Author of clean non-fiction & fiction books - all available on CD-ROM.
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Author of clean non-fiction & fiction books - all available on CD-ROM. |
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| An Exalted Commission | Leads one as far as Korea, and into evil in high places |
| An Idyll Too Far | Another historical novel ranging back into the last world war |
| Beyond The Cherry Tree | A mini saga of a young man's triumph over misfortune |
| Bim Joins The Force | An account of a young detective's first cases |
| Kiss The Dealer | Where a man takes on the drug pushers that ensnared his son |
| Opposite The Prince | Growing up in Barnet in the '20s |
| Kept - The Other Side of Tenko | A secret diary kept in a Japanese Prisoner of War camp with illustrations by the author |
| The Fairy Who Couldn't Say 'No' | Stories for children of all ages |
| The Greuzniak File | Terrorism leads the detectives to Scotland and realms of royalty |
| The Ham Sandwich or The Expendable Spy | Where an innocent man is suspected |
| The Mandelbrot Set | Visitors from afar have their marks recorded by the world press |
| The Next to Die | Crimes that lead one back into Bolshevik history, and The Great War |
| The Old Quarry Murder | Another crime for BIM & Co to solve through detective work |
| We Visit New Zealand | Account of two month's holiday with many pictures in colour |
| Young BIM | Tongue in cheek account of a bigheaded young man's early years |
| A Continental Affair | Another historical story, with links to the present. Based on the period when c.80,000 Turkish Armenians were massacred by the Turks toward the end of the last century |
| Len's Anthology of Verse & Anecdotes | True tales from a long life |
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| The comments and cuttings below refer to the book 'Kept - The Other Side of Tenko', unless otherwise stated. | ||
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'A terrifyingly authentic document that brought back all too vividly ( for me) the miseries of those years of captivity under the Japanese, Len Baynes has added some fine detail to the memorial honouring those who were not so fortunate as we, and did not survive to tell the tale - a tale of suffering, courage and soldierly cunning, in the face of medieval, oriental cruelty' Ronald Searle |
'The courage and fortitude of Len Baynes in recording those events was matched only by the extraordinary vividness of his writing, taking the reader right there into those awful places. Only half of those captured survived the hardships and that is why he thought it so important to keep a diary. He tore up each page he wrote, smudging it so that no-one but himself would realise it was anything but toilet paper. Years later he painstakingly put the pieces together again. A small part of the story was published in newspaper articles but this is the first time the full story has been told. Inspite of seeing his own men walking and toiling with bones showing through their flesh, he is able to write objectively and holds no rancour for the Japanese. This remarkable quality of the author produces a narrative of serious importance which is probably the most valuable document so far written on the subject.' The Book Guild |
'. . . . What was kept in the process was Len Baynes life, a wad of smudged papers on which he had surreptitiously made the diary entries from which this account was constructed. . . . . But I was not at all disappointed when I started to read. By writing about his experiences in close detail, without melodrama, self-pity, or rancor, Baynes has done more than any number of screen versions . . . . to evoke the actual quality of life in those wretched camps, and even to make some sense of the human aberrations to which he was witness. As one might expect, there are plenty of hair-raising descriptions of the primitive and life-threatening conditions with which the men were constantly faced, but the accent is on the ways in which they kept up their morale, and maintained self-discipline . . . . Despite all this, and although he was not what the English termed 'Jap Happy', Baynes has presented a view of his captors which is both credible and balanced. It goes further than he himself seems to have realized in bridging an enormous and - to anyone with personal experience of the Japanese today - perplexing gap. . . . . Nor does he shrink from reminding us, at one point, of the blackest side of British imperialism: he himself had served in the commandos, and heard stories from them which made him realize that our colonizing troops between the wars were pretty well as bad as the Japs at their worst' Mainichi Daily News (Japan) |
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'. . so you see how fascinating your book has been, thank you very much for letting me read it. . .' Edward Blishen (referring to Opposite The Prince) |
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' . . . . This is a clear, unemotional account of unrelenting hardship and death in the jungle told without self pity, and far removed from some of the romanticized Kwai type film and fiction of that period . . .' cutting from The Daily Telegraph |
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'The amazing adventures of Japanese PoW Len Baynes are to be preserved for future generations. . . . A (Imperial War) Museum spokesman "In the years to come there will be fewer and fewer survivors of Japanese war camps who are left to tell the tale. Mr. Baynes . . . . lived a charmed life among the stench, squalor and violence of the prison camps."' cutting from The Cambridge Evening News |
'Former PoW Len (Snowy) Baynes . . . subject of documentary on Sunday (Death Camp Diary. . . . His autobiography, Kept - The Other Side of Tenko, became a bestseller in Cambridge, recording how Mr. Baynes kept a secret record of the horrors of life on the notorious Burmese Railway, written in code on scraps of lavatory paper. . . . . giving a tape of the program to the Imperial War Museum' cutting from The BBC |
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Each story is available on a single CD-ROM disk. If you would like to order a CD-ROM from outside the UK then please contact Len to arrange the price and shipping. To contact Len, you may email him using baynes@glenoak.org.uk, or telephone 01223 843363 (from within the UK) or +44 1223 843363 (from anywhere else in the world). |
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