The serial: Largie Castle, A Rifled Nest Day 105

Daisy and her surviving children were deeply affected by the publication of Gibson’s story

This begs the question, that if he had admitted to any more injuries in court, the judge might have asked how he could have survived at all. It’s possible that from the very beginning, Gibson feigned his injuries so he could receive better treatment on the boat. When reading Gibson’s account, we learn that the detail in the Scottish Sunday Express and Reader’s Digest articles is fuller than what was revealed in court but the book published in 1952 has much more information in it than the articles.

This points to the fact the author embroidered and embellished his story step-by-step from the court testimony to the articles and finally the narrative of the Boat. But memory in general is usually fuller at the outset of recall.

One must take into consideration Gibson was writing at least seven years after the event took place and after he had experienced unimaginable trauma: a brutal trek through the Malayan jungle, 26 days on the boat, and four days’ interrogation by the Japanese after his capture on Sipora island.

His captors flung him in an empty cell without food for three days, punched, pummelled, and forced him to kneel for hours on a block of wood three feet long, four feet wide, and two feet thick. Shortly before the end of the war when Gibson was a passenger on a cargo steamer, the Americans torpedoed his vessel conveying him and other prisoners of war from Sumatra to Thailand.

The Times reviewer wrote that the Boat was “sensational on the face of it” and certainly it played to the lowest possible denominator. Gibson refers to the Japanese as pederasts although admittedly during the late 1940s and early ’50s attitudes towards homosexuality were very different to today.

In his attitude towards the young Chinese woman, Doris Lim, he is unabashed. He admits to being attracted to her: “I was seized with a male urge towards the girl as she lay in my arms. I began to fondle her.” “Please let me die in peace,” was her telling rebuff. The reader might well wonder if his approach was as decorous as he described. Apart from bashing a number of occupants over the head and pushing them overboard, he may well have felt entitled to force sex on the young woman.

Gibson explains that he and others on the boat were forced to rush “the murder gang” off the boat but who is to know which group or person did the killing? And if he was in charge of the rations, who could stop him from grabbing them for himself? It’s my guess that if he established himself as alpha male, the woman had no other option but to submit. In such circumstances, it is not the virtuous who survive but the most ruthless.

Gibson gives his reasons why he remained alive but we only have his word on that issue. When members of the Javanese crew on the boat slashed a dying soldier and plunged their hands into the wound and drew out some flesh, which they ate, who is to know if Gibson also joined in?

If the Javanese were the wolves, Gibson may well have been the hyena. Even his peers in the battalion suggest he was capable of such an act.

“Do you know,” suggested Eric Moss, “what most of us think happened to that wee Chinese girl who was in the boat with Gibson. We think he ate her!”

As the saying goes, many a true word is said in jest. Final moments Needless to say, Daisy and her surviving children were deeply affected by the publication of Gibson’s story in which he describes the final moments of Angus’s life.

It had been a long wait to know the truth, from the time when my grandmother received the War Office telegram in March 1942, announcing her son was missing, until the moment in June 1949 when Gibson gave his court testimony. During those intervening years, the family had tried to come to terms with their predicament. First, they entertained hope, which soon gave way to despair and finally acceptance Angus was dead.

While they struggled with the uncertainty, his siblings got on with their lives in a manner similar to Vera Brittain who, after the end of the Great War during which her fiancé and brother were killed, wrote in Testament of Youth that “if the living are to be of any use in this world, they must always break faith with the dead”.

In September 1947 mum married a man, the same height and age as her lost brother, who had attended the same prep school and, as an undergraduate, learned to fly not at Oxford but Cambridge.

There the similarity ended; after leaving university, my father continued to fly, by serving during the war in Bomber Command as a squadron leader. My parents’ wedding photograph reveals a delighted groom and a reserved but beautiful bride with “sad eyes”, observed sister Lis many years later.

Post-war austerity allowed mum no bouquet of flowers; she carried instead a small prayer book, its end covers lined in ivory, and the impersonal Edinburgh church where they tied the knot was a far cry from the intimate Largie chapel where the wedding ceremony of Esther’s older sister had taken place between the wars. In June 1948, Esther gave birth to me and adjustment to motherhood was hard especially as her father-in-law Hugh Gladstone died in spring 1949 and his wife Cecil three months later.

My father was thus unable to offer Esther substantive support with the outcome of Simon’s court petition in June that year. Hugh’s will deemed dad would inherit little from his sizeable estate, the lion’s share going to John, his older brother.

I have a framed photograph of me taking my first baby steps in a hayfield on dad’s farm in Berkshire. I had always regarded the occasion as idyllic with an attentive mum, slim and elegant in her Macdonald tartan skirt, and in the background the benign presence of an old cart-horse called Captain, but this domestic scene belies the tales of mayhem and horror spewed up by Gibson at that time in Edinburgh’s Court of Session.

After Gibson’s disclosures Angus, it seemed, suffered not one death, but two; his actual demise when he died of exposure, thirst and exhaustion, before falling off a raft at night into the Indian Ocean, and a more insidious death: the killing of his reputation. It goes without saying that Angus had no resting place, headstone or funeral.

His death also robbed him of the inheritance, held in trust for him since he was six. On leaving the army, therefore, he could have looked forward to owning an ancient title, the laird of Lee and Carnwath, a magnificent castle surrounded by farms of fertile fields, hills, lochs, moorland and woods.

Most importantly, Angus, as inheritor of the Lee and Carnwath estate, was to unite the Lockharts and Macdonalds. After Charles Lockhart and Elizabeth Macdonald married in the 18th Century, the two families fell out. Angus would unite them again just as he, the Macdonalds’ third child, acted as a bridge between his older siblings (Jock and Douna) and the younger (Simon and Esther).

His role of connecting and liaison was what he excelled at. As an army officer and chief of staff of his brigade, his job was to provide a link between higher command and the fighting companies in the field. More tomorrow