GREAT-GRANDAD Alf Davey, of Blackburn, has told of his three-and-a-half years as a Japanese prisoner of war, building railways, as plans are made to mark the 60th anniversary of VJ Day.

Alf, now 85, was captured with the 4th Battalion of the Royal Norfolk Regiment in Singapore on February 15, 1942. He left in steel railway trucks, not knowing where they were destined

Thirty soldiers to a truck, some suffering dysentry, travelled for five days, in burning sun and freezing night time temperatures, with one just meal of rice a day.

In his memoirs Alf describes some of the horrors he and his friends endured, seeing nurses raped, doctors bayoneted as they operated and his own colonel being beaten every day for disobeying orders.

When the prisoners were marched up country he recalls that: "Some of the lads were weak and fell by the wayside. We weren't allowed to help them, we had to leave them to die where they had fallen.

"Some nights we had camp concerts, the lads dressed as girls, you can imagine the wolf whistles they got! I will always remember one night one Australian tenor singing 'Somewhere a Voice is Calling' -- there wasn't a dry eye in the room.

"Then it was back to work on the railway with tools which were absolutely useless. The work was hard and rations very poor. We bathed, swam and washed our clothes and blankets in the River Mekon, which was close to all camps. We had one day off in 10."

He went on: "When you passed a Japanese, even a private, you saluted him. If you didn't you would be beaten and kicked most mercilessly."

Alf, who had nightmares on his release and still suffers from malaria today, recalls one of the worst jobs the soldiers endured was building a trellis bridge from green timber round a cliff:.

"We had to drill through the rock, with your mate holding the drill and you striking with a 14lb hammer. If he was weak he would move and you hit his wrist, sometimes breaking it,"

he recalled, adding that the lads who couldn't move out of the way fast enough would be blasted to death, but "the Japanese just laughed and pushed the dead over the side into the river below."

Wearing just a loin cloth and clogs made from bits of wood, the soldiers got their own back on their tormentors when they could, Alf recalls them once collecting all the bugs they could find and putting them in the Japanese huts to give them sleepless nights!

Finally, in August 1945 the war was over but Alf declared: "Apparently the Japanese had received orders to shoot us all and if the atom bomb had not been dropped, thousands of soldiers would not have lived and I would not be here today to tell my story."

After a joyous welcome at his Suffolk home he came up north to Blackburn to see Elsie, the girlfriend he had met on a blind date while training to go to war. The couple were married for 52 years.

Said Alf: "Her father advised against it 'cos I wouldn't last long after what I'd been through but, needless to say, I have out-lived her."