Ray Parkin speaks about how, through his drawing and painting, he could share the beauty of nature with other prisoners in the jungles of Thailand.
Transcript
Well I drew a lot of insects, butterflies, all sorts of things like that. Flowers, anything; but also, I had plenty of blokes to help me because as we went out we used to find things to discuss and we would discuss the new flowers that were out or what was happening, you know, the general state of nature as we went out.
And I had, all the blokes around me were collecting butterflies and insects, 'Have you got this, have you got that?'
Course, I didn't have time to paint it all. But still, with the butterflies, course, there were millions of them up there, beautiful, in flocks. And, I couldn't paint them but all the blokes were still bringing them back, so what we did we got little slivers of bamboo and made pins out of them and on the inside of the atap hut we'd pin these things on the ceiling and we had a ceiling covered with these beautiful butterflies and everything and I thought, 'Well this is better than the Sistine Chapel ever could be!'
Read more about how prisoners stayed sane on the Burma-Thailand railway.