Nothing could have prepared Madge for the extraordinary events she would experience after she responded to Lord Mountbatten’s appeal for nurses to serve in the Burma Campaign. She didn’t even know if she would make it back to England, but many years later, as she celebrated her ninety-fourth birthday on 24 July and her sixty-ninth wedding anniversary on 16 October 2017, she said there was a very simple reason why she would do it all again.
‘If I hadn’t gone to Chittagong, I wouldn’t have met Basil. We wouldn’t have had such a long and wonderful marriage and we wouldn’t have had Carolyn and Angela, our two beautiful daughters.’
Madge left the Birchington maternity home soon after the start of the National Health Service in July 1948 and worked in the commercial world until the arrival of Carolyn, her firstborn, in 1951. Angela followed in 1953. It was only after a plea in 1958 from a close friend to help in an area branch of the National Health Service in Woking that Madge agreed to return to work – ‘but just for a few months’. In a remarkable coincidence the office to which she reported was actually in the six-bedroomed home in Horsell that Basil’s mother and father had sold when they downsized after their family of six children had grown up and flown the nest.
Madge was hard at work one morning when a secretary asked if she had a moment to step into what had been the lounge of the Lambert home. Workmen had been removing the fireplace when one had found an old Christmas card that had fallen behind the back of the mantelpiece. It was a card to Basil, Brian and Bob from a lady who had been their nanny in the late 1920s!
The ‘couple of months’ Madge promised to work for the NHS soon stretched to years and she became a key figure in organising school vaccinations and inoculations. She eventually retired from the NHS on 24 July 1988.
Basil joined Provincial (now United) Newspapers in 1948 and then in 1951, during the Cold War with Russia, he enlisted in the Army Emergency Reserve with the Royal Engineers, based at Longmoor Camp in Hampshire. He continued his annual camps until retirement in 1970 with the rank of major. His military awards include: the 1939–45 Star, the Burma Star, the Defence Medal, the 1939–45 War Medal, SE Asia 1945–46 and the Army Emergency Reserve Decoration 1951–70 with two Long Service Clasps.
In 1985, after thirty-five years during which time he became an executive on the management side, he took early retirement from United Newspapers. The next decade of Basil’s business life was spent with Network Security, who dealt in corporate fraud, and whose retirement gift was slightly different from most. It was a round-the-world trip for two which enabled Madge and Basil to undertake a three-month journey down memory lane, to retrace the steps of a love story that had survived a war of unspeakable brutality. For both, the first port of call on their original journey had been Bombay, which had a population approaching 1.7 million. When they returned in 1994, Greater Bombay had grown to almost 13 million.
From Bombay they flew to Calcutta, where once again they made a point of seeing the good and the not-so-good. First, they were taken on a conducted tour of the poorer areas, which Madge found to be every bit as sad as it had been fifty years earlier. The hustle and bustle, kindness and courtesy hadn’t changed, but there was one major disappointment. Firpo’s was no longer a fashionable restaurant but had become a goods storage centre! The Grand Hotel was now the Oberoi Grand, but was still a haven of perfection. Last but not least, there was the wonderful sight of the Victoria Memorial, restored to its Taj Mahal-style white marble. At dinner the night before they left Calcutta Basil asked the pianist if he would be so kind as to play Madge’s long-time favourite ‘I’ll Be Seeing You (in all the old familiar places)’.
There was certainly nowhere more familiar than Chittagong, the next stop on their journey. Madge and Basil found the small town they had left at the end of the Second World War was unrecognisable. From being an area of enormous natural beauty with lush green forests and white sandy beaches Chittagong District had grown into a city with a population of more than 5.5 million. The one or two cafes on the main shopping street where Madge and Basil had spent those tender and precious hours had long since been blown away on the winds of change.
One thing which hadn’t changed in the half century since they had left was the natural courtesy and kindness which they remembered with great affection. When the manager of their hotel said it would be safer if he drove them in a conducted tour the offer was gratefully accepted. When they eventually got to the grounds of the old Governor General’s residence there was a major surprise. The big house had been turned into a museum but it was closed on the day of their visit so they never did see inside. The grounds which had contained the basha hospital complex had been turned into playing fields and Madge said she was certain that every patient who had passed through the hospital would have approved.
Burma was renamed Myanmar and Rangoon became Yangon in 1989, but even after years in the international wilderness the sweeping elegance of the city’s tree-lined boulevards and the colonial splendour of the dignified Victorian buildings were an eye-opener for both of them. The city was spacious and very impressive, and not at all what they had expected. Intense pressure during Basil’s posting in Rangoon had meant there was no time for leisure visits to monuments like the Shwedagon Pagoda and gold-plated Chaukhtatgyi Buddha, which made seeing them during this trip all the more special.
The pair visited Ho Chi Minh City (once called Saigon) in Vietnam and had a personal look into the Cho Chi tunnels. There was a stopover in Australia, where they visited Basil’s youngest brother Bob and his wife Esther. Then it was across the Pacific to places like Fiji, Hawaii and Los Angeles. Next they visited Vancouver, Memphis and Washington DC before spending ten days in Barbados, where Basil had arranged for their daughters and their husbands to be flown to the Caribbean paradise for a family holiday. It was a lovely end to the trip and Madge was equally delighted when they flew home business class.
Madge found the trip fascinating because it answered questions that had been at the back of her mind for fifty years. Basil had lived in a tent on Labuan for weeks and had told her there wasn’t a single building standing when he left. When they visited together, the island was a happy, thriving community.
For Basil, rugby union was a way of easing the pressures of the Burma Campaign and after he was demobbed in 1947 he played for Esher Expendables, until he retired in 1985. He served as treasurer for many years and later became chairman before being appointed club president. He went on to become the first administrator of Aviva Premiership rugby club Harlequin FC. He also spent more than fifteen years as joint club archivist with Nick Cross and is still a founder member of Quins and life member of Esher Rugby Club.
Age has not wearied Basil and Madge, nor have memories of the Burma Campaign condemned them to the years of despair suffered by so many in the aftermath of the confrontation. At its height the Burma Star Association, which was founded in 1951, boasted a membership in excess of twenty-six thousand. By the start of 2018, Madge was one of just twenty surviving women members entitled to wear the coveted Burma Star on her left lapel. Her status as one of the last of the few resulted in a conversation with former Prime Minister David Cameron at the seventieth anniversary of VJ Day in August 2015. The service of remembrance took place at St Martin-in-the-Fields in Trafalgar Square, where Madge had attended her last Sunday morning worship before travelling to India.
Following the VJ Day service Basil and Madge took part in the parade down Whitehall with over a thousand other veterans and around Parliament Square to a reception in the grounds of Westminster Abbey. Madge wore the 1939–45 Star, the Burma Star, the Defence Medal, and the 1939–45 War Medal. Prime Minister David Cameron asked if the medals she was wearing were her own and was told very politely that if people wore them on their left breast, as she was, they certainly were their own. Medals awarded to deceased ex-service personnel may be worn on the right by relatives, she explained.
The following year the live audience of BBC’s Strictly Come Dancing were in tears at the end of a moving tribute to Basil and Madge on the Remembrance Sunday show that peaked with an audience of almost 12 million TV viewers. The internet went into meltdown after the background to their love story stretching back more than seventy years to the Second World War was re-enacted by Strictly professionals AJ Pritchard and Chloe Hewitt. The dance routine included Leonard Cohen’s ‘Hallelujah’ and the music of violinist Andre Rieu and his orchestra. The story of the wartime romance had been told with Dame Vera Lynn’s wartime classic ‘We’ll Meet Again’ playing in the background.
‘It was marvellous to hear our favourite song sung by our favourite singer, who is also a Burma Star veteran. We had the pleasure of meeting her at the Burma reunion in 2005,’ said Basil.
What very few people knew was that the show only went ahead after Madge turned back the clock to her Nurse Graves days and used the magic potion that brought light into the darkest of times in the Burma Campaign. Dancer Chloe was so overcome by the emotion of the part she was to re-enact that rehearsals had to be halted because she was in floods of tears.
‘I can’t do this; it’s all so moving,’ she told Madge, as she stood sobbing at the side of the stage. That was until Nurse Graves mixed a generous helping of compassion with TLC and the gentlest of cuddles to calm Chloe down and get her back on stage. Madge told her she danced so beautifully that all she had to do was take a deep breath and everything would be fine. Chloe and AJ performed with such grace and elegance that when Basil and Madge joined them on stage they were all given a standing ovation.
Several months later in the spring of 2017, the two veterans were invited to a garden party at Buckingham Palace. It was hosted by Prince Harry who had spent the morning at the Tower of London revealing the names of the ninety competitors to represent the UK at the 2017 Paralympic-style Invictus Games. He returned to the palace later in the afternoon, stopping when Basil told him that Madge had cheered his granny on the way to her wedding to Prince Philip in November 1947. Madge also told the Prince that it was almost seventy-one years since she caught a boat home from Bombay to England after nursing in the Burma Campaign, which he was fascinated to hear about.
‘He was a real life Prince Charming,’ said Madge, ‘and after we’d thanked him for taking the time to talk to us, I suggested he should go and get a cup of tea and some cake before it was all gone. He burst out laughing.’
Before Prince Harry went to talk to other veterans, he made Madge’s day by having his photo taken with her. What Madge didn’t know, as the garden party drew to a close, was that her very own Prince Charming, husband Basil, had slipped on the lush palace lawn and broken his collarbone. Their daughter Angela went with him in an ambulance to St Thomas’s Hospital and their son-in-law Chris drove Madge there. Madge made the nurses smile when she told them that when she was preparing for the journey to nurse in the Burma Campaign she missed curfew at Baker Street in July 1944 because a bomb had landed near the hospital and the roads became jammed with traffic.
‘They were such interesting times,’ said Madge, on a sunny afternoon in the early autumn of 2017. It was the same afternoon that she received the sad news from the daughter of Grace that her friend of more than seventy years had passed away in Yorkshire. Vera, who never married, had died several years earlier and Madge had lost touch with Phyl.
‘They were all part of the abnormal life we led throughout the Burma Campaign,’ said Madge. ‘I know it’s an odd thing to remember but one of my overriding memories is of the sheer tiredness. We all seemed to be constantly craving sleep because of the physical and emotional demands placed on us.’
‘It was impossible to lead even the semblance of a normal life because those times were anything but normal,’ said Basil. ‘We were just grateful that we managed to live day to day although we lived with a constant worry about the Japanese. We both think about the brave souls who never made it back home and we pay homage to them every year.’
‘What we all learned in those troubled times,’ said Madge, ‘was to compromise. There was no option in the Burma Campaign but to compromise. And I feel it is that ability to compromise that has really been the secret to our marriage too.’
Vivid as those memories of the past decade may have been, nothing compared to the peace of mind that Basil and Madge experienced at the end of a match in Brighton between South Africa and Japan in the Rugby World Cup. Both were on the edge of their seats in their bungalow on the south coast as the game thundered to a thrilling end. Then when New Zealand-born Karne Hesketh scored a try in the last minute for Japan to triumph 34–32 to complete the greatest upset in the history of the tournament, the Burma Campaign veterans burst into very raucous and very unified applause.
Her words were chosen with extreme care because under no circumstances would the atrocities ever be forgotten, but as they cheered the Japanese Madge suddenly realised something profound seventy years after the end of the Second World War. ‘Basil, darling, we’ve forgiven them.’