Escape from Singapore — 5. 50 Years on : a Small World!

Background

This introduction is taken from the following sections of
1. My Childhood Escape : Background, The Evacuation.

My father Robert Piriam N. (“Piri”) Napper was a Plant Pathologist at the Rubber Research Institute in Kuala Lumpur. In the 1930s he revolutionised the treatment of diseases in rubber plantations. My sister Rosemary was born in 1934, I was born in 1937, but our mother Maude never recovered from my birth, and died six months later. On the way back from leave in the U.K. in 1939 Piri met and fell in love with a Dutch nurse, Suzanna (“Suze”) Balfoort, who was returning home by boat from Holland to Batavia (now Jakarta in Indonesia). They were married the next year.

The Japanese invaded Malaya, in the North, on December 8th 1941, the same morning as the attack on Pearl Harbour¹. They worked their way towards Singapore, taking Penang by December 18th, and K.L. by January 11th. Our family evacuated K.L. by car, moving to Singapore. Our father had volunteered for the MAS (Medical Auxiliary Service) in K.L. (before the invasion), and offered his services to the MAS again in Singapore. Our step-mother, being a trained nurse, also offered her badly needed services.

Women and children were evacuated from Singapore in the troop ships which had brought in reinforcements for the defence of Malaya. As our step-mother knew no-one in England, and was so clearly required in Singapore, she elected to stay on. This was possible because the wife of a close friend volunteered to look after us on the boat, and deliver us to our paternal grandparents in England.

We travelled in the “Empress of Japan”, which sailed on January 31st, a fortnight before the Fall of Singapore (Feb 15th 1942).

A Chance Meeting after 54 Years

In 1996 our friend Valerie Eastham asked my wife Hilary to chair a committee to organise a charity concert she planned to produce for a local hospice. After the concert we fraternised at the bar with some of the participants, but we turned down an invitation to go on to an informal party at the house where the actress presenting the concert was staying, with Valerie's friend Lizanne. We were just relaxing at home preparing to go to bed when a call came from Valerie at 11.40 p.m. pleading for us to come round to the party!

A 90 year old lady, “Midge” Warner, a friend of Lizanne, had been saying she came back by boat to England from Singapore just before the fall of Singapore in 1942. Valerie said she thought I had also done that, and the lady said she remembered a little boy who was travelling back without his parents (with family friends). So Valerie rang to ask if I could please come and talk to the lady! We duly climbed back into respectable clothes and turned out. Yes, I had been on the same boat and I did fit her description, so we agreed that I probably was that boy. In swapping history I remarked that my father worked at the Rubber Research Institute in Kuala Lumpur, and her daughter Jennifer (also at the party -- and on the boat!) replied that they lived next door to the R.R.I. and she used to get into trouble for sneaking through the hedge and buying sweets at the canteen! [Jenny now tells me she used to be sent by her Chinese Amah to buy cigarettes for her, “Rough Riders” they were called, and that the sweets were mostly given to Jenny by people in the canteen. So maybe she was still using her long-term cover story in front of her mother!]

For one of my fellow passengers on the “Empress of Japan” to have been at the party and had the connection made by a third person is a massive coincidence in its own right, though “it's a small world!” is a phrase that crops up surprisingly often. But to cap the coincidence by Midge and Jennifer living next door to where my father worked is unbelievable.

Midge sadly died a year or so later, and I never followed up the connection. However Valerie had the immense foresight to record an interview with her about her story. Valerie asked me to make make copies of the tapes, so I did hear what Midge said (but I still didn't see her again -- I am not a very social animal!).

When I was pressed into contributing my story to this website, it seemed obvious that I should consider if Midge's interview should be placed here as well. Given that it is a similar story to mine, but told in the detail that I am unable to provide from my memory as a four-year-old, and given that (I hope readers will agree) it is interesting and well told, the answer is that it should be.

Jenny and Valerie have agreed that, as I am willing to do so, I should transcribe the interview, and produce it as an addition to my pages. I was in any case going to tell the story of the chance meeting.

It has been agreed that the story should be told as by Midge, in the first person, and in spoken English, rather than as a third-person written narrative. It is not a verbatim transcription, but close to it. Hesitations and repetitions have mostly been removed, but also I have removed Valerie's questions and interjections, and reordered a small amount of material, mostly where Midge backtracked and recounted an event out of chronological order. I have also left out quite a bit of material about day-to-day living in Kuala Lumpur, which, given that it was referring to the time before the war affected Malaya much, is much less pertinent to an archive on ww2 memories.

Jenny, who was six at the time, has a fantastic memory, and she has kindly written her own memories of the events for these pages.

Midge's story starts on page 6a and continues on pages 6b and 6c. This is followed by 7. Jenny's story. The two stories can be cross-referenced by using the similar section headings.

¹ Japan made surprise attacks on a number of places around the West Pacific on the same morning, but the date for Pearl Harbour is December 7th, as it is the other side of the date line.

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