Welcome

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

I was about five when my mother explained that my father had been a prisoner of war in Singapore during the Second World War.  She told me that he had made notes on the birds in the camp "to keep his mind off things."  But I was not to talk to him about his captivity as his "nerves" were still in a bad state. 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 we had our first tentative conversations about his time as a POW, 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 answer the questions I had been wondering about 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, late 1930s.

Grey heron, photographed at Oaken Grove near Henley-on-Thames, England, mid-1930s.