Daily Express - 02.09.2019

RECOVERY:

Surgeon Harold

recovers after

bomb blast at

St Thomas’s

Hospital. Main

picture Gurkha

regiment in

1945 Burma

18 Daily Express Monday, September 2, 2019

DX1ST

SURVIVORS:

Walter, right,

in his

‘sleeping

quarters’

1940.

Below, the

Walkers in

1933.

Standing,

from left:

Harold,

Walter, Bee,

Edward and

Peter. Seated,

from left:

father Arthur,

Ruth and

mother

Dorothea

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WHILE model-turned-film star Cara
Delevingne, pictured, now touchingly recalls
godmother Dame Joan Collins encouraging
her to go into acting, the latter is known to
remember a different version of events.
Cara, 27, fondly recounts Dame Joan
once advising: “If you really want it, and
I think you do because I
know you, you’re going to
do it.” The glamorous
showbiz veteran, 86, had
revealed in recent years,
however: “Cara asked me
for advice about becoming
an actress... I gave her my
advice in a word, ‘Don’t.’”
She jokily added: “That
Jack Nicholson line... ‘Just what the world
needs, another actress.’”
Despite Dame Joan’s reservations a few
years back, god-daughter Cara’s screen
career – she stars with Orlando Bloom in
Amazon fantasy series Carnival Row – isn’t
looking such a bad idea after all.

FOLLOWING news Rolling Stone Keith
Richards is using a hi-tech ashtray to suck
up his cigarette smoke – in order not to
annoy fitness fanatic bandmate Sir Mick
Jagger – I’m reminded the singer was once
a confirmed nicotine addict himself.
Band insiders suggest Jagger, 76,
smoked his last cigarette “around 40
years ago”.

GROUCHY political interrogator Jeremy
Paxman, who now dismisses the Prime
Minister as a “clown” and “charlatan”,
previously put his life in Boris’s hands after
agreeing to be ridden around London by the
latter on a tandem in 2014, when bowing
out from BBC Two’s Newsnight.
The entertaining footage has also since
appeared in a BBC health and safety
video for staff, highlighting the hazards of
such stunts.

NOW publicly speaking out against calls
for a female successor to departing 007
Daniel Craig, actress Joanna Lumley,
pictured, had a small role as an “Angel of
Death” opposite former Bond
George Lazenby.
The Australian, who
played the agent in 1969’s
On Her Majesty’s Secret
Service, enjoys
suggesting relations with
Lumley could have been
more than professional at
the time. “We understood
each other. She’s a very
intelligent girl,” he’s
insisted. “You know, we
thought about a relationship, and then
she thought, ‘It’s probably not a good
idea.’” Perhaps Joanna remembers
events differently?

BACK in 1965, a fresh-faced Pete
Townshend wrote the famous line, “I hope I
die before I get old,” for band The Who’s hit
single My Generation.
Asked to imagine what his younger self
would say to him all these decades on,
guitarist Townshend, 74, bluntly responds:
“1965 Pete was a bit of a **** to be honest. I
don’t really care what he would say to me.”

RESPONDING to celebrity chef Marco
Pierre White’s provocative claim women
are less composed than men when
working in restaurant kitchens, outspoken
author and TV personality Kathy Lette, 60,
concludes: “What shall I cook today? I’m
thinking chauvinist pig on a spit.”

HICKEY

J

UST days after Ruth Walker was

buried alive in the rubble of St

Thomas’s Hospital in a London air

raid, she was posted to Park Prewett

hospital near Basingstoke,

Hampshire, to work under the

pioneering plastic surgeon Harold Gillies.

He had, she remembered, a kindly manner

and was dedicated to his patients. These

included air raid victims and pilots whose

burned faces and hands needed months, if

not years, of treatment, requiring multiple

operations and great skill.

Gillies would take skin from an unburned

area of the patient’s body, and put it through

a mincing machine. Ruth would then take a

piece of gauze, and “with a little pair of

tweezers we used to put a little bit [of the

minced skin] in each square. And then it all

grew together”.

The new skin was grafted on to the site of

the burn. Many of the procedures were

extremely painful and some nurses found

their patients’ agony too hard to bear and

had to be transferred to other wards.

Ruth, however, found she could contain

her emotions and stayed outwardly cheerful.

But later in the war, she received shatter-

ing news from the East: John Fisher, the

childhood friend who became her fiance, had

been shot down over the sea while on a

mission to rescue civilians in Borneo from

the invading Japanese. Despite bullet

wounds, broken bones and a circling shark

he had survived and swum ashore.

He had then been rescued from a desert

island and taken to Australia. But during that

time he met and fell in love with a beautiful

Dutch widow named Isabella.

Ruth was devastated when she heard this,

but she hid her heartbreak and carried on

as normal.

M

EANWHILE, her surgeon brother

Harold had recovered from the

terrible head injuries he had suf-

fered when St Thomas’s Hospital was

bombed. Despite the grim prognosis of one

neurosurgeon that, if he survived he

would be a “cabbage”, within a week

he was out of his coma, none the

worse apart from a few stitches.

Six months later, having

regained his strength, he was

training to become an

obstetrician. Later in the war, he

delivered a baby in an air raid

shelter. War did not just bring

misery, but new life – and love.

In London in July 1942, Bee,

the Walkers’ poised and beautiful

elder daughter, a former Norman

Hartnell model now working at the Air

Ministry, married an American serving in the

RAF, Flight Lieutenant Gaddis Plum.

As with many wartime weddings, there

were missing guests: Walter and Edward were

serving in India. As for Peter, the third son,

no-one knew if he was alive or dead.

Peter was Ruth’s favourite brother.

Mischievous but kind, he had been a

tea planter in India, following in the

footsteps of his parents, Arthur and

Dorothea, before joining the Indian Army in

December 1940. A year later, he was in

Malaya when the Japanese invaded. He was

thrown into a series of vicious battles as part

of an army that was poorly trained, poorly

equipped and poorly led.

The British retreat through Malaya culmi-

nated in the disastrous surrender in Singapore

in February 1942. Peter was among the

130,000 servicemen who became prisoners of

war. It would be five months before Dorothea

and Arthur learned of his fate.

In November 1942, Peter joined the

thousands of POWs working on a railway

that the Japanese were constructing from

Thailand to Burma, using their captives as

slaves. The Japanese despised them for

having surrendered and treated them with

contempt and cruelty.

Half-starved, beaten mercilessly as they

laboured under the scorching sun and

through the night, the prisoners became

emaciated and ill. Despite the heroic efforts

of their doctors, tens of thousands of POWs

died on what became known as the Death

Railway. Peter suffered from dysentery, den-

gue fever and ulcers. His back was a mass of

scars from cruel beatings.

Once, he intervened when a guard was

In part one of our serialisation of

To War With The Walkers by ANNABEL

VENNING, the true story of six

ordinary siblings caught up in the

1935-1945 conflict, Ruth and

Harold narrowly escaped

death in the Blitz. On

the other side of the

world, their older

brothers Edward,

Peter and Walter – the

author’s grandfather

• were about to face
  the enemy head on...

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Peter was

staked out in

the burning heat

and forced to stare

at the sun by

cruel guards