Alistair Urquhart - Worship in Captivity

The most stunning book I have read in a long time is Alistair Urquhart's The Forgotten Highlander.  He cheated death so many times and displayed such mental strength for three and a half years that it is amazing that he is still alive today, aged 94.  He survivied the Death Railway, the Hell Ships and the dropping of the atomic bomb on Nagasaki.

This is a passage he wrote about a concert followed by an impromptu church service at Changi camp in 1942, before the worst of the treatment kicked in:-

One evening hundreds of men milled about our normal spot up the hill.  There was to be a concert, a break from the grinding monotony of camp life.  As a music lover I was thrilled.  The boys were excited too.  Somehow, goodness only knows how, a piano had been dragged all the way up the hill.  It was a brilliant moonlit night and as the musicians arranged themselves total and respectful silence descended on the huge crowd.  Had it not been for the sound of the crickets and the tropical breeze, we could have been in the Albert Hall.  Then a solo violinist, a professional with the London Philharmonic called Dennis East, stepped forward and the plaintive notes of Mendelssohn’s Violin Concerto reverberated around the hillside.  It was the first music we had heard for months.  I sat entranced, and the boys, strangers to classical music, were agog – spellbound by Mendelssohn’s magic.  For a few minutes the beauty of the music lifted us out of the camp and reminded us of the greatness of European civilisation that Japanese militarists despised.  Some men wept.  When East finished several stunned seconds passed before rapturous applause and cheering broke out.  It was so beautiful.

Eventually the Japanese guards present got bored and left.  When they ahd gone an altar was set up and an interdenominational church service was held.  It proved a welcome morale booster.  Even people like me, not especially religious, found it comforting.  It was to be my one and only church service during three and a half years of captivity but it struck a real chord and made me think seriously about Christianity for the first time.  When the padre finished his sermon on our mount in Changi prison, thousands of miles from home, hundreds of voices joined in a moving rendition of `The Old Rugged Cross.’

The first verse seemed so appropriate to all of us caught up in the fall of Singapore:

On a hill far away stood an old rugged cross,
The emblem of suffering and shame:
And I love that old cross where the dearest and best
For a world of lost sinners was slain.

The Brinds (two teenagers who Urquhart looked after in his first months in captivity) were both devout Roman Catholics.  Freddie never talked about his beliefs but the brothers were always missing on Sunday mornings and were friendly with the Roman Catholic padre.  The Japanese did not allow church activities yet there were obviously secret masses going on – at considerable risk to all involved.  I never enquired because I did not want the boys to think I was spying on them.  Freddie always wore a crucifix on a silver chain, which he kept tucked under his shirt. If the guards had discovered it, they would have taken it from him and given him a beating.