Kindle Notes & Highlights
‘The boy’s too young to have been a soldier and too young, I’d have thought, to have been involved in any sort of industrial accident or -’ ‘Oh, Captain Adams,’ he interjected, ‘when you’ve been in this country a little longer you’ll come to realize the kind of things that happen here. The boy will have been deliberately mutilated to excite pity.
Next morning we found ourselves the centre of a crisis. We were white! It was imperative, for political reasons, that the first Allied troops to enter Singapore should be white and not Indian. Apparently this vital matter had hitherto been overlooked. We, at the moment, were the nearest white troops to Singapore; so we must re-embark and sail there forthwith.
Ironically, my sister, in her reserved occupation as a teacher, had been the only one of us actually to come under enemy fire. She had been blown across the room and nearly killed by a V.2 in Tottenham - one of the last, perhaps, that the Germans had been able to fire before the launching sites were overwhelmed.
