A Writer’s Journey in Time
(First published in the Northern Echo)

My 2002 novel, ‘The Long Journey Home’, was inspired by the story of a young soldier from County Durham who was a billeting officer for women internees at the Raffles Hotel during the Liberation of Singapore, 1945.

Years’ later - using books, letters, diaries, maps, images and people’s own reminiscences - I wrote this novel.  But still, before completing it, I needed to go to Singapore. I knew of the modern, Twenty-First Century city-state, a leader in world banking, an international port, an efficient, tightly-governed country where the streets were clean and the ownership and disposal of chewing gum is forbidden by law.

To this city, I took my baggage of information and insight about wartime Singapore. It was like having spectacles with the lenses set to different strengths. It they worked I would be able to see clearly enough for the purpose of my novel.

This clarity would, I hoped, allow me to see underneath the glittering skyscrapers, the shopping malls and the tourist-driven transformations and pick out something of the city of 1941. Singapore then was a thriving commercial city of empire, an efficient two-way conduit of raw materials and manufactured and exotic goods; an impregnable fortress with its massive dockyards and its teeming soldiery, with an hierarchical society based on arguably racist imperial values.

And it seemed that as I blinked, that city was there. It was there at Collyer Quay where we embarked on the Chinese junk Cheng Ho from the clean, deserted Clifford Pier. I could see this same quayside heaving with ships and boats desperately loading passengers on those last hours of evacuation.  Later I looked into waters where some small ships were blown out of the waters and survivors swam, stumbled and were hauled onto the islands. The feeling of panic and despair, as I stood sweating on the prow of the boat, was so powerful  that I had to go below and calm down.

We stayed in the middle of Chinatown at the modest Keong Saik Hotel.  Returning there at eleven one night, we found ourselves, for the sake of research, careering along a three-lane freeway in the middle of Singapore in an overloaded trishaw pedalled by a heavy-thighed Singaporean of pensionable age. He was veree strong. Veree happy also. So he reassured us.

The trishaw driver’s amusement when we gave him our address was later explained by  Peter Lee, an accountant we met who was not at all interested in the past. (Singapore, he explained genially, was a city of the future). Peter told us that Keong Saik Street, which led up from our hotel, was the street of officially approved brothels. ‘Look for the red numbers!’ he said. We did. Some of the numbers were indeed in red fluorescent tubing.

Our hotel was right beside the Chinese market and the narrow trading streets. Here ordinary Singapore citizens shopped, gossiped, traded and ate in the many cafes and stalls. Many were residents of the high-rise blocks of flats which replaced the unsavoury pre-war tenements mentioned in my sources. 

We ate – very cheaply and well - in the street cafes here.  One day we sat under umbrellas, tasting sambals and eating steamed fish in a street called Smith Street. I looked around at the cheerful traders and happy families and reflected that this was where the Kempai Tai had an interrogation centres. They brought prisoners  - including women - here after a purge of radios in the camps. Only a few survived.

Peter Lee took us to the magnificent Botanical Gardens. In the novel, my young heroine Sylvie flies a kite here. But I see now that the heavy rainforest canopy would have made that impossible.  Peter took us on to Sime Road – the site of an internment camp in my novel. He drove us to the spot, a scrubby bit of land just off a modern golf course. He laughed and told us this was where he had practiced his sharp shooting during his national service.

Then we went to Changi.  There is still a prison there, as there was before the war.  The museum told me nothing I didn’t know.  But then Peter took us to Changi Beach. At the very beginning, the Japanese allowed the internee children and mothers to come here for an occasional swim. But Changi Beach was also one of several sites where the Japanese killed thousands of young Chinese men. At this beach, they were driven into the sea and shot.  It was all a long time ago. Sixty years to be precise. But still, a shiver went down my spine and my eyes filled with helpless tears.

So, of course, to Raffles, which I found beautifully refurbished but, despite the Singapore Slings, strangely dissatisfying. Where was the big dancehall, so strongly featured in pre- and immediately post-war colonial life? Where was the thrum of live dance music, the decadent air of costume disguises and illicit liaisons? Only in my imagination.

And outside, despite its columns and courtyard gardens, Raffles is strangely bereft. Where once it looked out to sea at the heave of maritime commerce which was the raison d’etre of the city, now it is blanked by glittering  skyscrapers miraculously built on reclaimed land.  All this makes Raffles the saddest, most obsolete and inauthentic of buildings, despite its glamour.

My favourite grand hotel was The Fullerton: in another life, the monumental British Post, in a further life a Japanese Headquarters.  Now refurbished, the interior is a cool, covered atrium where you can sit on low chairs and drink coffee, listening to cool, live music.  Just the place for a tired writer to get out her notebook and make sense of this kaleidoscopic experience.

In the end, the only alterations I needed to make to my manuscript were some allusions to the peculiar qualities of the heat and the afternoon storms, to the nature of the sky. Oh, and I did find a good location for the flying of kites.