‘I don’t wish anybody else to go through it’
Arthur Massey, 97, served in the Royal Engineers during the Burma Campaign. He met his wife Marge while on leave and they’ve been married 73 years
Arthur Massey, 97, grew up in Wrexham and joined up at 18. He served in the Royal Engineers during the Burma Campaign. Far from home, British forces fought Japanese soldiers in searing heat. “It was terrible,” he says. “I don’t wish anybody else to go through it. I’d like to leave my pals there to sleep in peace.”
Massey twice contracted dysentery and was laid low for 11 months. He shares few details of what else went on, but he lost many friends. Does he ever talk about it? “I think about it,” he says, “but I don’t talk about it.”
He and Marge, his wife of 73 years, have four daughters, five grandchildren
and three great-grandchildren. Sometimes members of younger generations are curious about what Arthur did in the war, but he spares them the worst. “I try to be diplomatic. I don’t want to frighten them.”
The Burma Campaign was won at great cost. Massey embarked on a long journey home that involved stopping in Alexandria for three months on account of a damaged ship. The journey also involved a “belly flop” landing – when a plane lands without landing gear. “There were a couple of splinters, but nothing serious,” says Massey.
He is one of two men remaining in the North Wales branch of the Burma Star Association, an organisation for Burma veterans. Is that lonely? “Yes, it is,” he says.
He stayed in the Army for two years following the war, and was sent to India and then Iraq. Having met Marge while on leave, they married in 1948, and still live together in Wrexham. “A long time, that is!” says Massey with delight.
Marge, 93, who worked in munitions during the war, remembers sitting round the radio with her family on September 3, 1939. Together, they listened to the announcement that Britain was at war with Germany.
The country stuck together, she recalls: “Everybody helped each other”, even through the darkest periods. There was a point where she thought Britain might lose. “We nearly did lose it too. Arthur saw more of that than me, of course, because he was in Burma.”
Marge considers remembrance to be “very well done” in this country, and fondly recalls going to London with Arthur for the 70th anniversary of VJ Day. They laid a wreath on the Cenotaph and met Prince Charles. “It was marvellous.”
Those six years at war must have been extraordinarily difficult. What does Marge consider the most important thing to get across to her younger relations? “I tell them how lucky we are that we’re not speaking German!” she says, with gentle laughter.
I don’t ask Massey anything further about his war. He’s never written it down and doesn’t seem inclined to. His daughter Julie Birrell, 63, whom I speak to later, remembers stories about the men Arthur knew and the pet dog he kept, but didn’t find out much more until she interviewed him for a history course a few years ago.
“Those stories, which are important, will die with him. The voices are very few now from that time. If it goes with him, there is nothing to show what he did,” she says, her voice beginning to crack. “I’m getting upset. But I do feel it’s important that we know what he did by remembering what he wants us to remember. He doesn’t want us to know about a lot of the things that happened. But I think it’s important to remember what he did go through – willingly.”
Birrell, a nurse and former nursing lecturer, sells poppies every year with one of her sisters, Jacqui, 62. “It’s not about honouring war,” says Julie. “War’s a terrible thing. But it’s about honouring the sacrifice they made, and saying thank you for the world and the freedoms we have today.”
Buying a poppy, observing a twominute silence and preserving war stories are all well and good, but the debt we owe to people like Arthur is greater than we can ever repay.