Not My Father's Son (26 page)

“Here’s to you, Tommy Darling,” I said, a little teary. “You did a good job.”

T
he next day I found myself in the Malaysian National Archives, a grand series of buildings nestled on a hill above Kuala Lumpur, where amid the hushed corridors I was told I would find documented proof to back up the revelations about my granddad’s death.

I was ushered into a grand library by a gentle lady named Gowri. She disappeared to find the relevant files while the crew set up in silence.

Today I felt strangely calm. I knew the worst was over. I knew that the next day we would be flying to neighboring Singapore to visit Tommy Darling’s grave, but today felt like a buffer between the shock of yesterday and the finality of tomorrow.

Gowri returned and gently placed a thick folder of documents in front of me. It was labeled L773. Lieutenant T. Darling.

The first document I saw was a police telegram that detailed exactly the events of 22
^nd
June 1951.

Darling and Police Lieutenant Macdonald returned to Cha’ah from patrol 12 noon, entered coffee shop for refreshment, and were joined by Assistant Resettlement Officer. Darling asked Assistant Resettlement Officer for loan of his .38 revolver, took 5 rounds from chamber leaving one, spun chamber, held revolver to head, behind ear, and pulled trigger. You will recognize this as old game called Russian roulette. Striker hit the single round which discharged killing Darling instantaneously.

I let the thin piece of paper slip from my hands.

Next I saw some correspondence between the Malayan police force and my granny. Immediately my stomach clenched and I felt a lump in my throat. I thought of her, the laughing, joy-filled character who had always encouraged me to be naughty, to be reckless, to be myself. Now I wondered if she’d seen something of her husband in the little boy she’d spoiled all those years ago.

Dear Mrs. Darling, may I express to you on behalf of all ranks of the Force our sincere sympathy in the sad loss of your husband. Thomas was handling a revolver and by an unfortunate mischance he fired a shot which caused his own instantaneous death.

The letter went on to relay the particulars of his funeral, how many ceremonial shots had been fired, how many floral tributes. I kept looking at the paper and breathed in a deep, strengthening breath.

Of course. They didn’t tell my granny what really happened. How could they?

I thought how sensitive it had been of them to have kept the true horror from her and her kids. Then I saw the next letter in the paper trail.

It was from Granny.

I recognized her handwriting from birthday cards and notes she sent me over the years. I have the last one she ever sent to me framed on my bookshelves, so I was very familiar with her penmanship.

Dear Sir, about your inquiry as to how I would like to dispose of my husband’s effects, I would like ever so much to get them sent home . . .

My eyes began to fill with tears and my throat closed up at the thought of her sitting down to write this letter, the very letter I held in my hands now.

. . . as the children would like something belonging to him as a keepsake, also myself, as we have nothing of his to remember him by
.

My poor dear Granny. The man she had loved, but with whom it hadn’t worked out, had died on the other side of the world and she had nothing palpable to make sense of it.

I thought of how the story of Tommy Darling’s death had been passed down to me. Obviously the vagueness of the Malayan police force’s explanation had been slightly augmented or embellished over the years. I began to think back to the few occasions when it had been mentioned and the variations I had heard. I also remembered the way the whole incident was referred to in slightly hushed tones, partly not to upset Granny but also, as I now remembered, as there was a feeling of some wrongdoing on the authorities’ behalf in the way Granny had been treated.

Then I read a series of internal memos dealing with the issue of my grandfather’s officer’s pension, and eventually, after much toing and froing and a desultory mention of “the widow,” I saw to my horror the ratification of the decision not to award my granny her rightful widow’s pension, the pension that, though separated, Tommy Darling still wanted her to have.

The reason they gave for withholding this lifeline to my family was that his death was not the way it was
envisaged
in some subsection of the Malayan police rule book to merit it.

Out of nowhere came memories of stories of my granny having to work so many jobs in the fields of the farms around where she and her four kids lived, scrabbling to get by, suddenly plunged into poverty after the support her husband had always provided her stopped overnight.

There were a few more letters from Granny enquiring about the pension and when it would commence, and how she had had to borrow money and also agree to a temporary loan from the state to cover her family’s expenses. Then the letters stopped. She must have got the message. She realized the pension was not coming, if not the reason why.

Anger bubbled up inside me. Tommy Darling had worked hard for his country all his life. He had risked his life many times; indeed it was a miracle he hadn’t been killed in battle. Now, the very military system he had supported and upheld, that had made him the man he was, was punishing him and his family for the results of the circumstances he had endured. For I had no doubt that the reason Tommy Darling blew his brains out in that tent that sunny morning nearly sixty years before was because of the trauma he had suffered on the fields of war. He was undiagnosed, untreated, but the man was ill.

Still riled, I moved on to some correspondence from a year later with a letterhead from the police department in Elgin, a town near my granny’s home in Scotland. Apparently a sergeant from the station had been asked by the commissioner of police back in Malaya to go and interview Granny, perhaps because she’d moved and they couldn’t contact her. He wrote:

I interviewed her there and she states that she is the widow of the Police Lieutenant who died in Malaya in 1951. Mrs. Darling added that a box containing her late husband’s property has been lying at Liverpool docks for a year . . .

I lifted my hand to my forehead as if to keep inside the sadness I knew was bursting to get out at what I had seen in the next part of the sentence:

. . . as she is unable to pay the four pounds carriage demanded.

Tears ran down my face.

I cried for my granny and my mum and every working-class woman who had sacrificed like them and been denied proper closure and emotional balm because they had slipped through the system, no, had been
failed
by the system, and hadn’t the means to do so.

I blew out several breaths of sadness before I was eventually able to continue.

“Oh, my poor little granny. That’s so tragic.”

I dropped my head into my hands and just cried for a bit. All that I had been through in the last six weeks, from that revelation on the roof in London to the bombshell of yesterday converged in that library in an emotional dead end. And for all the horrors of Tommy Darling’s story and the dredging up of the past the sudden reentry of my father into my life had caused, it was this detail, this horribly human detail of a mere four pounds that got to me the most.

Life can be so fucking bleak,
I thought.

Imagine then how heartened I was to read the next letter, which recorded how the Malayan police had sent a postal order to my granny to pay for the shipping of the property. That was the least they could do.

I’ve been thinking a lot
lately about how a man I never knew putting a gun to his head in a town on the other side of the world over sixty years ago had such an impact on my attitude towards money, and in fact the whole way I live my life.

We all learn lessons from our parents, of course, and they from theirs. But perhaps more importantly we glean our wisdom from our circumstances and our feelings of security, or lack thereof. Mary Darling was a girl of thirteen when her life was turned upside down, sending her and her siblings into hardscrabble poverty. I think I learned from her that having money could never be guaranteed. It could disappear at any moment. And so I have grown up wanting to feel secure when it comes to money, but doing so by treating it as something to be enjoyed, shared, and not given power. I guess I could have gone the other way and become one of those people who define themselves by their wealth. But I honestly believe that I have taken the knowledge that things can change in an instant, and made it key to my philosophy of life: neither money nor my work define me. I like them, they allow me to do many things I enjoy, but if I did not have them, I know I would be able to find something else to do, I would be able to survive, I could be happy.

Sometimes the worst thing about change is the shock of the change itself and not actually the new circumstances. Perhaps because of Tommy Darling, genetically and through his legacy, I embrace change, I never take anything for granted, and I never forget how lucky I have been, and am.

L
ater that day we all went to the Coliseum Café. This was an old colonial hangout where military personnel traveling through Kuala Lumpur to their positions elsewhere in the country would have congregated. Again I was in a place Tommy Darling would almost certainly have been. The bar didn’t look like anything had changed much since his time. The yellow peeling walls were packed with pictures of military types in formal gear as well as framed newspaper articles about various important issues to the clientele like “When Your Servant Has Malaria!”

I got a beer and sat in the window watching the world go by as the crew set up, enjoying the feeling of nearness, thinking about how he must have sat here sipping a drink and looking out on this same street. My odyssey was nearly over but I knew it would resonate with me for a very long time. I began to wonder how Tommy Darling would have fared in the present, if he were a soldier now in Afghanistan or Iraq, how different his life would have been. I remembered the article I’d read in the middle of the night before, jet-lagged and fixated on his story and how to best couch it all to my mum. Although combat stress, or post-traumatic stress disorder, is now recognized by the military as a medical condition, there is still a huge amount of stigma attached to it by all sections of society, and there is no significantly successful treatment. Sadly, the article went on to say that suicide is the leading cause of death for members of the U.S. Army today, which has seen its rates double since 2004. Maybe Tommy Darling wouldn’t have fared so well today either.

But as I downed the last of my beer I determined to do something when I returned home, a fund-raiser, some sort of memorial in Tommy’s honor that would benefit a PTSD organization, in the hope that someone, somewhere would get the help he never did.

“His death is not so shocking when you look at his life,” I began when the crew was set up.

Elizabeth asked if I felt I’d learned anything about myself. I stared into space and thought for a moment.

“Finding out about him and having to share that with my mum and my family has kind of reinforced my belief that it’s really important to be honest and open and to have no skeletons in the closet. Cos, you know, the truth can hurt, but not knowing can hurt more.”

I wasn’t talking just of Tommy Darling of course. The two parts of this story now seemed so clearly connected, mirroring each other perfectly. I had lost a father but found a grandfather. One of them had never sought the truth and lived a life based on a lie; the other’s truth was hidden from us because society deemed it unsuitable. Both caused strife, and sadness. But now, both combined to reinforce for me what I knew to be the only truth: there is never shame in being open and honest.

It was shame that prevented us from knowing what a great man Tommy Darling was. And it was shame that made my father treat me and Tom and my mum the way he did.

All those years ago, lying in the grass of the forest at Panmure, I rejected shame instinctively. Now my forefathers had reinforced for me how right I had been all along.

T
he next day we made the short flight from Kuala Lumpur to Singapore and then drove to Kranji Cemetery, where Tommy Darling was buried. As we walked through the large stone sentry gates that guard the grounds, I remembered how excited Mary Darling had sounded when I told her this was to be the conclusion of my journey, and I vowed I would walk through these gates again one day with her.

There is a white cross-shaped memorial in the center with a large tower reaching out from it, and just past there and on to the right as far as you can walk is where I found my grandfather’s final resting place.

I felt surprisingly happy. I had not lost anyone, I had found someone, and I was here to celebrate him. He was in a nice spot, under a big tree. I paid my respects, and it was all over.