Billy: My Life as a Teenage POW

I had never experienced a regular home environment, and certainly nothing even approaching what people take for granted today. I had never experienced the feeling of belonging to a proper family, or the warm comfort of a family home. Life for me had always been a game of chance; a matter of heads or tails. Yet it was here, on that faraway island, while chained to a cable on an old timber wharf, that I had my first yearning for home. -- Billy YoungThis book has been compiled from a personal chronicle penned by Billy Young throughout the 1970s, supplemented by hundreds of conversations that Lynette and Billy have shared in the course of their close friendship spanning over two decades. It is the only first-hand published account by an ordinary soldier imprisoned by the Japanese at the infamous Sandakan POW Camp, and one of only three books by a survivor at the Kempeitais equally notorious Outram Road Gaol. Billy is now the only soldier left alive from Sandakan, and the only Australian prisoner still alive from Outram Road. Lynette Silver provides historical details gleaned from years of combing archival documents, and Billy gives his unique narrative immerse vibrancy and life as he takes the reader on a very personal journey. Through the eyes of a tearaway teenaged soldier, Billy shares his thoughts and experiences, some of which have never before been revealed -- secrets that he has kept even from his closest family.