Priest In Prison - Four Years Of Life In Japanese-Occupied Singapore

Four years in Japanese-occupied Singapore was not, as the title makes reasonably clear, the restful overseas posting the Reverend John Hayter might have preferred. Priest in Prison is his account of captivity during the Second World War: a world of deprivation, danger, uncertainty and the peculiar daily business of remaining both human and useful when nearly everything familiar has been taken away.

Hayter writes not merely as a former prisoner but as a priest, giving the book a perspective rather different from the standard military memoir. Faith, fear, endurance and fellowship all have to coexist with hunger, illness and the arbitrary brutality of occupation. There are no easy theological shortcuts here; maintaining one’s spiritual composure is considerably harder when the surroundings are designed to remove every other kind of comfort. Yet humour and ordinary human decency persist, as they inconveniently tend to do even under the least promising management.

Published by Churchman Publishing in 1989, this is a compelling personal record of wartime Singapore and the experience of internment, written with the clarity of someone who had a very long time to consider what captivity revealed about people. It will appeal to readers of Second World War history, Far Eastern prisoner-of-war accounts, religious memoirs and books in which courage consists less of charging heroically forward than of getting through another day without allowing circumstances to decide entirely who you are.

This copy is in Very Good condition: a notably respectable survivor, especially for a book devoted to conditions in which “very good” would have seemed an almost indecently ambitious assessment. Sold by Crappy Old Books, where we cannot promise spiritual enlightenment, but can at least provide the book in substantially more comfortable circumstances than those described inside.

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