The Plantation (27 page)

Julie took the stapled, photocopied copy of her great aunt’s booklet. ‘This is amazing. I’ll read it as soon as I can, and thank you so much for finding it.’

‘I’m so glad I could help. Come along, I’ll take you to my favourite place on the river for a coffee. It’s called the Rajah Brooke’s Café. More history,’ laughed Angie as she closed the museum shop and hung a sign, ‘Back in 15 mins’ on the door.

7

C
URLED IN A DEEP
rattan chair after a swim in the pool, the chick blinds lowered against the late afternoon sunlight, a gin and tonic in her hand, Julie felt relaxed and very at home. Shane, Peter and Martine, Shane’s beautiful wife, were eager to hear about her trip upriver in Sarawak.

‘I haven’t been to a longhouse and when we went to see the orangutans, there weren’t any,’ said Martine in her musical French accent. ‘I must try again. What do you think, Shane?’

‘It was fascinating,’ said Julie. ‘I fell in love with the orangutans. They have the most wonderful personalities. And the Iban are lovely people. They might have been headhunters once, but they have a very polite and caring society. I can see why Great Aunt Bette was so intrigued with their culture.’

‘We didn’t expect you back so soon,’ said Peter. ‘We thought you’d be gone for at least a week with the research team.’

Julie shifted in her chair. ‘Oh, well, they had work to do and the living conditions were very primitive.’

Martine smiled at her. ‘And? I sense there is something else?’

Julie returned her smile. ‘Trust a woman! Actually I was a bit uncomfortable, no, annoyed, actually, with David Cooper. He overdid the tuak, the rice wine, and made a pass at me …’

‘That stuff’s lethal. But you can’t really hold that against him, can you?’ said Peter.

‘That’s such a male thing to say,’ said Martine. ‘You can’t use tuak as an excuse, especially if one doesn’t reciprocate the feelings.’

‘Exactly,’ said Julie. ‘He’s one of those men who’s always touching you and being overattentive. If you like the guy – fine. But he’s just not my type, not that it registered with him. I certainly didn’t want him looking after me. It became unpleasant, so I came back under my own steam, and here I am.’

‘Well, you timed your return well. We were planning a quick trip and thought you might like to come along and now with your early return from Sarawak, the timing is perfect,’ said Shane.

‘Where were you planning to go?’ asked Julie.

‘Langkawi Island. Friends of ours run a resort there, which is rather fun. There’ll be several of us going. Do you think you’d like to join us?’

‘I’d love to, if it’s not wildly expensive. What’s at Langkawi?’ asked Julie. She thought that an island resort would be a nice change from the jungle setting she’d just experienced.

‘There is a series of islands north of Penang, bordering Thailand. The main island is Langkawi and it has rainforest, resorts and some nice eateries.’

‘And very lovely spas,’ added Martine.

‘We’re planning to share a house for a few days at a resort which is made up of old traditional Malay houses … but they are done up with comfortable furnishings,’ said Shane.

‘So maybe there’ll be seven or eight of us. I wish my girlfriend was here,’ said Peter. ‘Do you like fishing, Julie? We can hire a boat. Chris is coming. You met him here. The RAAF chap. He’s mad for fishing. And we can always climb up to the lake, if you’re feeling energetic.’

‘I love the spa and relaxing by the pool,’ said Martine. ‘It’s a very stylish place.’

‘That sounds good to me, too,’ said Julie. ‘I like fishing but I’d like to explore too, as I might never get back there again.’

After dinner that evening, Shane took Julie into their great grandfather’s library. She tried to ignore the glassy-eyed mounted animal heads and watched as Shane opened a drawer in the large, elaborate old desk in the corner. He pulled out a bound notebook and handed it to her.

‘Roland’s memoir. It’s the original. I thought you might prefer to read it in his hand.’

‘How wonderful.’ She fingered the old notebook. ‘I don’t think that I’ve ever held anything that belonged to him before. Can I read it here?’

‘Yes. It’s not a diary, it’s really a short account of his war years. It wasn’t meant for publication or anything like that. I don’t even think that it was for the family. I know that many men who served wrote some account of their time in the war,’ said Shane. ‘It may have been the highlight of their lives. In our grandfather’s case, his whole life was quite eventful, but when you read this, you realise that he revelled in his years fighting in special operations behind the lines.’

‘I’ll look forward to reading it.’ She glanced at the handwritten title neatly underlined in red ink and when Shane left her, she began to read.

Behind the Green Curtain. A Memoir. By Roland Elliott.

On reflection, one wonders how more people didn’t see it coming. The war. The invasion. The rise of communism. I suppose hindsight is a wonderful thing. We thought that we were important to England, but found that we weren’t. Whitehall had more important priorities in Europe and we were betrayed. Even after the Japanese war was over, the times have changed and the mood is no longer complacent in our neck of the woods. Life on our plantation appears to have returned to normal, but the scars run deep. Even now, I realise that the halcyon prewar days will never return and I am doubtful that Malaya can become united. Too many races, cultures, creeds, too much betrayal. But, as my dear father was wont to say, ’twas ever thus.

But that is now. The days before the war were carefree. The word of the white man was obeyed without question and we had the best of times, the best of whatever was available from here and from abroad, and, along with the sense of privilege, we also had the freedom to do as we wished. We were treated as honoured guests in the villages, given a meal that could have cost a family a day or more of hard toil. And we took it as our due. And when the war came, when we were reduced to being no better than coolies in the eyes of the invaders, when the loyalties of those we’d looked down upon came to save us, to help us shelter or escape, and inevitably, at the end, we let them down.

Of course, many never expected the war with the Japanese to come anywhere near us in Malaya or Borneo. Life went on at its indulgent pace with parties, dances, hunting and tennis, love matches, courtships, and the business of making money. If you were rich, influential, educated, no matter what your skin colour, you mixed with us. My father occasionally commented that Malaya was run by the British for the benefit of the Chinese or, depending on your viewpoint, Malaya was a country run by the Chinese to benefit the British. The Malay elite had a sense of entitlement, which perhaps is not surprising. It was their country, the other races were immigrants. But, of course, if you have money, position, power, you can enter any of the worlds of Malaya. But the poor, the Chinese coolies, the Indian plantation workers and the native Malays, with neither wealth nor influence, were overlooked or dismissed by the ruling powers. This was the Malaya I lived in before the war, which changed it all.

Although war had erupted in Europe in 1939, it was thought, especially in England, that the European war would never touch the Pacific. Indeed Whitehall thought that the strategic defences of Malaya could be kept minimal. The belief was always that ‘Singapore will be held’, an invincible island fortress, we were told. And who would attack us? The Japanese had already invaded Manchuria and then China and it was well known that they wanted to control the oil fields of the Dutch East Indies, but Father thought that was all very unlikely. So life went on, keeping up appearances, a stiff upper lip, and worrying about family back in the old country. My mother was living there with her elderly parents and my father was concerned for her safety.

But some of us, myself included, were worried about the Japanese. We knew that the Jap community had been busy for years, poking about in the jungle around the estates. They also had holdings at important rail and road junctures, in mining areas. One could hardly avoid noting the ore that was being shipped to Japan those past years, undoubtedly to be put to use in making armaments. Later we found out that their business organisations were not only sharing important information with their government, but were a cover for spying and intelligence gathering and other political activities. Small businesses were established at convenient locations where they could observe the activities – or lack thereof – happening at the aerodromes, ports, around the bays and coastline, in the jungles and the swamps. We had been carefully observed, measured and our metier taken since the 1930s. Too late we learned of secret caches of arms and bunkers hidden in rubber estates owned by the Japs. We had been complacent to our cost.

Blame for this ignorance can be placed at many feet, for when information was being collected by natives, telling planters of Japanese activity in the jungles and the remote coast and islands, along with the observations by fishermen, rangers and miners, and sent to the authorities in Singapore, it was, sadly, ignored. Even when I raised the subject with other planters about the rumours swirling around Malaya, my views were considered to be alarmist.

But little did we know that the defence of Malaya had been scaled down by the heads in Whitehall. The war in Europe was considered far too serious to give any thought as to what might happen in their far-flung eastern empire. However, we, in Malaya, pressed on, doing our bit with petrol rationing, rising prices and the inconvenience of routine blackout trials. Even when the Japs moved into Indo-China, the administration did not feel unduly threatened. The feeling was that, ‘They wouldn’t dare! And if the Nips made any move, we would be ready for them.’

Why did they say that? We had so few defences which, we later learned, were in all the least strategic positions. But anyone who dared to question was pooh-poohed. Everyone with any authority, any connection with the military, became so puffed up with their own importance, so petty minded, bureaucratic and downright insufferable, that the tokenism of our war efforts were laughable. Sometimes I really did indeed think that our society was becoming rather like something from a Noel Coward play or from the pages of a novel by that dreadful Somerset Maugham. Nonetheless I felt I had to do something constructive and I joined the Perak Volunteers. My father wanted to do his bit, but I talked him round. Staying put, I thought, was the best thing for him to do.

Then on December 8th 1941, we were stunned to hear that not only had the American fleet been destroyed at Pearl Harbour, but that the Japs had landed at Kota Bharu in northern Malaya. They were also bombing the main airfields in the north-west of the country, destroying half of the Allied aircraft stationed there. Three days later we heard news that was considerably worse. The battleship
Prince of Wales
and the cruiser
Repulse
, which had been sent to reinforce the British defences only days before, had been sunk with a huge loss of life. Morale dropped.

The consequences of these Japanese actions were catastrophic. As the disaster continued to unfold, my father and I sat in the evening peacefulness at the end of another balmy day, enjoying a stengah on the verandah as flowers fell lightly to the grass in front of us. My wife and her visiting sister gossiped quietly while they sat and knitted for the war effort, which had once seemed so far removed from us and yet unmistakably was coming closer.

Then events moved more quickly.

The inevitability of the war was brought home to us a couple of days later, when the Winchesters, friends of ours from Penang, arrived at Utopia with just a couple of suitcases. Penang had been savagely bombed and they were fleeing the town, leaving almost everything behind.

‘My dear,’ said the distraught Mrs Winchester, ‘we’ve had to leave everything. I just want to get to Singapore, where we’ll be safe. Hopefully we might be able to get a ship from there to South Africa. I can’t believe what is happening. The planes just came over Penang without any warning and bombed the place. There must be thousands killed. We were lucky, as we live on the hill and the Japs only seemed to be interested in destroying the town and the harbour, so we were able to get away, but still, it’s all such a disaster.’

(They were never to return. They lost their home and all their possessions in subsequent fighting.)

My wife Margaret and her sister Bette comforted Mrs Winchester, but the news that these people were running ahead of the Japanese forces unnerved Margaret.