#this one is partly based on my grandparents' experiences so mmm a lot of thoughts about this era

[stirringwinds]

tagged by @oumaheroes to post a WIP! so here’s one I have centred on the collapse of Australian and British/other Commonwealth forces to the Japanese during the Fall of Singapore in February 1942:

“You know—” Jack takes a shaky, shuddering breath, and it looks to Zee as though he’s going to fall apart. But then, it comes out, a vivid torrent, “the very last time we spoke, it was February 1st— at the Municipal Building. Right after Pop’s engineers blew up the causeway to Malaya to try and stall those fuckers. Whole place in total bedlam, people running up and down, the air raid sirens blaring on and off, and he was with the Governor, General Percival and a bunch of the other brass. All of them in this room with a gigantic map of the island, the telephone ringing off the hook, everybody cussin’ me out in relief, askin’ where the bloody hell I’d been, sayin’ they thought I got captured up in Johor.” 

Jack’s stare is faraway. “And for some godforsaken reason—I say don’t worry, everything’s gonna be just fine. I say all that steamin’ horseshit, all those lies, right after we got chased down from the top of Malaya back to Singapore in four weeks. That me and my blokes are here—that it won’t be like what happened to Leon. That the wily old fart may be stuck in London, but he has a plan. And he just looks at me in silence; he’s worried, tense. Says that he hopes so, ‘cuz those vindictive bastards know many of his people have been sending money to the resistance in China since the ‘30s, and they’re just itching to settle the score.” 

Jack runs a hand through his hair roughly. He continues. “I could’ve shut my goddamn mouth then—but I don’t. I say hell naw, it won’t, mate. That when this nonsense is over, I’ll buy a round for everyone at the Raffles Hotel bar; he kinda chuckles faintly, says he’ll hold me to it, and that next time, he’ll show me that good satay place. We shake hands on it—and then I’m off.” Her brother’s jaw is taut. “Off to send my men to be cut to pieces again for King and Empire, with not a bloody thing to show for it except—” His voice breaks off, but he doesn’t have to say more. 

Zee’s tongue feels leaden, useless. Her stomach twists. 

They’re ugly words, unconditional surrender. 

It’s still in her mind’s eye, the two-week-old newspaper the clerk at the airfield had dug up, placed in her hands earlier. It’d been ironic that they, who’d been so close to it all, hadn’t seen its full aftermath immortalised in black-and-white, the way millions across the world had—until now.  Underneath the blaring headlines—Father’s men, all of them blurry and out of focus, their backs to the camera, seated across a wooden table from a stern-faced Japanese general, still in his battle dress. The latter, in turn flanked by his staff officers, all of their expressions ranging from calm nonchalance to barely-concealed impatience, the white sheets of paper that constituted the instrument of surrender between them and Father’s men. 

A single, bloodless photograph, that nonetheless embodied how the elder nation that was Father’s once-ally had— with clinical and deliberate precision—rubbed Father’s face and the empty boast of British power into the shattered rubble of Singapore and Malaya before the eyes of the whole world.

anyone else who wants to share writing WIPs, take this as an invitation to do so! ✒️