3 days ago
The last survivors of a forgotten war: ‘We were locked in for hours'
Jean Hamilton, 87, was five years old when she fled the Japanese. She and her mother boarded a train evacuating women and children from Penang, Malaya [now Malaysia], in January 1942. 'We were locked in for hours, all the way to Singapore,' she recalls.
After crossing the causeway they were deposited at the docks where the evacuees were put on board a ship to Jakarta, Indonesia. They stayed there, sharing lodgings with a displaced Scottish mother and her newborn, before being moved to Sydney and then Melbourne for the rest of the war.
I have been thinking of Jean (one of my mother's great friends in Aberdeen, whose father, a bank manager, was in the notorious Changi Japanese internment camp in Singapore) because of The Second Map — The History Podcast, a riveting, revelatory three-part documentary series on BBC Radio 4 and BBC Sounds commissioned to mark the 80th anniversary of VJ Day (Victory over Japan Day) on August 15.
