An Irishman's Diary

I HAD TO VISIT a dentist in Carrickmacross the other day and emerged from the experience with a temporary but severe speech impairment. This might not have been a problem in Dublin. But in your home town, everywhere you turn, you’re liable to meet friends you haven’t seen in a while, bent on conversation.

So while waiting for the anaesthetic to wear off, I went for a ramble around Carrick’s less chatty parts, including the library. Then, my jaw still numb, I paid a rare visit to somewhere even quieter than the library: the Protestant graveyard.

There’s something slightly forbidding about this place, although it has more to do with topography than religion. Immediately inside the gate, the path rises very steeply in a series of steps: a challenge for undertakers, even in good weather.

The avenue is flanked by the usual Yew trees, with their evergreen promise of immortality. Yet such is the gradient that, by the top, pall-bearers must think they’ve accompanied the departed on more than usual of the journey to heaven.

Altitude aside, the place is a typical Church of Ireland cemetery: peaceful, picturesque, and not too crowded. As elsewhere, most headstones hint at lives well lived and at natural deaths, “safe in the arms of Jesus”.

But as I walked among them, the chiselled summary of another life caught my eye. The name was Mary Cooper, aged only 27 when she died, in 1945. And, according to the headstone, she met her end a very long way from Carrickmacross: in a prisoner-of-war camp in “Sumatra”.

How had it happened, I wondered idly, as I probably did the last time I stood at the grave, years ago. But the miracle of Google had since intervened. And moments later, still among the Yew trees, I was reading extracts from a book published only this year, called The Emperor’s Irish Slaves.

WRITTEN BY Robert Widders, a Liverpudlian, it tells the grim story of some of the 650 Irish men and women who, serving in the British armed forces in South East Asia, became prisoners of the Japanese imperial army during the second World War.

Mary Cooper was one of them. A military nurse, she was among those who fled Singapore as the Japanese advanced in February 1942. Of course, nurses were even more needed because of the invasion, and many were reluctant to abandon their patients.

But there was a harrowing precedent from Hong Kong weeks earlier, when the surrender of a hospital had led to mass rape and murder of staff.

So they were ordered to leave Singapore, which was easier said that done. Like other ships, the one carrying Mary Cooper and other women and children was bombed while still in the docks. It escaped to sea, but not for long. Another bombardment left it simultaneously burning and sinking. Survivors swam for their lives in water strafed with machine gun fire. About 250, Cooper included, made it to the temporary safety of a place called Pom Pong Island.

The Carrickmacross nurse may or may not have left the island on another passenger vessel that, days later, was also attacked and sunk. An English nurse and friend of Cooper, Margot Turner, was on board and would afterwards describe having to deal with “a ghastly shambles of mutilated bodies” and then the panic of the sinking, as children drowned all around her and others struggled desperately for survival.

For those who made it on to rafts, there was the added misery of watching more children die, over several days from thirst and heatstroke. And as Widders writes, the ordeal didn’t end there. Many who washed up on Japanese- occupied islands were bayoneted or otherwise killed.

Somehow, amid these horrors, Mary Cooper survived to become a military prisoner. This was a dubious honour. Under the Japanese army, says Widders, it meant “slave labour, starvation, and brutality”. There were no concessions for women.

The same Margot Turner shared a cell with Cooper, and after the war recalled one period in 1943: “Terrible things started to happen in the jail; the prisoners were beaten and tortured and many of them died as a result. The things we saw were so horrible that I still can’t bear to think, much less talk, about them.” When she and Cooper were transferred to another camp, both now skeletal, an Australian nurse Betty Jeffrey wrote in her diary: “They looked terrible, and had a definitely wild look in their eyes, which is not to be wondered at.” Three years of mistreatment destroyed Cooper’s health. In the spring of 1945, as the thoughts of even the Japanese turned towards possible defeat, and the calling to account that would follow, camp authorities decided Irish nurses would be allowed to go home. But it was already too late for her. When the camp was relocated in April, she had to be carried by stretcher.

She had mixed feelings about leaving in any case. On May 26th, 1945, Betty Jeffrey wrote that Cooper was “desperately ill and she wants to go home, but not alone like that.” Her dilemma was soon resolved. Exactly a month later, Jeffrey updated her diary: “No Ireland for poor little Mary Cooper [who] died this morning . . . an awfully nice girl, only in her twenties too.” Even in death, Nurse Cooper didn’t make it back to Carrickmacross. She is buried in Jakarta War Cemetery, surrounded by the sub-tropical greenery of Indonesia. Only her name was added to the family grave, among the damp Yew trees on a hillside in Monaghan, where I stumbled upon it the other day in an idle moment.