Remembering a forgotten survivor - Page 4
From Griffith REVIEW Edition 18: In the Neighbourhood
© Copyright Griffith University & the author.
Written by Rachel Buchanan
RONALD SEARLE CLUNG TO HIS IDENTITY as an artist throughout the war. His pen was his lifeline, the thread that connected his pre– and postwar self. What did Lofty have? The man who had pushed aside his own suffering to nurse the sick now could not get well. The ‘doctor' became the patient.
In 2002, Jill and John Parkes wrote to Searle to tell him about Lofty's life and discuss what should happen to the pictures. Searle wrote back: ‘Lofty was a remarkable man. Remember, he was a POW too, yet somehow he found the energy and devotion to look after we "survivors" of the Thai-Burma jungle camps. He was inspiring in his care and his splendidly forthright, Australian, no-nonsense attitude, kept us from feeling too sorry for ourselves. Under dreadful circumstances he was superhuman – and he was loved by all.'
The effort must have been huge. By 1947, Lofty was out of hospital. He got a soldier-settler farm at Tresco, near Swan Hill. Lofty grew oranges on poor land that would soon become a salt desert. Peg had had a hysterectomy before they married and in 1949 the couple adopted a son, David, who they found after responding to a plea in ‘Miranda's column' in the Herald and Weekly Times. Jill's earliest memory of Uncle Harry was his height and the big pink fluffy teddy bear he gave her. She remembers visiting the farm: ‘Uncle Harry was always stooped, he really seemed quite spaced out. He didn't talk much but he had this booming laugh. He seemed to be burdened then.'
They struggled to make the marriage work. Harry even joined the committee of Tresco's All Saints Church of England. ‘It was so hard for her, the ignominy of having him so anti-social.' He was addicted to painkillers; he hid them in the pockets and lining of his coats. He drank too and would sometimes sleep rough in railway good sheds. ‘I always felt they didn't have sympathy for Harry. You were just supposed to get on with life.'
In 1960, the Cannons left Tresco. David and Peg moved back to East Malvern and Lofty went to Bundoora. Lofty had some contact with his wife and son and extended family but it was sporadic. ‘By the 1960s the family appeared largely to neglect him,' John Parkes wrote. The archival trace for the last twenty years of Lofty's life is thin. The final bit of medical evidence I have seen is from the Heidelberg Repatriation Hospital.
Name: Cannon, Henry Judge.
Admitted: 5 March 1960.
Treatment for: Psychopathic Personality and alcoholism. Treatment and investigations: sub-coma Insulin; special drug treatment; individual psychotherapy; occupational therapy; social work and employment action.
Discharged: 13 June 1960.
Condition on disposal: Recovered.
Lofty's life at Bundoora would have been difficult. In 1985, a Commonwealth review of repatriation hospitals said the psychiatric hospital offered ‘long-term psychiatric care for veterans with mental disorders that have been accepted as due to war service'. In 1973, Lofty was one of 255 veterans at Bundoora. In 1984, there were 154 left. ‘The Review understands that until relatively recently there were serious deficiencies in certain aspects of the standard of care being provided at Bundoora. A change of administration has resulted in significant improvements.'
Even though he had been diagnosed as ‘psychopathic', Lofty's remaining letters are lucid. In 1966, he wrote to Searle. The letter was on Australian Red Cross Society paper, the address is the Returned Soldiers Psychiatric Hospital Bundoora.
Dear Ronald Searle, I take the liberty to bridge the years, because if you will remember there comes a time when a man needs an encouraging word from a friend and that is what I need right now. My eyesight is going fast and I keep thinking I am chained to the Burma Railway and so to set my mind at rest my own people have locked me up again. I know all this seems a bit harrowing but it's unburden or burst. My wife took me to see the ‘Magnificent Men', although I know that your work has changed a lot, I could see the Ronald Searle I knew so well, peeping out now and again from under his mosquito net and it warmed my heart and I laughed and so I will close wishing Ronald Searle, the ‘Spotted Wonder of Ward V' a still brighter future. If you find the time and in your goodness answer this, would you post it to my wife?
That letter was dated January 28, 1966 and refers to the 1965 film ‘Those Magnificent Men in Their Flying Machines' for which Searle produced still and animated sequences. In October, Lofty wrote another letter.
Dear Ronald, I was unfortunate enough to lose your letter which I wanted to give to my son, and I wondered if you would drop him a brief line and say hello. I would like him to remember, that his father, although a nut, had at least one sane and famous friend. Regards, Lofty Cannon.
It is hard to imagine that Searle ignored this request but the letter has not survived. Lofty died in 1980; a year later David was killed in a car accident. David had married by then and had one daughter; another daughter was born after his death. Peg died in 1994 and Jill's parents both died recently. ‘Thus we believe ourselves to be the sole custodians of Harry's memory,' John Parkes wrote.
THERE IS ONE OTHER LIVING PERSON, though, who could be described as a custodian of the memory. Although the trajectory of the men's lives has been so different, there is an unusual symmetry. In 1960 Lofty Cannon withdrew from family and farm life and went to a psychiatric hospital. In 1961, after covering the Eichmann trial, Ronald Searle became deeply depressed. He was convinced that his ‘increasing disgust with most activities of the last fifteen years was more than justified'. He left his wife Kaye and their young twins, abandoned his life in London, his fame and success to live in France. He later married stage designer Monica Koenig and continued to travel the world, reporting and drawing. In 1968 he was stuck in his Paris apartment during the student riots and ‘produced 100 variations on the snail'. His first New Yorker cover was published the following year and in 1973, two hundred and fifty of his pictures were displayed in a one-man show at Paris' Bibliotheque Nationale. In 1978, French critic, Pierre Dehaye noted the elements of horror and ridicule in Searle's sketches but suggested that if viewers looked closely enough they would also find tenderness: ‘His satire is not of the cut-and-thrust variety; it is at one remove from the battle front: he acts as stretcher bearer, he takes oranges to the wounded in hospital.'
The day after my fax to Ronald Searle, I received a red and blue airmail letter from a small village in France. The hand was delicate and beautiful and the stamp depicted a stone angel.
Your letter has arrived but I am embarrassed to say that it has arrived too late. My memory is now totally unreliable and I would hesitate to recall with any guarantee of accuracy, events that passed well over sixty years ago. All I can say is that ‘Lofty' Cannon was the epitome of kindness and devotion under circumstances that were medieval and barbarian. He was a nurse that pushed himself beyond the level of endurance and comfort to care for the miserable survivors that we were, from the jungle, to the relative misery of Kanchanaburi.
As you know, he gave at the expense of his own sanity. When you ask why did I write: ‘Lofty helped to save my life', if I and the rest of us in that primitive hut had not had Lofty's care, most of us would have died. The background to some of this is in my book ‘To the Kwai – and Back'. Sorry not to be more helpful. But there it is. The flutterings of the past in an 87-year-old head are not ice-cold sharp – or even vividly Dickensian! Sincerely, Ronald Searle.
The art of war is terrible but look closely and you find tenderness, friendship, humility and humour. Time reverses many roles. Now Searle is a stretcher-bearer for his dead friend. ‘As my lucky generation of Baby Boomers heads into retirement, the men and women of World War II are well into old age,' John Parkes wrote. ‘Harry probably would not have wanted to die a hero. The best that we can do is see is that he, and those like him, are remembered.' Lofty Cannon, 1914-1980. Lest we forget. ♦