So it is a little strange, and I can't comprehend it really, but how is it, that despite me having come to this place more than half a year ago, I can still remember it as well as if I had gone there only yesterday?
Perhaps there really are some places in life that stick to you (if) you choose them to.
I had not planned to go to Fort Siloso.
Really.
I had thought there wouldn't be enough time.
But as life goes, the stroll on the (not so new) Siloso Walk turned out to be shorter than I'd thought it to be, and so there I was, on a very hot spring day, standing at one end of the bridge walk looking out over the horticulture shrubs to the hilltop entrance of Tunnel B.
To be honest, I was surprised.
I had not thought it possible to access the top of the hill (with tunnels and tunnel complexes underneath) through a man-made structure of a hilltop bridge.
Neither had I ever imagined that after all these years one day I would be making approach to the Fort not from the bottom of the hill but from the summit.
Then again I had not come here in 6 years.
And what with my feet already planted here on summit soil, I wanted to take a peek.
So to the entrance of Tunnel B I went.
From the outside it didn't look like much.
At least to my untrained eye it looked like the same, very much like how it would have looked like when it was first built years and years ago.
After seeing the exterior of Tunnel Complex B, across to the other hilltop structure I went.
It turned out to be a Battery Command Post- with fully clothed, fully accessorized wax figures in situ inside.
People unacquainted with wax figures might find these a little eerie, even ghastly with their lifelike facial expressions, limb positions, costumes and all.
But if we civilians are to understand what it was like, if we of present day are to realize just what it took for them to be at their posts day after day, hour after hour, bearing out their duties to the best of their abilities, we need them.
We need them to show just how many men were present at the Battery Command Post working the Depression Range Finder, the Depression Position Finder, making communications via telephone that had its own exchange at Collyer Quay.
We need them to show just how it was like to have to transfer the propellant cartridges from the Magazine to the passageway to the ammunition hatches and up to the guns above ground.
We need them to show how alone, and tough, a soldier's life sometimes might have been. I admit I was a little taken aback at the sight of this lone wax figure crouching below the opening where in real life a soldier would have been stationed there- by himself- to pass the shells or cartridges out from here to his comrade on the other side.
There's a reason why this figure is here.
In the same way there're reasons why we find full-sized, well-maintained wax figures at various spots all around Fort Siloso today.
You don't find them in unusual corners or unexpected places, but they're there at the Guardroom, the Cookhouse, the Dhobi and the Tailor, which, unfortunately, save for the ones at the Guardroom, this time I didn't get to see.
There wasn't enough time.
Between seeing exhibits that I'd already seen before versus the tunnel complexes, it were the tunnels that I wanted to go.
So all around the complexes I went, including the sub-surface ones, which, by the way, according to www.fortsiloso.com, have to be called sub-surface complexes instead of tunnels (as how the Fort describes them) because the passage is open to the air and the rooms are covered with earth. There didn't even use to be mesh.
I was really quite intrigued by how the tunnels, the rooms and the sub-surface structures looked.
For some time as I wandered along the corridors in the light, I wondered how it was for the men who once spent their waking hours here in between the narrow walls underground.
I wondered how it was for them to spend each day- in the tropical heat- carrying out the duties required of them to keep the fort and the guns inside the fort functioning and ready for battle.
Or what was it like in the days of conflict when the guns were put to defensive use.
One thing I have to admit, seeing these pictures now I don't know which room belongs to where and which tunnel belongs to which.
I don't even remember whether I went back to to look at Tunnel B.
I might have.
I might not have.
But these oblong-shaped rooms I know were in Tunnel A, which begins right after a very long down-sloping walkway that leads you from ground level to the corridors below.
Seeing these figures here make me wonder what these rooms had been used for- possibly the Boiler and the Engine Rooms, maybe- and if these guys- like the one receiving Signals- were really housed here.
Still, one of the most intriguing spaces in the complexes has to be this room that www.fortsiloso.com tells me forms part of the Submarine Mining Station.
I don't have a picture of the staircase leading to the station this time but it's to the right of the position where I stood taking the picture of this lone figure standing mid-observation in the (now blocked) Observation Post.
What intrigues me isn't the mere fact that the entrance to the station is sealed, but it is that until I read the work of Peter W. Stubbs on the Fort Siloso website, I hadn't known of submarines being on our shores during the 1940s.
For some reason we don't talk about it much.
And if there were, I somehow must have missed out.
Hitherto I've written mostly about the tunnel complexes I visited on this particular afternoon.
But there's more to Fort Siloso than guns and tunnels and OPs and concrete floors and narrow walls.
There's as much to see above ground as there is below it.
Like the casemates, for example, which today house an exhibition of the Japanese Occupation 1942-1945, and several other buildings that I think once used to be stores.
I've no idea what's inside the stores- didn't go in this time- but the casemates I did.
Not for the exhibition- I've seen a fair bit of it- but for the aircon.
Which, what with Fort Siloso being a very warm, humid place, I desperately needed..
Why the Fort's so warm, I don't know.
Maybe it's the presence of the tunnels and the bunkers that run fairly deep below ground.
Maybe it's the presence of the lush, thick tropical foliage that traps humidity on land like no other.
Maybe it's the currents that bring the sun-warmed waves of the South China Sea right onto the Fort's sandy shores.
But there're rewards to all the humidity and warmth.
The views.
Like this spot at the Searchlight Tower that looks right out onto the water of what is today Siloso Point and across to Labrador Park (and the Labrador Bunkers).
It is a bit of an effort to get this point, however, via a long flight of stairs from the top of the Tunnel A complex, and which at the bottom has a carefully restored room holding decor that's made to look as if the soldiers had simply upped and left.
There is a fair bit of foliage here at Fort Siloso.
Some of it is right in your face.
Some of it you have to peek a little.
Like this spot that based on the map seems to be like it's is near the 7 Inch Gun Emplacements facing out towards the Telok Blangah side, the Pasir Panjang side and the entrance of Keppel Harbor.
Except that the guns here don't look like the picture of the 7 Inch ones on the website, and I have no idea what they are.
But over and beyond the trees, the waters are beautiful, and I wonder quietly what the soldiers might have seen or thought as they looked over the surface of these waters.
There're always parts of history that will always stay a mystery, that we'll always never know.
But, really, it doesn't matter.
Sometimes we see things with a familiar eye.
Sometimes we see things with a new eye.
But timelessness has it's place, and on occasion gets better as the years go.
I don't think there were that many trees during the time the soldiers used this jetty.
Located right near the present-day Surrender Chambers, it looks like a landing point of sorts- but here's what we have today, and somehow, with the overhanging branches and everything, we've got a rather romanticized feel of the Fort's once heavily-used jetty.
