to the end of WW2 in SE Asia in Radio Times this week, in advance of Saturday's commemoration of VJ-Day. Among them is "Finding my father", Libby Purves's write-up of an interview with Eleanor Holland, daughter of Colonel Henry Ross Power. Col. Power had served in Burma, been captured by the Japanese and survived until the end of the war in a Rangoon jail. He had written a secret diary which he preserved in a box in the family home. It was the Covid lock-down's forcing her to suspend her day job volunteering at the National Maritime Museum in  Cornwall which spurred her to fill the empty hours by investigating her late father's belongings. The result was the touching story recounted by Ms Purves.

There will no doubt be more discoveries of what veterans of the conflict and, too often, of cruel incarceration, expressed in writing that which they were unwilling to talk about once they were repatriated. May those discoveries continue to be made as we - and more importantly our children - inevitably lose the living testament of the survivors.