大象传媒

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This story was submitted to the People鈥檚 War site by Phil Sealey of the Somerset County Museum Team on behalf of Hazel Lowson and has been added to the site with her permission. The author fully understands the site鈥檚 terms and conditions

鈥淭he island buzzed with rumours and I became uneasy. I had seen this stirring and excitement before in men, this sense of apprehension in their women, whispers and sad looks that were pushed away and replaced by gay laughter and determined smiles at their children. War had arrived that time, but in Singapore we were far from the War, weren鈥檛 we? 鈥榃ill the war come here, Mummy?鈥�
鈥楴o, darling, this island is too strong; no one would be so silly, don鈥檛 worry about it.鈥�
So I didn鈥檛, until the night of the bat. It flew into the house, a small flittering harbinger of doom. We had never had a bat in the house before and I followed its swooping path through the rooms with great interest. My mother was alarmed; my father reassuring: 鈥楬eavens, May, this is the tropics there are bats outside the house every night!鈥� He could be impatient with his Irish wife鈥檚 intuition. 鈥榊es, but they never come inside, something bad is going to happen tonight鈥� declared mother.
鈥榃hat?鈥� I asked intrigued I didn鈥檛 want to miss anything but when towards dawn the bombs started falling on Singapore, a sound Mother and I knew well, I knew Mummy had been right - something bad had happened, the war had followed us [from England].
I knew very little about the Japanese. I knew they were small people, always smiling and bowing. Many wore glasses and I was told this meant they couldn鈥檛 fly planes properly, how come then they were so good at hitting the docks so close to where we lived?
I found the talk of the war very confusing, but listened avidly. The Japanese had behaved very badly, it seemed. Instead of attempting to land in Singapore from the sea, thereby enabling them to be satisfactorily blasted by our big guns prepared for such an invasion, they had chosen to sneak into Malaya on several of her beautiful East Coast beaches.
The Japs continued to NOT play the war game by the rules of the British army. They had cheated by bombing Singapore without first declaring war and then their soldiers were not like our soldiers at all.
They didn鈥檛 mind the sun, they didn鈥檛 seem to sweat, or get prickly heat, and they didn鈥檛 even wear proper boots! They didn鈥檛 need NAAFI or a decent meal. They drank water from jungle pools and could live off a handful of rice. They used the fine roads of Malaya (built by the British) for their tanks, but they also used bicycles, hundreds of them. They looks so much like the Chinese you could hardly tell the difference between the two races, which made recognition difficult for Western eyes and finally, they thrived on discomfort, despised anyone who surrendered and welcomed a brave death as a honourable entrance to a glorious hereafter. No they were not like us at all. It certainly wasn鈥檛 fair.
They came south very fast, slipping through the jungles and the rubber estates with Asiatic ease. Behind them they left pockets of our troops, cut off, isolated, to be annihilated later at leisure. In front of their advance came my rubber planter brother, John, fleeing south with an army unit blowing up bridges behind them. He arrived back in Singapore, weary and now very aware that the Jap was an extremely dangerous foe. John, now 18, joined Alex, now 20, in the Singapore Volunteers Forces and, like so many, prepared for the battle of Singapore to begin.
On the radio the Japanese told us to enjoy our Christmas for we would have a very bad New Year. The impossible had suddenly become possible.鈥�

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