Welcome

Welcome to my website which is about a story I have been trying to complete since childhood.

Sitting me down at the kitchen table one evening, my mother explained that my father had been a prisoner of war in Singapore during the Second World War, and that he had studied the birds in the camp "to keep his mind off things." But as his "nerves" were still in a bad state, I was not to talk to him about it. And so, for almost five decades I didn't. 

In those years of silence and avoidance, the story of my father's POW bird notes loomed large in my imagination. It was only towards the end of his life that he showed me the articles he had published based on the notes, and only after he died that I came across a large box in my parents' attic that I hadn’t noticed before. It was marked: SINGAPORE.
 

Would the contents of this box fill a space that had been missing for me since childhood? Singapore Birdsong is my attempt to find out.

This website is a supplement to the memoir, which is nearing completion. It will include jottings -- I don't aspire to more than that -- on some of the books, travels and conversations that have influenced me while writing it, along with background material, reflections and illustrations. I am not the only child of a prisoner of war, so I also hope that others -- either with similar experiences or not -- will find some value in it.  

Jack Spittle, my father, in the late 1930s.  The image above is of a grey heron he photographed at the Oaken Grove heronry near Henley-on-Thames, England during the mid-1930s.