The Missing Years

A Secret Memoir of Living Hell ... Revisited.British officer Capt Hugh Pilkington of the Royal Norfolks enjoyed the full and fun life of a rubber planter in pre-war Malaya. Then war broke out and he found himself fighting in Johor. Shot by a sniper, he was hospitalised in Singapore, only for the hospital to be overrun by the Japanese in a horrific massacre. As a POW he was soon sent to labour on the Death Railway in Thailand.Then, 60 years later, his son Paul retraced his nightmarish steps -- with best-selling travel writer travel Stuart Lloyd -- with some really surprising findings and encounters along the way.Part Military History. Part Travelogue. Pure Human Spirit!Over 30 pages of historical and original new photographs.Voted one of the Top 3 War Books of the Year when it was published by The Australian newspaper.Finalist, Book of the Year, Australian Society of Travel Writers.Why?Because -- through secret diaries written between 1942 and 1945 -- it draws you into the very personal observations of Capt Hugh ’Pilk’ Pilkington of the 6th Royal Norfolks, who’d spent 12 years working in pre-war colonial Malaya. He goes from a life of privilege to a life of a prisoner for 3.5 years. And his son spends a night in a Malaysian jail to see what it’s like! The Missing Years is full of these side-by-side comparisons of then and now in Changi and the Alexandra Hospital (Singapore), the former battlefields of Batu Pahat and Parit Sulong, Johore, (Malaysia), and Kanchanaburi, the Bridge on the River Kwai, and Hellfire Pass (Thailand).In February 1942, a sniper’s bullet brought down Captain Hugh Patrick Pilkington of the 6th Royal Norfolks. Fevered in Singapore’s Alexandra Military Hospital as the island fell, he was too weak to evacuate. What followed was three and a half years of hell-and one man’s unflinching chronicle of survival against impossible odds.Written in secret on scraps of paper purloined from the Japanese themselves (at pain of execution), Pilkington’s diaries became a memoir aboard the repatriation ship HMT Sobieski in September 1945. Raw. Unfiltered. Visceral. These were not memories dimmed by time but accounts seared into the present moment-the stench of suppurating wounds, the delirious night screams, the brutal reality of the Thai-Burma Death Railway.What emerges is far more than a POW chronicle. This is an exploration of empires colliding, of men pushed past breaking point, of the thin line between survival and surrender. Pilkington’s superior knowledge of Malaya-where he’d lived as a rubber planter for fifteen years-becomes both blessing and curse as he watches the colonial world he’d known consumed by something he never imagined. 6