Those I Have Lost: A heart-wrenching and unforgettable World War 2 historical novel by Sharon Maas

Author:Sharon Maas
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781800196209
Publisher: Bookouture

Chapter Twenty-Three

I returned to Colombo three months later as a qualified bilingual stenotypist. I moved into the Huxleys’ house in Cinnamon Gardens, an elegant two-storey colonial mansion that had been converted into two flats. Graham usually lived in the top flat, which was now empty. An English family usually occupied the bottom apartment but the wife had been evacuated along with her two small children, and now only the husband, who worked in a reserved capacity with the Apothecaries, lived there, along with his father, a widower, a retired admiral.

With the intervention of the aforementioned admiral, and after a series of interviews, I was given a job with the Far East Combined Bureau. This was an outstation of the British Government Code and Cypher School, which had been set up in 1935 to monitor Japanese, Chinese and Soviet intelligence and radio traffic. Initially set up in Hong Kong, it had later moved to Singapore, Colombo and Kenya and then returned to Colombo. Pembroke College, an Indian boys’ school, was requisitioned as a combined code-breaking and wireless interception centre.

That was where I found work as a secretary to the code-breakers, in a long low hut among several similar huts, where all this top-secret essential work was carried out. I had to sign the Official Secrets Act and I wore a white uniform to work, which was all rather exciting: I was working with spies!

Back in March there had been an influx of refugees from Singapore and Burma, for whom accommodation had to be found, and soon both flats in the Cinnamon Garden house were occupied by refugees; below, a mother and three children had moved in with the two gentlemen, while above, in our flat, a mother and her teenage daughter, Mrs Grantley and Pamela, had found refuge. I found them very pleasant indeed, and I was happy not to be living alone. Mrs Grantley’s husband had been a rubber planter in Singapore, and she was in agony not knowing what had, what would, become of him.

‘They say that all British men have been sent to Changi Prison,’ she said, ‘but I’ve not heard a word and I doubt if they’ll allow him to write.’

She told chilling stories about the Japanese; her account of the massacre at the Alexandra Hospital on 14 February made my blood run cold. She had not wanted to leave, but there had been no option, especially with a young girl in tow.

Pamela and I got on well, and when I had time I showed her a bit of Colombo and the surrounding areas – her mother was not inclined to come with us. Eventually, once they had settled, they both decided to make themselves useful and volunteered for war work. Mrs Grantley was a trained nurse and she immediately got a job in that field, working long shifts, while Pamela worked as a nurse’s assistant, mainly fetching and bringing items to doctors and nurses as they worked, rolling bandages, emptying and cleaning bedpans. After that we all saw less of each other; they were hardly ever at home.

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