The serial: Largie Castle, A Rifled Nest Day 98

The prelate’s visits helped Daisy by providing her with spiritual stability and a means of strengthening her faith

Colonel Stewart, Angus Rose, and David Wilson reached Colombo in Ceylon on March 2, 1942, the day the Rooseboom was expected. After three days’ rest at the Galle Face Hotel, the officers caught a train to Delhi where they formed a ‘jungle training team.’ During his voyage and after reaching dry land, Stewart prepared a talk on the Argylls and the Malayan Campaign, broadcast and read by a senior army officer in Bombay on March 10.

Stewart’s party departed Singapore on the morning of February 12 on The Durban, a Royal Navy cruiser and arrived the following evening in Batavia, Java. From there, they boarded The Pankor, a bomb damaged Malayan steamer and sailed up the west coast of Sumatra and, after dodging enemy aircraft and submarines, they reached Colombo 10 days later.

Returning to the War Office letter, perhaps the disinterested correspondent had some prescience when he or she advised Daisy to notify the department of her new address if she moved house. Maybe grieving widows and mothers tend to up sticks and move. For this is what Daisy did. Agreement Early that summer she ‘flitted,’ but not far, just a couple of miles up the road to Ballure. At that time Cosmo Lang was the tenant, so Daisy asked if she could have the house back.

They came to an agreement that, provided Daisy let Lang stay there each summer for as long as he liked, she could live at Ballure.

Daisy moved with the bow tie-wearing Robert in a horse-drawn cart piled with her furniture. The move was easy; she had made many when she let Largie for the shooting.

Still, my grandmother clung to her hope that Angus was alive. The worst of it was not knowing. At least Violet was certain of Martin’s fate. Because his death was unequivocal she could grieve properly and even visit her son’s grave. Her twin sister had no such ‘luxury’.

In all cultures, grieving families wish to retrieve the remains of their fallen servicemen so they can bury them with honour.

In Angus’s case, because his body was never found, there was no certainty and Daisy was left in limbo poised between hope and despair. As she received no official recognition or death certificate, she could hold no funeral ceremony, burial, entombment, or scattering of ashes for Angus.

So the grief cycle of shock, numbness and disbelief was suspended.

There was a stop-go effect on the family’s consciousness and they were unable to break ties with the deceased, which is necessary for mourning. They were also unable to reintegrate the loved one’s memory into themselves and thereby find closure.

The confusion as to what had happened to Angus froze the grieving, and Daisy was unable to move forward. What was she to think? Was her loss final or temporary? Were there not tales of men, long after they were reported missing, emerging alive from the jungle or found on desert islands?

There was, however, plenty to divert the lady’s attention. She redesigned a border on the house’s west-facing wall and planted tulips and lilies and read books in the summer house that looked out on to the islands. By mid June, Ballure’s tenant returned. Stability Lang hadn’t visited since before the outbreak of war. Driven in his old Morris by Mr Wells, his chauffeur, he arrived wearing a plain collar and tie. He stayed for 2½ months, drew strength from his visits to the Cell, the small room he used as a personal chapel, and excursions to Rhunahaorine Point, but was peeved to find his favourite walk spoiled by the Admiralty’s firing range.

The prelate’s visits helped Daisy by providing her with spiritual stability and a means of strengthening her faith. He was a trusted friend who, in spite of his high ecclesiastical position, was also a good companion. Their High Anglican orthodoxy was a given, yet they resorted to a monastic simplicity when celebrating the liturgy in the Cell.

Anglo-Catholicism was a comfort to Daisy; it protected her from more extreme religious practices such as spiritualism. A friend suggested she consult a medium, to see if she was able to find out anything about Angus but she refused. My grandmother had a horror of “contacting the dead” even though her generation, who lost so many young men during The Great War, were keen on occultism.

While her father campaigned in South Africa, Daisy’s older brother, Colville experimented with “table-turning”. This alarmed the Crabbes, especially when “messages from the other side” proved wildly doom-laden and inaccurate.

On May 8 1945, the war in Europe ended but Prime Minister Mr Churchill’s address to the nation that day was cautionary. The conflict in the Far East was far from over. Only after America dropped an atom bomb on Hiroshima and another on Nagasaki did Japan surrender.

Indeed, on September 2, on board the USS Missouri, she signed an unconditional surrender. Closer to home, Daisy’s son-in-law Henry Rogers was repatriated on April 23 from a German prisoner of war camp. But there was still no news of Angus. Secrecy In late October, ships full of Far East prisoners of war and internees arrived at Liverpool’s docks. The Japanese had held them in captivity in countries as far flung as Hong Kong, Sumatra, Thailand, Malaya, Singapore, and Japan.

Before these men and women, weak from starvation, disease and other forms of physical abuse, shuffled to freedom down their ship’s gangway, they agreed to swear an oath of secrecy about the treatment they had received.

They were the lucky ones; thousands had died building railways, working down mines, and constructing roads, buildings, and bridges. When peace came, some were so weak that they died on the voyage home while survivors suffered for years afterwards with medical conditions.

The worst legacy was the psychological damage. The horrors of that period never left the former POWs. When Daisy learned about the torture and starvation these servicemen suffered, she was relieved that her son had not worked on the infamous “death railway” or laboured down a Japanese mine. She was convinced that Angus would have died in captivity. “He was too tall,” she said. “It was the short, wiry type who coped best.”

More tomorrow