Three Came Home [Paperback]

"one of the most remarkable books you will ever read" John Carey, Sunday Times

Three Came Home should rank with the great imprisonment stories of all times.

A truly remarkable book.

This humane and moving book deserves to be widely read.

one of those remarkable records of the strength of the human spirit that are at once desolating and uplifting

Agnes Keith was a young and promising journalist in San Francisco in November 1934 when she was savagely mugged by a drug addict with a two foot iron pipe on the doorstep of the San Francisco Examiner. During her long recovery from the resultant skull fractures, loss of memory and eyesight damage, she travelled a lot and on her return to California, somewhat restored, she met an Englishman, Harry Keith, whom she married and settled down to live with in Sandakan in N Borneo. Miraculously, she seems to have made a full recovery from her head injuries and to have regained all of her writing talents, which she lavished on three-books about her life in Borneo before, during and after the Second World War.

Our barrack was regarded by non-residents as a dirty hole, a stinkhole, a pesthole, a hellhole. It was Hades let loose on a rainy day. It was the final crash of a brass band throughout feeding hours. It smelled of kids, pots, and wee-wee. The noise started at 6 a.m. and continued until 6 a.m.

But there was one hour after supper at night when the type of noise changed. The children were all in bed then, the mothers were too, being too exhausted for anything else. Then took place that sudden transformation to which children are subject when the dusk falls: thirty-four little devils become thirty-four little angels. They smell good, they speak sweetly, they squeeze your hand, they even want to kiss you - and they sing! Tragedy came and went in our camp, but we never missed a night of singing.

‘Kiss Me Good Night, Sergeant Major’; ‘Good Night Daddy and Jim’; ‘Christopher Robin Is Saying His Prayers’; ‘I Think When I Hear That Sweet Story of Old’; ‘One Finger, One Thumb, One Arm, One Leg’; ‘Hark, the Herald Angels Sing.’ And always without fail, to end up with, in bed: ‘God save our gracious King... God save the King.’

I can never forget the sound of those children’s voices, singing - with nothing to sing for. If their song could have been broadcast to the outside world I think that hearts would have broken. I have stood outside our barrack at night, listening, and weeping with pride and love and sorrow for those our children.

I said to begin with that we brought them all through alive. But perhaps they brought us through alive.