There was a rumble and an RAF plane dropped leaflets on us...the war was over
Jenny Martin spent the first three years of her life in a POW camp in Singapore with her mum, Daphne.
One of her earliest memories is of British aircraft flying overhead, alerting them the war was finally over.
“I had only just turned three,” recalled Jenny, from Edinburgh. “There was a rumbling in the distance and a plane with RAF markings flew over. The women said, ‘Thank God, thank God’. Pieces of paper with a message dropped out. ‘The war is over, Japan has surrendered, we will come for you shortly. When you are freed, don’t eat too much.’
“A few days later, trucks arrived and we were taken to a hotel to be looked over by doctors.
“It wasn’t long after my father came to see us. I remember not being sure what I thought of this strange man hugging my mother, but we soon got to know each other.”
James Davidson had moved to Singapore to take charge of a rubber plantation. Daphne worked for the Colonial Secretariat, and they married in 1934.
“My mum was destroying files her work didn’t want the enemy to see when the Japanese marched down the peninsula on February 15, 1942. She was four months pregnant. Allied civilians were told to gather in the middle of town with one suitcase, which she’d packed nappies in.”
The women were taken to Changi Prison. Daphne gave birth on July 31 and was allowed to spend two weeks in hospital before returning to confinement. James, who was eventually put to work on the Burma railway, was granted one visit when Jenny was 10 months old.
“He’d made a rattle from an old tin can and some pebbles, with a piece of wood he’d cut for the handle. It was too heavy for any baby to rattle, but it was all he had and he must have felt he needed to take a present for his new child.”
Jenny and her mum were moved to another camp when she was two, where they remained until the liberation. The family was put on the first boat out of Singapore to Liverpool.
When Jenny was 10, her parents decided she needed a Scottish education, and she came here to attend a boarding school. Sadly her father died when Jenny was 16.
It was only in her mother’s later years that Jenny learned more about what had happened in Singapore.
“I wasn’t interested when I was younger – it was my embarrassing secret,” she admitted. “But my mother was asked to speak at the Women’s Institute and was nervous, so I told her to write it all down.
“I sat in on the talk and listened, and I still have those notes today.”