Forgotten Wars_ Freedom and Revolution in Southeast Asia - Christopher Bayly [38]
For the British, some of the most moving scenes were at the civilian internment camp at Sime Road. There 3,160 men, 1,020 women and 320 children were liberated by former colleagues of the Malayan Civil Service, men who had got out of Singapore before the fall and were now in uniform. One of them was O. W. Gilmour:
A number of my friends were unrecognisable, on account of the great beards which adorned their faces and the deteriorations of physique, while others were equally unrecognisable for the latter reasons only. Some had grown old beyond what the years could account for, and worst of all, a number had obviously changed completely; the change having started in frustration of mind and worked outwards.96
The women and children had been interned separately from the men and had run their own affairs. The world they had created was abruptly dissolved. Sheila Allan had been a motherless child of sixteen when she was imprisoned, and like many young internees had come of age in captivity. Before the war she had lost her Malayan mother; in Changi she had also lost her father. Her diary records a flood of powerful new impressions: the sudden plenty of Red Cross parcels – ‘powder puff, face cream, lipstick, toilet papers and sanitary towels’ – dances, the sexual attentions of soldiers and, above all, the loss of the close-knit community of the camp. ‘I don’t think’, she wrote, ‘that anyone really knows what he or she is going to do…’ Like so many others, Sheila Allan would have to begin her adult life with no resources of her own.97
The former civil servants were crushed by the sight of a new administration. They had expected to return immediately to their jobs, and over the long years had drawn up elaborate contingency plans, even down to leave rosters. Whilst the military commandeered the best hotels and the clubs, the internees were left for several weeks in their squalid camps, without even fresh linen. One Malayan civil servant, Sjovald Cunyngham-Brown, was liberated from a camp near Pekanbaru in Sumatra. There the POWs cleared a landing strip. A plane circled and landed, and Cunyngham-Brown ran to meet it. He lost his loincloth, his only scrap of clothing, in his excitement. A striking and smartly dressed woman disembarked. ‘I say,’ he said, ‘I do apologize.’ The lady opened a gold cigarette case; ‘What you need is a cigarette!’ As he led her to his camp, he asked her name. ‘I am Lady Louis Mountbatten.’ In her work for the Red Cross, Lady Edwina covered 33,000 miles and sixteen countries, visiting camps in an attempt to accelerate the relief work. Later that day Cunyngham-Brown managed to fly to Singapore, where he presented himself to the island’s chief civil affairs officer, P. A. B. McKerron. There his reception was very different. McKerron refused to meet his eye and told him: ‘To tell you the truth, we don’t want you around.’ Cunyngham-Brown ignored this and made it to his former post in Johore, where later that evening he was put in charge of the northern part of the state. His case was exceptional. The civilians carried with them the stench of the failure of 1942; their physical dilapidation impeded the restoration of white prestige. As Cunyngham-Brown acknowledged, ‘we embarrassed everybody’. He bristled at the new arrivals ‘worming up to us as though we were lunatics, speaking in baby-talk and offering us their nauseating pity’.98
Some internees made it upcountry to visit their homes. One long-time Ipoh resident, John Lowe Woods, drove north giving a thumbs-up sign – a gesture new in Malaya but popularized by the war elsewhere – to the locals. He travelled through a series of Arcs de Triomphe: ‘at least two in every small kampong (one at each end), lots of odd ones along the road at estate entrances, solitary kedais [shops] and so on, aping the dignity of a large village or small town; quite a number, one for each