Lucky Me!

By Jim Curson

In 1940 Sapper James (Jim) Curson set sail with his British unit-
251 Field Company, Royal Engineers and joined the fleet to
India. His ship, The Empress of Asia was bombed and sank off
the coast of Singapore. Rescued, he found he'd been reported
missing, and his wife told he'd been killed in action.

When Singapore fell to the Japanese Jim became

• Language: English
• Publisher: Publicious Book Publishing
• Release date: Feb 20, 2014
• ISBN: 9780992458218

Book preview

Introduction

By James Curson recipient of:

Territorial Medal, Long Service

1944/5 Pacific Star, Service Medal

1944/5 Star

1944/5 War Medal

At ninety-three I have come to the conclusion that love and friendship make the world go round. There have been many hardships in my life, but I feel blessed. Where so many others perished I survived and have plans that will take me up to a hundred – as the old comedians say, ‘after a hundred I’ll plan year by year.’ My dear wife of almost seventy years died a few years ago and left me bereft, but time heals, life goes on and today I am content.

I’ve never been a drinker or heavy smoker and I don’t think my diet is different to others – except I like a heap of sugar and an average amount of salt on my food. I suffer from regular tropical diseases brought on by my time as a prisoner of war but, apart from their effects, I am relatively healthy for a man of my age. Today, I still drive my car, play my musical instruments and continue my hobby of woodwork. I grew up surrounded by females and to my great joy, my best friends are still women who continue to spoil me…yes, I am truly lucky and grateful I’m still here to tell the story.

I’ve often been asked what kept us going and how I managed to survive, as one of the few prisoners of war, still alive, who was forced to work on the Burma Railway. Completed in a year, around 60,000 prisoners worked on the railway; British, Australian, Dutch, American, Canadian and New Zealanders, and of these, 22, 602 POWs died as a direct result of the project. What kept us going was a list of basic rules:

•   Never fall back – hang on to other’s belts so the strong helped the weak.

•   Avoid the outside of the column as the Japanese soldiers would whack you.

•   Wear your hat (if you had one) or the sun will fry you.

•   Have a strong will to live, despite being classed as expendable and humiliated by the Japanese.

•   Stay mentally strong, despite it being impossible to be physically strong.

•   Support one another, keeping in mind group strength is stronger than individual strength.

•   Stay mentally aware and in full control of your nervous system.

•   Shut out pain by mental concentration.

•   Acquire the art of meditation.

•   Keep emotions and depression under control despite mates dying.

•   Remind mates of family and home when they became sick but never sympathise.

•   Remember to class yourself above the illiterate and uneducated guards.

•   Smile at the Japanese wounded – they didn’t know you were remembering they killed your mates.

Over the years I’ve come to terms with the obsessive behaviour of the Japanese soldiers and how they treated me and my fellow POWs. Under the influence of their Emperor, they were driven by a vision that caused their fanatical behaviour. I no-longer hate them for the atrocities they inflicted. Hate takes over memory and is self-destructive, but, despite visiting many countries, I have not yet visited Japan. God saved me from the terrible ordeal and showed me that life is so important. We humans seem to have an in-built ability to forget bad things. I decided long ago to focus on the good things in life and live to enjoy each day.

One of my father’s many professions was being an accomplished blacksmith, and in England there’s a belief that being born in a blacksmith’s shop is good luck. If this is true then I started out with an advantage– luck was on my side. This is my story.

Chapter One

The Early Years

Why my parents had me at such a late stage in their lives can only be explained by a mistake…there is no other reason. It turned out to be a lucky mistake for me!

At forty-five years of age my mother became pregnant with me, and I was born on the 2nd November 1920. My parents were English farmers – father Walter James Curson, a builder, and mother, Fanny Olive who – already had a full life living on a working farm with two daughters: Olive, 16 and Myrtle who was 14. Although I was never made to feel unwanted despite my late arrival in the family, their every single moment was fully involved in the busy life of looking after farm animals and the farm itself. Any ‘leisure hours’ were filled by farm work. The last thing they needed was a baby to care for.

My parents’ farm consisted of a hundred and forty acres of land on which we grew mixed barley and sugar beet as well as raising a herd of Guernsey cows, which were milked daily. The milk was passed through a cooling machine into glass bottles for retail through the local dairy. This process never took a holiday and neither did my parents. Whilst my father spent long hours working as a master builder, he’d long held a desire to farm. He could turn his hand to anything to do with house-building, and also worked as a blacksmith, but he wanted to live on and work a farm. When he bought the property it was a small-holding of agricultural land, but there were no buildings on it.

He set about building the family a new home, known as Field House Farm, which we moved into when I was six months old. The design was Canadian, a two-story, four-bedroom home with indoor plumbing. At the back of the house he built a dairy and an office with cooling fans to keep the milk and the house cool in summer. He and my mother planted fruit trees and a vegetable garden enclosed by a border of conifers round the perimeter of the land. For the 1920s in England, it was a luxury residence.

In the County of Norfolk, our farm was sited in a village called Lyng, situated on the River Wensum, the historic city of Norwich some 14 miles (23-km) away. The area is known for its inland wetlands, the marshy Fens of the Norfolk Broads, and fields of mustard, as well as being a hub over the centuries for various religious groups. The area has many churches and a history of housing Spanish Jews, Huguenots and Flemish ‘Strangers’ who fled Catholic persecution, eventually numbering as many as one third of the population of Norwich. This chronicle of religious mix may account for my family being religious Christians. I’ve been a committed Christian Spiritualist for years and I believe in spiritual healing which is not new. It’s something that has been around for thousands of years, but became widely known through the Spiritualist movement, especially in England. When I was young, my father shared his religious visions with me and, whilst I dismissed these at the time, my basic trust in God has seen me through many bad situations. Apart from churches, the Norwich area also boasts numerous pubs, but I’m pleased to say I’ve never been a drinker so I’ve kept out of them, not being a club or beer man, and led a happy, sober life.

My family were extremely hard working and disciplined. My mother took care of the house and the family’s needs, with the help of my sisters, and the remainder of the farm work and the animals. There are no days off when raising cows and farming; each is a full time occupation in itself so, as well as running the household, a farm and a building business, having a baby to care for would not have been at the top of my parents’ ‘wish list’. As in many families in those days, the ‘baby chores’ fell to my