Prisoner from Penang: The moving sequel to The Pearl of Penang

by Clare Flynn

  ‘I have received orders from the highest authority that all nursing staff must leave the colony immediately.’

  There was a collective gasp.

  ‘A small skeleton staff will be remaining. I am not asking for volunteers, as I know you would all step forward. Those of you who will be remaining already know who you are. The rest of you should proceed immediately to the harbour, where ships will be waiting to transport you to safety. May God bless you all and I thank you for your tireless service.’

  She clambered down from her stool, leaving us with more questions than answers. I was standing close to her and saw the unshed tears glistening in her eyes. The nursing staff was already overstretched. How on earth would a skeleton staff cope? It appeared that the authorities were at the point of capitulating and abandoning the precious jewel that was Singapore to the mercy of the invading army.

  There were so many patients, and the bombing so bad, that new admissions were lying on the floor awaiting treatment in the absence of sufficient beds. As we moved between them, heading for the exit, the floor was sticky with blood.

  For the past several days my role as letter scribe had been abandoned in favour of assisting the nursing staff. Untrained, I had been put to work preparing and applying bandages and dressings, washing wounds, sluicing bedpans and fetching and carrying. I held the hands of dying men, bearing witness to their passing.

  As we followed the orders to leave, the eyes of those exhausted wounded men looked up at us as we said our goodbyes. It was as if they were saying ‘That’s it. It’s all up for us. We’ve had it.’

  My first patient, Charlie, had been discharged a few days earlier. Although I was sure a missing arm was insufficient to justify a priority place on a ship, I prayed he’d make it out of Singapore before it was too late.

  As we left the hospital, we could hear rifle fire from just a couple of miles away. The air was thick with smoke and the smell of explosives. The city of Singapore, the British Empire’s pride and joy was descending rapidly into chaos. As I hurried back to the hotel on foot, the skies were lit up with the streaks of tracer fire, and the sound of exploding mortars followed our progress.

  I walked with a group of doctors and nurses. We barely spoke. All of us were experiencing a sense of abandonment and betrayal by our government and military. None of us wanted to leave our patients. I was not the only one anxious about their fate and that of the few doctors and nurses who were remaining to care for them.

  The road into the city was constantly strafed by Japanese aircraft, machine-gunning anyone visible, without mercy. A couple of times the only place where we were able to take cover was in an open ditch by the side of the road. Believe me, when your life is at stake, you’ll do anything to stay alive, even when that ditch is an open sewer.

  When, at last, I walked into the hotel bedroom I was sharing with my parents, Mum looked at me in horror.

  ‘Mary! What in heaven’s name has happened to you? You’re filthy.’ She clamped a hand over her mouth.

  I tried to make light of it. ‘I managed to fall into a drainage ditch. I had to walk back from the hospital.’ I started to pull off my clothes. I wouldn’t be wearing them again. There was no time for laundry.

  The situation since the bombing of Penang had disturbed Mum’s equilibrium. She constantly worried about Dad, who was finding the heavy physical work tough. Recently retired from an office job, being plunged into doing vigorous labouring must have been an ordeal. Yet he never complained. It was Mum who struggled. She couldn’t accept what had happened to us. She wanted to wake up, find herself back in Penang, going to her weekly bridge games, knitting socks for soldiers in Europe, baking cakes and doing her daily crossword puzzle. It was impossible for her to believe that the war had come to us.

  After I had quickly washed and changed my clothes, I saw Mum was crying. Back in Penang, she had always been the most cheerful of people, content with life, retaining a robust sense of humour. Now she was crumbling in front of me.

  Bombs were dropping in the nearby docks, obliterating the godowns and destroying the food and raw materials stored in them. As we talked, the walls of the hotel shook.

  ‘We have to leave, Mum. We have to get down to the harbour and onto a ship. If we don’t go, right away, there might not be any room left.’ I waved the piece of paper I had been issued with that morning. ‘I think we’re on the point of surrendering.’ I bit my lip as soon as the words were out. It felt awful to be verbally acknowledging the inevitable.

  ‘I’m not budging without your father.’ Her face was a mixture of defiance and terror.

  ‘Mum, we have to go.’ I started throwing clothing into a couple of holdalls. ‘Otherwise we’ll be blown up or the Japanese will capture us. They’re only a couple of miles up the road from the hospital.’ I put an arm around her shoulder. ‘It’s over, Mum. It’s just a matter of time until they reach us here. We have to get out.’ I tried to keep my voice calm, but I wanted to grab her and shake her.

  Mum stared at me. ‘I’m not moving. There’s nowhere to go. I’d rather stay here and die with your father. You can go, but don’t expect me to come with you, Mary.’

  Before I could reply, there was a hammering on the bedroom door. I opened it and Veronica Leighton was standing there. Her face was filthy, streaked with dirt, and her white shirt was splashed with blood. She pushed past me into the room.

  ‘We have to go. NOW! There are a few ships in port, and they’ll be sailing at dawn, and we need to be on one if we’re going to get out of here alive.’

  Mum’s head was bent low and she didn’t even acknowledge Veronica’s presence.

  ‘Come along, Mrs Helston. Pip pip!’ Veronica clapped her hands. ‘Only one small bag with the essentials. The ship will be extremely crowded.’

  Mum didn’t move.

  ‘She refuses to go without Dad.’

  ‘She’ll have to.’ Veronica moved to the bed and grabbed my mother’s elbow. If it weren’t for the gravity of the situation, I’d have been amused at the picture of the petite and elfin Veronica struggling to pull my overweight mum up and onto her feet.

  Mum jerked her arm free and snarled at Veronica. ‘I’ve told you. I’m not going.’

  A deafening crash shook the room and a yawning space appeared where the window had been. Smoke and dust billowed inside between the shredded remains of the curtains. Veronica and I were coughing but my mother was screaming.

  Veronica turned to me, and through her splutters managed to ask, ‘Are you just going to let her die? Come on. We’ll grab an arm each.’

  We took Mum by the arms. She was wailing, sobbing and trailing her feet on the floor, as she tried to resist us. Somehow, we managed to manoeuvre her down the staircase and into the foyer of the hotel where people were rushing about in aimless panic. Acrid smoke was everywhere, although the structure of this part of the hotel appeared undamaged. Through the clouds of dust, I saw my father coming towards us and I heaved an enormous sigh of relief. I hurried back upstairs to collect our bags.

  From then on, Mum was compliant. She believed that Dad would be sailing with us. I knew it was improbable, as the instructions I’d received had made it clear that apart from the severely injured, no men would be permitted to join the ship.

  We made our way through the chaos, towards the harbour. Walking along streets with bomb-damaged buildings, sandbags piled in doorways and broken glass everywhere, it was like a scene from newsreels of the London Blitz. We may have come late into this war, and extremely ill-prepared for it, but its presence was now incontrovertible. Just weeks before, the city of Singapore had been operating as ‘business as usual’ – no blackout, no drills, no fear. It was apparent that our days as lotus eaters in a tropical paradise were gone – possibly forever.

  The docks had been laid waste. Where once godowns had lined the quay, there were piles of rubble, still smoking from the latest attack. The sky was black with the smoke from burning fuel and the fumes caught in my throa
t so that I struggled not to be sick.

  At the dockside, a cargo ship, the Empire Star, was preparing to depart, already full to the gunwales with passengers, many of them nurses from the Alexandra. Around it, the quay was stacked with discharged cargo. Mostly munitions and military supplies, there no longer being any warehouses to store them nor dock workers to move them. I couldn’t help thinking that it was a pointless delivery and would probably have to be destroyed by the army before the Japanese could get their hands on it.

  We were directed into a long line of people waiting to board another ship. As we stood waiting, a motorcar approached, pulling up at the far end of the harbour front, facing the water. Two men got out and together pushed the vehicle over the side of the quay into the water. It looked a new model. Smart. Expensive. American.

  ‘Better than leaving it for the enemy,’ Veronica said.

  Just before dark, we were told we could board our waiting ship, moored beside the Empire Star. The Royal Crown was smaller, a passenger steamer that had been chartered by the admiralty for war use. It was being readied to transport women, children and wounded to Batavia in the Dutch East Indies, from where we would be travelling onward to safety in Australia, Ceylon or India.

  Mum was bound to make another scene as soon as she found out Dad would not be coming. But Dad had anticipated this and took her aside to explain that he would be boarding separately, as the crew wanted to get the women and children settled first. Mum appeared to accept what she believed would be a brief separation.

  I didn’t know what to do. I felt duplicitous keeping the truth from Mum but the rules had been made clear. Women, children and wounded only. Dad would have to fend for himself.

  Mindful that I might never see Dad again, I planned to stand on the deck and wave to him until he was out of sight, but he must have known this was possibly our last goodbye. With a knowing look and a finger to his lips, he pushed a letter addressed to my mother into my hands, and once he saw we were safely up the gangplank, he turned and hurried away from the dockside. I didn’t know it, but it would prove to be the last time I saw him.

  3

  Into Captivity

  Once on board the Royal Crown, I discovered that there were several deserting Australian soldiers who had managed to sneak aboard. I was angry. Dad was getting on in age and just a lowly bank official. He was not as strong as he used to be, and these soldiers were hale and hearty. There were also other men, managers from The Ministry of Works who had been evacuated with us. I failed to understand why they had been allowed to leave when men like Dad and Reggie Hyde-Underwood had been left behind.

  The Empire Star left before us, slipping out of Keppel Harbour, with two-and-a-half-thousand passengers tightly crammed on board, as soon as daylight allowed them to negotiate the mines the British navy had laid through the southern approaches to the island. It was a choice between using daylight to navigate the minefield safely or using the cover of night to try to avoid the Japanese air attacks. Daylight sailing was judged the lesser risk.

  Most of the women, including my mother, and all the children, were sent below to the hold where they would be safer from an aerial attack. Mum was dazed but happy to have found some friends from Penang among the throng and went compliantly into the hold as instructed. She was still nursing the belief that Dad was safely aboard, segregated from us.

  As VADs, Veronica and I remained on deck with the wounded men and the nurses, so that we could assist where required and carry messages around the ship.

  Just after nine that morning, the Japanese launched an attack on the Empire Star. Scores of planes, like a swarm of locusts, dived through the sky, relentlessly strafing and bombing the ship. On the decks of the Royal Crown we watched at a distance, helpless, at the other, larger ship under fire.

  ‘They must know it’s a ship of evacuees,’ I said to Veronica who was standing beside me. ‘It’s sheer cruelty.’ I ought to have lost the capacity to be surprised by such things.

  ‘They don’t care. All they want is to make us so demoralised we’ll surrender as fast as possible.’ Veronica’s brow was furrowed, and I reflected how much she had changed since the war had caught up with us.

  As we sailed away from the colony, I looked back at a sky red with the flames from burning buildings and oil tanks. The air was rent with the echo of shellfire and explosions. Singapore had become the yawning maw of hell.

  This Armageddon was hard to reconcile with the familiar city of elegant colonial architecture. Abandoned were the tennis courts, the golf tournaments, the sun umbrellas dotted along the beach at the Singapore Swimming Club, the tea dances, parties and concerts, the fine dining and sipping of cocktails in the hotels and clubs. Singapore was in its death throes, laid waste by an army whose strategic battle planning contrasted sharply with our British incompetence and complacency.

  As we passed into the open straits, our turn came. The whining screech of the diving Japanese planes competed with the screaming of children and their terrified mothers, huddled in the hold. Hearing, feeling, but not seeing an enemy attack, must have been even worse than watching it unfold.

  I was busy helping the wounded men on the decks. The QAs had set up a makeshift nursing station and Veronica and I rushed about, fetching and carrying, cutting bandages and replacing simple dressings.

  We appeared to be more fortunate than the other ship. The attack on us was brief and did no damage to the hull and the precious cargo in the hold. Just one short sally by half-a-dozen planes, depositing their remaining ammunition upon us after the full-scale attack on our sister ship – but plenty of damage was done. The servicemen sitting or stretchered on the deck, were open targets for the diving fighter planes, which sent burning white-hot shrapnel among them, unleashing even more injuries from breaking glass and flying splinters. Through it all, those men sat patiently, passing around the bottles of whisky someone had salvaged from the bar of the Singapore Club. A group of Australian and British airmen led a rousing chorus of Waltzing Matilda.

  Two men and one nurse lost their lives in the short bombardment and their bodies were quietly slipped over the side while an army pastor said prayers. There was no possibility of keeping the bodies on board our overcrowded craft.

  I had no time to think about anything, as I did the nurses’ bidding, helping where possible, despite my lack of training or skills, until one of the sisters suggested that, as a teacher, I might be more use down in the hold where the children were in a state of abject terror.

  Any thoughts I’d had of setting up an impromptu schoolroom for the children in the hold were soon dashed. People were squeezed tightly into the limited space, mothers clinging to small children and babies, all near hysterical with fright – even though the aerial attack had stopped.

  Instead, I tried to get them to follow the example of the servicemen on deck, by singing. At first, there were only one or two participants, but after a few minutes, more joined in, along with several mothers, grateful for distraction. We worked our way through the complete canon of nursery rhymes and lullabies, before moving onto hymns and other songs. The tunes wandered off-key at times, but were soon steered back. Among the women were one or two I recognised from Penang – mainstays of the dramatic society and the choir.

  We sailed on through the day, until early in the evening, without warning, the ship’s engines went silent and we came to a sudden juddering halt.

  For a moment there was deathly silence. My stomach did a somersault as fear gripped me. The children began to cry again.

  I was sitting closest to the hatch leading to the companionway. Jumping to my feet, I called, ‘Keep on singing, children! I’ll go and find out how long we’re stopping here.’

  I plastered a big grin across my face, but the blood in my veins was cold with fear. I went above to investigate.

  Up on deck, even though it was after dark, the light was white and intense. I blinked, temporarily blinded by the glare. The source was a pair of giant searchlights traine
d upon the Royal Crown by a Japanese warship. My heart stopped and I could feel my legs shaking.

  Our captain had already run up a white flag to surrender the ship and signal the presence of women and children. I was frozen with terror at what lay ahead of us, as the air was split by strident barked orders conveyed over a loud hailer from the enemy vessel.

  My legs shook so badly they could barely support my body. I wanted to stay on deck and witness what was about to happen, but I knew I had to find Mum first.

  There was pandemonium in the hold. I stood in front of the hatchway and summoning up as much authority as I could muster, I told them all they needed to be extremely quiet. To my surprise they immediately shut up. The fear that was coursing through my body must have somehow been transmitted in my voice. Only one or two small babies continued to cry but everyone else looked at me expectantly.

  I turned to an elderly woman who was sitting nearest to me. She had a fierce-looking countenance that I judged likely to inspire respect. ‘I need to talk to my mum for a few minutes. Can you hold the fort?’

  I guided Mum through the hatch into the companionway, dreading breaking the news that we were prisoners of the Japanese – but telling her did not go in a way I would have predicted.

  Mum took the news with equanimity. By now, the thud of feet and high-pitched voices coming from above us indicated that some of the Japanese had already come aboard.

  ‘We’ll just have to make the best of it,’ she said, matter of factly. ‘It won’t be long before we’re rescued and there are rules about how they have to treat us.’ She folded her arms and looked defiant.

  Relief surged through me. If she had behaved the way she had done in our last days in Singapore I couldn’t have coped.

  Mum’s widowed friend, Marjorie Nolan, emerged into the corridor looking as brash and confident as Mum was. The two were evidently feeding off each other in the bravado stakes.