Epilogue   

Shortly after burying Judy, Frank Williams nearly joined his late dog in the everafter. His contract finished with the Groundnut Scheme project, he boarded a flight leaving Tanganyika, the first leg in a long journey back to England. Incredibly, the plane crashed on the slopes of Mount Kilimanjaro. But Frank had survived too much to perish now. He walked away from the crash unhurt and made it back home in one piece.

By that point, Frank had much to live for. He had once again found a close companion, this time of the human variety. An Englishwoman living in Tanganyika had heard about a compatriot who was searching far and wide for matériel to build the proper memorial for his deceased dog. Intrigued, the woman sought out the grieving man and persuaded him to lead her on several guided tours of the countryside surrounding his home. She was a striking, curly-haired brunette almost as tall as Frank, and something sparked during those treks through the bush.

About a year later, with both of them back in England, Frank married the new Mrs. Doris Williams. The couple started a new and peripatetic life together, one that included a son. Frank Alan Williams was born in Yorkshire in 1954. But once again, the crushing weight of home impelled Frank to flee England. In Frank’s obituary, his first son (who goes by Alan) said that “the stuffiness and artificial formality of postwar England didn’t suit Frank.” Remembering how the beauty of Vancouver had struck him when he docked in western Canada as part of the Merchant Navy, Frank persuaded Doris to immigrate there in 1955. Alas, jobs were difficult to come by in British Columbia, so when his old foreman from the Groundnut Scheme, who remembered Frank’s competence in Africa, reached out to Frank and offered work in Pakistan, the Williamses packed their bags once again.

After three years in south Asia, where Frank and Doris had another son, David, the family returned to Canada in 1958. A third child, Ann, was born in 1959, completing the immediate clan. This time British Columbia stuck. Frank had trained to become a mechanical engineer, and he was hired to work with a variety of large construction firms, including Laing Construction and Chemetics International. His work took him on a number of overseas assignments, feeding his travel bug, but he also contributed to numerous projects at home, including Vancouver’s huge Pacific Centre mall and the downtown Four Seasons Hotel. Most important was the family home he built from scratch in the suburb of Burnaby, where he would live for the next four decades. The family called it Fort Williams. True to his motto—“If a job is worth doing, it’s worth doing well”—the house was of the finest craftsmanship.

Frank retained not only his love of animals but also a tangible kinship with them. In 2004, his daughter, Ann, wrote of her father’s touch with nature. “He had a way with animals that I have not experienced with anyone else. They always understood him, and always adored him. If an animal was found hurt or suffering, they knew somehow to put their trust in him, and could relax at the sound of his voice, or his caring touch.” Ann kept ponies as a girl, and they would invariably follow Frank around the field and crowd around him as he fixed up a fence. He once found a lost skunk and kept it as a pet, often taking it on long walks. “He would wake us up as kids in the middle of the night because he discovered something cool,” Alan told the Vancouver Sun—once to show the children a giant toad he had found in the backyard.

His children would remember two Franks—one a lighthearted storyteller, the other practical, conservative, and “downright stubborn at times.” His love of flight stayed with him despite his negative experience in the RAF, and he maintained pride in his English heritage even though he’d taken every chance to leave the United Kingdom.

Of course, his special relationship with Judy was one his family knew all about. “He didn’t advertise it by any means,” Alan told the Burnaby Now newspaper in an obituary, “but he was happy to talk about it. If you got him going about it, he wouldn’t stop. Probably the folks he worked with knew about it, but he didn’t go out of his way to say, ‘By the way, did you know I had a dog who was a heroine?’

“I think personally the bond he created saved his life,” Alan continued in the obituary. “I think she added an element to his life that gave him more reason to live. She took care of him, and he took care of her.”

In 1992, at the age of seventy-three, Frank underwent minor surgery, but while recovering in the postoperative ward, he fell out of his bed, with disastrous results. He lost feeling in the lower half of his body and spent the next year in the hospital. When he finally went home, he was a paraplegic, cruelly confined to a wheelchair. His memorial website reads, “He had always been an agile, active, and self-reliant man. The loss of freedom and independence was probably the hardest thing of all.” What the Japanese had failed to do was accomplished by a mere slip from bed.

Frank lasted for ten years after the accident, mixing good times with bad, keeping his humor and high spirits around his nurses and his friends but understandably lapsing into melancholy in quiet moments. Infections and sores, aftershocks from the fall that took his mobility, no doubt brought him back to the Sumatran jungle, to the painful skin ulcers and the awful creep of the crippling beriberi.

Frank finally passed away on February 16, 2003, one month past his eighty-fourth birthday. On display in the chapel at Frank’s funeral service at the Forest Lawn Chapel in Burnaby was a picture of Frank and Judy. His second son, David, wrote on the memorial website devoted to Frank’s memory this touching eulogy: “The only thing that helps me to overcome my grief is the knowledge that you are strolling leisurely along the warm sands of some heavenly beach… laughing at Judy, while she valiantly defends the shoreline from yet another impending wave.”

Frank lived for fifty-three years after Judy died. He never again owned a dog.