Chapter Six : Post-war Me : rnories
St [ oseph ' s Institution after World War II .
A
u the Brothers were in bad shape , physically , by the time the war ended . In this respect there was no difference between those who had been in the jungle at Bahau and those who had been locked up in Changi Gaol . However , rest and recuperation were far from being their first concern . As soon as he could , the Director set ou tfor Singapore with three companions for he was afraid that the school might be looted in the interval between the end of the war and the return of the British . His premonition was correct . He found tha t a lot of the furniture had been used as firewood and all the electrical fittings , lamps , switches and wiring had been removed .
Even before all the Brothers had returned from Bahau the registration of new pupils had begun . About three weeks after the formal surrender of the Japanese on the Padang , the school re-opened . The opening day was an extraordinary scene . The whole compound was crowded with thousands of families seeking admission for their children . The Director and ten or twelve lay masters tried to make a start . He opened eight classrooms devoid of furniture on the first floor and gave instructions that only former pupils were to be admitted .
In a few hours a dozen books of admission forms had been filled and then ordinary paper had to be found : this was in short supply . Hundreds of paren ts whose children had never been to the Brothers ' schools had to be turned away . At St Anthony ' sBoys ' School there were similar scenes , and also at St Patrick ' s , housed temporarily at Telok Kurau , where Brother Remigius was in charge .
Before they realised it the Brothers had accepted
1400 pupils , and they began teaching . Boxes , long boards and beaten-up tables had to do duty for chairs and desks . Army Officers , when they saw the need , supplied the school with pens , ink and paper taken from Japanese supply dumps . Little by little by school got under way , but food was in short supply , and , here again , a few Army friends proved invaluable .
If the po sition of the Brothers was fraugh t with difficulty , their problems were compounded by the obtuseness of ' the British Military Administration . Brother Director complained that the authorities seemed never to have heard of Aided Schools , that only ceaseless agitation seemed to move them to pay the teachers a centof salary , and tha tthe machinery of government moved hardly at all , so bound up was it with red tape . Thicker , redder and broader than ever before ,' he noted in exasperation . The pupils had their own difficulties : many had not been inside a school since the arrival of the Japanese . ' 1 £ there had been no war ,' commented Lirn Choo Sye , who was teaching Standard VI at SJI , ' they would have been normal , respectful young fellows . But with three and a half years of Japanese Occupation , of BlackMarketing and various kinds of activities , we had a tough job . However , in spite of having acquired bad habits like smoking and gambling , they realized that they were many years behind so far as education was concerned , and so they decided to learn .' That helped the teachers , even if they were taken aback by the amount of copying that went on . ' After all ,' commented Mr Lim , ' they had had no morals for three and a half years :
The education authority decreed that boys were to enter the Standard that they would have been in had there been no war . So boys who were in Standard IV in 1942 were now putinto Standard Vll . Theconsequence was that the teachers had to cover , in two years , the work that would normally have taken three or four years to complete . A further consequence was gross overcrowding . Over at St Anthony ' s , CR . Eber , a survivor of the notorious Burma-Siam Railway , was teaching a class of seventy-five boys ! Brother Ignatius , who had started teaching a class even before the officialre-opening , took time to teach during the holidays and on Saturday mornings . One way or another , the Brothers ' Schools were striving to repair the damage done to a whole generation .
Gradually the marks of the war years were re-
Post-war Memories 41