SOUND: groans
Dorothy: The bugs. The stench. It’s nauseating.
Chan: See that Malay? He’s had his stomach set on fire. That’s the smell. Burned flesh. Along with the dysentery and Singapore foot. That Chinese over there, he seems luckier than the others. Don’t be deceived. He told me he received the water torture. They tied him to a ladder and kept pushing his head under water to the point where he almost drowned, over and over.
Scene Forty-Eight: Westminster Office
SOUND: typing
Dorothy: And still, no matter how horribly abused, how weak and broken down, all the prisoners remained gentlemen to the end. Politely turning their heads when Li or I went to the loo, a pedestal in the back right hand corner of the cell with a tap above it. We drank and washed from that same place. In turn, I shared my daily ration of rice, but a handful, with some of the men.I myself have always been able to subsist on very little food, but to see men ravenously hungry is one of the saddest sights in the world. Oh how I hate those snake eyed devils for reducing us to this.(crying)
Clerk: Mrs. Nixon. Would you like a break?
Dorothy: No. Not necessary. Almost done. After a month I was released and taken with two others, John Birks, the new Colonial Secretary, the man who had told me, so optimistically, on February 9, 1942, that Singapore could not fall, and a Chinese called Choo to Outram prison to await trial for military crimes. John held my hand the whole way and at one time badgered the guard to get me a cup of tea and Choo was kind and attentive,too, sheltering me from the rain with his arm. When we arrived at Outram I was separated from them and put in solitary in a filthy little cell. The Japanese know how to find a subject’s weak spot.
Scene Forty-Nine: Cell Outram
SOUND: None
Dorothy: Oh, the screams. The screams. I shall go mad. Why won’t they go away. Why can’t I be back at the YMCA with my friends. What day is it? I must keep track. I must find something to do. Why won’t they give me a book to read? I’ll write a novel in my head. To keep me busy. I’ll make it a love story…”Susan North gasped as she walked out of the YMCA building into the sunlight.
The fresh air went straight to her head like wine and she felt dazed by the sun after four weeks in a cell in that ill-omened building which smelled of death and torture. For four long weeks, 28 days of brilliant electric light from an unshaded bulb hanging in the middle of the cell; eighteen men and two women had existed in that vitiated atmosphere with no ventilation except for a grating high in the wall at the back of the cell and the the stale air which entered from the corridor which ran along the front of the cells.
It was raining, but the sun was still shining and although the temperature was tropical, Susan shivered in the ragged dress which had fallen to pieces on her as she sat cross legged on the floor. Once and once only had that dress been washed during the month she had been in the custody of the Japanese Gestapo in that building in Singapore that was dreaded by all the inhabitants of the ill-fated city.
She looked at the men who had come out with her: Farraday, gaunt and grey with ragged beard and hair long and curling, swaying on his feet as though he might collapse at any moment; Thompson grotesque and hideous and fat with beri beri; Langley, skinny and yellowish-grey with eyes sunk in great cavities in his face like a living skeleton and the other Europeans all in various stages of emaciation or the ugly swelling of beri beri and the 8 Asiatics, most of them showing the signs of captivity and the scars of torture. She had seen most of them every day and all day long for a
month but seeing them now in the light of the tropical sun she realized the horror of their plight and her own. When they had been called by name and told to come out she had, for one heart-throbbing moment, thought they were being released and sent back to the internment camp which seemed by contrast a veritable heaven.
But when they were herded into a room then taken out to a lorry with the hated Yankee tongued Japanese interpreter, and two guards, she felt that they were being moved to some other torture house. Langley and Farrady helped her into the lorry and gave her smiles of encouragement. In spit of the horror of the situation Susan feld a warm glow round her heart when she looked around the lorry and saw the kindly looks of the men, both European and Asiatic. They were her very dear friends made dearer by having borne the weary days together. They seemed to forget their own misery in her concern for her. She wished as she had wished many times in that past month, that she could do something to comfort them. .
Scene Fifty: Westminster Office
SOUND: typing stops.
Clerk: Mrs. Nixon???
Dorothy: OH. Yes. (sx typing resumes) I was interrogated twice more by the Kempetai. Other than that, for 5 months I saw no one but my Japanese guard who came to bring me food (2 cans of condensed milk a day) and escort me, occasionally to my bath. Well, I rinsed my body under a cold water tap two feet off the ground -with no soap. I gave my scalp a good scraping with my nails, which I had grown long to better pick the nits out of my hair..But, this was all in the open air so it was welcome change. At first I was embarrassed to take off my dress in front of the guard, but soon I got to regard him as no more than a dog or cat. And he wasn’t a bad sort of family pet, when sober.
Scene Fifty-One: Outside Outram cell
SOUND: Bird song tap running
Guard : Grunt
Dorothy: I will not. I will not sit on your lap
Guard : Grunt
Dorothy: Please put your clothes back on. What would your superiors think to see you like that?
Guard : Grunt
Dorothy: Here are your pants. And you boots. And I humbly bring you
your sword.
Guard: Angry grunt
Dorothy: Am I not bowing deeply enough?
SOUND: Sword being pulled from scabbard
Dorothy: Fine. Kill me if you will. Plunge the blade right here, into my heart.
Guard: Bellow
Dorothy: I’ve been threatened with death so often, I almost welcome
it.
Guard: Laughing, laughing, louder and louder
Scene Fifty-Two: Westminster Office
SOUND: Typing
Dorothy: Yes, he was one of the better beasts. He’d sneak me in a sweet or fruit when he could. And on two occasions, at night, when I was sick and delirious with fever, I seem to remember him cradling me in his arms and holding cold compresses to my head… When I was finally released from Outram, a stretcher case, he said he hoped I would make it to my homeland safely and offered me a cigarette, but I refused it. I hadn’t had a smoke in 7 months, but I wouldn’t take one,not then,not from a Jap. I was taken to the camp’s new Sime Road location, to their hospital.
The camp was liberated mid September 1945.There were two of them, both tall. And they seemed so handsome and clean and beautifully British. They eyed us up and down and told us we looked lovely , so nice of them, but spoiled it by saying we smelled. We were most indignant and assured them we were very clean. They the food appeared, a tub of rice and a tin of blachang, and this is what smelled. We made them each eat a spoonful but they immediately spat it out and said “What awful muck!” and would not believe that we had existed on this and worse.
Cramden: Grumble.
SOUND: footsteps and slam of door
Clerk: He requires further instructions. We may have to edit your testimony down, it is long. Are you returning right away to Cumberland.
Dorothy: Yes.
Clerk: It’s rather mild out there, but that is slim consolation.
Dorothy: Yes, if the Japanese couldn’t kill me the English winters certainly will. I wonder if you can help me. My front teeth. They were loosened by a blow while in solitary. I couldn’t get them fixed in Bangalore, where I was sent to recouperate,as I am a civilian. And now I can’t seem to get them fixed here in England. Is this how I am to be rewarded for my loyalty? Insupportable!!
Scene Fifty-Three: Lemon Creek Road.
SOUND: Thunder. Radio in background
Ingrid” Is that your grandmother?
Dorothy:Yes
Ingrid:She’s a real sunbaked bag of wrinkles. What’s with the frown?
Dorothy : What are you doing?
Ingrid: Playing Monkey See Monkey Do. Have I got the scowl right?
The hunchback?
Dorothy: Stop it. She’ll see
Ingrid: What. Does she have eyes at the back of her head too?
Dorothy: It’s just not nice. My brother says she was spy during the war
Ingrid: A spy? Like Agent 99. Or like Honey West?
Dorothy: No. Like Emma Peel.
MUSIC: Wonderbra Jingle: We care about the shape you’re in. And so does he. SO does he. Wonderful wonderful . Wonderbra. Announcer voice: By Playtex.
Ingrid: Right. Just like Mrs. Peel.
SOUND: The girls laugh and laugh and laugh.
SOUND. Music on transister Ode to Billy Joe
Quote: Unquote
“They (white colonial women)have possessed (or still possess)all the advantages of wealth but never been trained in the responsibilities,”leadership and courageous example. They are pampered and admired all out of proportion to their desserts in an open market.”
Giles Playfair. Singapore Goes off the Air, 1943
“Indeed, the presence of white women in the tropical East sets a problem for which a satisfactory solution has yet to be found. The disadvantages are obvious; an enervating climate, a multiplicity of servants to attend to her wants and nothing to do all day except to seek amusement. I doubt if the white woman will ever be suited to long residence in a tropical country like Malaya, and I cannot resist the contention that her presence in such large numbers, is responsible, at least to some extent, for the decline in the white man’s prestige.
Bruce Lockhart. Return to Malaya, 1937
The unsung maiden aunts of the Edwardian era deserve a very special place in British history. There would have been thousands of sad, unfulfilled women who were forbidden to take a career yet where blatantly exploited by the more fecund members of their families. Without these devoted slaves the children of Empire Builders could not have been educated in England because it was impossible to go home every holiday in those days of sea travel.”
Dr. Cecily Williams: Retired Except on Demand by Sally Cradock. 1983
The soul of man wanders through the uttermost regions of the universe, and she seeks to imprison it in the circle of her account-book.
Somerset Maugham. The Moon and Sixpence.
Sx Song( Red Rubber Ball) Announcer: 15 men all European died during the Double Tenth Incident interrogations, including the new Colonial Secretary,Hugh Fraser, the Men’s Camp Representative, Adrian Clarke and Dorothy’s co-conspirator from the Men’s Camp in the Radio Racket (the starving man)Middlebrooke. (I’ve changed the names of everyone there, but all names are well known.)None of Dorothy’s distributors were ever arrested. Supposedly no Asians were killed, although that’s hard to believe all things considered. R H Scott, the Eastern Representative of the Malayan Broadcasting Corporation was also tortured in the Double Tenth but he survived. He was accused of masterminding the alleged Radio Espionage Incident at Changi by the Japanese Defence at the war crimes trial. (It pears the 6 or so member of the MBC Board did not evacuate with the other MBC employees.) 8 Japanese Kempetai and informers were condemned to death at the trial, 7 sentenced to various terms of imprisonment,and 7 acquitted. The Kuala Lumpur Book Club was used as a cook house during the Japanese occupation. (Alternate history: Japanese kept it open.)Many irreplaceable volumes, including, ironically, most of the History section, were destroyed. Upon Dorothy’s retirement in 1966 the Kuala Lumpur Book Club had 2,700 subscribers, 1,900 of whom were Asian. At her death in 1972 her private book collection was donated to the Malaysian people through the Malaysian National Library where it seeded their Rare Malaysiana Collection.
