Bamboo Heart - inspirations

It’s over ten years since my first novel Bamboo Heart, was first published by Monsoon Books, and I’ve have been thinking back to what first inspired me to write it.

 Bamboo Heart is the story of Tom, a British soldier during WWII who is captured by the Japanese at the fall of Singapore and sent to work on the Thai-Burma railway. Decades later his daughter Laura travels there to try to try to piece together what happened to him during the war.

The seeds of the idea were sown over twenty-five years before that, when I first went to visit the River Kwai and the Death Railway with my mother. I had grown up knowing that my dad had been a prisoner there during the war and that he’d never recovered physically from the experience. Dad died when I was seven, and the urge to find out about his wartime experience grew stronger as I grew older. When I was in my twenties, I decided to go to Thailand to discover as much as I could for myself.

It was not easy then to find information out about what happened to individual prisoners, and I don’t think their records were available in the National Archives as they are now.  But Mum and I travelled to Kanchanaburi, stayed in a bamboo hut right on the river and saw as much as we could of the railway, the bridge on the river Kwai and the only museum that was there at the time – the JEATH museum. It was not an easy experience for either of us, especially for Mum who was of the generation that wanted to forget.

Mum on our hut on the River Kwai, February 1988

During that trip I kept a diary, which was the source of inspiration for quite a few of the scenes in the book and my subsequent books about WWII in Southeast Asia.

But the idea to write a novel based on my father’s wartime experience didn’t come to me until 2010, when I discovered his Liberation Questionnaire in the National Archives in Kew, in which he gave details of the camps he’d been in, and some of the horrific experiences he’d witnessed and experienced. That included the sinking of his transport ship, the Hofuku Maru off Luzon in the Philippines. On that day, 1,047 of the 1,289 British and Dutch POWs on board died. My dad was one of the lucky ones who made it to shore, only to be recaptured and transported on another ‘hell-ship’ to Formosa or Taiwan until the end of the war.

Dad's Liberation Questionnaire with details of his time as a POW

After reading my father’s own account of his experiences, I decided to write Bamboo Heart, the plot of which was based around the events he described. It was first published by Monsoon Books in 2014, and has been well received by readers, winning the Asia Books Blog prize for fiction in Asia in 2015 and being shortlisted for the Singapore Book Awards best fiction title in 2016.

My initial research inspired me to write several more books about WWII in Southeast Asia, now included in my Echoes of Empire Collection. The latest of these, The Lotus House, is about US military nurses and soldiers captured by the Japanese in the Philippines. That was published in October last year and I’m currently working on another book to add to the collection.

Bridge on the River Kwai