Ironic and Creepy

Yesterday, I noticed that someone in Afghanistan had downloaded by play Looking for Mrs. Peel, about my grandmother’s trials at Changi, during WWII.

Normally, it’s Britons looking up relations, or Australian school children looking up CHANGI, or Changi Prison, Or Changi Prison Life = but this person (who used the google.co.uk search engine) was looking up Double Tenth Interrogations.

Creepy all considered. Were they looking for more tips?

I entered that searcj term into Google to see that the URL to my play at www.tighsolas.ca/page745.html comes up first of a number of posts on the infamous (as they say) Double Tenth Incident, as it it usually called.

My story uses my grandmother’s first hand account as well as the book The Trial of Sumida Haruza, among other sourses.

I start with the quote given by the prosecution|” The keynote of this whole case can be epitomized in two words: Unspeakable horror. Horror, stark and naked permeates every corner and angle of this case from beginning to end….”

Hmm. Torture and war crimes with respect  to the invasions occasioned by this decade’s War on Teror have been in the news, in the US and especially the UK lately. It is clear the modern torturers have nothing to learn from the Kempei Tai, many of whom were put to death for their ‘heinous, despicable, inhuman’actions at the Double Tenth, including the head of the operation, Sumida Haruza.

My grandmother was proud her testimony, given in Westminster in 1946, helped convict the guy. Funny, if you read the transcript of the trial, her testimony was used in a rather bizarre and extremely sexist manner.. but anything to get an conviction. She wasn’t there at the trial, which was held in Singapore a few months after she testified before a Minister of Oaths in London. She returned to England after the war, but only briefly.

I say they have noting to learn, because they’ve already done their homework: electric shock, waterboarding, starvation, mental manipulation it was all done back then by the Japanese Gestapo, as some people referred to them. According to testimony in the Trial of Sumida Haruzo, waterboarding was the most evil of the torture techniques, if torture techniques can have a hierarchy.

Ironically, my grandmother’s diary reveals that the Japanese in general were very lax with civilians at Changi, against the long held belief. Even obliging.

When things were going well for them, they allied the civillians to pretty much do what they want… until…..

My play is also available in pdf form at www.tighsolas.ca/page3.pdf.pdf.

Four Days Inside Guantanamo was reviewed in The Guardian. Peter Bradshaw gives the documentary four stars. It  is about Canadian Omar Khadr. There’s a disembodied and very sinister Canadian interrogator heard in the film, which is almost unbearable to watch, claims Bradshaw.

http://www.guardian.co.uk/film/2011/oct/06/four-days-inside-guantanamo-review?INTCMP=SRCH

Looking for Mrs Peel 1

The year 1967 has been described as The Last Good Year, by Canadian historian Pierre Berton, also as The Year That Changed Cinema, by Time Magazine, as well as the Best Year Ever in Pop Music by, well, just about everyone. In and around anglo Montreal,that memorable year, radio was the communications medium of choice for young people. Kids listened to the likes of Buddy Gee on CKGM, Dave Boxer on CFCF and CFOX’s Charles P Rodney Chandler on their chintzy transistor radios and kept track of the respective weekly hit lists. One of the most popular new DJ’s was an import, a former British merchant marine sailor named Roger Scott also on CFOX. In late May of 1967 Scott aired ‘pirated’ tapes of the Beatle’s Srgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Album, before it was officially released. My older brother was mightily impressed.

In the US it was the Summer of Love and the Summer of Race Riots -two facts I couldn’t ignore because my British father preferred getting his news from American Walter Cronkite, on the CBS television station WCAX Montpelier Vermont – and as was the norm, we had but one black and white tv. But these same heady Expo months were also a time of tension in the Middle East with Six Day War where we came close to nuclear war ….again… and ‘the tipping point’ for Vietnam and a time when decisions were made that ‘signaled the end of Britain’s’ imperial adventure’.* According to Historian Matthew Jones, in 1967 the British wanted to pull out of ‘East of Suez’(Singapore, Malaysia and the MIddle East) entirely. While school children from Victoria to Gander were learning the words to CA NA DA, Bobby Gimby’s giddy centennial year signature song , the Americans were putting pressure on the British to stay. President Lyndon Johnson even bribed them, offering to back the pound sterling and “solve all your financial problems.”*

So, if Lyndon Baines Johnson appeared to carry the weight of the world on his shoulders, as he rode that long long escalator up past the kitschy photographs of Marilyn Monroe and Humphrey Bogart in the American Pavilion at Expo 67 on his official visit, that’s because he did. (* Matthew Jones’ Decision Delayed Historical Review.)

Malaysia, the 15th country to sign up for the World’s Fair – in July ’64 (plot 3320 Ste Helene’s Island) didn’t have a pavilion in the end. They had pulled out; perhaps because Singapore had been expelled from the Malaysian Federation in 1965 ( to quell the unrest between the Chinese and the Malays) and couldn’t come up with the money.

Tunku Abdul Rahman Malaysia’s first PM had visited the Expo site in ’64. One wonders what Bobby Gimby felt about all this: the so called Pied Piper of Canada, a former CBC musician and bandleader, and a Canadian cultural icon, is reported to have composed them an unofficial anthem, Malaysia Forever, and earned his whimsical moniker, on a visit to Singapore in ’62. The song itself is steeped in mystery; no former colonial or expert in Malaysian studies I have reached has ever heard of it. Negara Ku has been Malaya’s (Malaysia’s) national anthem since 1957.

Looking For Mrs. Peel Complete play pdf