Hospital in Burma

This story is taken from an interview with George and Peggy Lapsley, and has been added to the site with their permission. The author fully understands the site's terms and conditions. The interviewer was David Reid, and the transcription was by Bruce Logan.
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That was the happy days. There was lots of bad things, but you don’t remember them. You have a sensory nerve in your brain which cuts these things out. One thing I do remember which does annoy me. I was in Burma when the Japanese, the British prisoners of the Japanese were released, and a lot of them came to Burma and were looked after by us. And of course we wondered, what can we do? We’ll give up half our rations to give them more food. We were politely told afterwards, “No, we don’t want your food. Because if we feed these people too much, they’ll die. Because they’re not used to food. They’re used to half your rice”.

But I then had to go into hospital for jaundice. When I went abroad I was 15 ½ stone, when I go home I was 9 stone 6. So that’s its own tale. When I went into hospital, the hospital, this is a bad thing but I do remember, you were taken in on a stretcher. And there were 2 wooden runners along and an orange box, the old style orange box at the end of the bed. And the stretchers were put across there, and your clothes, since all I had on was swimming trunks, because Burma was hot. And they put my naval uniform in an orange box at the end of my bed because I was too weak to get out of bed. So we had, I remember, we had 2 good things that happened. We were allowed a mug of Bovril a day and we were allowed a gramophone and one record. That record used to drive us mad because the boy would come in with the Bovril, wind up the gramophone, put the record on and then disappear! But eventually I got strong enough to get out of bed. The first thing I did was look for my clothes. And in the orange box was a pile of black buttons. All my clothes had been eaten by soldier ants who went through and as they go through they eat everything in front of them. They had eaten all my clothes. I had not a stitch of clothing except a pile of buttons.
They had to kit me out. Now that caused trouble because Naval people are very proud of the uniform. You didn’t like a new collar, a new collar was navy blue. You wanted a collar that was light blue, that meant you’d served for some time. The first thing you’d do was get some kind of concoction to bleach the collar.

The sad thing about that hospital was that the Japanese prisoners, the English prisoners of the Japanese, some wouldn’t go into Ordinary barracks because they were mentally disturbed. So they had special Padded cells at the hospital, and every night you would have heard these poor souls screaming “Oh, don’t let them at me, please, oh no, don’t”. That was the Japanese maltreating them. Some of those, I’m quite sure, never got home. They couldn’t send them home. What would they do when they got home?

They had been really badly treated. I did, when we went on our holidays to Thailand, I did go across to the graveyard where a lot of these had died, and I laid a Poppy in the graveyard where there’s thousands of those poor souls buried that didn’t have a chance to fight.

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