Then there was another story of a German officer swaggering ashore in the town and passing a Nip sentry without saluting that august representative of the Japanese Emperor. The sentry’s orders were that all Europeans must salute him, but on attempting to strike the German officer, he was surprised to find himself calmly and mercilessly beaten up. That took a bit of straightening out with many Nip smirks and grunts. The last story was told to me by an eye-witness, and concerned a Dutch ship that had a German prize crew aboard and was loading up in the Empire Docks. A young German seaman leaning over the ship’s rail saw a Nip beating up an Australian; immediately he leapt down onto the dock and knocked the Nip straight out. What you might call complete Axis agreement in matters of policy!

It was in this Syonan Times that we first read of Red Cross ships calling in at Singapore on their way to repatriate various diplomats. On two or three ships were Red Cross supplies for us, and within a few days we did really see Red Cross crates rolling along our road in Japanese trucks. These were probably the only Red Cross goods that arrived without wholesale looting or just plain sequestration by high I.J.A. authorities. The drugs were everything the hospital could have desired with the exception of diphtheria serum, a necessity that could hardly have been foreseen, and there was something enormous like 12 tons of Marmite. Among the foods we had tinned milk, M. & V., breakfast food biscuits, soup powder, vitamin sweets and bully beef. There was even cocoa for after the evening meal, and there was enough of it to eke out at least a month. Some clothing came too, chiefly brown felt hats, and everybody got a pair of excellent boots. We were very grateful to the South African Red Cross.

It was about the end of September, and as was so usual with the Nips, two seemingly flatly contradictory things happened. In the first place were distinct, repeated rumours of huge moves up country to Thailand to build a railway; and then the Nips got us to open up vast new gardens on better soil some miles from Changi, the products of which were to make us eventually self-supporting – which made it look as if we were staying in Singapore indefinitely.