56
why such discomfort should be endured just north of the Equator, and
ask for whom was it done, there was only one answer - The Queen.
Before I could be introduced to Chinese food, we attended a large din-
ner given by a Chinese family in a mission hall for a visiting bishop. I
looked at my husband across the table. So practised with chopsticks,
speaking Chinese to fascinated ladies left and right, he was a stranger
to me. Could he not see the waiters, in shorts and singlets, clattering
on clogs, pausing to hawk and spit over the verandah on their way to
the kitchen? I managed to eat hardly more than a little rice. In the car I
burst into tears. ‘You’ll get used to it; you may even grow to enjoy it,’
said Val, putting his foot down in the Morgan roadster.
I was allocated duties by the wife of the Colonial Secretary - to take
handicapped children swimming in the sea and to assist in distributing
English magazines to the third class ward of the General Hospital, an
ordeal of exceptional horror, most of the patients being burns victims
from accidents in rubber factories. Only the starch of my red Cross
overall kept me upright. These duties had to be abandoned when I
was invited to fill a vacancy in the Defence Branch. I had what they
needed. I was British. No Asian was allowed a glimpse of the Top Se-
cret files. So I was sworn in under the Official Secrets Act and assigned
to the office of the Second and Third Secretaries.
The Secretariat, in grand Empire style, sat on the bank of the Singapore
River where Raffles had landed, the offices on the upper floor for cool-
ness. Fans dangling from great height stirred the air and wafted the
foul smell of the river at low tide into the Defence Branch. Here Min-
utes were written, files were circulated, Minutes were re-written. In
view of past events it was crucial to get it right. The Commissioner for
Civil Defence would be sent for regularly and urged to hasten his
plans. But Colonel ‘Binks’ Firbank, ex-Sam Browne’s Cavalry, was
used to Army life in India where the working week ended on Wednes-
day for the serious business of polo and pig sticking. At the end of the
day, I tied up the files with red tape and handed them to the wife of a
Police Commissioner who placed them in the strong room. Eventually,
and quite easily, I was lured into the commercial world, to one of the
great entrepôt trading companies. Here lay the prosperity of Singa-
