‘Let’s go inside,’ said Sarah, attempting to take her arm. ‘We have something to tell you, Mummy.’

‘No. Tell me now,’ she demanded breathlessly. ‘Is it your father? Have they found him? Is he …’ Her words faltered and died and the colour went from her face as she realised what they’d come to tell her.

Jim just managed to catch her as she crumpled in a dead faint. He scooped her into his arms and carried her up the path to where Amah was waiting in the front doorway and watching it all with sad, knowing eyes.

Once he knew Sybil would be well taken care of, he left them to mourn in private and went to find a dark, quiet bar in which he could drink enough to blot out the stories and the images they’d invoked.

21

As the days went by and there was still no news of Philip, Sarah began to believe that he’d suffered the same terrible fate as her beloved father. She knew that the search and burial teams were slowly making their way down the torturous route of the Burma railway, and that more and more camps, makeshift cemeteries and survivors were being found – but having discussed it with Jim and Elsa, she realised the list of the dead was growing, and she could only hope that if he was buried out there, someone had left a marker to remember him by.

She didn’t know how to feel about Philip, for he’d become a shadowy figure – a blurred memory from a past age that was gone for ever. But she had loved him once, and because of that she could mourn him and all they’d lost.

Elsa had been a stalwart supporter over those first few terrible days, and had come back the following evening with a traditional white mourning sari, incense and candles for Amah. The elderly woman had quietly and efficiently tended Sybil, who’d made a remarkable recovery. Sybil had clearly accepted that her worst fears had been realised, and although she was grieving, decided she needed to go back to her work at the orphanage.

‘I need to do something,’ she said a week later. ‘Your father wouldn’t want me sitting about here feeling sorry for myself when he gave his life so we could be free.’

Sarah had thought it was far too soon, but Jane and the others agreed with Sybil. None of them had any idea of how long they would have to wait to hear what had happened to Philip, and there was urgent work still to be done at the hospital and in the RAPWI office.

Telegrams had been sent to Australia, and to Peggy and Jeremy, who’d now returned to England. The routine of their lives in Singapore stuttered to a start again, and they all found that it helped enormously.

The respite camps were beginning at long last to be cleared, and the men, women and children were now on their way home in the ships that came in almost every day. Raffles was slowly returning to its quiet, almost sombre self, but the hospital was still overwhelmed as prisoners were brought in from Sumatra, Java and the islands off Japan. There was a real sense that no one had been left behind or forgotten, for those who’d died were now laid to rest in cordoned-off cemeteries, their names, ranks and numbers marked on stones if known – unless they were known only to God.