Dad called for lanterns and they went to the village. The child was about ten and racked with pain from his stomach. His mother, with an agonized face, crouched in the corner.
My father was no doctor, not even a paramedic, but a compulsory course of first aid and a clutch of medical textbooks gave him enough knowledge to recognize acute appendicitis. It was pitch-black and closing on midnight. Changi General Hospital was eighty miles away, but he knew that if appendicitis turned to peritonitis, it would kill.
He ordered his motorcycle brought out, fully fueled. The father used his wife’s broad sash, the obi, to fasten the child on the pillion, tied to my father’s back, and he set off. He told me later it was a hellish journey, for all the predators hunt at night. It was nearly an hour down the rutted track to the main road, then due south for the causeway.
Dawn was close to breaking some hours later when he rolled into the forecourt of Changi General Hospital, yelling for someone to come and help him. Nursing staff appeared and wheeled the child away. By luck, a British doctor was coming off night shift, but took one look at the boy and rushed him to surgery.
The doctor joined my father for tiffin in the canteen and told him he had been just in time. The appendix was just about to burst, with probably lethal results. But the boy would live and was even then asleep. My father gave the obi back.
After refueling, my father rode back to his estate to reassure the impassive but hollow-eyed parents and catch up with the delayed day’s work. A fortnight later, the riverboat brought the mail package, the usual stores, and a small Japanese boy with a shy smile and a scar.
Four days later, the carpenter appeared again, this time in daylight. He was waiting near the bungalow when Dad returned from the latex store for tea. He kept his eyes on the ground as he spoke.
“Tuan, my son will live. In my culture when a man owes what I owe you, he must offer the most valuable thing that he has. But I am a poor man and have nothing to offer save one thing. Advice.”
Then he raised his eyes and stared my father in the face.
“Leave Malaya, tuan. If you value your life, leave Malaya.”
To the end of his days in 1991, my father never knew if those words caused his decision or merely reinforced it. But the next year, 1936, instead of sending for his fiancée, he resigned and came home. In 1941, Imperial Japanese forces invaded Malaya. In 1945, of all his contemporaries, not one came home from the camps.
There was nothing spontaneous about the Japanese invasion of Malaya. It was meticulously planned and the imperial forces swept down the peninsula as an unstoppable tide. British and Australian troops were rushed up the spine of the colony to man defensive points along the main roads south. But the Japanese had not come that way.
Out of the rubber estates came scores of sleeper agents, infiltrated years before. On hundreds of bicycles, the Japanese rode south along tiny, unknown jungle tracks, guided by the agents. Others came by sea, leapfrogging down the coast, guided inshore by winking lanterns held by fellow countrymen who knew the coast and all the inlets.
The British and Australians were outflanked over and over again as the Japanese appeared behind them, and in strength, always guided by the agents. It was all over in days and the supposedly impregnable fortress of Singapore was taken from the landward side, her massive guns facing out to sea.
When I was a child but old enough to understand, my father told me this story and swore it was absolutely true and it happened nearly seven years before the invasion of December 1941. But he was never quite certain that his village carpenter was one of those agents, only that had he been taken, he, too, would have died. So perhaps only a few whispered words from a grateful carpenter caused me to appear on this earth at all. Since 1945, the Japanese have been held responsible for many things, but surely not this as well?
A LARGE JAR OF TALC
The spring of 1940 was not a relaxing time to be in East Kent. Hitler had swept across Europe. France was overrun in three weeks. Denmark and Norway were gone; Belgium, Luxembourg, and Holland were swallowed.
The outflanked British army in France had been driven into the sea off Dunkirk and Calais, and only rescued, minus all their equipment, by a miracle of small inshore boats manned by civilians who chugged across the Channel from the English coast and, against all the odds, brought 330,000 of them off the sand dunes.
All Europe was either occupied by Hitler, putting into office servile collaborator governments, or sheltering in their neutrality. The British prime minister had been tossed out, to be replaced by Winston Churchill, who vowed we would fight on. But with what? Britain was completely isolated and alone.
All Kent waited for the invasion, the famed Operation Sea Lion, which, on Eagle Day, would see the German army roar up the beaches to invade, conquer, and occupy.
My father had already volunteered for the army, but was still based in his native Kent and living at home. He and my mother decided that if the invasion came, they would not survive. They would use the last gallon of petrol in the old Wolseley and, with a length of hose, end their lives. But they did not want to take me with them. With my crown of blond curls, I would be accepted by the Nazis as of good Aryan stock and raised in an orphanage. But how to see me safely evacuated somewhere else?
The solution came in one of the customers at my mother’s dress shop. She was the principal of the Norland College, the training school of the famous Norland nannies who for decades had gone out to raise the children of the rich and royal worldwide. The institute was at Hothfield, a village outside Ashford. It was going to evacuate to Devon, far away in the southwest. My mother put it to her client: Would they take me with them?
The principal was dubious, but her deputy proposed to her that nannies in training would always need babies to practice on, so why not this one? The deal was done. When the train bearing the Norland Institute steamed out of Ashford, I went with them. May 1940: I was twenty months old.
It is hard to describe in the modern world, or explain to the new generation, the anguish of those parents as Ashford was emptied of its evacuees, seen off by weeping mothers and a few fathers who thought never to see them again. But that was the way it was at Ashford station.
I cannot recall those five months I was in Devon, as class after class of eager young nannies experimented at putting me to bed, getting me up, and constantly changing my nappies. That was before Velcro fastenings and absorbent padding. It was all terry toweling and pins back then.
It seems I could hardly pass wind or let go a few drops before the whole lot came off to be replaced by a new one. And the standby was talc: lots and lots of talc. I must have had the most talc-dusted rear end in the kingdom.
But the Few in their Spitfires and Hurricanes did the job. On September 17, Adolf simply gave up. His vast army on the French coast turned around, took a last look at the white cliffs across the Channel that they would not conquer after all, and marched east. Hitler was preparing his June 1941 invasion of Russia. The landing barges bobbed uselessly at their moorings off Boulogne and Calais.
Sea Lion was off.
Our photographic recce planes noted this and reported back. England was saved, or at least saved to struggle on. But the Luftwaffe bombing raids on London and the southeast would not cease. Most of the evacuated children would stay far from their parents, but at least with a good chance of reunification one day.
My own parents had had enough. They sent for me, and back I came, to spend the rest of the war in the family home in Elwick Road, Ashford. I recall none of this, not the going away, or the ceaseless attention to the nether parts in Devon, or the return. But something must have struck in the subconscious. It took years until I ceased to feel trepidation every time I was approached by a beaming young lady with a large jar of talc.