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Australia felt like exile to Evie. She was relieved to have brought the children to safety but was desperate for news of her friends. She devoured the newspapers and discovered that Europeans from the entire Malay peninsula had crowded into the small island of Singapore. Officers as well as the rank and file of the retreating British army, engineers, planters, tin miners, civil servants, and their wives and children, all racing for safety to the impregnable fortress that Singapore was claimed to be.
The men were drafted into service to lay barbed wire on the northern shore, which had been left undefended in the misguided assumption that the only conceivable attack by the Japanese would come by sea from the south.
But on the 15th February, the island that had been the strategic pivot
