Jack weighed just six and a half stones

WHEN Jack Massey came back from war, aged 27, he weighed six-and-a-half stone – about half his normal weight. Years after his imprisonment in a Japanese PoW camp, his young daughter Jan would hear him sobbing in the next bedroom at their home in Newbold Verdon.

Jan, now 65, said: “No-one would guess the hell he’d been through.

“He never spoke about his three-year incarceration and always showed a happy face to the outside world.

“He was popular and well-known as a cheerful person.”

A conductor on Brown’s Blue Buses in Leicester, he later worked at Ratby Engineering.

Jan only became aware of the terrible traumas he had faced in the war when she was older. Even then only bits of it ever came out.

He had joined the Leicestershire Regiment aged 18, five years before the war, having lived in Broad Lane, Markfield, with his parents and two younger sisters.

When war broke out, he served in India and fought in the Malaya Campaign.

After action in many crucial battles, Pte Massey was captured near the Thai border, where the Tigers and Second East Surrey Regiment had formed an alliance

Battalion.

He was taken prisoner on February 15, 1942, with many other soldiers from the Battalion

As a prisoner, he was put to work on the Thai Burma railway – known as the Railway of Death because so many died labouring there, with nothing to eat but rice.

He suffered dysentery and malaria, yet managed to survive.

Scratched in the bottom of his food tin, which always only contained rice, the Japanese had cruelly inscribed “Ham and Eggs” to remind the soldiers what they were missing.

In a form of defiance, Jack decorated the outside of the tin with names of comrades and friends.

Once home, he would refuse to eat rice ever again.

Jan recalls that all his life, her dad could not bear to be in a dark enclosed space.

“He could never stand to have the curtains closed and I wondered why.” she said.

“It emerged that while he was a PoW he was incarcerated in a hole in the ground in total darkness, like being buried alive.

“Even at his funeral in 2010 our family decided that to honour his memory we would not allow the curtains to close on his coffin.”

The soldiers suffered such physical and mental cruelty it is not surprising Jack had flashbacks all his life and, when Jan was 17 – over 20 years after the war ended – he suffered a nervous breakdown.

Jan said: “We know now he obviously suffered post-traumatic stress disorder.

“He had always had night terrors and when he later developed stomach cancer, medics said it was a direct result of his ordeal.”