Bluff Road: The Malaya Diaries 1953-1955

July 1953: “I reported to Aldershot still wearing light infantry uniform (unlike my fellow trainees who were given paper and string to send their civilian clothes home)… The only memories of civil life that I carried with me were my sketchbook and rugby boots.”

February 1954: “The tugs towed the ship down the channel and those of us on deck took our last look at the lights of Liverpool: our last sight of England for eighteen months.”

March 1954: “A heavy humid grey dawn and the sea of the Straits of Malacca rolling like oiled grey linoleum. Then the first sight of land, dense forests of monochrome grey. Birds, masses of birds, wheeling and crying over us. The heat has nothing of the dry heat of Egypt or Aden. This is another heat, intensely charged with moisture. A wet blanket of heat. There is too the heavy weight of history. A little over a decade earlier, ships just like this one, landed groups of healthy, well-trained soldiers, just like us, as reinforcements for the besieged Island of Singapore. Many of them died on the Siam-Burma Railway or in Japanese POW camps. How could we, their successors, landing on Singapore, forget that?“