SINGAPORE - She was only seven then, but Madam Sim Soo Wee, now 87, remembers vividly the day she lost her beloved father.

It was the third day after Singapore fell into the hands of the Japanese in February 1942 during World War II. The Japanese soldiers rounded up her family and neighbours living in River Valley. They were ordered to gather at Ord Bridge nearby, where they spent the night.

The women and children were dismissed the next morning, but the men were told to stay and among them were her father and his younger brother.

"I did not know that would be the last time I saw my father," Madam Sim said in Mandarin. "I was scared, but as I hadn't seen the Japanese killing anyone with my own eyes, I thought everything would be fine."

She was recounting her childhood experience to The Straits Times, ahead of the 80th anniversary of the British surrender to the Imperial Japanese Army in Singapore on Feb 15, 1942.

There were no last words nor heartfelt goodbyes. Madam Sim, her sister, nine, and their brother, 12, hurriedly left the bridge with their mother.

Her father, Mr Sim Teow Kwang, and his younger brother never returned home.

"The adults were whispering among themselves that the men were killed at Changi Beach," she said. "But in my mind, I hoped that my father was sent somewhere to work, and not killed."

Mr Sim was only 37 at the time and working with the foreign exchange department of OCBC Bank. A handsome and multi-talented man, he taught himself photography and studied English at the Young Men's Christian Association. He even learnt how to cut and perm his wife's hair.

Madam Sim waited for his return every day. It took her about three years to accept that her father had been killed.

Her mother, who was also 37, died of tuberculosis on Sept 8 in 1942.

"Sorrow aggravated her condition," Madam Sim said. "When she died, her eyes were wide open."

After their mother's death, Madam Sim's brother was cared for by an uncle, who took him to Johor Baru.

Madam Sim and her sister were adopted by her mother's younger brother and his wife.

They lived in a room that the couple rented for $7 a month in Tank Road. Her uncle and his wife slept on the upper level of a bunk bed. Madam Sim and her sister, together with the couple's four-year-old daughter, huddled together on the lower deck. They had an overturned milk crate as their table.

Food was scarce and meals were mostly tapioca mixed with rice.

"There was no nutrition," she said. "The food was just to fill stomachs. I have seen grown men whose legs swell and they die - from eating too much tapioca," said Madam Sim.

She is full of praise for her aunt, who treated her and her sister like her own.

When her aunt saw that the younger orphan girl was hesitant about helping herself to food at home, she told the child not to be "silly" and to go ahead and eat it. "She did not reserve the best for her own daughter," said Madam Sim.

With their uncle's meagre salary as an odd job labourer, they did not have enough to get by. They planted some vegetables on a tiny plot of land at the foot of nearby Fort Canning Hill, but there was barely enough to feed everyone.

So every day, the three young girls would go to the Singapore River where coolies unloaded sacks of rice. The trio, like many other children, would use little brooms made of coconut husks to sweep grains that fell out of the sacks into little containers they took along.

"Some of the coolies who pitied us would poke their metal hooks into the rice sacks with a lot of force so that more grains would fall out," said Madam Sim.

The girls also earned two cents from trishaw riders every time they helped them push their vehicles up slopes.

Even though she was only a young child, Madam Sim took on several jobs, including becoming a young nanny to a newborn and working in different factories.

After the Japanese surrendered to the British Military Administration on Sept 12, 1945, and exited Singapore, some of the children started going to school. But not Madam Sim because she "was an orphan and had to work", she said. Her elder sister and young cousin also did not go to school as the family was too poor.

However, Madam Sim would sit beside the neighbours' children and try to learn from them when they were doing their homework.

"I was always trying to learn," she said. "I would have been a doctor if not for the war, as I was very interested in medicine."

Her keen desire to learn was a tribute to her late father, who would find every opportunity to teach his children, including during their daily evening walks at Fort Canning Hill before the war started.

"The first letter of the alphabet he taught us was O," she said. "He made us compare our O to see who had the roundest and nicest circle."

Now, Madam Sim attends a memorial service held on Feb 15 at the War Memorial Park yearly. The only mementoes of her father are some photos and his small red English dictionary, in which he penned his name and the date, Nov 17, 1941.

"Look at my hands," she said, spreading out her fingers widely. "I have my father's manly fingers and broad nails. I always think of him when I look at them."

The great-grandmother of one lives in Tampines in a Housing Board executive apartment with her 66-year-old son and daughter-in-law. She spends her time watching China Central Television programmes and tending to her bonsai plants. She also cooks, does simple housework and sews some of her clothes, including the samfoo she wore for this interview.

"I don't despise the Japanese, but I hate the war," she said. "There are many things we can learn from the Japanese today, like their standards of hygiene and education."

Her mission in life, she said, is to share the horrors of war so that future generations will not have to go through it.

"People always ask me if what I shared was my own experience, and I say yes. That gives me some authority on the subject and attracts genuine interest."

Though the memories are painful, she does not often shed tears talking about the past.

She added: "The war toughened and strengthened me, or I would never have survived."