Madge found the trip fascinating because it answered questions that had been at the back of her mind for fifty years. Basil had lived in a tent on Labuan for weeks and had told her there wasn’t a single building standing when he left. When they visited together, the island was a happy, thriving community.
For Basil, rugby union was a way of easing the pressures of the Burma Campaign and after he was demobbed in 1947 he played for Esher Expendables, until he retired in 1985. He served as treasurer for many years and later became chairman before being appointed club president. He went on to become the first administrator of Aviva Premiership rugby club Harlequin FC. He also spent more than fifteen years as joint club archivist with Nick Cross and is still a founder member of Quins and life member of Esher Rugby Club.
Age has not wearied Basil and Madge, nor have memories of the Burma Campaign condemned them to the years of despair suffered by so many in the aftermath of the confrontation. At its height the Burma Star Association, which was founded in 1951, boasted a membership in excess of twenty-six thousand. By the start of 2018, Madge was one of just twenty surviving women members entitled to wear the coveted Burma Star on her left lapel. Her status as one of the last of the few resulted in a conversation with former Prime Minister David Cameron at the seventieth anniversary of VJ Day in August 2015. The service of remembrance took place at St Martin-in-the-Fields in Trafalgar Square, where Madge had attended her last Sunday morning worship before travelling to India.
Following the VJ Day service Basil and Madge took part in the parade down Whitehall with over a thousand other veterans and around Parliament Square to a reception in the grounds of Westminster Abbey. Madge wore the 1939–45 Star, the Burma Star, the Defence Medal, and the 1939–45 War Medal. Prime Minister David Cameron asked if the medals she was wearing were her own and was told very politely that if people wore them on their left breast, as she was, they certainly were their own. Medals awarded to deceased ex-service personnel may be worn on the right by relatives, she explained.
The following year the live audience of BBC’s Strictly Come Dancing were in tears at the end of a moving tribute to Basil and Madge on the Remembrance Sunday show that peaked with an audience of almost 12 million TV viewers. The internet went into meltdown after the background to their love story stretching back more than seventy years to the Second World War was re-enacted by Strictly professionals AJ Pritchard and Chloe Hewitt. The dance routine included Leonard Cohen’s ‘Hallelujah’ and the music of violinist Andre Rieu and his orchestra. The story of the wartime romance had been told with Dame Vera Lynn’s wartime classic ‘We’ll Meet Again’ playing in the background.
‘It was marvellous to hear our favourite song sung by our favourite singer, who is also a Burma Star veteran. We had the pleasure of meeting her at the Burma reunion in 2005,’ said Basil.
What very few people knew was that the show only went ahead after Madge turned back the clock to her Nurse Graves days and used the magic potion that brought light into the darkest of times in the Burma Campaign. Dancer Chloe was so overcome by the emotion of the part she was to re-enact that rehearsals had to be halted because she was in floods of tears.
‘I can’t do this; it’s all so moving,’ she told Madge, as she stood sobbing at the side of the stage. That was until Nurse Graves mixed a generous helping of compassion with TLC and the gentlest of cuddles to calm Chloe down and get her back on stage. Madge told her she danced so beautifully that all she had to do was take a deep breath and everything would be fine. Chloe and AJ performed with such grace and elegance that when Basil and Madge joined them on stage they were all given a standing ovation.
Several months later in the spring of 2017, the two veterans were invited to a garden party at Buckingham Palace. It was hosted by Prince Harry who had spent the morning at the Tower of London revealing the names of the ninety competitors to represent the UK at the 2017 Paralympic-style Invictus Games. He returned to the palace later in the afternoon, stopping when Basil told him that Madge had cheered his granny on the way to her wedding to Prince Philip in November 1947. Madge also told the Prince that it was almost seventy-one years since she caught a boat home from Bombay to England after nursing in the Burma Campaign, which he was fascinated to hear about.
‘He was a real life Prince Charming,’ said Madge, ‘and after we’d thanked him for taking the time to talk to us, I suggested he should go and get a cup of tea and some cake before it was all gone. He burst out laughing.’
Before Prince Harry went to talk to other veterans, he made Madge’s day by having his photo taken with her. What Madge didn’t know, as the garden party drew to a close, was that her very own Prince Charming, husband Basil, had slipped on the lush palace lawn and broken his collarbone. Their daughter Angela went with him in an ambulance to St Thomas’s Hospital and their son-in-law Chris drove Madge there. Madge made the nurses smile when she told them that when she was preparing for the journey to nurse in the Burma Campaign she missed curfew at Baker Street in July 1944 because a bomb had landed near the hospital and the roads became jammed with traffic.
‘They were such interesting times,’ said Madge, on a sunny afternoon in the early autumn of 2017. It was the
