My lost letter from the father I never knew
Ahead of VJ Day, Val Gornell tells Joe Shute of receiving a shock letter from her POW father long after his death
Stern in a sunhat and khaki uniform, what little Valerie Gornell ever knew of her father came from a photograph her mother kept on a bedside table. Lance Corporal James Ambrose had been killed in a Japanese prisoner of war camp in 1943, leaving behind his young wife and infant daughter to whom relatives said he always bore an uncanny resemblance. Val’s mother never remarried and, according to her daughter, never even so much as looked at another man again. “That was my father, really,” she says. “The photograph next to her bed.”
But shortly before her death at the age of 85, Val’s mother, Lucy, decided to open up about her one and only love. She gave Val a first birthday card her father had written from India, and another letter written when she was just 19 months old.
The card he addressed “to my daughter, one of the two things worth fighting for”. In the letter, he imagined their lives when he would return home. “Cheer up, my dear, the day is not far off when your mummy will say ‘Daddy is coming home today’,” he wrote. “Til then, my dear, may God watch over you and your mother.”
For Valerie Gornell, remembrance has always been a private affair. She has declined an invitation to attend the VJ Day commemorations at the National Arboretum this Saturday, and has never previously publicly spoken about her father.
But during the VE Day commemorations earlier this year, she was moved to post a tribute on the Commonwealth War Graves Commission’s digital wall of remembrance for families of the fallen in both world wars. She says she did so to honour the men of the “Forgotten Army” – still fighting in the Far East while Europe celebrated back home. “People always talk about VE Day as the end of the war,” the now 79-yearold says from her home in Cumbria. “But it wasn’t.”
Her parents met at the Phoenix Cycling Club in their native Liverpool in 1933. James Ambrose was a promising amateur cyclist, winning several medals in his youth. Lucy got involved with the club as another rider had married her sister. Both from working class backgrounds, it took them six years to save up to get married. They did so at the Holy Name Catholic Church in Fazakerley shortly after the start of the Second World War.
For six blissful months, they lived together in a rented house near Aintree racecourse, but then Ambrose was called up to fight. Posted to the 13th Battalion of the King’s Liverpool Regiment, he underwent initial training at a base in nearby Formby but, soon after the birth of his daughter, was posted to the Far East.
He set sail from Liverpool for India on December 8 1941, coincidentally his wife’s birthday. They would never see each other again.
In heavily censored letters home,
Ambrose described his work in India, driving supplies between various bases from dawn until dusk. Soon, he was selected for deployment into Burma and underwent harsh “Chindit” training to prepare for combat in the jungle. He was one of 400 or so men from the regiment who survived the whole six months of training and, in February 1943, crossed the Chindwin River to march into Burma.
For months, they operated deep in enemy territory, demolishing railway lines and roads and engaging in fierce fighting. But progress was dogged by poor communication and missed rendezvous points and supply drops.
Eventually, the order came through to disperse and retreat for the border. Ambrose was part of a group of six men that became separated and decided to make for the Chinese border.
Only one of the group, a man called Leon Frank, was to survive, and his diaries make for stark reading. The starving men operated like bandits in the jungles, holding up villages for desperately needed supplies and recruiting guides to lead them to the border. Eventually, they encountered a Japanese patrol. Wracked by malaria and dysentery, weakened by starvation and with no ammunition left for their guns, they were captured.
The men ended up in Rangoon jail. Val has researched the conditions prisoners of war were subjected to there and says they were unimaginably grim. “It was horrible,” she says. “The guards were very cruel. If you didn’t bow every time they looked at you or immediately respond to an order which was in Japanese, you would be beaten. And the food was really the minimum.”
One of the group of six died almost immediately on arrival at the prison, and others would soon follow. Ambrose survived until November before succumbing. Val has not been able to establish the exact cause of her father’s death, only that he “died at the hands” of his captors. Death, she
‘Mum just closed up. In her heart, she believed he was coming back’
says, was ironically where the prison guards showed some humanity. Prisoners were allowed to bury the dead in properly marked graves, and their names were kept on a register. It meant that following the war her father’s remains could be reinterred and transferred to the Rangoon War Cemetery where they are today (and which Val visited in 2003).
Back home in Liverpool, Val’s family faced an agonising wait for news. Her mother, who during the war worked in a factory producing components for munitions, had been informed in 1943 that her husband was missing in action. But his death was not confirmed until May 4, 1945 – just four days before Victory in Europe was declared.
“She just closed up and really didn’t want to know,” Val recalls. “In her heart, she believed he was coming back.”
Val was four years old when news of her father’s death came through. She recalls her extended family gathering at home and one of her cousin’s telling her what had happened. “He was never a person to me up until then,” she says. “It was only when I got older – and later had my own children – I realised how much I had missed not having a dad.”
Her mother, she says, was “fantastic” and took on full-time work at a printing company (where Val also worked and later met her husband, with whom she has three children) to support the two of them.
However, the grief never left her. Val recalls how sad she would become even if she heard a certain song, I’ll Be Seeing You, from a musical they had once seen together. “She was so traumatised by losing my dad, I don’t know if she ever even looked at another man, to be honest.”
The moment before her death, when Val revealed the box of letters, was a cathartic one for mother and daughter. For Val, it put into words the image of the man she had carried in her head for so long.
As for the other personal letters in the box which James Ambrose had written to his young wife, Val could never find them again. She suspects her mother burnt them shortly before her death, carrying the words of her true love with her to the grave.