World War II Adventures

At the end of 1940 arrangements were made for women and children to leave Japan. Isabella sailed for Sydney, Australia, in a Japanese ship. Apparently she took her china with her; Bill sent the furniture on later, and they went into store in Sydney. Isabella remained in Australia for 2 years. In 1941, when Bill had leave, he joined Isabella there. His return journey to Japan at the end of his leave in November was cut short in Hong Kong as there were no ships going any further. He had to wait in Hong Kong before boarding a Chinese freighter bound for Manila to collect water and other supplies. It was early December 1941, shortly before Pearl Harbour, and Manila Bay was full of ships refuelling and picking up supplies. Bill was standing on the deck of the freighter, in the bay, when a group of planes flying overhead in formation dropped their bombs. Ships on either side sank, but the Chinese freighter escaped undamaged and continued its journey to Jakarta. There Bill went ashore with the ship's captain and was able to contact his office in Singapore. He was told to continue on to Singapore, and would have liked to stay on there to work with General Sanson, but his employers refused to terminate his contract.

On Boxing Day 1941 Isabella put in a request to be shipped to Cairo. She'd heard rumours that that was where Bill was heading, though she wasn't sure of it. She found passage on a fast Norwegian freighter that was scheduled to make the journey from Sydney to Suez in about a month. At the end of January 1942 she boarded the ship with the goods she could carry. She'd despatched one of their friends to collect her mail and bring it to the ship. In the bundle was a cable from Bill suggesting that she try and get a fast ship to South Africa, leaving all her goods in Australia. However, it was too late; she was already on her way to Suez. The journey started well enough. There were only 8 passengers, and Isabella had a double berth cabin, complete with bath, all to herself. The Captain too was kindness itself. However, the ship got no further than the Australian Bight when she broke a crankshaft in a storm. The ship managed to limp into Fremantle harbour, but the only place where it could be fully repaired was New York. That wasn't what the Captain wanted to hear; he was laden with grain destined for the Middle East, and faced a dilemma in what he should do with his passengers. While the ship idled the days away in Fremantle Isabella's visa ran out. She went ashore to renew it. The official in charge looked at her papers and then told her majesterially that she couldn't go to Egypt because "women aren't allowed there". But Isabella wasn't having any of that and replied: "Well I don't want to stay here, and no doubt you don't want me here either so what do we do?" The official disappeared for a few moments before returning with a smile on his face. Handing back her papers he said "I've put you down as in transit".

After a week, the ship set sail once more for the journey across the Indian Ocean. By that time (February 1942) Singapore had fallen to the Japanese and evacuees were being shipped across the Indian Ocean to Durban, trailed by enemy submarines. Isabella's crippled freighter had a maximum speed of 9 knots, and had to zig-zag as it was too dangerous to follow a straight line. So progress was slow. And although it was armed - with a gun on its stern, noone knew how to use it. After they'd passed the submarine menace the crew threw an empty barrel into the water and tried to hit it with the gun. They missed with every single shot. Somewhat miraculously the ship made it to Aden, where they took on board guns and gunners for the journey through the Red Sea to Port Taufiq. At Suez there was a tug waiting, requested by the Captain to help the damaged ship through the Canal. However, the tug master said it was going to take two tugs, and the second one had to come down from Ismailya, a day away. While the ship waited Isabella pursuaded the Captain to contact Bill, who by then was indeed in Cairo. She was therefore able to leave the ship at Suez and Bill raced the 80 miles or so down there to meet her. She'd arrived in Suez on 8 April, just missing Bill's birthday on the 5^th: a journey that should have taken a month in fact took two and a half months. As it turned out Bill had never gone to South Africa: he just thought it would be safer to advise Isabella to head there, given events in Singapore.

The first task in Cairo was to find somewhere to live. People were already leaving the city, fearing Rommel's advance, so finding accommodation wasn't too problematic. However, it wasn't long before Isabella was on the move again. Bill was in charge of evacuation plans and although he knew where Isabella would be going he wasn't allowed to tell her.

He got home for dinner late one night and told her to pack her suitcase. The following morning she boarded a train at Cairo station and returned to Suez where she boarded a P&O ship, the Strathnaver. Amazingly this was the same ship on which she had journeyed to India several years earlier. Now it had been converted into a troop carrier and was full of bunks. Isabella had to share a cabin with two other women and two children, but she couldn't face sleeping with them in the blackened out room so she slept instead on the deck under a clear starlit sky. As the day dawned it began to get hotter and hotter, and when she returned to the cabin to brush her teeth she discovered that her clinical thermometer had burst in the heat, spilling mercury into her spongebag.

The ship was heading for Durban, a journey that took 10 days. Isabella had friends in Johannesburg, Greta Young and Sam Thornton - so on arrival she said she would like to go and stay with them. Durban was overflowing with evacuees from Singapore, so new arrivals were being cleared as quickly as possible. Nevertheless Isabella still had to wait a couple of days before she was able to move on to Jo'burg. Isabella had been Greta's bridesmaid when she married Sam, who was a chartered accountant. He had been in Jo'burg for several years and had set up business there with Greta's brother as his partner.

Isabella spent 10 months in Jo'burg, until Rommel's advance was halted. By that time Bill was due to retire, and he was planning to join Isabella in South Africa until the war was over and they could return home. However, yet again things didn't go to plan, and when a cable arrived in Jo'burg from him it was to say that she should join him back in Cairo "any way possible". One of Bill's old schoolfriends was an aide to General Smuts in Jo'burg, so Isabella turned to him to see if he could help. All he could offer, after a couple of days, was passage on an ammunitions ship from Mozambique to Egypt, but Isabella would be the only woman on board and the ship would have to sail through the Mozambique Channel, which was still full of Japanese submarines. Not surprisingly Isabella didn't fancy that so she booked instead, through Thomas Cooks, onto a Rhodesian Airways flight to Nairobi. Even that wouldn't be straightforward as she would only be allowed to stay for 10 days in Nairobi, and as it was May and the Nile steamer wouldn't be running because of the monsoon, the only way out of Nairobi would be by air. Isabella took a calculated risk, reckoning that since she was travelling on her own it wouldn't be too difficult to find passage by one means or another.

She had never travelled by plane before. The flight left at sunrise on a Sunday morning, at the dawn of a glorious day. The sky was clear and coloured golden and red. It was a 5-seater plane and Isabella had a single seat at the back. She loved it. The plane touched down at Bulawayo for breakfast. There was no airport, just a strip of land and a couple of tents, one serving food, the other providing toilet accommodation. The next stop was Salisbury, where they spent two nights and a day. The plane flew low for the next leg of the journey, passing over herds of elephant and wildebeeste; and as it passed over the African lakes hoardes of flamingoes rose in a colossal bright pink cloud. There was another drop in the jungle and a night spent in log cabins with lions roaring outside.

Isabella finally reached Nairobi at about 4.00pm the following Wednesday. Her first priority was to head for Thomas Cooks to enquire about the possibilities for onward travel. It didn't look too good, so Isabella booked into a hotel and spent a couple of days sightseeing before returning to Cooks to see if they'd turned anything up. She was offered the chance of a place on an army personnel-carrying lockheed due to leave Nairobi at crack of dawn the following day. She jumped at it. It made the trip to Khartoum in one day, but it was too late for her to catch the Nile steamer. Khartoum seems to have been a hub of activity, a cross-roads for army traffic, and Isabella spent a few days there in a hotel next to the zoo: from her bedroom she could hear the lions. She didn't find the local authorities very helpful, but she remembered that there was a railtrack running from Khartoum to Port Sudan. Trains were running, so she took one at the end of May. In Port Sudan she booked into a hotel full of US army personnel engaged in building Liberty ships for the war. They seemed to have all mod-cons - air cooling, an outdoor cinema, cigarettes, daily deliveries of mail from home - and their postings were limited to only three months. Yet they coped badly and many of them suffered nervous breakdowns. They were delighted when Isabella turned up in their midst and opened their hearts to her, though she seems to have offered little sympathy. She did, however, make good use of the cinema while she waited for a ship. Finally one arrived, and though it wasn't in great condition, it was heading slowly for Port Taufiq. By all accounts the journey was rather miserable: the cabin smelled of cats and there were bugs in the bed, but it did finally reunite Isabella with Bill in Cairo at the end of May.

By 1943 Rommel posed no more threat and in the late summer of that year Sicily fell to the Allied forces. Bill and Isabella managed to get on to the first passenger ship that went through the Mediterranean. It was full of men and women, but no children. Men were put on one side of the ship, women on the other, so that if there had been a need to launch the lifeboats, men and women would not have had to share. The ship passed Malta, and was then joined by a huge convoy of ships some 500 strong leaving Sicily with evacuees. The convoy skirted round the west of Ireland and then split into three as there were too many ships for one single harbour. Bill and Isabella's convoy sailed up the Clyde. It was a beautiful sunny day and the snow-clad tip of Ben Lomond was a welcome sight after the arid colours of Egypt. They were home safely.

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