Pierre Boulle also agreed to appear and John’s approach to the novelist—‘a highly imaginative man [who] never saw the railway and was never in Thailand . . . [but] wrote the brilliant satire Bridge Over the River Kwai’ (BBC Written Archives Centre T56/203/1, Coast’s cast list)—is harsher than his treatment of the Japanese. He is riled with Boulle’s crude fictionalisation of the POW experience, though Boulle argues that he was more concerned with the universal condition of ‘human absurdity and its novelistic possibilities than with the historical accuracy of his characterisations and context. John was aware that Railroad had been mined to borrow characters and context; ‘Kwai’, for example, was borrowed from John’s (mis)spelling of the name Khwae (which simply means ‘stream’ in Thai), and the sadistic Colonel Saito was presumably sketched from the real Sergeant-Major Risaburo Saito, who had been considered relatively fair and was later defended by Colonel Toosey during his war crimes trial. Although several of the more extreme distortions of fact depicted in the feature film are not inventions of the novel, John is visibly rattled as he interrogates Boulle.

In the 20-year hiatus between 1945 and John’s ‘return’ to make the documentary in 1969, his connection with Southeast Asia had grown strong and deep. These intense years of inter-cultural work may account for his very apparent ease with the climate and people, and for his impeccably calm presentation. John is not vengeful; he is objective and questioning. Throughout his life he was fascinated by the rich variety of human existence and effort, by the vagaries and frailties of the human condition, by the stories unfolding. He recorded these stories with resolute accuracy and eloquence. There is little sentimentality or heroic romance in any of his memoirs or in this documentary; instead there is a sense of truth-seeking and steadiness in his narration.

John did not return again to the camps; One Pair of Eyes was only broadcast twice by the BBC before languishing in the archives, and this book fell out of print and largely out of mind. The rest of John’s extraordinary journey was focused on music and theatre. It did eventually lead him to discover the young Luciano Pavarotti at an operatic festival in Italy, and to represent many of the greats of opera and pop music, including José Carreras, Mario Lanza, Jon Vickers and Montserrat Caballé, Bob Dylan, Ravi Shankar among many others. John died in July 1989 after undergoing heart surgery in Norfolk. He left behind a wonderful cultural and literary legacy, not least this account of his time working on the Railroad of Death. We hope that this new edition, and the previously unseen materials that make up its appendices, will restore it to its proper place.

Laura Noszlopy

Shrewsbury, 2014