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Haunting film that made me see Dad was a hero - not just a cruel drunk I despised: How seeing The Railway Man healed a lifelong rift between father and daughter By?BRYHER SCUDAMORE PUBLISHED:?23:53 GMT, 7 January 2014?|?UPDATED:?00:07 GMT, 8 January 2014 My father was an angry, troubled man who was deaf in one ear — the result, my mother confided to me one day, of a vicious beating by a Japanese soldier.? Daddy, who was called Douglas Mitchell, was also an alcoholic who lived entirely for the moment. Not once did he concern himself with the future. Indeed, our household finances were irrelevant to him.? My mother, Peggy, who died in 1999, had to manage all the bills so we weren’t thrown out of our home in South London, or plunged into cold and darkness when the electricity was cut off.? Bryher Scudamore, pictured with her father Douglas Mitchell. She said a new film, The Railway Man, which is released nationwide this Friday, made her realise her father was a hero, not a cruel drunk Many memories of my father still sting me to this day. The sheer mortification I felt when I was a child and he would turn up drunk at school open days.? The time I discovered he’d sold my precious Christening gifts — a sapphire brooch and a beautiful antique silver spoon — to buy himself alcohol.? My mother had always promised that these gifts would be released from their hiding place and given to me on my 21st birthday.? On the morning of my birthday, I discovered what my father had done.? My poor mother had to break the news that they were gone: that Daddy had sold them because he needed the money ‘for drink’. He died in 1991 from a massive stroke. He was 75. And although I arranged his funeral, I shed no tears. After so many years of neglect, I simply had no feelings left.? What I didn’t realise then was that my flawed father’s life was utterly defined by his experiences as a ‘railway man’ in World War??II. He was one of the many British prisoners of war put to work by their Japanese