V - PUBLIC INTEREST QUICKENS: LEAVE TO APPEAL GIVEN

Summary

Once the case had been brought before the courts, it ceased to be a private issue between two families. Talk about it spread through Singapore and beyond. Its religious and racial undercurrents began to bubble to the surface.

The central figure was a pretty thirteen-year-old girl, fair-haired and brown-eyed. Born of the Christian west and nurtured in the Muslim east, she exemplified the upheavals of a war which was still raw in the memory.

The press scented a story. They sought out Che Aminah and approached the Dutch authorities. They interviewed ex-Sergeant Hertogh at Bergen-op-Zoom, Holland. They tried the Social Welfare Department, both at the Old Supreme Court and at the Girls Homecraft Centre, York Hill.

The Department confirmed that, Maria was in their care but, as was normal practice, refused to allow reporters to interview Maria or to discuss the case while it was sub judice. Maria's father in Holland acknowledged that his daughter had been found and that he hoped to get her back, indicating that there was more behind the story than he was then prepared to tell. Che Aminah and the Dutch authorities in Singapore gave their own versions in response to press enquiries.

So by 19 May, when the hearing was resumed, public interest was widely aroused. A large number of local reporters and representatives of the foreign press were gathered at the approaches to the Supreme Court and in the office outside the Chief Justice's chambers.

Maria was brought to the Welfare office in the Old Supreme Court by Miss B.N. Tan, Lady Superintendent of the York Hill Home, where Maria had been living. She was dressed in European clothes, the idea being to make her less conspicuous. She wore a printed mauve floral dress. Her hair was in two pigtails. She had two red hair clips, two tiny gold earrings and a locket on a thin gold chain round her neck.