Ernest Froggatt RIP

We had one full day in Singapore to visit the war memorial at Kranji with our friend and my ex-wife Rosemary.  Her grandfather Ernest Froggatt has his name carved there and her mum was keen for her to pay her respects.

Kranji is on the opposite side of the island from Singpore city, facing the Straits which separate it from Malaysia.  It was here that the British and Commonwealth troops retreated in January 1942, after the Japanese had pushed them back through the Malayan peninsula.  The memorial commemorates not just those that were killed defending Singapore, but all the commonwealth soldiers who died in Southeast Asia in the Second World War, many in Japanese prisoner of war camps.

We took the metro to the station nearest Kranji, then walked the last kilometre in blazing midday heat.  Rosemary and I separated nearly twenty five years ago after being together for fifteen years.  Not having much family of my own she feels like my nearest relative and so in visiting this place I felt a family connection too.  It's a large site on a hill, but has a secluded and peaceful atmosphere.  Like everywhere else in Singapore the grounds are beautifully maintained by unobtrusive gardeners and there were only a handful of visitors.

We found Ernest Froggatt's name and his entry in the register with little difficulty.  Rosemary explained that he had joined the Territorial Army before the war so he could learn to drive and this effort at self improvement had led to him to be called up and shipped off to Southeast Asia.  He drowned in 1943 in a ship transporting prisoners of war to Japan which was sunk by a US submarine.  In fact there were many survivors, some of whom ended up witnessing the dropping of the atom bomb on Nagasaki.

Looking around with Rosemary and Sue, taking all this in, I felt very stirred up.  There I was with these two very important women in my life and all of us connected together in a tapestry of historical events involving our relatives (Sue's Dad did his National Service in Malaya and mine spent many years in the navy in this region too) and Britain's empire and its aftermath, which is still reverberating on and on and all of the more recent history personal stuff between us as well.  All of this there in the atmosphere, like background radiation, but not things you can really talk about in a rational way, but more like an echoing chord of great depth and complexity, which goes on and on until it fades into a silence where you think you can still hear the chord and then into a total silence.  And then you look around and say something dull and meaningless like:

 "Well, what do you think?  Are we about done here?  Shall we head back to the station?"