- Hardcover: 288 pages
- Publisher: W&N; First Edition edition (9 Mar 2000)
- Language English
- ISBN-10: 0297643584
- ISBN-13: 978-0297643586
- Product Dimensions: 21.4 x 14 x 2.8 cm
- Average Customer Review: 5.0 out of 5 stars See all reviews (2 customer reviews)
- Amazon Bestsellers Rank: 872,345 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)
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More About the Author
Product Description
Amazon.co.uk Review
Andro Linklater, the travel writer and prize-winning biographer of Compton Mackenzie, has discovered a truly thrilling and heartrending story. Here is his account of unimaginable suffering and of love surviving across several years and many thousands of miles of separation. It is also a portrait of another age, of reticence and understatement, duty and loyalty, before our own age with its rather different values of "self-fulfilment" and the tell-all confessional.
In the spring of 1939, the beautiful young Pamela Kirrage met and quickly became engaged to a handsome young RAF pilot called Donald Hill. Soon after, Hill was transferred out to Hong Kong. When the city fell to the invading Japanese Army, Hill was imprisoned in Sham Sui POW camp and what he suffered at the hands of the Japanese over the next few years left him a changed man for life. When he returned to Pamela and England, they got married but he could never talk about his time in the camp and eventually, in 1970, he was finally confined to hospital in a state of mental collapse. In 1985 he died in Pamela's arms. But the story does not end there. For Donald left behind a coded diary that took another decade to crack. When its meanings were revealed, it told the full story of just what had happened to Donald and, at last, Pamela understood. It is a remarkable account, sensitively written by Linklater, skilfully interweaving the thrills of code-breaking with the romantic early days and later dark days of Pamela and Donald's marriage. The Code of Love is fascinating, compassionate and deeply moving. --Christopher Hart
Product Description
The Code of Love is Andro Linklater's portrait of a woman's search, for over fifty years, to discover the truth about the man to whom she devoted her life. In the spring of 1939, Pamela Kirrage, headstrong and beautiful, met Donald Hill, a handsome RAF pilot. After a golden summer of courtship, they became engaged. In September, with Britain now in conflict with Germany, their plans disintegrated. Hill was transferred to the Far East to defend Hong Kong. Sensing that he was caught up in the sweep of great events, he began a diary in an old school exercise book. However, officers serving abroad were forbidden to keep such records, so Hill devised a secret code that transformed his words into numbers. When Hong Kong fell to the Japanese and Hill was captured and sent to a prisoner of war camp, he took his diary with him. The Donald Hill who returned from the war, after four brutal years of incarceration, was a dramatically changed man. Though he and Pamela married quickly, once the relief and emotion of their reunion had subsided it was obvious that Donald had been scarred deeply by his experiences. Eventually, tortured by savage flashbacks, he was confined to hospital. Pamela had always known that the numbers in the school book were a code and that somewhere within the lines of figures she would discover the key to understanding Donald's mental collapse. Eventually, after Donald's death, she found a mathematician who was able decode the diary and reveal its account of Donald's suffering in the camps. The Code of Love is an unforgettable love story. It demonstrates vividly what happens when ordinary people are caught up in global events and transports us back to a romantic world that prizes different values: honour, duty, loyalty.
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Customer Reviews
Most Helpful Customer Reviews
4 of 4 people found the following review helpful
Format:Hardcover
I didn't know anything about this story before I bought this book but I got straight into it. It's a wonderful book and a very sad funny and moving tale. The writing carries you along, and you can easily imagine yourself in wartime England as well as appreciate the horrors of Donald Hill's prisoner of war camp. I would highly recommend this book.
Format:Paperback
Can't imagine why this book isn't better-known, as it is such an elemental tale of war, with its separations, trauma and transformations. It focuses on one couple's wartime experiences, but tells a much broader story of what war does to individuals and families. It is also a remarkably detailed tale of life in a Japanese prisoner of war camp, somewhat akin to Agnes Keith's Three Came Home. Rich and full.
Most Helpful Customer Reviews on Amazon.com (beta)
Amazon.com:
3 reviews
6 of 6 people found the following review helpful
Simply the Best
26 Mar 2001
Format:Hardcover
This is simply the best book I have read in a long time.
Andro Linklater writes clearly and eloquently about the love affair between Pamela Kirrage and Donald Hill at the eve of World War II. He brings to life the great excitement of their budding romance and the long, difficult years they spent apart, Pamela doing her part to support England's war efforts at home and Donald languishing in a Japanese concentration camp.
The atrocities that Donald experienced are described in a matter of fact manner that does not take away from the sheer horror of what he must have endured. He was determined to document what happened in the camp at the risk of his own life and eventually coded his diary to ensure that it would not be discovered. Through it all, his promise to return to Pamela gave him the will to survive.
Years later after Donald's death, Pamela resolved to know the contents of his diary so she could understand what had happened to him, what had happened to them. I found the efforts to decode his diary just as fascinating as the turbulent relationship between Pamela and Donald.
This is an intelligent and articulate account of two passionate people caught up in the throes of war and their struggle to regain their lives and relationship once reunited. It is a romance, a war history, and a mystery all rolled into one.
I am recommending it to everyone I know. Read it!
A view from Historian
22 Dec 2011
Format:Paperback
As an historian on the Battle of Hong Kong, "The Code of Love" is a book that must be placed in our bookshelf.
Donald Hill's story was completely forgotten in previous studies, who suggested to use the obsolete Vidlebeeste plane for suicidal attack by himself. In his years of capitulation, he saw his close friends killed by Japanese. The only thing kept him alive was simply his love to his fiancee. After the four years in the prisoner camp, he returned to Britain and fulfilled his promise by marrying her. However, he was completely forgotten by the country that he had fought for, he was no longer capable in flying planes and found himself being expelled by the RAF. His memories in the prisoner camp never faded away and haunted him throughout the rest of his life. It is heart-breaking to read about the unfortunate couple split eventually, but still their love continued until his last breathe. And she left, probably back to him, right after this very book published...
Although we seldom placed a non-fiction on our shelf, I strongly recommend to have this book no matter who you are. War is not merely about tactics and strategies, war is meant to be sufferings. And this book clearly, though not consciously perhaps, illustrated how we forgot those brave soldiers who had fought for us all over the world against tyranny and atrocities. Their sufferings were never clear-cut by the end of the war and kept haunting us until the end of their life, and yet we choose not to hear, not to care, not to remember them and provide any help that we can give. They slowly faded away and no one noticed them. It was the love between them and the determination to understand his suffering by his wife, Pamela, that let the story being revealed. Let us read their story, remember their story and let no more suffering ever appear in our world again!
Donald Hill's story was completely forgotten in previous studies, who suggested to use the obsolete Vidlebeeste plane for suicidal attack by himself. In his years of capitulation, he saw his close friends killed by Japanese. The only thing kept him alive was simply his love to his fiancee. After the four years in the prisoner camp, he returned to Britain and fulfilled his promise by marrying her. However, he was completely forgotten by the country that he had fought for, he was no longer capable in flying planes and found himself being expelled by the RAF. His memories in the prisoner camp never faded away and haunted him throughout the rest of his life. It is heart-breaking to read about the unfortunate couple split eventually, but still their love continued until his last breathe. And she left, probably back to him, right after this very book published...
Although we seldom placed a non-fiction on our shelf, I strongly recommend to have this book no matter who you are. War is not merely about tactics and strategies, war is meant to be sufferings. And this book clearly, though not consciously perhaps, illustrated how we forgot those brave soldiers who had fought for us all over the world against tyranny and atrocities. Their sufferings were never clear-cut by the end of the war and kept haunting us until the end of their life, and yet we choose not to hear, not to care, not to remember them and provide any help that we can give. They slowly faded away and no one noticed them. It was the love between them and the determination to understand his suffering by his wife, Pamela, that let the story being revealed. Let us read their story, remember their story and let no more suffering ever appear in our world again!
2 of 5 people found the following review helpful
A true tear jerker!
20 Mar 2001
Format:Hardcover
Pamela Kirrage and Donald Hill were very much in love and living in England right before the outbreak of World War II. Donald was sent overseas and spent three and a half years in a Japanese prison camp. He was never the same after the war, but tried to live a normal life with Pamela and their children.
David kept a diary during his imprisonment, but no one could crack the code until years after Donald's death, when Pamela found a mathematician who solved the mystery.
This book tells Donald and Pamela's sad, but moving story of true love, the horrors of war and the ultimate triumph of the human spirit.
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