Lucky Me!

In 1940 Sapper James (Jim) Curson set sail with his British unit-251 Field Company, Royal Engineers and joined the fleet toIndia. His ship, The Empress of Asia was bombed and sank offthe coast of Singapore. Rescued, he found he'd been reportedmissing, and his wife told he'd been killed in action.When Singapore fell to the Japanese Jim became a prisoner ofwar, toiling in the jungle in the slave labour camps to build theinfamous Burma Railway. The line was completed in a year, butit cost the lives of more than 22,600 POWs and 100,000 nativelabourers. Many of them were buried there. 70 years later, Jimis one of the few survivors who came home, and is still aliveto tell his account of their life; a story that can now be told byonly a few Japanese prisoners on the notorious death railway.He tells of the ability of the human spirit to overcome the mostunbearably cruel conditions ... the misery, brutality, squalor, thediseases, and the starvation the prisoners suffered under theJapanese.Farm boy Jim never gave up hope that he would return to hiswife, and she too held the hope he was alive. Returning to Britainhe found the Japanese nation was being remade to become aWestern ally and nobody wanted to know about the horror he'dbeen through. Despite having to learn to live in civilisation again,Jim and Dorothy lived a happy life for almost seventy years. Thisis his story.