War hero, artist, poet, 97, seeks someone to talk to
THE SILVER LINE Former PoW Jack King has led an incredibly rich life. Our Christmas charity allows him to talk about it, finds Boudicca FoxLeonard
Paintings fill the walls of Jack King’s home near Eastbourne; impasto mountainscapes, prosaic still lives of cooking apples from the garden, the coastguard cottages at Birling Gap.
They’re all by one artist; King. He’s spent a lifetime painting. As a child growing up on the south coast he covered his exercise books in sketches of burly cavemen, and as an adult working various jobs to raise his family, painting was his pastime-passion.
He and his wife Audrey used to go down to the Seven Sisters and watch cloud shadows on the sea and cliffs. “Sometimes the sun was like a searchlight on the cliffs,” smiles Jack.
Now, though, it’s just him. Audrey died seven years ago after 65 years of marriage. Two strokes left her unable to communicate, but King visited her every day in the nursing home near to their home, and held her hand. His own failing health means he is now housebound. An old shrapnel wound from his time as a prisoner on the Burma Death Railway during the Second World War means he has trouble walking. He has had multiple hip replacements, and could really do with another. “I’m too old, they say.”
Life can be lonely. He has three sons but they all live a good few hours’ drive away. Yet King has never struggled to fill his days. Painting isn’t his only love.
He’s written more than 40 novels, as well as an account of his three years in Burma (now Myanmar), and a delightful book on how to paint watercolours; all of which are available on Amazon under the name Jack P King. He used to play and write organ music, too.
His has been a life full of enviable talents, but in recent months macular degeneration has caused his eyesight to fade dramatically and life has changed.
The problem is that he may be 97, but he doesn’t feel it. “That’s the trouble,” he says with quiet resolution. “You are the same person but you’re trapped in a body that’s getting older and older and more and more useless. And you get frustrated because you cannot do the things that you did. Simple things. And now I’m losing my sight, so I can’t paint any more.”
Beautiful low winter light fills the sitting-room; in the corner is his electric organ, that he can no longer play. At the bottom of his south-facing garden is his painting studio. It’s filled with canvasses of all sizes; Tahitian ladies in the style of Gauguin, pastoral scenes after Pissarro.
My favourite painting is of two shimmering sardines on a plate. “I was in town one day and saw them in the fishmongers; they looked beautiful,” he recalls. “I took them home and was painting them in my studio, when Audrey kept coming down to look in the door. I thought, ‘That’s strange, she’s taking an interest in my art!’. But as soon as I was done she whipped them away and we had them for tea,” he laughs. “They’re all foggy to me now though,” he adds gesturing to the walls.
Writing has become his solace. “I sit at the computer with the font set at 72, and I still have a job to see it even with a magnifying glass,” he says with a laugh. “But I do write every day. At the moment it’s poetry.” He wrote four poems last weekend. It helps to keep the loneliness of the weekends at bay.
“Sometimes it gets to me,” he admits. “Saturday is usually the black day. But I keep myself busy and I find the days go by quite well.” There’s no self-pity here. King understands that his three sons – the eldest is himself in his 70s – have their own demanding lives. They may phone, but travelling down to visit isn’t something they can do often.
King is equally sanguine about his lack of local community. He has one regular visitor, a woman he met when she was 12 and attended a painting class of his. Now 46, she comes and helps him with odd jobs. Most importantly she makes sure all his poems are correctly typed up so they can be printed off and placed in a binder. All his original neighbours are gone. “They all died,” says King. “Now everyone around me is young – people with their families. They’re not interested in an old codger like me.”
King, though, has a mind full of thoughts, ideas and interests. And like all of us, a need for conversation. And so when he saw an advert for The Silver Line, he decided to contact them. The Silver Line, one of three charities supported in this year’s Telegraph Christmas Charity Appeal, is a 24-hour helpline set up by Dame Esther Rantzen, which gives lonely elderly people someone to talk to, any time, day or night.
Now every Wednesday at midday a lady in her 60s called Chrissy calls him to have a chat. “It’s something that I look forward to,” says King. “We have a good laugh, usually.” That they have similar interests is wonderful. They talk about poetry, and music; King is a huge fan of the violinist and conductor André Rieu, whom he recommended to Chrissy.
“Generally we have a very interesting conversation about other things as well. Sometimes I’ll read her one of my poems, if I can see it. And she will read a poem to me from a book that she likes. We usually overrun!”
It’s easy to imagine how time flies. Talking to King is a pleasure. There’s a quiet reserve that masks a rich life.
There was a time when he never talked about his experience in Burma – “People weren’t that interested” – but that has changed. He shows me the piece of shrapnel that was lodged in his hip for more than 30 years, as well as a substantial piece of rock that flew across the river Kwai when they were blasting the cliffs. “It made a hole in my forehead the size of a penny. The medical officer washed the fragments off my brain with boiling water. He had two tablets – antibacterials – and he crushed one and plugged up the hole. The other he gave me to take. Then we waited to see what happened. I came round, so I was all right,” he smiles.
At age 60 he wrote and illustrated his account of those difficult years of malaria and near death, called A Magic Shadow Show. The title is a quote from The Rubaiyat of Omar Khayyam, which King recites:
‘Sometimes it gets to me. Saturday is the black day. But I keep busy and the days go by quite well’
“For in and out, above, about, below ‘Tis nothing but a Magic Shadow-show Play’d in a box whose candle is the sun Round which we phantom figures come and go.”
At his request I take down one of the neat volumes of his poetry and read one aloud to him.
“You read that beautifully,” he says kindly, afterwards. I wonder how many other elderly, interesting and interested (Jack asks me plenty of questions about me) people there are out there unable to leave their homes but still very much engaged with the world. And how The Silver Line is providing a lifeline for them all.
To make a donation to this year’s appeal, visit telegraph.co.uk/ charity or see the form, left