Margaret Swanson

My favorite picture of my grandfather appeared in the Milford Daily News in Massachusetts in 1945, just months after his release from a Japanese prison camp. He stands smiling, his hand hooked in his belt, his baggy clothes hiding his still emaciated frame. Beside him is his grinning brother, portly in his suit.

After almost four years in prison camps in Singapore, Korea, and Japan, he was on his way home to England to his wife and three children—across two oceans and the North American continent.

The article says Sgt. Midgley was a “liberated Jap prisoner” stopping to visit his parents. No political correctness back then.

I don't recall when I first saw the photo, already yellowed four years when I was born. But I remember paying rapt attention to stories he told on our walks. The sorrowful bagpipes when his ship set sail from Southampton. The Japanese attacking Malaya on the same day as Pearl Harbor and their marching down the peninsula to “impregnable” Singapore. Using canned milk when he ran out of oil for the Howitzer. Shivering in rags in the Korean winter. Dysentery. Malaria. Mining coal in crumbling tunnels under the bay in Japan. Eating rats—when they could—with their meager rations of rice.

The picture is my favorite because of his smile. That's how I remember him when I was young and sat on his knee while he drank a cold Narragansett on the lawn in summer. He smiled—just like in the picture—glad to be alive.