Sheila Allan was just 17 years old when Japanese forces imprisoned her in Changi Gaol during the occupation of Singapore and Malaya (1942–45).Footnote 1 In this tense environment, she developed a particular attachment to Dr Elinor Hopkins, the Liaison officer and Camp Commandant for the women's prison.Footnote 2 SheilaFootnote 3 admitted to her diary in May 1942 that she kept ‘thinking I wish she is my mother — how I'd like my mother to be — my Dream Mother’.Footnote 4 Her desire to identify a ‘dream mother’ reflected both her personal history of abandonment and her more immediate need for protection and intimacy. This was especially important as British and Japanese leaders considered her ‘Eurasian’, subjecting her to fraught racial hierarchies across empires. This article explores Sheila's exaltation of a white Briton as a ‘dream mother’ in Japanese-occupied Singapore in conversation with other wartime letters and diaries to reveal how internment reflected and, at times, challenged, wartime and colonial concepts of race, gender, and intimacy. Imprisonment forced women and men to renegotiate racial and gender categories simultaneously. For captives, personal identity was inseparable from the traumas of racial and gender segregation, shifting and divergent British and Japanese colonial hierarchies, and the lived reality of violence.Footnote 5 While the experience of POW and internment camps is well-known, little attention has been paid to how these traumatic experiences shaped wartime and postwar aspirations and identities. Sheila's experience of an internment camp intended for white Europeans, divided and segregated along gender lines, embodied the entwined nature of gender and racial identities under colonialism.
This article examines Sheila's ability to navigate — and redefine — British and Japanese colonial categories in a tense wartime environment, setting the course for her experience of war and its aftermath. Further, her extensive and meticulously kept wartime diary — together with subsequent memoirs and interviews — provide a rare glimpse into the mind of a woman living at the crossroads of colonial categorisation. She experienced internment from the ages of 17 to 21 after spending much of her early life in a series of convents in colonial Malaya. She was also a Eurasian woman with an Australian father and Malay mother, which meant simultaneously reconciling British, Australian, Malay, Asian, and Eurasian identities.Footnote 6 Both Japanese and British leaders considered Sheila ‘Eurasian’ even though she had no meaningful connection to Singapore's significant Eurasian community. During the invasion, Japanese leaders tried to separate her from her family, perceiving her as Asian. This tied her bureaucratically to a birth mother she barely remembered, rather than the Australian father with whom she travelled. Some European women captives used racial slurs against her during internment. She had little-to-no regular exposure to men — a situation exacerbated by the gender segregation of camp life. Therefore, her account provides a unique window into the fragility of wartime and colonial identities.Footnote 7 Her exceptional experience as a young British and Eurasian woman highlights her limited access to privilege and power in both war and peace. In turn, her wartime traumas — processed through the desire for a ‘dream mother’ — demonstrate the long-term impact of internment and colonialism on gender and racial identities.
Race, gender, and Eurasian identity in Southeast Asia
Sheila's early life reflected the intersecting gender, sexual and racial politics of colonial Southeast Asia, which laid the foundation for her quest for a ‘dream mother’ in Changi. She was born in Taiping in 1924 and lived with her Malay birth mother until she was nine years old. After that, her white Australian (Tasmanian) father, John Charles Allan, a tin mining engineer and dredge master, took over her care. She stopped seeing and lost touch with her mother, living most of her life in various Malayan convents. She visited her father once a year during holidays, sometimes in Siam. His main role was ensuring that she was fed, clothed, and educated. When John married a Siamese woman, Vichim, in 1941, Sheila referred to her as ‘Mum’, although she rarely mentioned or commented on the nature of their relationship. Sheila described her father as ‘the dearest and best in the world’ even though he played little role in her early childhood. Much of her early life, therefore, was dominated by the convents run by the nuns of the Order of the Holy Infant Jesus. She later described the nuns as ‘kind and gentle’ and life in the convent as ‘secure, serene, and peaceful’.Footnote 8 In 1939, Malayan convents felt a world away from a European conflict. Yet these set her expectations for a life among women and the ideals of loving femininity that she later sought in Changi.
Life in convents shielded Sheila from the sometimes-harsh reality of being categorised as a Eurasian girl in Malaya. The convent residences were a mix of Malay, Eurasian, Chinese, and European girls led predominantly by white women — specifically, Irish and French nuns. Sheila later remembered life in the convent as a time of ‘peace and tranquility’. She aspired to become like the nuns: ‘quiet and serene and happy’ and ‘content with what I have got’.Footnote 9 At fourteen she even became Catholic, dreaming of becoming a missionary, even though her father was Presbyterian.Footnote 10 Other women who attended the Holy Infant Jesus schools were equally enthralled with the nuns. One remembered them as ‘so godly, so devoted’ and a ‘great inspiration to me’.Footnote 11 The convent also taught practical skills such as shorthand and bookkeeping, exclusively in English, and offered recreation such as theatre and music.Footnote 12 Sheila learned sewing, which provided her with valuable skills and would help her bond with the European women in Changi.Footnote 13 She noted that ‘the only male I ever saw was a parish priest once a week and the bishop’.Footnote 14 Interestingly, Sheila's attraction to Catholicism could have connected her to the Eurasian community in Malaya. Members of the prominent Eurasian community in Penang, for example, held leadership positions in many Catholic congregations and charities.Footnote 15 Despite this cultural connection, Sheila later resisted categorisation as Eurasian in the camps, reflecting the contested and stigmatised nature of Eurasian identities.
Born in 1924, Sheila was part of a generation of children who could officially claim the European status of their fathers.Footnote 16 However, according to Ann Stoler, there remained two main measures by which metis — including Eurasian — children could claim Europeanness. The first was through ‘physical features of race’ and the second was the ‘moral certainty’ derived from a child's name, clothing, and upbringing. This made it important that Sheila went by her Australian name — Sheila Allan — rather than Zatun, a name that she later learned was assigned to her at birth. Children, many colonial officials believed, needed to be ‘taught’ race and the family was the primary site of guiding and creating future subjects and loyal citizens. Without ties to her impoverished Malay mother, the convents became the primary place where Sheila learned and performed Europeanness. This would have saved her from European feminists’ fears of Eurasians becoming an ‘underclass of European paupers’ and prostitutes. Without proper guidance, most assumed that women like Sheila faced an inevitable life of crime and vice. Even with European education and manners, Eurasians embodied European fears of racial degeneration and moral decay.Footnote 17
Evelyn Brooks Higginbotham has argued that in ‘societies where racial demarcation is endemic to their sociocultural fabric and heritage, gender identity is inextricably linked to and even determined by racial identity’.Footnote 18 This was especially true for Eurasian women in colonial Asia, whose very existence, in the minds of many British leaders, reflected sexual licence. For Stoler, European colonial leaders were often ambivalent about European and Asian sexual unions. Colonial administrators sometimes supported marriage with Asian women to prevent paying Europeans the higher wages to support European wives. Still, Eurasian and Indo-European children were widely stigmatised within and beyond colonial Asia.Footnote 19 Whether their family origins were Chinese, Indian, or Malay, all Eurasians faced racial and class prejudices due to the perception that their mothers were low class and conceived them illegitimately.Footnote 20 Some Eurasians gained positions within the colonial bureaucracy through their language skills and presumed superiority to other Indigenous peoples. Still, racial bars on employment in the civil service in 1904 hurt their claims to privilege and power.Footnote 21 The Eurasian community in Malaya had relatively less social, political, and cultural stigma or visibility than in other British colonies, numbering between 6,000 and 9,000 people in Malaya in the 1930s and 1940s.Footnote 22 Still, according to Kristy Walker's analysis of Eurasians in colonial Penang, ‘race became the primary category of social analysis in Southeast Asia, governing employment opportunities and public space’.Footnote 23 Race, like gender, sexuality, class and religion, was integrated into regulatory systems in colonial spaces that created and limited people's choices and opportunities.Footnote 24 For this reason, the term ‘Eurasian’ remains contested, due to its power to include or exclude people due to their parental heritage, reifying the racism of colonial power.Footnote 25
In some ways, British anxieties about Eurasians intensified in the early twentieth century. By then, European anti-prostitution campaigns and growing anti-colonial sentiment led colonial officials to encourage further migration of white European women, increasing social stigmas against white men who married Asian women.Footnote 26 Many Eurasians responded by isolating themselves and embracing a specific ‘Eurasian’ identity to experience social mobility.Footnote 27 Some of the British administrators who would later be interned had Asian wives and children whom they sent back to Indigenous communities, or kampong, with the arrival of more white women. Europeans, in turn, increasingly resented Eurasians in their social circles.Footnote 28 These Europeans became many of Sheila, Vichim, and John's fellow internees. Men like John, who continued to blur the lines between ruler and ruled, endured greater social stigma. European men's failure to acknowledge their colonial families only amplified John's ‘otherness’ for insisting that Vichim was his wife and Sheila was his daughter.Footnote 29 Further, Sheila and Vichim's presence at Changi would have been a source of controversy due to colonial officials’ perceptions of Eurasians as threats to white prestige.
Sheila's English language skills, Catholic education and faith, and other cultural markers all situated her at the crossroads of elite Eurasian society and aspirational Britishness.Footnote 30 This cultural capital brought her some of the privileges of whiteness.Footnote 31 Perhaps most importantly, she identified as British, despite her categorisation as Eurasian within British and Japanese bureaucracy. This aligned her with a global network of Black and Asian colonial subjects who identified with Britishness and performed British codes of respectability to claim imperial subjecthood for themselves.Footnote 32 By the early twentieth century, however, definitions of ‘Britishness’ increasingly emphasised whiteness to unite Britain with the white settler colonies of Australia, New Zealand, Canada, and South Africa.Footnote 33 John, as a Tasmanian Australian, embodied the regional and global dynamics of Britishness, through which race was a central prism. Sheila's embrace of Britishness, and her lack of connections to the Eurasian community, helped her find a degree of belonging and acceptance among interned Europeans. Unfortunately, Japanese officials and British internees constantly challenged and undermined her claims to a British identity, with tremendous consequences for her postwar life.
From convent to conflict
When Japanese forces invaded Malaya in December 1941, Sheila was enjoying a vacation in the Cameron Highlands with her father, stepmother, and two dogs. This was to be her final farewell to Malaya before relocating to Melbourne to attend university. However, they soon abandoned their holiday and travelled hastily through Malaya to Singapore, evading Japanese troops. This gave Sheila a quick introduction to life outside of the convent. In Lower Perak, they met some friendly soldiers who shared news of their losses. Sheila observed the men with nervous fascination, knowing ‘little of man and his ways’ and uncertain of ‘what to say if one of them had spoken to me’.Footnote 34 Compared to her nervousness with men, she continued to associate women with safety. When they arrived in Ipoh, John tried to arrange for Sheila to stay at the convent. However, the Reverend Mother told them that only children without relatives could stay behind. This made Sheila reflect on her own mother: ‘Is she still alive? Why doesn't Dad ever speak of her?’ She did have some memories, particularly of ‘a certain woman who had played an important part in my childhood — some-one I had called “Mother” who used to beat me up whenever I was naughty; who had a violent temper’.Footnote 35 All she knew was that life before the convent was not happy: ‘we knew of poverty and starvation and unhappiness born of a family not united’. She remembered begging for food from Chinese and European women before her father took over her care. It was in this life of desperate poverty that she first ‘invented a “Dream Mother”’. She envisioned this person as ‘someone I could talk to in my thoughts’.Footnote 36 Little did she know that a ‘Dream Mother’ also would help her cope with the war.
By January 1942, Sheila and her family made it to Singapore. Despite its reputation as an ‘impregnable fortress’, their arrival brought little comfort. Civilians competed for dwindling opportunities to evacuate as Japanese assaults on the city intensified.Footnote 37 Despite the racism that privileged white Britons during evacuation, Sheila and Vichim secured passages to Australia, but ultimately stayed behind with John.Footnote 38 Remaining in Singapore meant coping with constant death, and destruction, as bombs, shelling, and food shortages intensified.Footnote 39 In hindsight, Sheila remembered these uncertain days in Singapore, rather than internment at Changi, as her hardest experiences of the war.Footnote 40 These tense weeks also shaped her understanding of sexual difference — and danger.Footnote 41 Her family stayed in the heavily-bombed Rex Hotel, where soldiers were ‘young and cheeky wanting to kiss me at every opportunity’.Footnote 42 Other men were even more aggressive. A European planter, whom she referred to only as ‘Mr. M.’, was in his forties and had a habit of making her ‘feel uncomfortable’ by bumping into her, standing by her side, or sneaking up behind her. She felt ‘nervous with him’.Footnote 43 Even when her family moved accommodations, to Amber Mansions, Mr. M. followed. He insisted on putting his arm around Sheila ‘to protect’ her during air raids, despite her protests that she could protect herself. His persistence made her feel uneasy — ‘All I know is that I don't like him touching me’.Footnote 44 By February he got so aggressive grabbing her during a raid that she hit her head. His ‘protection’ was causing her physical and psychological pain.
On 15 February 1942, the night of the British surrender, Mr. M. tried to kiss Sheila in an air raid shelter. Much to Sheila's surprise, another young man, Leslie, proposed marriage, which made Mr. M. jealous. He turned her off by suggesting that ‘if I married him, the Japs wouldn't assault me’. She scoffed at the thought of ‘Another one trying to protect me!’Footnote 45 Both Leslie and Mr. M. used the fear of invasion to force Sheila's affections — or compliance. Their relative power as European men made them feel confident in their efforts to ‘protect’ Sheila — drawing her closer to their own desires. This suggests that the threat of sexual violence existed for Sheila before encountering ‘enemy’ troops. Her vulnerability stemmed both from age and her perceived availability as a ‘Eurasian’ woman, whom Europeans often regarded as illegitimate and morally lax.Footnote 46 When she refused Leslie's proposal, he reiterated that ‘marriage would give you some measure of protection’.Footnote 47 However, it was Mr. M. from whom she felt she wanted the most immediate escape. The one silver lining to what came next was her separation from Mr. M.
Within two days of the British surrender Sheila learned that British imperial troops and subjects would be interned. Traumatically, this almost did not include her. When her family tried to register with Japanese officials one guard ‘roughly pushed’ Sheila, separating her from her father by pressing a bayonet against her back. The soldiers did not understand John's pleas that she was his daughter. Sheila recalled that ‘I had an Asian face’ so ‘the Japanese thought I was Chinese’.Footnote 48 The stakes of this categorisation were quite high. Japanese military personnel killed 30,000 Chinese civilians in Singapore by March 1942, due to Japan's longer conflict with China and the assumption that they might be, or were working with, communists.Footnote 49 Sheila even saw invading Japanese soldiers ‘beating Chinese women and men’ and murdering babies shortly after the British surrender. Despite her near-categorisation as a Chinese woman, Sheila rejoined her family after they appealed to a Japanese captain, with the aid of an Indian interpreter. As they left, a Japanese sentry warned that ‘no young, unmarried girls should be seen out in the open!’Footnote 50 Japanese soldiers reiterated European men's insistence that marriage was Sheila's only avenue for protection during the war. Most men — whether they were soldiers or civilians, Japanese or European — could not imagine that homosocial bonds might be just as life-saving.
By late February, Sheila was interned at Changi alongside her father, stepmother, and many other British officials and civilians. Ample scholarly and public attention has been paid to the horrific conditions of many Japanese POW and civilian internment camps across Southeast Asia.Footnote 51 The Japanese military occupied much of Southeast Asia until 1945 capturing more than 200,000 allied prisoners of war (POWs) and at least 130,000 European civilians.Footnote 52 Despite the many differences between camps, Changi has a notorious reputation due, in part, to the number of high-ranking British and European officials held there. It also is associated with the torture of military POWs at Changi Barracks before they were sent to work on the notoriously brutal Burma-Thailand Railway. However, some POWs called Changi ‘POW Heaven’ or a ‘Phoney Captivity’ compared to the brutalities that they faced elsewhere.Footnote 53 In fact, some Eurasian women saw internment as a safe option and hoped that it might facilitate repatriation after the war.Footnote 54 Those Asian and Eurasian civilians left behind outside of camps endured the constant fear and uncertainty of life under occupation.
Compared to wartime alternatives, Changi Gaol was, in some ways, a best-case-scenario for Sheila.Footnote 55 Being an interned civilian meant a higher likelihood of survival.Footnote 56 Sheila later felt ‘thankful for having been in Changi prison’ because ‘I doubt whether I would have survived if I had lived out’.Footnote 57 Eurasians outside of camps faced racial discrimination and violence. They struggled to secure food, jobs, and housing. Some participated in Japanese resettlement plans in Bahau, with the promise of fresh food. However, fatality rates among settlers were roughly 25 per cent — comparable to the highest death rates in Japanese camps.Footnote 58 Being in Changi meant not having to compete to survive outside of it. Yet internment brought many challenges. Captives competed for resources while fighting disease, depression, and poor treatment from guards. For Sheila, internment also provided a deeper immersion in Japanese and British racial and gender hierarchies and inequities, shaping her understanding of being a Eurasian girl and becoming an Australian woman.
Sheila, like many women, knew that war and internment were very gendered experiences. Many Japanese soldiers opposed miscegenation and mistrusted interned Eurasians due to their ties to European and Chinese communities in Singapore. For Takashi Fujitani, Japanese leaders encouraged a ‘polite racism’ in colonial spaces like Korea which emphasised men's ability to overcome ethnic difference through military service and power over women.Footnote 59 This created a shared belief that women were obliged to serve military needs, facilitating the forced conscription of many women as sexual labourers, euphemistically referred to as ‘comfort women’.Footnote 60 Many Eurasian women and families with daughters fled to the margins of Malayan cities and towns to hide young women in the rubber estates or fields whenever the Japanese forces approached.Footnote 61 By contrast, Sheila admitted that she felt secure in Changi surrounded by ‘a lot of other women’. This made her feel like ‘we will be there to help each other’ because there was ‘safety in numbers’.Footnote 62 She admitted later that, unlike at other camps, ‘shocking brutality and rapes’ were not the norm. Nonetheless, the ‘threat of such barbaric treatment’, haunted their everyday lives.Footnote 63 She credited her relative sense of safety to the ‘women running the camp’, who ‘were so protective of us’. This included her ‘dream mother’, Dr Hopkins.Footnote 64 For Sheila, women represented comfort and protection.
Claiming Britishness
While interned, Sheila found comfort in performing a ‘British’ identity.Footnote 65 In her school days she always ‘thought a lot of England’ and ‘loved the Royal family’. On the night of the surrender ‘they sang Rule Britannia until they were hoarse’. During the arduous eight-mile march to Changi they left ‘in the true “British spirit” — singing’ the patriotic refrain ‘There will always be an England’. She emphasised her difference from Asian civilians when she wrote a poem called ‘The March’, including the line ‘Chinese, Indians and Malays watched them go — Where to, they did not know’.Footnote 66 This sense of alienation related in part to the growing ethnic nationalism of the early twentieth century, which saw an increase in Chinese, Indian, and Malay political organisations.Footnote 67 By contrast, her attraction to Britishness made Camp Commandant Dr M. Elinor Hopkins an ideal source of inspiration. According to one observer, Hopkins was ‘very “English” in voice, manner and outlook’. Some internees found this ‘extremely irritating’.Footnote 68 For Sheila, who almost lost her claim to a ‘British’ identity, Englishness was a source of comfort, aspiration, and desire.
Sheila's Anglophile tendencies chafed against Japanese rule and their perception of her as Eurasian. Throughout the occupation, Japanese leaders were variously ambivalent and hostile to Eurasians. Many soldiers condemned interracial marriages and viewed Eurasians with disdain. Some Japanese officials urged Eurasians to forget their European ties and ally themselves with fellow Asians. Others distrusted that many Eurasians were Christians and had business ties with Straits Chinese, which led to suspicions that they prayed for the British to return or disseminated anti-Japanese propaganda.Footnote 69 Shortly after the surrender, Sheila learned that ‘Europeans mean “married to one” — “children from such union” — or if you profess to be a “British subject!”’Footnote 70 However, Sheila was categorised as ‘Eurasian’ rather than British or Australian, while other children were listed under their ‘fathers’ nationality’.Footnote 71 Sheila's own devout association with Britishness may have helped her assimilate into camp life but earned her little sympathy from the Japanese.
British internees proved to be just as invested in strict identity categories as their captors. Nominal rolls at Changi had over a dozen categories, which included Australian, British, and Eurasian — all of which could have included Sheila.Footnote 72 Many internees condemned the diversity of the camps generally and the presence of Eurasians specifically. Australian nurse Veronica Clancy, held at camps near Palembang, resented living beside ‘yellow half casts [sic]’ and wondered ‘how far these girls could be trusted?’.Footnote 73 Constance Sleep, interned in Changi and Sime Road alongside Sheila, alleged that ‘the native and Eurasian women’ were disloyal, due to their apparent willingness to sew or work in match factories for the Japanese. While she conceded that some white women took the work as well, she singled-out ‘native and Eurasian’ women as the problem. She resented Eurasians in the camp because ‘Our funds have to pay for milk, eggs and fruit provided for these people’. This made her feel ‘bitter about it, and about the men in the camp who are the begetters of these Eurasian children’.Footnote 74 Further, many European women resented the presence of Eurasian mistresses, referred to as ‘Mrs’ and the last names of well-known British officials.Footnote 75 This deepened many white women's equation of Eurasians with immorality. Other Eurasians enjoyed better access to food through their connections with family and friends who remained in occupied towns. Many British women suspected that the true origins of these luxuries were sexual relationships with Japanese guards.Footnote 76
Sheila's relative privilege of having a white (‘European’) father also singled her out in Changi, as many British women vented their frustrations on Eurasians.Footnote 77 Sleep maintained that ‘I don't despise the Eurasians as such. In fact, I have known some very admirable people amongst them, but I do despise the European men who are responsible for bringing them into the world.’Footnote 78 Sheila may have passed Sleep's test of being a ‘very admirable’ person individually. Yet Sleep called Sheila's existence into question and belittled her father — her closest tie to white imperial privilege. Nurse Clancy, who shared Allan's Australian identity, also condemned Eurasian children as ‘the victims of these marriages between the East and West’. She maintained the common view that ‘Eurasions [sic] … are not wanted by either people’.Footnote 79 Europeans often treated Eurasians as a burden and a nuisance in camps to deflect the humiliation of surrender and condemn their alleged ability to win favours from ‘both sides’.Footnote 80 In reality, white women ‘tried on’ various ‘ethnic’ identities during internment, dressing up as Indian, Chinese, and Javanese women during theatrical performances.Footnote 81 Identity, for Sheila, could literally be a matter of life and death. White women condemned Eurasians as a threat to white prestige while also claiming the ability to play with racial boundaries for their own amusement.Footnote 82
White women also increased sexual danger for Eurasian women. Australian nurses held at Palembang protested sexual coercion by suggesting that there were ‘a number of Eurasian girls in the camp’ who were ‘more than willing to fill the part’.Footnote 83 Teenager Betty Kenneison, a Eurasian girl with a convent education, remembered the trauma of her teenaged friend agreeing to work in the Japanese club in exchange for food and clothing. This could hardly be considered ‘more than willing’.Footnote 84 Yet some white nurses were ready to offer-up Eurasian women as sexual sacrifices, echoing the view that Eurasians were a byproduct of sin and illegitimacy and therefore predisposed to sexual laxity.Footnote 85 Sleep understood things in these terms in Changi, when she noted that there were ‘quite a number’ of ‘Eurasian and native girl friends [sic] of some of the Nips’.Footnote 86 White women claimed to have autonomy and rights over their bodies, while insisting that Asian or Eurasian women were outlets for men's sexual needs. They framed this as a reflection of the ‘degraded’ or ‘willing’ nature of Asian women to maintain their own place in both British and Japanese racial and gender hierarchies. All of these pressures weighed heavily on Sheila as she struggled to find love and intimacy in Changi.
Drafting a dream mother
Not all white women were ready to throw Sheila to the mercy of the Japanese. Some welcomed her socially, and included her in morning tea-breaks, or ‘elevenses’. One of the most encouraging was medical doctor Elinor Hopkins, who became Liaison officer and Camp Commandant in March 1942. By May, Sheila confessed her admiration, saying that she was ‘attracted to Dr Hopkins — I think she's beautiful — Gray hair, blue eyes that can look straight through you and a smile that lights up her face’. She admitted that she was the embodiment of ‘a dream image I've always had of my own mother’.Footnote 87 By contrast, her ‘Mum’ — or stepmother — Vichim, started to pay attention to other men. Sheila's sexual inexperience, and desire to fit in with Europeans, may have made her sceptical and even resentful toward Vichim's sexual desirability. It did not help that Vichim appeared to take little interest in Sheila's life, forgetting her eighteenth birthday. However, she took great interest when Sheila stopped menstruating. Vichim asked if Sheila had been ‘sleeping with man’.Footnote 88 In Sheila's view this was a ridiculous question, since the sentries would never let men pass into their sleeping areas. Of course, Japanese soldiers did rape and have sex with women prisoners in Changi. Accusations were most common among Eurasian women, no doubt increasing Vichim's concern.Footnote 89 Sheila avowed her innocence, but Vichim insisted that she visit the doctor — sending her further into Dr Hopkins’ world.
Vichim's concern thrust Sheila into a frightening new world of sexual knowledge. The doctor suggested that Sheila's stepmother probably thought that she was pregnant. Sheila retorted that this was impossible because she had not ‘been sitting on a man's lap and let him kiss me so I can't have a baby’. Her reproductive knowledge, as it turned out, came exclusively from girls at the convent. The doctor invited Sheila to come back the next day, and gave what Sheila described as her first sex education.Footnote 90 British medical women in Changi, therefore, facilitated Sheila's sexual awakening. Sheila marked the momentous — and troubling — new transition: ‘with this knowledge am I now a woman or still a child? Do I use this knowledge as a shield to protect my womanhood or childhood? Does this mean that I've crossed the dateline that marks the end of innocence and the beginning of maturing conflicts?’Footnote 91 Sexual knowledge, in Changi, made Sheila feel at risk, forcibly introduced into a frightening world of adulthood, where men were dangerous.
As Sheila became more anxious about men, her feelings about Dr Hopkins intensified. She was disappointed whenever she could not find Hopkins at social and theatrical gatherings in the camp. In November 1942 she observed that Dr Hopkins was ‘just “something” — she's so different to the others’. By contrast, Japanese sentries ‘can be pigs sometimes — no, most times’. Women endured slaps and kicks for failing to bow correctly or for whispering. When Sikh men became the camp guards, they were not much better and only increased concerns about ‘fraternisation’. European men remained close but inaccessible. Sheila caught occasional glimpses of the men, noting that they looked really thin ‘and so brown’.Footnote 92 The prospect of sex with men evoked embarrassment or pity at best — or fears of rape, coercion, fraternisation, and pregnancy at worst. Her love of Dr Hopkins was a secret desire that sustained her through dark times.
Sheila longed for a ‘Dream Mother’, but her descriptions of Hopkins often evoked sexual longing. In December 1942 she heard that Hopkins was sick in the hospital. She wondered ‘What is it about her that makes me want to be with her?’ She found solace looking through a book of poetry, including ‘Rosaline’ by Thomas Lodge, which ended each stanza with ‘Heigh ho, would she were mine!’ Edgar Allan Poe's works about his wife also resonated. Reading these gave Sheila ‘Vague fancies and strange longings’ that filled her ‘being’ when she went to sleep. She repeated Poe's ‘beautiful’, ‘sad’, and ‘hopeless’ words and then thought ‘of Dr Hopkins’. Sheila wondered, ‘Does this mean that I have a “crush” on the good doctor — I sure have — I think she's just wonderful!’Footnote 93 Hopkins was a source of frank sexual discussions, kindness and tenderness — all rare and welcome changes for Sheila. She made her feel love and loved — to feel hopeful, to feel desire. This contrasted the feelings of neglect, discrimination, and fear that were ever-present in Changi. Wartime confinement intensified and provided the opportunity to explore feelings that may not have been possible otherwise.
When Sheila reflected on her first full year of confinement in 1943, she regarded her infatuation with Hopkins as a combination of love and madness. She knew that her mood had been altered by bouts of dysentery and malaria, and she wondered if she had ‘gone mad since coming here!’ She admitted thinking of Dr Hopkins ‘every day and night’. In these instances, Hopkins ‘appears before me … as a vision’. She noted that her fascination was not just with the beauty of her ‘face and form’. Rather, she felt that Hopkins had a ‘harmony of her whole being … the perfect union of her body and soul’. She felt that ‘happiness is near me’ but feared ‘to be shown the summit of earthly bliss’ only to be ‘thrust out into the flat, sandy wastes of existance [sic]?’. In other words, now that she had found Hopkins, she worried that she was learning ‘To love and then be forever alone!’ Sheila called herself a poor fool and then insisted that ‘She doesn't know you exist — I mean nothing to her’. She repeatedly undermined her feelings, insisting that these were ‘ramblings — I must be going “nuts”!’Footnote 94
By January 1943 Sheila could no longer contain her feelings and shared her love of Dr Hopkins publicly — under the guise of a literary competition. The resulting product, completed on 19 January, was, essentially, a love letter to her ‘Dream Mother’. It was a fictional piece entitled ‘Motherless Eileen’. The protagonist, Eileen Carey, recalled: ‘The day she set her eyes on that beautiful woman five years ago, she had fallen and been in love with her ever since.’ The beloved character was called Edna Harmon — a thinly veiled reference to Elinor Hopkins. Their relationship was ‘one of the most beautiful friendships that could be imagined’. Harmon was one of the few people who could see that ‘Eileen was not really happy and that there was something lacking in her life’. Echoing Sheila's longing for Dr Hopkins during an illness, ‘Eileen’ and ‘Mrs. Harmon’ bonded when Mrs. Harmon became ill and Eileen nursed her. She clarified that this was a mother-child type of love. Eileen's mother had died a few days after she was born, and she was put in a boarding school. Eileen, therefore, ‘had not known a mother's love when she needed it’. Edna became Eileen's ‘ideal mother’ who ‘aroused’ a ‘craving for a mother's love’. In this fictional account, both Edna and her doctor-husband had a daughter who had died, so they adopted Eileen. The story ended with the new family watching a sunset. Sheila wrote that: ‘everything spelt calm and peace. It was only the beginning and promised a happy future for the three watchers’.Footnote 95
Sheila's story bears remarkable similarities to — and differences from — her love of Dr Hopkins. The fictional story ended with a heterosexual couple adopting and loving a daughter. This was hardly possible for Sheila, who was 18 years old. Her most socially-acceptable avenue of permanent companionship was (heterosexual) marriage rather than adoption. Also, Eileen had a deceased mother while Harmon had lost a child, giving each an equal desire for love. By contrast, Sheila never mentions Hopkins’ husband, who was also interned at Changi.Footnote 96 She never suggested that they bonded over shared losses. This was due, in part, to the fact that Sheila's mother was still alive. Her writing drove home Eileen's feeling of not knowing ‘a mother's love when she needed it’. This was undoubtedly true for Sheila, who longed for a ‘Dream Mother’ during the darkest periods of her life. It also erased Vichim — Sheila's stepmother — with whom she was interned. Sheila felt that there was a barrier to their intimacy because Vichim ‘didn't speak much English’. Her diary — where she wrote of Hopkins — became ‘like a father confessor to me’ because ‘I didn't have anybody to talk to’.Footnote 97
A fascination with whiteness also played a role in Sheila's life and fiction. In her early life, Sheila converted to Catholicism because the French and Irish nuns were ‘so kind and so gentle and so serene and I thought perhaps being a Catholic might make me like that’.Footnote 98 She processed this through religious rather than racial terms. However, it is striking that her Muslim Malay mother, Buddhist Chinese amah, and Siamese stepmother all failed to inspire such devotion. None of these women became her ideal ‘Dream Mother’, unlike the European nuns and British doctor. Meanwhile, whiteness marked positive traits in her story. Eileen apparently had a ‘fair clear complexion’ and fingers that ‘were very slender and white’ which ‘denoted her sensitiveness and artistic nature’.Footnote 99 Seth Koven has argued that cross-class admiration of ‘clean white hands’ evoked both close personal intimacy and a longing for a life without hard work.Footnote 100 In colonial spaces, white femininity was regarded as the height of purity and prestige.Footnote 101 The immediacy of the ‘fall’ of Singapore to the Japanese, and the consequent blow to British power, makes it impossible to ignore the racial implications of Sheila's depictions. She longed for the kind of unconditional love that she found among the nuns in the convent, making her nostalgic both for childhood and a life under British rule. Meanwhile, ‘Dr Harmon’, had a ‘transparent glow of health’ and ‘light blue eyes’.Footnote 102 Sheila's love and admiration for Dr Hopkins only deepened her equation of whiteness with ideal, loving femininity, at a time when Asian leadership and intimacy evoked fear, violence, and neglect.Footnote 103 Ultimately, Sheila's story received immediate praise and a ‘special prize’ in the literary competition.Footnote 104 She won a 1-pound tin of peaches — a prize worth more than gold in Changi. Once again, her love of Dr Hopkins brought salvation.
Changi challenges
Despite some successes, life in Changi only became more difficult for Sheila as time passed. Initially, internees called Changi ‘Changi University’ because of the art, theatre, and education available. As the war intensified, captives were subject to frequent searches, torture, long hours of hard labour, confiscation of personal belongings and shortages of food and medicine.Footnote 105 They endured repeated bouts of hunger and diseases such as dysentery, beri-beri and malaria. By May 1943, Sheila noted that it was hard to keep her diary because of her ailing health. She confided that she would prefer to die than endure severe illnesses every few weeks. When news of suicides came through the camp, she wondered how many more would follow. Psychological torment came from seeing ‘loved ones slowly fading away’. In these dire conditions, some women turned on one another. Sheila mentioned fights, imprisonment by fellow captives, and prostitution as causes of serious rifts between interned women.Footnote 106 Tensions only escalated as more internees joined the camps in the later years of the war, further stressing the food, water, and sanitary conditions. This increased hostility toward Eurasians, as more joined the camps by 1945 and eventually outnumbered Europeans seven to one.Footnote 107 Some Europeans speculated that Eurasians wanted to be interned so that they get food ‘meant’ for Europeans.Footnote 108 In this environment, love and comfort were rebellious acts.
By mid-1943 Sheila used a new nickname for Hopkins, calling her ‘M’ for Mother. Her fantasies also became more intense. In one, she envisioned ‘M’ tied to a post to be beaten in a Rose Garden. Sheila imagined rushing to her aid and wrapping her arms around her just as the Japanese were about to start whipping her. She chastised herself for ‘becoming morbid’. Yet love and fear became entwined in her fascination with Dr Hopkins. The threat of disciplinary punishments let Sheila imagine herself as the saviour of her beloved ‘M’.Footnote 109 Saving her ‘Dream Mother’ from imminent torture was a socially-acceptable way to embrace a woman she loved.
Despite the new moniker of ‘M’, Sheila's descriptions of Dr Hopkins continued to have an undercurrent of sexual desire. On Christmas, 1943, she gave Hopkins ‘a pair of cami-knicks’ (underwear) that she made. She enclosed the following, impassioned note:
All that you wish yourself to-day, I wish you and please accept this gift as a mother would because I know exactly how you feel about it. I do not want you think [sic] that you ought to do something in return, for if you do, it is I who will be under an obligation, not you. Please do not thank me. The pleasure of doing this for you is all the thanks I allow myself. Besides, what I really want is not esay [sic] to obtain. So I am quite content and thankful for small mercies that come to brighten my way. It is a year to-day since I have known you personally and I thank you for giving me something I will cherish all my life — meaning yourself and the memory of you after this — Thank you for all that you have done for me — For your patient care — your gentle reproof and sound advice — for tour [sic] sympathy and discretion — for listening to me and above all for being what you are to me — my Dream Mother my Inspiration. Thank you ‘Mother’ is all that I can say for these little things that mean so much to me. God bless you and all those you love and others who love you. May to-day be for you as happy as it can possibly be in here. I pray, also, that for you, the next Xmas will find you in the midst of your loved ones.Footnote 110
Sheila's gift of underwear and somewhat mournful, self-effacing note speak to the tensions and dynamics of their relationship. She indicates that Hopkins was aware that Sheila thought of her as a mother. She alluded to several intimate exchanges — through ‘patient care’, ‘gentle reproof’, ‘sympathy’, and ‘sound advice’. There is also a hint of shared secrecy — with Hopkins apparently exercising ‘discretion’. Further, Sheila claims to know ‘exactly’ how Hopkins felt about receiving a gift of underwear. The relationship also feels largely one-sided. Sheila performs contentment to give Hopkins her love, affection, and gifts, with no stated expectation for anything in return. Even a ‘thank you’, she felt, would only deepen her debt to Hopkins. Yet she did receive a gift in return — a small autograph book. In some ways, this was a personalised gift, as Sheila desired to become a writer and kept meticulous details about her experiences at Changi.
While Sheila's language hints at deep sexual desire, a gift of underwear was not necessarily a sexual proposition. All combatant nations prioritised clothing for soldiers rather than POWs and internees. By 1944, Sheila mentioned that clothing was in short supply and most women were running out of underwear.Footnote 111 Therefore, war created a different set of norms for captive bodies. Constance Sleep observed that women had to work ‘in the blazing sun, many of them wearing hardly any clothes’.Footnote 112 Women had no privacy because frail undergarments could only be ‘discreetly veiled’ which proved difficult ‘when doing chores’. Suntops were increasingly considered ‘inadequate’ by the Japanese officials and European captives simultaneously.Footnote 113 Giving Dr Hopkins underwear was as much about offering her the much-desired opportunity to ‘cover up’ as simulating erotic closeness. Life in the internment camps temporarily broke down pre-war definitions of acceptable nudity. However, few considered this liberation from prewar social norms.Footnote 114 Instead, interned civilians equated nakedness with privation, scarcity, and involuntary vulnerability, leading many to crave control over exposing their flesh. It is clear, though, that a gift of underwear was an act of love.
Long hours and limited mobility gave Sheila multiple opportunities to negotiate her complex feelings about bodies, love, and sexual desire with other captive women. Some of her fellow captives got engaged while interned and babies started to be born in the camp with some frequency in 1944. Sheila was slightly more cynical, stating, ‘I don't think I will marry — seen too many marriages break up.’Footnote 115 At a time that she desired and loved Dr Hopkins, marriage to a man seemed unlikely and undesirable. Bonding with other women helped Sheila through feelings of hopelessness and depression.Footnote 116 Despite their shared suffering, though, Sheila rarely shared the intensity of her feelings about Hopkins with anyone beyond her diary.
Emotion and subjectivity
How can scholars make sense of Sheila's intense love and admiration for a white British woman in an internment camp? Social and cultural dynamics shaped, but did not exclusively dictate, Sheila's experiences in Changi. The histories of emotion and subjectivity prove instructive for analysing and conceptualising Sheila's experiences. Monique Scheer encourages historians to see emotion as ‘a kind of practice’ to understand how emotions themselves change over time.Footnote 117 This is not only because norms, expectations, words and concepts change but also because the practices in which they were embodied, and bodies themselves, transform. In Sheila's case, extreme bodily strain profoundly shaped her emotional experience as well as her understanding of her emotions. For some scholars, emotion reveals the depth of domination to social, cultural, and political forces. People feel shame, humiliation, timidity, anxiety, or guilt which manifest physically through stuttering, trembling, anger, or rage. Each of these emotional responses reveal signs of submission to dominant social mores and constructs. Women excluded from public space, for example, lack an embodied experience of random encounters with male strangers and develop a fear of public space that leads to self-exclusion. Emotional ‘practices’, like courtship, evolve and change over time and, in turn, shape the types of feelings people participating in them are meant to have — ranging from passion to respect, admiration to lust.Footnote 118 Sheila's emotional practices of love were deeply entwined with the practice of worship and divinity, separated, as she was, from familial intimacy. Her exclusion from men, guided by norms of virginity in Catholic teachings and anti-Eurasian colonial sexuality, shaped her methods of conveying and experiencing emotion.
Sheila's emotional practices can be understood in part through the lens of the convent — which emphasised interiority, morality, divinity, discipline, and obedience. Acts like penance — with which Sheila would have been familiar — were about achieving an embodied experience of regret, which mobilise the body to experience pain or discomfort and associate it with certain actions.Footnote 119 In making Dr Hopkins a gift of underwear, Sheila enacted a sort of bodily ritual — suffering and sacrificing for her love. Convent and British morality — coupled with the stigma of looking Asian in a European space — made her question and interrogate feelings of love that blurred the lines between intimate longing and sexual passion. Further, writing in a diary, Scheer argues, was about processing emotion for oneself, rather than proclaiming feelings out loud which would shape social relationships.Footnote 120 Sheila conveyed ecstatic emotion through her diary — rather than to Hopkins directly.
Seth Koven's analysis of the cross-class encounters of Muriel Lester and Nellie Dowell also proves instructive for understanding Sheila's relationship with Hopkins. He notes that when women became ill it ‘broke down their self-sufficient bodies’ and ‘opened up emotional space for them to love one another while touching, writing, and talking about their two bodies in ways that were acceptable to their families, friends, neighbors, and most of all, to them’.Footnote 121 Similarly, living in the confined spaces of internment, where scarce food and clothing meant frequent exposure to life-threatening illness and unwanted gazes, Sheila and Hopkins experienced a particular space of intimacy and trauma that complicated pre-war assumptions about bodily interactions. So did their shared calling in the medical profession, where touching and caring for bodies was a routine part of their daily lives. Koven notes further that the first decades of the twentieth century led to ‘new understandings of human interiority’ and ‘unprecedented levels of state-sanctioned violence against bodies’.Footnote 122 These concerns collided in Japanese-occupied Singapore, where British racial hierarchies, maintained by segregation, a plantation-labour system, and internment, fused with emerging and recently-formed Japanese imperial ambitions and understandings of warfare, gender difference, and the relationship between soldiers and civilians in wartime.
Understanding Sheila exclusively through the discursive lens of early twentieth century British, Malay, Australian, or Eurasian cultural codes would undermine the specificity of her individual experience and how she responded to those experiences emotionally. Like Koven, Michael Roper emphasises how exceptional circumstances, like illness or war, force people to adapt to new ‘domestic routines of eating, getting sleep, staying warm and dry, in circumstances of great physical and mental discomfort’.Footnote 123 Understanding how people process these changes would mean situating categories like gender, race, and class within human relationships. For Roper, ‘relationships’ and the ‘webs of care in which they were suspended’ should be ‘at the centre of study’.Footnote 124 Sheila's identity status as a Eurasian woman was not only legal and bureaucratic, but structured by her proximity to, and distance from, specific people. Individuals whom she grew to know quite well — doctors, captives, guards — policed the boundaries laid out by contending colonial regimes.
For Roper, childhood memories and relationships — especially with mothers — were frequent reference points for people seeking comfort and intimacy during traumatic periods of their lives, especially war. Many people, he believes, never stop thinking about themselves as children, even as they perform various adult identities.Footnote 125 Doing so of course runs the risk of flattening the complex differences for people across different times and places who viewed motherhood and childhood differently. For Leonore Davidoff, ‘it is within the family — however that has been constituted — that formation of both body and psyche, literally and symbolically, first takes place’.Footnote 126 It is clear that Sheila experienced a profound sense of comfort in the idea of a ‘Dream Mother’ in Changi that was lacking in her early life. This, no doubt, intensified her feelings. As a 17-year-old with a convent upbringing at the start of internment, she overtly and repeatedly refers to herself as a child, even naming her memoir ‘Diary of a girl in Changi’. She writes of herself, and her surrogate, Eileen, as younger than she was. In her own mind she was a child wishing for a mother's love, even though it was something she barely remembered experiencing. Yet the absence of a mother was something she felt very deeply, and her longing for a mother began at an early age. She continued to feel like a British girl even though the rest of the world saw and treated her like a Eurasian woman. Changi gave her a new understanding of family — one that was deeply personal and permanent due to the daily intimate encounters of internment life, but also temporary — lasting only for the duration of the war. In a context where many captives constantly dreamed, thought, wrote, and prayed for ‘home’, Changi was one of the most consistent homes of her young life. Losing the comfort and intimacy of this temporary family, even and especially in the desperate environment of Changi, proved deeply traumatic.
Ends and beginnings
The move from Changi to Sime Road camp in May 1944 expedited Sheila's transition to postwar life and created a new calling: nursing. As early as New Year's Day 1943, during one of their precious few visits, John told her that becoming a writer was unrealistic.Footnote 127 Before the war, he hoped that she would train as an engineer in Australia. During internment, though, he urged her to think about medical work and to talk with Dr Hopkins and other medical women about the career. Working as a nurse at Sime Road would help her to secure a nursing position after the war was over.Footnote 128 It also ushered in more frequent contact with the imprisoned men. At Christmas, 1944, she received cards from young men, including Gerrie who had ‘lovely eye-lashes’, Glennie who was ‘a real flirt’, and Murphy who had ‘dimples every time he smiles’.Footnote 129 Greater contact between men and women made Sime Road notorious for sex scandals and coercion. ‘Brothel Houses’ facilitated sex between women internees and guards. Meanwhile, rumours spread rapidly about a Eurasian man having sex with a 14-year-old boy, eliciting homophobia and a backlash regarding Eurasian sexuality.Footnote 130 Despite these pressures, Sheila's thoughts inevitably returned to Dr Hopkins. In March, 1945, she wondered ‘what she now thinks of me — probably thinks I've got over it — but how wrong — I still love her and loving her more each day — only more silent in my love’. She was overwhelmed that she ‘can't show my feelings’ because ‘I love her much too much! and it hurts!’Footnote 131 Even as her circumstances changed, her love of Dr Hopkins never wavered.
Sime Road also forced Sheila to confront her father's mortality, forcing her to lose yet another source of love and intimacy. On New Year's Day 1945, John gave Vichim paperwork that would help them in the event of his death. By April, John was severely injured after an altercation with another man.Footnote 132 Sheila noticed that ‘lately … he rambles a lot about the past — not making sense really. He seems such a child in his manner and I am worried about his mental state’. He moved to the ‘Old Man's Hut’ where he became ‘depressed’.Footnote 133 She mourned her father's rapid decline, writing ‘Please God, take care of him — he doesn't deserve this — help him please’. Her spirits rose when Dr Hopkins arranged for her to visit him one last time before he passed away. Still, she felt that ‘Dad had gone — too late for us to say good-bye’. She took some comfort in learning about his conversion to Catholicism. Still, she felt angry to be left alone and missed ‘his jokes, his loving arms around me’. Vichim was even more distraught and ‘needed comforting’, which let them share their grief. Sheila wrote a poem, entitled ‘Dad is waiting for me’.Footnote 134 Little did she know, freedom from internment was on the horizon.
Being a functionally orphaned, unmarried woman categorised as ‘Eurasian’ put Sheila in a vulnerable position when the war ended.Footnote 135 She navigated these fears by trying to secure work as quickly as possible so that she would ‘not be a burden to anyone’. While she felt confident in her own abilities, she worried about ‘how the world [was] going to treat’ her.Footnote 136 She recognised that discrimination and harassment might await no matter where she lived. In the last months of confinement, she heard other captives refer to her by a racial slur, reminding her that her acceptance among Europeans was conditional and temporary.Footnote 137 When Allied forces liberated the camps, ‘a handful of us Eurasian girls and boys’ were left behind ‘just waiting’ because ‘some of us had lost our parents and we didn't know what was going to happen’. British administrators were ‘more involved with their own people’.Footnote 138 However, her relationships from Changi gave her a safety net. P.B. Marriott knew her father from the camps and agreed to help her make arrangements after his death. He organised funds from a local convent and connected her with a hospital matron, who admitted her to formal training as a nurse.Footnote 139 Hopkins also gave her professional advice and tried, unsuccessfully, to have Sheila documented as ‘Australian’ in British records.Footnote 140
Securing employment was especially important because, after the war ended, Vichim left the camp before anything had been organised for Sheila.Footnote 141 Vichim was, perhaps, even more vulnerable in the aftermath of the war, owing to her more difficult claims to European power, prestige, and mobility.Footnote 142 Sheila recalled that Vichim lost a husband and ‘was alone … in a foreign place’. Vichim had been interned because of her connection to John, providing protection for someone who was ‘still a young woman’ and ‘attractive’.Footnote 143 After internment, Vichim received $200 from P.B. Marriott, who suggested that she place ‘her affairs entirely in his hands’. This promise of aid from an unknown European man no doubt inspired at least some trepidation. She had to provide a marriage certificate and a statement of John's assets, even after years of captivity. She ultimately decided to press on to Ipoh, while Sheila remained in Singapore. Sheila believed that Vichim was ‘relieved in a way that she doesn't have to be responsible for me’.Footnote 144 After ‘liberation’ from Changi, Sheila was more alone than ever.
Like Vichim, Sheila considered remaining in Southeast Asia. She thought about moving to Siam due to happy memories of visiting her father there. However, British civilians urged her to stay in Singapore for training and then to proceed to Australia or England. In Singapore she enjoyed a brief yet jubilant period of drinking, dancing, and even kissing soldiers who were all too eager to celebrate the end of the war.Footnote 145 Still, she worried about the future. She was fast-tracked into a new career on the charity of strangers who feared for her long-term prospects. Nursing was one of the few professions where women could earn a living while completing training. It also made her feel that ‘my future has been mapped out for me’.Footnote 146 She realised, though, that:
I had no idea who to go to, there was nobody I could go around asking help for. I wouldn't know how to go around asking for help at that time. I was completely naïve about things like that. So anything that had to be done had to be done for me, because I didn't know who to approach.Footnote 147
Now that the war was over, she could not help but think about what she was losing, including her dream mother:
soon, very soon we will part, perhaps, never more to meet … there is a pull at my heart-strings each time I think of that day. Oh, ‘M’ you won't realise how I will feel when the time comes — ‘M’ of my Dreams, I'll never forget you as long as I live — I shall always breathe a prayer for you and wherever you are, I shall always be at your side in spirit.Footnote 148
The end of the war — however much of a welcome relief — also meant losing her dream mother forever.
A Changi nurse in White Australia
As someone tied to Malaya, Australia, England, and Siam, Sheila struggled to belong. Some white internees, such as Constance Sleep, felt that the war and occupation created interracial solidarity because ‘The natives … had a bad time under the Nips’ including ‘hunger, degradation, and often torture’.Footnote 149 However, this sense of ‘shared suffering’ certainly did not extend to the postwar period. Sleep returned ‘home’ to England by October of 1945. By contrast, Sheila, and many other Eurasians were ‘more or less got forgotten, put aside for the time being’ because ‘they were busy repatriating, transporting all of the others first’.Footnote 150 The lack of support for Eurasians, interned alongside white Europeans, indicates just how quickly racial hierarchies returned to colonial Singapore. When one Eurasian woman, Winsome Mayo, protested about being paid two-thirds as much as Europeans after the war, her boss confided that even though ‘he attributed his survival in Changi to food smuggled in by Eurasians’ he would not pay her more.Footnote 151 The percolating resentments, hidden beneath the relative solidarities of wartime, re-emerged, leaving women like Sheila adrift in a broken world. In fact, later in life, Sheila looked back on Changi as a time that she endured less discrimination than at others — including when she moved to Australia after the war. In the camps, ‘Anybody that the Japanese considered not Japanese was interned, they were all alien’.Footnote 152 By contrast, moving to Australia forced her to confront further pains of not belonging.
Nursing provided Sheila with a lasting connection to her father, Changi, and Dr Hopkins, as well as an opportunity to claim her Australian heritage. She started work at a hospital in Singapore on 17 September 1945.Footnote 153 By October, her Aunt Grace — John's sister — reached out to the Red Cross to find news of Sheila. Grace was told nothing about Sheila's whereabouts when she learned of John's death. This reflected Sheila's continued vulnerability as an erased ‘Eurasian’ offspring rather than white kin, who were promptly sent back to Europe and the dominions. The Red Cross only found Sheila because she had taken up work in the Kandang Kerbau Maternity Hospital.Footnote 154 When she heard from her aunt, she was reluctant to leave, as she had fallen in love with a young Royal Air Force airman named Jinx Jordan. However, when she told him the news, he confessed that he was leaving Singapore the next day. He was glad that she was going to Australia, where she would have ‘a better chance’ of doing something with her future.Footnote 155 This heartbreak may have saved her from further hardship, as many other Eurasian women found that British men often believed that ‘it was alright to go out with Eurasian girls, to sleep with them if they must, but if they married them they would lose their jobs’.Footnote 156 Life in Australia meant making a final, permanent move from Singapore, where she had lost her father, three years of her life, her dream mother, and her childhood. It was where she learned what it meant to have her choices mapped out for her, in a world where the alternatives were even more unsettling.
Sheila's arrival in Australia made her more, rather than less, conflicted about her identity. She arrived very thin and so her aunt took her to the doctor. She initially lied about where she had been because ‘I was very frightened, very confused, never been out of Malaya before.’ Equally frightening was that ‘I'd never seen my aunt, all the people were different; they were all blond, blue-eyed, six foot tall and here me; with my Asian face and little.’ Her sense of alienation did not abate when she finally confessed that she had been in an internment camp. The doctor told her to ‘forget about it. Don't think about it … Get on with your life.’ He told her aunt not to ask her any questions because ‘it would bring bad memories’.Footnote 157 Despite the doctor's insistence to ‘forget’, Sheila's time in Changi — and Malaya — shaped the rest of her life. She graduated from nurse's training at Queen Victoria Memorial Hospital in 1949, committing herself to a career connected to her ‘dream mother’ and Changi. She continued to write privately but, for many years, gave up her aspirations to become a writer. It was difficult to write about a life that she was told to forget.
Despite her best efforts to move on, Malaya would not let her go. In 1950, Sheila received a letter stating that her birth mother had been looking for her throughout the war.Footnote 158 The correspondence included a photograph of Sheila from when she was around nine years old. Numerous photographs of her mother as both a young and old woman helped Sheila see the physical similarities. However, her fellow Australian citizens warned her to be careful. This was the heyday of the ‘White Australia’ policy, which encouraged the settlement of British and European civilians and imposed strict limitations on Asian migration. The Australian Government explicitly privileged the acceptance of ‘pure’ British migrants under the 1901 Commonwealth Immigration Restriction Act.Footnote 159 Fellow captive and Australian nurse Veronica Clancy felt even more confident in this policy after her own internment. She wrote:
According to Educationalists all races are equal. I do not know, but we always said that we would be prepared to do almost anything if it would help to keep Australia White. We all endorsed the Japanese idea of Asia for the Asiatics. One girl remarked, ‘Who would want to live with them, anyway’. So why not Australia for the Australians?’Footnote 160
The continued commitment to ‘White Australia’ meant that many who longed to flee Southeast Asia after the Japanese Occupation were unable to do so. Eurasians who tried to evacuate colonial Asia were often turned away before the Japanese Occupation, and continued to face difficulties migrating after the war.Footnote 161 Eurasian veteran George Hess'e was refused entry to Australia, despite his service resisting the Japanese in Force 136, because he was ‘dark skinned’. Eurasian women such as Esme Kenneison gained entry only after invasive physical inspections and her ability to ‘pass’ as white.Footnote 162 Fellow Australians confidently told Sheila that her mother might be using her to migrate. Some suggested that Sheila return to Malaya instead — again threatening her ability to claim her Australian identity. After spending her entire adolescence and young adult life longing for a ‘dream mother’, her opportunity to reconnect with her birth mother was thwarted by postwar migration, racism, and her own ambivalence about her identity. She even learned that she had another name — Zatun — which preceded her Australian name of Sheila Allan. She had this deleted from her legal name. Meanwhile, Australian nurses did not like the name Sheila because of its connotation as a generic slang term for women. When pressured to give an alternative, Sheila went by ‘Sunny’, because convent girls had called her ‘Sunshine Susie’. Despite Sheila's many modifications of her identity, she continued to face discrimination in ‘White Australia’, where people told her things like ‘Go back to Japan’, even when she served as their nurse.Footnote 163 This, no doubt, proved a double trauma, since she had familial ties to Australia and had suffered under Japanese internment. It also reflected a more common experience of downward social mobility not uncommon among migrating Eurasians.Footnote 164 Even after marriage and children she maintained the silence about her past prescribed to her by medical professionals whom she had so long trusted. She continued to cope with trauma long after her war years.Footnote 165 Aunt Grace might have become a tempting new ‘dream mother’, facilitating Sheila's transition to a new life in Australia. However, Sheila had lived and learned — and loved and lost — enough not to need one.
Conclusions: Labouring whiteness
As a young woman who identified strongly with Britishness, Sheila worked hard to fit in. Nonetheless, stories like hers were all but erased in most British depictions of internees at Changi as soon as the war ended. Newspapers were filled with tales of white husbands, wives, and children reuniting after suffering the indignities of captivity.Footnote 166 Notorious incidents — such as the Maria Hertogh case — made famous the struggles of reuniting children with their white parents in Southeast Asia.Footnote 167 Endless films, articles, and memoirs emphasised the brutality of Japanese guards towards captives — including beatings, food shortages, and disease.Footnote 168 Especially worthy of comment was the outrage of white women doing manual labour in Asia. Betty Jeffry, an Australian nurse, wrote a famous novel entitled White Coolies — which emphasised the upheaval of racialised labour during the Japanese Occupation of Southeast Asia.Footnote 169 ‘Coolies’, in the minds of most Europeans, meant Asian labour. Foregrounding whiteness underlined that ‘White Coolies’ were against the ‘natural’ imperial order of British colonialism. Photographs and newspaper articles frequently depicted white women's experiences in prison camps after liberation to emphasise that servility— especially in the service of an Asian ‘enemy’ — were at odds with white femininity.Footnote 170 White imperial subjects frequently evoked coercive, racialised systems of repression closely associated with British imperial history, including slavery, to describe their confinement.Footnote 171 This left little space for depictions of women who were not white enough. The perceived incompatibility of white femininity with manual labour influenced Sheila's treatment in the camps. She admitted that she took some undesirable jobs like sweeping the kitchen and cleaning drains in the early years of the occupation. She later maintained that racism did not play a large factor in her treatment. The only people who were not treated well, in her view, were those ‘who wouldn't work or tried to get out of work’.Footnote 172 In fact, the situation was more complex. Sheila sometimes took jobs that other women did not want — and clearly felt that they should have — to do. This earned her both the designation of a ‘hard worker’ but also maintained the racial prejudices of many white women.
Sheila's hard work also reflected the worldview of her father, whom she remembered as relatively strict and sparse with words, but guided her with well-known sayings. One that he emphasised was ‘Hard work never killed you but doing nothing will’.Footnote 173 Her underlying assumptions of how to behave in the camp were influenced by her father's position as a white settler in colonial space. Europeans in Southeast Asia often stressed how personal character, including hard work, was the key to their opportunity and prestige, rather than racial or class privilege.Footnote 174 In some instances, this created interracial solidarities between workers across ethnic differences, especially for white settlers who lived and worked with — or married — Asian civilians, as John had done.Footnote 175 However optimistic Sheila was that her hard work prevented her from facing discrimination, though, many women used racial difference to explain inherent value. Constance Sleep was certain that Eurasians were ‘liabilities in the Camp. They either won't or can't take their share of running of the Camp’.Footnote 176 Sheila was considered lazy by default and had to perform ‘coolie’ labour to prove that she deserved access to European space. This earned her relative exemption from the abuse that other Eurasian women faced at the hands of white prisoners. Even after the war she worked hard to become a nurse so that she would not become a ‘burden to anyone’. This did not save her from being told to ‘go back to Japan’.
These dynamics underline why Dr Hopkins mattered so much to Sheila. Hopkins was certainly not the only European woman to extend Sheila courtesy, comfort, and intimacy. Still, many other women treated her like competition — for men, for resources, for comfort. While this was true for all captives, her status as a Eurasian placed her under greater scrutiny. She proved her value by showing that she could perform hard work for British citizens — but not for the Japanese. Dr Hopkins, by contrast, treated her like a multifaceted person — a writer, a child, a beloved, a confidant. Hopkins was one of the few people — European or Asian — who did not treat her like a nuisance or a commodity. Further, her encounters with Asian women were usually a mix of detachment or distance. Asian women — including her impoverished mother, her Chinese cook-servant, and her Siamese stepmother — reminded her of the hard truths of life as an Asian — or Eurasian — woman under colonialism. These women would not let her live in a dream world of cloistered virginity, sexual ignorance, or innocent desire. European women, with their claims to sexual autonomy, did. Whiteness was not only a ticket to power and prestige — but also to a fantasy world that transcended life's harsh realities.
Sheila's story hints at the limitations of hard categories of sexual identity. She had passionate and sexualised fantasies about Dr Hopkins — before experiencing sex. Being ‘immature’ and inexperienced may have saved her from some condemnation as an ‘immoral’ Eurasian in the minds of European women. It did not stop white women from seeing her existence as a reflection of sexual licence. In turn, she remained hesitant about heterosexual encounters. Even when she fell ‘in love’ with Jinx Jordan, she was nervous and scared when he held her.Footnote 177 She learned about heterosexual relationships through a lens of coercion, manipulation, shame. This made her reluctant to form serious sexual bonds, long after her freedom from the gender-segregated internment that made doing so impossible. She would, however, go on to marry a man and have children. Her knowledge of the world in wartime — sexual and otherwise — was limited by a convent education and limited exposure to men. She longed for intimacy — blurring the lines between sexual desire and familial acceptance, or the sort of intimate and transcendent bonds that she had known in the convent.Footnote 178 All the while, she became aware of the dangers of sexual coercion — first from European and imperial soldiers and civilians, and then from Japanese and Sikh guards. She knew what it meant to be uncomfortable by sexual advances before she knew what sex was. Loving men brought danger. Loving women brought joy and escape.
The ability to claim a British and Australian identity in Changi helped Sheila return ‘home’ — to an aunt she had never met and a country she had never seen. Loving Europeans, and immersing herself in whiteness, gave her the tools to survive and migrate in an unequal world. Without Changi, Sheila would have had to endure the horror and violence of wartime and ‘postwar’ Southeast Asia alone.Footnote 179 While British and Australian subjects frequently commemorate Changi as a symbol of national pride through collective suffering and perseverance,Footnote 180 Sheila Allan's story reminds us of the complex mix of liberation, restriction, and trauma that war and colonialism engendered long after ‘peace’.
