King Rat

KING RAT

PRAISE FOR JAMES CLAVELL

and His Spectacular Bestseller

KING RAT

“A magnificent novel … scintillating … vibrant … expert.”

—Washington Post

“A powerful, satisfying novel … fascinating … penetrating … provoking.”

—New York Herald Tribune

“A blockbuster of a novel … one of the best we have read, and we read every word.”

—Boston Herald

THE ASIAN SAGA CHRONOLOGY

1600 SHOGUN

1841 TAI-PAN

1862 GAI-JIN

1945 KING RAT

1963 NOBLE HOUSE

1979 WHIRLWIND

TITLE PAGE

DEDICATION

For Those Who Were There

and Are Not.

For Those Who Were There and Are.

For Him. But Most,

for Her.

There was a war. Changi and Utram Road jails in Singapore do—or did—exist. Obviously the rest of this story is fiction, and no similarity to anyone living or dead exists or is intended.

FOREWORD TO THE NEW EDITION

by Michaela Clavell Richards

Darling,

This letter is number 205. We have had no news of you since your letter dated February 1, 1942, posted from Singapore. We’re praying for your safe return.

I’ve started each letter off the same, so if you’ve read the above before, forgive me. But it’s difficult, not knowing if this one will reach you, if any of them have….

When my father walked out through the gates of Changi prison to freedom, six feet tall, ninety-eight pounds, and twenty-one years alive, he was handed a small but bulky bundle of papers and the news that his beloved father was dead. For three years and eleven months my stubborn half-Irish grandmother had written weekly letters, via the Red Cross, to a son reported only as “missing, captured in Java.” For almost four years the bundle had grown, saved and collected by the Japanese. And never delivered. Without reply she had written to a prisoner-of-war camp in Singapore, where ninety-nine out of every hundred men died, courtesy of malaria, malnutrition, cruelty, and dysentery. Miraculously spared these, my father survived despite starvation, appendicitis, bullet wounds, jungle sores, and even a broken nose, received while defending his hut’s honor and its pregnant coconut tree.

King Rat was born from the ashes of this experience.

He wrote it during a screenwriters strike in 1963. Unable to work at his then trade, my mother suggested somewhat forcefully that instead of just lying about, he write a book on his experiences in Singapore. Six weeks later King Rat was completed. Expertly edited by Herman Gollob, it was published without the additional pages included in this edition. Pages that give a glimpse of seven women’s lives during the war—girlfriends, mothers, and wives of men in the camp. Perhaps, at the time, it was felt inappropriate for a harsh and groundbreaking novel of survival to include women’s equally harsh stories. But my father knew it was everyone’s war, and that no man, woman, or child was spared.

When we were children, my sister and I were told and retold stories of our family’s experiences in the war. My mother, at sixteen, would sit with her mother on the rooftop of their London house at night, watching the bombs drop and burst rather than cower in the airless shelter below. If it had your name on it, it would find you wherever you were.

Like many other women in England and around the world, my father’s mother went to work for pay and rations. Granny Clavell, shop steward, electrical engineer, and welder by day, volunteered as a Red Cross ambulance driver by night, delivering bomb victims, mainly women and children, through demolished and unlit streets to overcrowded makeshift hospitals. Aunt Joan, Father’s youngest sister, at eighteen a Wren with top secret clearance, served under Mountbatten in Ceylon, making her way from England by sea, enduring dengue fever and saltwater showers on a condemned Indian cattleboat while German U-boats patrolled the seas like hungry sharks. Aunt Meg in England, his eldest sister, sergeant at arms of a military transport yard at Boscombe Downe, a high security facility where experimental planes and bombs were manufactured and tested, drove through the black night without headlamps, maps, or street signs, delivering important personnel safely to their secret destinations. The stories were high adventure to us. No one had died. No lost limbs. We could see no scars.