My father, Noel Good from Mapperly, Nottinghamshire, didn't really talk about his days as a Japanese Prisoner of War. We knew he had been one because he was missing for three and a half years from 1942, but when he came home he left the whole thing behind him.

He came back to my mother, Margaret, whom he'd met whilst playing the organ for a church in Colston Bassett. She was a trained singer and when she first met him she said 'I hope you won't let me down like the other organist!' It turned out my father had played organ on cruise ships and was very accomplished - they got together and married in 1940.

I didn't know anything about his wartime experiences until November 9, 1989, when I received an unexpected parcel just two days before Remembrance Day.

It turned out that an American serviceman called Mel Blanton had picked up a bundle of papers he found lying on the beach in Okinawa after VJ Day. They had been in the sea and were sodden on the outside, but dry inside. He realised that it was a personal account of life as a POW, so before handing it over to American intelligence, he typed the whole thing up - it turned out to be over 80 pages.

Mel Blanton went home and started a normal life with his family and forgot about the diary for over 40 years. But when he was diagnosed with a brain tumour he wanted to set his affairs in order, so approached a local Wisconsin paper, the Ladysmith News. They serialised the diary and had lots of letters from people saying how much they'd enjoyed reading it, but who did it belong to? A reporter, Peg Gillis Fiertag, decided to find out .

She wrote to Cambridge University, thinking that a place called Colston Bassett mentioned in the diary could be a college - so where else do you write to? They wrote back, saying it was in fact a village in Leicestershire. So she contacted the local vicar there and, as the writer had mentioned he played the organ at a church, the vicar asked his older parishioners and they came up with my father's name. It had to be Noel Good, who rode his bicycle in from Mapperly twice a day and married a girl called Margaret. Friends saw an appeal for Noel's family to get in touch in the local paper - and so finally, after 44 years, I received my father's diary which I never knew existed.

The diary covers nine months of his life at war as his ship sails into the South China Sea, without any idea where they're going. They arrive in Singapore in torrential rain to dock 13, at 13.00 hours on Friday the 13th. My dad always said his lucky number was 13 - another reason how I knew this was his diary.

And it was lucky - the terrible rain storm prevented the Japanese boats sailing down the peninsula from seeing my dad's ship and so it didn't get bombed and they succeeded in disembarking.

But the Japanese did come and the soldiers went back to sea. My father's ship was bombed and sank - there's a long passage about how they had to hang on in the sea for dear life, and how so many men died, he and the other survivors had to join a new battalion. We knew nothing about this.

These were just ordinary men, not professional soldiers. My father was a musician - the idea of him going out to kill people was not part of his agenda. He was just a quiet, lovely, Christian man.

Life in the camps.
Extracts from Noel Good's diary.