MEMORY UPDATE

Is it really possible to superimpose a newer memory over an older recollection? And is there any benefit in trying to do so? These thoughts have occurred to me occasionally over the last 30 years after, quite suddenly, I was confronted by the awfulness of conditions endured by members of the Norfolk Regiment - and many others - in the Japanese prison camps of Singapore, Malaya and Siam, and on the Burma-Siam railway, during the Second World War.
In 1982, on the 40th anniversary of the surrender of Allied forces in Singapore, I was fortunate to be one of the helpers escorting a party of some 65 former prisoners of the Japanese, widows, sons and daughters of former prisoners, and a handful of other interested parties, back to the locations of their incarceration.
We flew to Singapore where we stayed for a few days (visiting Changi prison, Selarang Barracks, and Kranji cemetery) before flying to Bangkok, where we boarded two coaches which took us up-country to the Kwai river, calling at a number of places the veterans knew including Tarso, which in those days was as far as the old railway went. Here, the rusting lines and rotting sleepers, which the men had originally laid, simply petered out in the jungle on the edge of the settlement.
The entire trip was unrelentingly emotional (one veteran, alas, died in the hotel overnight in Bangkok) for the former prisoners and their relatives and descendants, who found themselves, particularly in Bangkok, surrounded by reminders of the Japanese. There were two widows, I recall, visiting their husbands' graves for the first time, and one son visiting the grave of a father he could barely remember. And so on. It was heartbreaking.
Then another major problem arose. On every single day of the tour there was someone who was dreading returing to the next location listed on our itinerary. For example, we arrived in Kanchanaburi knowing that three or four veterans were already upset because of a forthcoming scheduled visit across the river to the former base camp at Chungkai. They remembered it as the cholera camp, a place of nightmares.
Recollections of this and other places had haunted these men since the 1940s, and throughout the subsequent years they could not get the pictures out of their minds. It had tainted their lives and their marriages. It was the biggest problem of all, they said. Memories.
In the end they all went to Chungkai, and no-one opted out. And here, as elsewhere, change took hold. Changi prison in Singapore, for example, was still being used. The veterans waved at prisoners standing at the windows, who waved back. 'Crikey,' said one incredulous veteran, 'there's a chap standing at the cell window I used to stand at!' And when they finally got to Kranji or Chungkai or Kanchanaburi, they found not horror, but beauty.
Trimmed lawns, immaculate flowerbeds, trees and bushes smothered with scented blossoms, and gleaming white grave markers in parks tended with diligence and respect by their cheerful Thai caretakers. And so, gradually, these new scenes became dominant, and while they did not totally vanquish the recollected horrors they at least push them lower down the list.
'If I think of Chungkai now,' said one on the long flight home, 'I think of the lawns and the flowers.' Not the horror and the brutality. Without exception, they agreed that the journey had somehow helped them to at least start to deal with problems that had haunted them since the War.