Hmm. The information on the Internet is growing exponentially. In 2003, I found one reference to my grandmother and now there are many, many and not just created by me.
Well, today, someone came to my website looking up Giles Playfair, the writer of Singapore Goes Off the Air, published in 1943, that is during the war. This book describes the Malaya Broadcasting Corporation during the siege and describes my grandmother as the only European to stay behind because of loyalty to my grandfather.
I've always found this a little weird as she had a boyfriend, who went back to England. When she left Kuala Lumpur, both my grandfather and this man, Hastings, took her to the train.
Well, way back, when I read Singapore Goes off the Air, I looked up Giles Playfair, a writer, so you'd think there would be a lot on the Internet about him. There wasn't. And he was a wonderful writer. I found his grave in Montmartre.
Today, I looked up his name (as the visitor to my site had done) and there was a snippet from a book about spies during the war, claiming he was a counter-espionage agent in the US in 1946, after he escaped Singapore.
Hmm. The plot thickens. I knew Singapore Goes Off the Air couldn't tell the whole story, as it was published during the war. But now I wonder even more if my grandmother's story is more complicated than breaking the rules at Changi, by passing information from the men's camp to the women's camp, information about BBC broadcasts, passed around only to improve morale.
I mean, she spent a time with Playfair. He stayed in the same apartment for some days.
