Wild life | 2 July 2011

‘So much sorting to do,’ said my Aunt Beryl. We stood in the middle of her home in Sussex. I hadn’t visited for many years, not since Granny and Grandpa lived here. The memories of those dear people came in such a rush of images I had to sit down. That’s when I noticed the canvas leaning against a wall. The painted side was away from me, so I went over and picked it up. It was a portrait of my mother, Doreen Sanders, as she was in 1945, in Burma.

I had never seen this portrait before in my life. ‘Your mother didn’t like it,’ said Aunt Beryl. I wondered, ‘Why ever not?’ The painting is of a beautiful young woman. She’s only 19, but she’s already seen more than two years of war very near the frontlines — around Kohima, Imphal and the Arakan. Serving in the WAS(B) — the Women’s Auxiliary Service (Burma) — she’s nursed in field hospitals, she’s run a mobile canteen for the troops of the 14th Army, and she’s taken down letters home for a wounded soldier who has lost his hands.

Now it’s just after the fall of Rangoon. Perhaps this is just after the party when her unit laid on a feast for liberated POWs and tried to get them to dance — and the men were so emaciated all they could do was stare at the food and cry.

The artist was Derek Fowler, a young intelligence officer and war artist. Most of the Burma war pictures I’ve seen by Fowler are of exhausted soldiers sleeping, reading or writing letters. A lovely young woman must have been an exciting change for him. In the picture she’s wearing her jungle-green uniform, but she’s put on red lipstick and eye make-up so that she can sit here for Fowler, on a Rangoon veranda out of the humidity and heat.