By Dorothy Nixon

3)Written out of History.

I started researching my grandmother's life after I found a mention of her on the Web, as the "endlesly helpful secretary of the Kuala Lumpur Book Club." A former expat, a Mr. Smith, was writing a review of Out in the Midday Sun, by Margaret Shennan in 2000, and was correcting a typo.

The book mentioned my grandmother once in relation to the Double Tenth Torture Incident but called her Dorothy Dixon. I contacted Mr. Smith and he told me about meeting my grandmother and using the Book Club.

The book Sinister Twilight, the Fall and Rise of Singapore by Noel Barber (1968)(which I read in 2009, after I posted the play Looking for Mrs. Peel) tells the story of the Fall of Singapore from military and human interest points of view and is rich in detail and anecdote.

As it has recently been reissued in paperback, I guess it has become a definitive account of the event.

Sinister Twilight relies heavily on the oft repeated stories of Freddy Bloom and Dr. Cecily Williams (Shennan mentions these women a few times. According to Joan Kitching Hague, whose father's account of the Fall of Singapore also figures prominently in the book, author Barber preferred using first person accounts.)

Sinister Twilight does not mention my grandmother, not once, but in one section, about the Women's walk from Katong to Changi, Barber describes the women entering and how one women "a tiny matron under five feet, a human dynamo of immense courage" starts everyone singing "There'll always be an England" as they enter Changi.

Now, I've read this anecdote before (perhaps in the bio of Freddy Bloom but no name mentioned.) Clearly Barber knew who this woman was and the description fits my grandmother who was tiny, 47 years old, women's camp leader and Double Tenth victim. But if this is, indeed, a reference to my grandmother, why then does the author, Barber, just a few pages later, fail to mention that my grandmother was involved in the Double Tenth? He claims that 'two women' from the camp are taken, not three, as was the case.

In 2003, after I had contacted the man who wrote the Amazon review,I then contacted Bernice Archer, the expert in women prisoners of war and she kindly dug out some other references to my grandmother in books.

One book, The Men Who Made British Malaya,by Dorothy Barr, describes my grandmother in old age, retired and waiting to die in the Majestic hotel in Kuala Lumpur surrounded by her personal library of books.

Barr also claims the Book Club provided trash reading to thrill starved planter's families,which is quite ironic, as Mr. Smith claimed my grandmother had a fine and nuanced taste in literature.

In Priest in Prison, another book about Changi Gaol, the author describes how my grandmother once slipped a tea pot full of water to some male prisoners being tortured in solitary "at great risk to herself" and describes how, she, herself was tortured in solitary confinement and made to subsist on two cans of milk a day.

And in another book, In the Shadow of the Rising Sun,by Mary Thomas (is this Lady Thomas? No! I just found this woman's obit online. She was a teacher who lived to 102. She died in 2009) my grandmother is mentioned as well.

These are all small references, lost to history. Archer told me my grandmother was a 'shadowy' figure at Changi and that no living internee she has contacted remembered her. (Well, they would have been young.) But as it turns out my grandmother was a key figure at Changi and with respect to the Double Tenth Incident. She just didn't write about it afterward, at least for publication, and that is the difference. Archer wanted me to see if any Men's accounts of the Double Tenth jive with Dorothy's but I opt to believe her and besides, the men who would have known, the men who got her into the 'radio racket', as she described it,all died in the torture chambers or soon afterwards.

Written out of history, maybe, but not written out of the “present”.

In the book Singapore Goes off the Air by Giles Playfair, published in 1943 (yes, that is right!) my mother is spoken of often. As her memoirs show, she worked at Malayan Broadcasting Corporation in the Cathay Building just before the Fall of Singapore. This book gives an account of what is going on, in semi-diary form.

Page 153: “I had dinner with Margaret Robinson. She has a flat in the Cathay Building which she shares with a Mrs. Nixon, whose husband is serving with the Volunteers. She knew Mrs. Nixon in Kuala Lumpur before the war. Mrs. Nixon was librarian there and came to Singapore a day or two before its fall. She’s in her early fifties now and I feel very sorry for her. She’s lost everything and so has her husband, who left his lifework behind in Kuala Lumpur and has no recognizable future. However, she’s one of the people whom disaster has made neither plaintive nor cowardly. She’s behaving courageously. She’s got herself a temporary job with the MBC and her husband has joined the LDC.

Seemingly her only worry is a guilty feeling that she and other Europeans in Malaya failed in their duty to the Asiatic population. She says whatever happens here, there will be no more evacuations for her. Both Margaret and Mrs. Nixon were a little critical of some of the women who left in the last day or two and ironically enough I found myself defending them.

Page 213. For myself I am preparing to lay me down once again on the camp bed in Margaret’s sitting room. Mrs. Nixon still says that Singapore won’t fall. She tells me she had a long talk this afternoon with Hughie Fraser, the new Colonial Secretary, who assured her there was nothing to worry about. I argue that Mr. Fraser’s words have unfortunately been disproved already by events. But she replies, somewhat illogically, that she knows that Singapore is going to hold.

Poor Mrs. N. She is perhaps the only one in the Cathay building tonight who clings to the old illusion of hope, for even Margaret abandoned her determination to gloss over the facts with brave words and full recognizes now the uselessness of further pretense. Whether Mrs. Nixon’s refusal to admit defeat comes from obstinacy or courage, from self-deception or plain bluff, I’m not sure. But whatever the cause, and however foolhardy she may be, it is impossible not to admire and envy her steadfastness.

Page 226.. Among the Europeans, only Mrs. Nixon has refused to have anything to do with departure. Although she no longer pretends to have obstinate faith in Singapore’s impregnability, she insists it is her duty to stay behind with her husband who is serving with the LDC and who has no chance of escape. Andrew Carruthers and I spent more than an hour trying to persuade her to change her mind. But we merely wasted our breath. We failed utterly. When we urged her to consider the feelings of her two sons in England, she said she knew they would wish her to stay.

When we suggested that in the end evacuation of women might be made compulsory, she retorted that she would never be coerced. And when we warned her that she would probably be separated from her husband by the Japanese, she said that she was willing to run the risk. Her decision was obviously made and no argument, specious or potent, could deflect her from it. And yet I wish we had prevailed not only for her sake but our own. For while I believe her decision is a wrong one, I’m convinced now that it is born not of bravado but of calm and reasoned courage. Therefore it strikes sharply at the conscience.