Showing Short cruise on the Vyner Brooke by Ralph E. H. Armstrong

The Vyner Brooke was a small, nineteen hundred ton Clyde-built steamer designed to carry cargo and no more than fifty passengers between Sarawak and the Dutch East Indies. But on St Valentine's Day 1942, her decks and cabins were packed with over three hundred women and children,evacuees fleeing from a ferocious and unprovoked Japanese assault upon Singapore, which had left its waterfront blazing.

They hoped, somehow, to reach Australia and safety. Instead, the Vyner Brooke was bombed and sunk by Japanese aircraft off the coast of Sumatra and survivors left to struggle for long hours,even days,battling strong currents to reach shore exhausted, only for some of them, chiefly Australian nurses, to be slaughtered by Japanese troops on the beach.

The author, then not in his teens, escaped the massacre to pass with his mother and sisters and his infant nephew into a cruel captivity and to suffer a terrible bereavement.

This is his personal story, honestly told, all seen through the eyes of a young boy overwhelmed by events he could not possibly reconcile with the sheltered life he had previously led yet, for his even younger nephew's sake, assuming a caring responsibility far beyond his years.