What is it like to shake hands with the man who killed your father? Jo Berry, daughter of the late Tory MP, Sir Anthony Berry, gave some insight into that experience in Galway recently, when she described her first encounter with the man known as the Brighton bomber, Patrick Magee. Lorna Siggins writes.
One could barely hear a breath drawn among several hundred students in the O'Flaherty lecture theatre in NUI, Galway, when the two shared a platform there several weeks ago. Both declined to use a microphone. Both spoke in barely audible tones as they described their response to a series of meetings since the first contact, made through associates of the Glencree Centre for Reconciliation, four years ago.
Commander Bill King (94), resident of Oranmore Castle in Co Galway, has little or nothing in common with Patrick Magee, and didn't have the benefit of any counselling or reconciliation services after 14 years on submarines, six of which were during almost continuous service during the second World War. It was his grandmother who helped him to rid himself of some of his demons afterwards - she had learned to ski, climb and sail in her late 70s, and had taught him the rudiments as a boy.
After wartime duty below the sea, King spent several seasons up among the waves when he crossed the Atlantic four times under canvas and was the first person to sail single-handedly south of, and round, the "entire inhabited world" in the Galway Blazer II. He also took to the mountains, climbing the Matterhorn, Mont Blanc and other great Alpine peaks. However, some of the aforementioned demons threatened to return when he received notification earlier this year from a Japanese resident of California.
Akira Tsurukame was three months old when he lost his father. Chief engineer Tsurukame was on board the I-166, a Japanese submarine, when it was sunk by the British submarine Telemachus in the Straits of Malacca in July, 1944.
The Telemachus was Cdr King's "boat", and the decision to fire on the I-166 was described in some detail in his autobiography The Stick and the Stars. The commander's crew had plotted the Japanese craft on the chart travelling at 20 knots. "Within Telemachus, the whole action was so silent that it had a dreamlike quality," King wrote. "Although I had done this all before it seemed strange. The tubes ready. The crew at diving stations. Twenty minutes of careful, often-rehearsed work. And now all was ready for a collected shot. . ."
The I-166 was one of many "targets" hit or missed during King's career. It wasn't a career he chose. He had been raised by his mother, as his father and uncle had been killed in the first World War. At just 12 years old, he was dispatched to the Royal Naval College at Dartmouth, where flogging was regularly employed as incentive and deterrent. He was eventually sent to sea at the age of 17.
His "nursery" was a battleship, HMS Resolution,in the Mediterranean. However, the life of rude "fresh air" which he had hoped for was to be replaced by the claustrophobic confines of submarines. He was 29 when he embarked on his first mission in Snapper, based at Sheerness, with orders to patrol the mine-strewn North sea.
King's world became the "dark daytime of a dived sub", "bounded by the chart table, the periscope and the bridge", with the constant smell of "diesel oil, chlorine and unwashed bodies". There was the constant threat of scurvy and weevils in the food. He would never forget the "damp fug", and "the sense of danger which lurks in a crew all the time", especially when they had to surface at night to take in oxygen and recharge batteries.
That the son and grandson of one of his wartime victims should track him down six decades later, and be made welcome in his home, says something about the human spirit, and about King's strength of character."I thought he might have explosive boots and blow us all to glory," he says. In fact, the meeting between King, his daughter, artist Leonie, grand-daughter Heather, the Tsurukames, and a Dutch friend, Katja Boonstra, whose father had been killed in a submarine fired on by the I-166, had a "miraculous" quality about it. There was much talking, tears, laughter, and a decision to mark the event with a crab apple tree.
The tree was planted recently at Oranmore Castle, where King has lived since he and his late wife, the biographer Anita Leslie, settled there. Leslie, who had been decorated for her work as an ambulance driver in the French army, had bought the castle in 1945 for £200 and used an emerald ring which her mother left her to pay for a new roof. The couple hunted with the Galway Blazers, King sailed, and they reared their two children, Tarka and Leonie. King still travels and climbs, having recently hiked up the Worcestershire Beacon.
He wrote a novel after his wife's death which he regards as one of the best of its genre since Thomas Hardy. In his bedroom,among his decorations for military duty and his Blue Water Medal for sailing, he has a picture postcard which he has kept since he was a boy of a Turk named Zaro Agha, then the oldest man in the world at 156, and father of 35 children by 11 marriages.
The "commander", as he is known fondly, is surrounded now by construction sites, but shares none of the widespread angst about a rapidly changing Ireland. "Nothing could be worse than the forced emigration of before," he says. He attributes his good health to gardening (including a very therapeutic daily "riddling of the compost heap"), travel, and his ski stick - which came in handy during a recent attempted mugging back at home. Bayonet training in military school stood to him then, he says. "And if anyone is going to be left to argue with the judge, it is going to be me."