The memory plays tricks, particularly when you have been a prisoner of war, but for me it has been a life saver. Through years, when, in the burning heat of the day, there was no rest for the racked body from the savage demands of forced labour under brutal tasks masters, memory has been my companion; elusive, yet strangely staunch, fickle with the charm of a woman who stays away for a while only to return with renewed ardour and sweetness.

Memory, carrying the magic nostalgia of happy childhood, would come in the night, too, in those grim times, stealing into the restless dream, extending its familiar hands to be clutched at in the whirling horror of nightmare, soothing with sanity and hope the mad awakenings in the dark and the sickening realisation of yet another day's ordeal to be endured under the sinister yellow smile.

Now, at the beginning of this story, I should like to tell of the bright, clean things in which memory was routed for me; the events that helped to mould me; life in England, where men have rubbed shoulders so long with freedom and the notions of it that they accept it in a particular - and sometime peculiar - way as their birthright. I have no brief for jingoism, but I have come to see, as perhaps I never saw in boyhood or youth, what freedom has meant to the English character. My excuse for saying so is that I learned the hard way what it was to be a slave for years - a slave with a memory of freedom nurtured in a land which for all its faults, is for me a gem of the purest water - and now I am free again; free to write, to express an opinion, and within limits of the law to do as I please without the whip, the bludgeon, or the rifle butt at my back or the boot in my guts.

Yorkshire, the lovely Dales, and Bradford - most of all Bradford - are my background. Bradford, a city of muck and brass, as those who like labels call it. But the label is like all labels; once the gum hardens it falls off and is forgotten. There is, perhaps, no longer as much muck or brass there now, but in the way I think of it neither seems to matter much. It is not so much a thriving industrial city, part of the backbone of England, as a series of parishes tacked on to one another - each with a unit tang, with names as characteristically distinct as regiments in any army. This is a city in a valley and a city on the hills; the grime gets into the blood stream and the spirit of the city is in the soul. I am a Bowling man. (East Bowling, West Bowling-Areas of Bradford). The boundaries of that district mark the limits of my childhood. The cobble back streets some of them mean were my forests of boyhood. This is J. B. Priestley's country. Each street has it sharp memory for me too. Here, for me, is where the notions of loyalty and courage were born; in the dim little back to back houses, and the small through terrace houses.

The winds swept down from the moors; in the streets where comradeship flourished and rivalry found an outlet in polished door knockers and trim, yellow-stoned front steps, in the dark passages of the local stone, the playgrounds of the ragged, the open courts of the imaginative. For all boys, in their different ways, are poets; and Bradford, for me, in those days was a book of poetry. For me it is forever impregnable to the assaults of time. My affection for it is ineradicable. The twinkling lights, the old trams, the rugged winding slopes, the tall blackened mill chimneys, the cobble stones - most of them gone, alas, now - the pie shops, the smell of wool, the cricket grounds; the long jowls, the longer vowels, the men sitting in the sun at the boundary's edge, flat caps shielding their eyes, flinging ribaldry at the Saturday afternoon players between visits to the beer tent.

These are just a few of the pieces that fit into the jigsaw puzzle which is my boyhood Bradford. Each one of my memories of Bradford was for me a fragment of joy and a sustainer of hope in the black years when I was a prisoner of the Japs. I do not suppose that any man is capable of recording accurately everything that has passed through his mind on any single day of his existence, but I am trying here to paint a picture in the broadest terms which will help others to project themselves imaginatively into what feelings and memories I had as a prisoner.

Let us burnish the memory; let us burnish it brightly. Perhaps the brisk polishing will help bring back the glittering, shivering pageant, vivid and sharp to the eyes as if the magic lamp had been rubbed and the past resurrected. There is enough of death and disaster to come; the fire must burn merrily before the ashes sink into the grate.

I was six years old when the 1914-18 war ended, and too young to understand what that holocaust meant both to British and World history. What I remembered most clearly is that in the weeks after the Armistice there was a subtle change in the atmosphere of life in our small house; it was as if spring had come suddenly after a long hard winter. My mother and two elder sisters chatted freely, and there was a distinct air of expectancy of the kind that thrills a child with its mystery and promise. It started with a letter from my brother who was in France with a mule team mobile cook house unit. His news was that he would soon be home on leave. I did not know him at all. He had left for the War a year or two before. To me he was a mythical figure. Fred was always doing something important according to mother, who treated the arrival of his letter with the deference one might have expected to be reserved for a missive from God, but for me there was no physical presence to invest him with reality.

Mother bustled about with increased zest for household work. The fireplace, with its black-leaded range full of odd nooks and crannies - I loved to crouch down before it particularly when the flames roared and the oven was giving off the delicious smell of baking bread - gleamed with a fantastic brightness after all the brushing and rubbing. The chair covers were washed; the ornaments dusted endlessly, the rugs given an airing; the linen on the beds was a white dream of crispness; and I began to get more and more excited as the days slipped by and my brother's home coming came nearer.

The day arrived. In walked my brother in his khaki uniform, his legs putteed from the ankles to the knees, his buttons shining on his tunic, and the West Yorkshire Regiment badge standing out like a star on his peaked cap. He was laden with side packs and kit bag, and carried a rifle. Altogether I was a bit disappointed, he looked - what shall I say? - cumbersome to me, although I have no doubt that at the time I hadn't the faintest notion that the word existed. It was the kit bag I was really interested in, I think; it 'bulged'. I must have been rather impatient until the preliminaries were over and the meal was eaten. The big moment was when the kit bag was opened. Out came the presents - something for mother, something for my sisters. And for me? nothing for me? Fred grinned and dipped deep into the bag. Out they came, one by one, produced with the air of a magician. A toy engine, two coaches, seven or eight pieces of shiny tin rail track. My delight knew no bounds. Fred was down on his knees assembling the lines in a small circle on the hearth rug. He put the engine and the trucks on the track. He wound the engine up, released the starting catch and the train clicked smartly over the track. It had suddenly become the most important thing in my life. Fred's gift, one of the most vivid memory of my early childhood. When he went back to his unit I continued to play with it endlessly on the hearth rug. I do not know how long it maintained priority among my prized possessions. A child, a toy train, and a circle of metal on a hearth rug; the scene must have had its counterpart in countless millions of homes. For me, the train became part of the mystical warp and weft of memory; I never forgot it.

Even today I can picture it as clearly as on the day I first saw it. I do not know what eventually became of it. All I know is that over the years, touched by the hidden springs of memory, it has loomed up clear in the mind, whirling away over the lines, edging out of the way, inexplicably, the work of the moment exerting its supremacy at the strangest times and in the quaintest places; it has even invaded my dreams in far off Thailand. These may be matters for the mind experts, to play with and to analyse; but in the most intimate sense the toy train has been with me most of my life. Is it coincidence that in the years to come one of the most harrowing experiences it has been my misfortune to undergo was concerned with the building of a railroad track - the "Death Railway" for the Japs? I leave it to others wiser than I to conjecture. The little red train goes chucking on ...... it has far to go, believe me.

And now the sea. It is the sea which has played perhaps the most vital and terrifying part in the pattern of my war life. It is scarcely surprising that one brought up as a landlubber trapped in the close- ringed hills merging into the inland Yorkshire moors, should have no innate love of it, though I have met Bradford lads who for one reason or another, have been mysteriously moved by it and unable to wait with patience for the day when they could go off to fight it, woo it, and sell their life to it. I am not of that breed, but I have profounds admiration for those who are. I found it odd that one of my most vivid memories is of my first holiday away from theYorkshire or Lancashire areas; it was my first sea trip, and I went to the Isle of Man. I remember that I had considerable difficulty in persuading my father and mother that I was old enough to travel so far away with four of my friends. For the record I was seventeen years old. As a school boy I never travelled far from home, and only on rare occasions did I spent a day at the seaside. I looked enviously at my sisters when they went off on their annual summer holidays; since they were older than I they were presumably capable of surviving the colossal dangers to life and limb which, if mother was to be believed, lurked in those Yorkshire and Lancashire coastal resorts, the haunts of pleasure. I can see my sisters now, with their laden suit cases and raincoats strapped on the outer side, stepping gaily out of the house to catch their early morning holiday train. They always came back safely enough; this sometimes surprised me as a boy in the light of mother's fears, and I suppose in someways I cherished a slight resentment that they always returned unscathed and brimful of zest. Still, there was always the stick of peppermint rock for consolation, with Blackpool, Morecombe or Scarborough running through the centre, and an outsized mint humbug for good measure.

I remembered that on that first sea journey the crossing was perfect under a clear blue sky, with hardly a ripple on the water. The return journey was vicious. The boat pitched and tossed in the rough seas, and most of the holiday passengers were ill. My friends and I were immune. We sat on the upper deck, ripping out song after song to the accompaniment of the ukulele, which was popular in those days. I don't think the seasick cared much for our singing. I learned on that trip that I was a reasonably good sailor. The ship berthed at Liverpool. I was to visit that port again - in a mood far from the spirit of holiday making. Perhaps it is as well I had no inkling of things to come. I ought to stress that it was a very rough sea. There were to be more for me later.

When I left school I went into what was, for me, a new world of dazzling adventure. I started my working life as a copy runner in the local newspaper office. I was a round face, stocky little lad, with wiry hair which persisted in springing up around my head however much I brushed it. I wore short trousers, I was scrupulously clean - mother, with her iron notions of respectability, decency, and what was proper for boys, saw to that. Ernest, one of the senior reporters on the paper, a jovial man, was soon a friend of mine; he always maintained he had never seen a Yorkshire lad with better scrubbed knees. He contended that this was a major achievement for a boy in the smut and grime of a northern climate. "There's perfection - or is it 'PEARS'?", he would say jocularly. He was plumpish, with a clear complexion, and meticulously dressed. His hands were those of a man of method. His work was as neat and tidy as his appearance. To me the shorthand outlines in his notebook were a never failing source of wonderment. They were beautifully done and when I entered later into the mysteries of shorthand writing I became expert enough to read his notes almost as well as he could himself. They was no reason for me to preen myself about this; the outlines were exquisite - the copperplate stuff.

It is a joy now for me to recall the men among whom I worked. They taught me the sound basic principles of newspaper life. Mostly, it seems to me, they were men with a mission. Certainly, there are some of them employed now in Fleet Street. Their names could be mentioned without embarrassment on "The Times", "The Observers", "The News Chronicle" and other papers. They were individuals in the best sense, proud to fight in the battle of daily journalism. The bedrock standards were those of the good, traditional English provincial newspaper. It is a matter of regret to me that "The Yorkshire Observer" no longer exists as a separate entity; its death after the war had, for me, the numbing effect of a ship going down.

I remember with gratitude Robert, another senior reporter at the time about which I write. He is now well known in Fleet Street and on TV. He seemed to write with a sort of effortless ease, typing out sheet after sheet of his special articles in a way that impressed me mightily. He was a kindly chap, too. He always seemed to want a lot of shopping done for him. I usually ran the errands, and mostly he would reward me with a six penny tip. Six pence then was a sum of consequence to me. The newsman will understand how the fever for journalism gets into the system. I fingers over the key board of the typewriter, churning out news items with the relentless persistence of looms weaving cloth in a textile mill. Experience may convince us that many yards of that copy were not as scintillating as the production appeared to be to the onlooker; but it was the manner, the mode, that mattered to me then, as it usually matters to the young. This was exhilarating; this was life, reflected and mirrored in the minds of men touched with the magic of words. They were happy days. Even when I had to slog up and down the stairways of the building - it had never been erected specifically for newspaper purposes and still retained a perplexing topography with quaint little rooms leading of corridors. It was fun finding out where the various departments were, stopping to pick up a bit of useful information, or rushing out to collect stories from reporters sitting at the courts held in the Town Hall or at the old West Riding Courthouse, (pillared portico fluted Corinthian columns and an air of disgruntle resentment, as if it ought never to have been put up in smoky Bradford, but belonged to the loftier realm of far off Greece).

Getting into the city court was at first difficult for me because I was in short trousers. Policemen loomed over me everyday to ask the same tedious question, "are you fifteen years old?" The moral quandary was swiftly resolved; I lied. The alternative -failing to pick up bright, new shining copy from the courts, with the hungry presses waiting - was more than I could bear in my inflexible loyalty to the cause. I would return hot footed to the office to hand the collected copy over to the chief sub-editor, secretly gloating in my triumph. He was an elderly man, a gentleman, who never seemed to get flustered and never lost his temper, what ever the crisis. He endlessly thumbed through the news reports which clicked into the office throughout the day. If I was late and deserved a rebuke, he always ticked me off with an air of apology which had the impact almost of praise. Robbie was a sort of second father to me.

One of my duties was to fetch tea, coffee and snacks for the editorial men from the office canteen. I should think that no body of men in the world drink more tea and coffee - to go no further than that - newspaper men. My mid morning, lunch time and afternoon trips in the canteen were a matter of breviary. On top of that men would bring mashings of tea which I brewed up for them several times a day in pint pots. Ceylon ought to be grateful! Rotund Thomas Edward, the sports sub, was the terror. He had huge bushy eyebrows, and across his heavy face spread the most luxuriant, wax-ended moustache I have ever seen. Sometimes, as he leaned over the desk, it would droop with the inexpressible elegance of a mandarin's whiskers. He had to be served with tea and sandwiches right on the dot. This was not always possible. When his meal was late Tom would bellow so loudly that they could hear the noise two storeys up. At first, I perceptibly flinched; but gradually I came to realise that his bark was worse than his bite. He was golden-hearted, really, but the gold seemed tarnished occasionally to an impressionable boy.

Another part of my duties, was to go to the nearby confectioner's shop for food, and to the pork butcher's for hot meat pies, cornish pasties and succulent pork sandwiches, famed throughout the area, that oozed with grease. It was Len, another reporter, who was the hot pie and pork sandwich specialist. His face was round and jolly, wreathed in perpetual smiles. He was the office humorist, fond of the leg-pull, master, when he pleased, of the look of feigned innocence and the exploding verbal cracker. He ate his snacks with tremendous gusto smacking his lips as the hot juice of the pies spilled down his chin. His way of tackling a pork sandwich had a near Dickensian quaintness. His teeth would drive deeper and deeper into the pork until his eyes seemed to be popping almost out of his head. Then, in some incredible way, he would manage to convey through to the mass of meat and bread that this, this particular sandwich, was the best, the finest, the most juicy he had ever had the good fortune to eat; as everybody knew ....champ champ, champ.... he wasn't .... champ, champ, champ ..... really very partial .....champ champ champ..... to per per pork.

Sometimes Len - an artist, too, with water colours and brushes, would arrive at the office with a carrier bag containing tripe and udder, and a bottle of mustard sauce. He would remove these delicacies, place the paper bag on the office table and then liberally adorn the tripe with sauce. As he devoured the food, the water from the tripe would drip to the floor from his fingers. The whole performance was so crammed with joy of living - and eating - that nobody found it offensive. It was fascinating to me. I had never before seen anything remotely like it. He was an expert on all stories eccentric and curious. If a parrot, a monkey, a cat, and an alligator could live in harmony in a bathroom, Len was the man to get the news. If a wood existed in which 90% of the tree bore lovers' markings carved into the bark and the rest had withered and stunted, Len got the story. He had an unerring eye for the fantastic and sometimes in his makeup redolent of all that Pickwick Papers conveys in terms of inns, coaching, and essential cheeriness. He used to tell a story of how he once came up in the office lift with a horse, but I cannot say whether it was true or false. There was a comic genius in Len when he was in top form.

The editor, a stern Yorkshire man, was small and dapper with crisp grey hair and a bristling moustache. He was a disciplinarian. One always knew when he was coming. One learned to listen for his distinctive walk - the short steps, the soles and heels of his shoes tapping smartly on the composition floor of the corridor linking his sparsely furnished room with the editorial offices. He had a habit of tapping on the wall with his pencil as he walked along. From the first day I saw him I was never really at ease in his presence, and I held him in awe until well into my late teens. I do not think I was alone in that feeling. His favourite trick was to march briskly into the reporters' room, look round keenly, pick out one of the cub reporters and indicate to him that he was needed. The cub, with notebook in hand, would follow the editor back to his sanctum like a lamb going to slaughter. The editor would pick up the latest edition of the paper and begin a shorthand dictation lesson. If it was not accurately transcribed the fireworks began. I soon found myself among those marked out for special interest, and decided that the best thing I could do would be to study shorthand at a night school class. I got on quite well, and became reasonably proficient as time went on - but I never cared to hear the editor's bell tinkle. This meant that I had to go into his room to take down correspondence replies. More than once I was sternly rebuked for a typing error or a grammatical mistake; he was a stickler for perfection. I have no doubt he was an excellent editor. I can only say that when he retired I was conscious of a certain relaxing of tension.

Over the years the pageant of personalities grew. There was yet another Tom, who wrote our nature notes. I shall never forget the chagrin over one paragraph he telephoned into the office for publication next day. I took down his notes and retyped them. He loved to write about the birds, the busy bees and the flowers; on this occasion is was about flowers. - the wood anemone, in fact. Unfortunately, this was misheard over the 'phone and, inexplicably, got into the paper as the "wooden enemy". He eventually saw the funny side of it, too.

Then there was Charles, a brilliant writer, if sometimes rather unorthodox. He was quite capable of sitting down at a moment's notice and writing a column - or two columns, if need be - of fine, readable gossip. He was music critic, too. He had a sense of humour which found an ideal foil in Len's. Their joint buffoonery was something to be watched and heard. The pageant of personalities grows .... for those years are rich in memories.

Who could forget the sight of Chris, bowler-hatted, pacing up and down the office floor as he thought out his approach to stories. Round and round he would go, deep in thought, for minute after minute. Then, suddenly, he would dart to the typewriter, and rattle off his copy without stopping once. A legacy of his 1914 - 18 war service was a shaking hand; in consequence he wrote only about six shorthand outlines, huge, grotesque, like the rambling of a drunken spider, to one page of a notebook. It used to be part of my duty to help him to read his notes from time to time, particularly if he had been to a local dinner and dined and wined too well, as he occasionally did.

There was Harold - "Hal" to everyone - tall, willowy, gentle, lover of the woods and the dales. He would get up at six in the morning to explore the woods near to his home before coming to the office. It was said he knew every birds' nest in the woods, noted where every leaf fell. He was excellent to work with and for, and now -though he is gone, alas! - I am glad to say how much I owe to his interest and advice. There are many others who would say the same about him. He had the knack of gaining mens sympathy.

So I learned about newspaper life - with and through men who had dedicated their lives to it; learned the smooth feel of the well-worn bannisters leading up to the editorial department; sniffed daily the unique smell of the building, compounded of printer's ink and dust and the faint odours of strange cookery; felt the drum and beat and hum of the presses; had ground into my being the challenge of the clock, the fight against time, the battle of the whirling words; and learned to thrill, as every newsman does, when the new, warm, clean folded copies of the latest edition came up, scented, as it were, with the romance of life lived as the world lives it. This was the stuff that got into my bloodstream with the grime and wonder of Bradford; the stuff which memories are made.

In years to come when I had drifted away from the familiar faces, the men I knew so well - leaning over a ship's rail, toiling with pick and shovel in distant lands, sweating in the hot suns, turning restlessly in a rough bed, smarting under the heel of the tyrant, yearning, dreaming, hoping, praying, suffering, and at last rejoicing again after surviving the hell which transcended anything I could have imagined - in those years, these were part of the secret food that sustained me when, it seemed, the long exhausted body, drained of every vestige of strength, at the limit of its endurance, must succumb. What sort of justice is involved in all this, if there be any justice, what the meaning, what the significance of the test - these are questions I cannot begin to answer. But I know this; if there be any man alive who, in times of plenty, would turn up his nose at a good home-cooked dinner - Yorkshire pudding, thick brown gravy, roast beef and baked potatoes - followed by the ineffable joy of being able to sit back by his own fireside in a cosy armchair, he has not yet begun to understand what a privileged man he is.