They Left Us Everything (32 page)

Almost immediately Dad was posted to India and the Far East, possibly for a two-year stint, and Mum’s strategy, “to
build up a bold indifference,” crumbled. She was losing her hair as a result of the drugs—
They’re calling me Baldy—
and she melted into melancholy. As the glamour of war wore thin and 1945 dragged on, her letters to Dad swing from love and longing
… I must have been born loving you … If you do stay two years, I think my heartstrings will be plucked clean by then …
to anger and resentment …
I don’t want to be the widow of a hero! Dammit, this makes me maddernhell—you don’t have to fight
every
battle in this damn war!

But her letters aren’t all so feisty; they also include her unique observations:
I was glad to read where the Allies are forcing German civilians to tour the awful concentration camps and see them while the pitiful victims are still there, but I believe only God can bring justice to the criminals. Somehow it seems kind of egotistical for us to be talking of giving justice—don’t you think so?

When Dad describes landing in Burma and witnessing “the ragged, starving natives” and the “awful sacrilege” committed by the Japanese forces against the “beautiful cathedral in Rangoon,” which has been gutted and filled with pigsties, he draws a sketch of what he’s seen and writes that he can never look at a Japanese soldier the same way again. But Mum tells him,
It’s not the Cathedral that’s been desecrated—the Japanese soldiers have desecrated
themselves.

Reading Mum and Dad’s letters makes me feel that I, and my whole generation in North America, have only experienced “life-lite”—with none of the sacrifice and courage demanded of theirs. No wonder Dad thought we had it “too soft.”

When the war ended in Europe, Dad’s unit remained in the Far East—in what they referred to as the “other war,” the one that hadn’t ended yet—waiting for the Japanese surrender. One of Dad’s letters calculates the amount of time he’s been
able to spend with Mum since they first met—twelve percent. Mum returned to her family in Rokeby where, after seeing Dad the following spring for a brief “second honeymoon,” she discovered she was pregnant with me:
I’m filled with more than just promises now!

Mum’s letter to Dad describing my birth reached him aboard ship, off the coast of Manila in late November 1946. She had inked the soles of my feet to the paper and taped a snippet of my hair. Dad cabled back,
Always wanted a daughter
. He suggests naming me “Victoria,” but Mum doesn’t like it—she says it’s way too British sounding. She’s willing to compromise, though; if he wants to name me after a plum, it should be a sweeter variety than the Victoria—so how about “Sugar Plum”?

Dad had finally returned to his pre-war civilian job in the Far East, and he sent for us. Mum took me in a bassinet by train from New York to San Francisco, where she boarded a ship for Hong Kong.

She wrote daily to her mother.

Dearest Mum, They call the
General Meigs
a converted troop ship, but they forgot to convert it! There are eighteen of us to a cabin— all in bunk beds. Plum has been so good—she just sleeps and smiles.

After a month on board ship, she docks in Shanghai, tantalizingly close to her final destination:
I feel like I’m serving a sentence in a girls’ reformatory & am coming up for parole— praise Allah.

She describes travelling up the Yangtze River and docking in the harbour where milling, screaming people are holding up banners lettered in Chinese, trying to locate friends and relatives aboard ship. Dozens of sampans and junks besiege the ship, hawking carved boxes, vases, and kimonos. With long-handled nets, they hand up a ball of string to the
passengers who tie money to the string, drop it over the side, and hoist up their purchases. The ship keeps its fire hoses over the side, periodically turning them on full blast to scatter the hawkers, but it doesn’t keep them away for long. When police boats appear, looking for opium smugglers, the sampans “vanish like mist.” Mum didn’t go ashore—she’d heard too many stories about vandalism and robberies and didn’t want to risk it so close to the end of her journey. She set sail for Hong Kong in the afternoon.

April 4, 1947. Dearest Mum, I still can’t believe that I’ll be seeing Alex in 2 days—I feel as tho’ I’ve been on this damn ship for years. It’s been a nightmare …

I hadn’t realized the gargantuan effort it took to travel with me or what guts it must have taken for Mum to leave behind her family and travel into the unknown to be with Dad.

In Hong Kong, Dad was anxiously awaiting us. He’d found an ideal piece of land on Coombe Road, high on The Peak with spectacular views of the harbour and mountains, and here he built a spacious, sprawling bungalow with separate servants’ quarters. My
amah,
Ah Kan, spent every waking minute with me, and when my brother Sandy was born in 1948, he got his own
amah,
too.

Now that they’ve spent their first two years together, Mum’s descriptions of Dad aren’t quite as glowing as they were when she first married him after knowing him for only two weeks:

When he gets his mind set on something, there’s absolutely nothing I can do—it’s hell! For the first time in my life, I’ve run into a stone wall. Alex, like Daddy, doesn’t know what rest means, can’t stand being idle, highly disapproves of sleeping in late even if he has to concoct things to do; thinks milk is far better for his health than Scotch whiskey; and that it’s a sin to take a taxi instead of a bus when there are so many starving people in the world!

She’d been more hard-hitting when she’d earlier put her feelings on a piece of paper for Dad:
I don’t think you’d listen to all this in conversation, tho’ you might absorb it in writing—am I right? We’ll have to make a start towards agreeing with each other, for we are forever being childish and stubborn and taking opposite views, just to annoy. That gets us nothing but unhappiness and it’s time we matured. I’ve always had the feeling that you didn’t respect my opinions, from the way you instantly discard them, and I don’t give you the cooperation you frequently want & need. I know you’re interested in talking
to
me, but I’ve never had the feeling you were in the least interested in what I have to say. I resent being slapped down! Believe me, nothing can separate 2 people as quickly or completely as that lack of mutual support, and nothing conveys itself so quickly to children—as you should well remember.

It’s a revelation to me to discover that their marriage had been so conflicted from the start. I’d clung to the illusion that their early years were supportive and romantic, but it seems that was only because they were kept apart. Oddly, I find myself feeling humbled that despite their ongoing battles they stayed together because of us; mindful of the personal sacrifices they made; grateful that I’m allowed to see the private, inner workings of a marriage of great longevity—not something to be ashamed of, but a hard-fought achievement, an investment in
love
—a union that left us
all this
.

In 1949, we left on a big boat to go see Granny, but I didn’t want to leave Ah Kan.
Please don’t make me leave Ah Kan. Please, please, please … Ah Kan! Ah Kan!
Daddy unhooks my fingers. Ah Kan is crying. Through the railings on deck I see her getting smaller and smaller until I can’t see her anymore.

April 21, On board ship: Hong Kong to London. Dearest Mum, We’ve been thru absolute hell on this ship—in a cabin so tiny, there’s not even a spot to put the baby’s basket & not any soul to watch the kids. We spend all our time nursing, washing & feeding. Dear little Plum has suffered absolute heartbreak with everything she’s ever known vanished from her life—she won’t let us out of her sight. We had to leave her alone, screaming in terror several times, in order to get food. She misses Ah Kan unmercifully & says hopefully, “maybe tomorrow I go home?” She has tried so hard to be brave, but all sparkle has left her. I leave Sandy in his pram on deck and hope that if he cries, somebody will tell me. When Alex yells at me, Plum says, “Sorry, Mummy.” We arrive in London a month from now …

Although Mum and Dad took a six-month leave, the trip took more than two months by sea, each way, travelling via the Suez Canal to Portugal, London, and New York City; then back via San Francisco, Hawaii, Japan, and Singapore, so that once they arrived in Virginia, Mum had only six weeks to spend with her family.

She describes the ship’s cabins as being “the size of a telephone booth,” with no bath and few facilities for drying diapers or mixing baby formula. Adults were required to dress formally for dinner and children weren’t permitted, so they had to be left behind alone in the cabins. Switching ships at various ports often meant organizing the transfer of luggage— trunks, suitcases, cribs, and pram—remembering to keep on hand enough formula and diapers for emergencies because there were none to buy in the ports. She’s saved a dog-eared pamphlet:
If You Must Travel with Baby During Wartime
. One of its helpful hints is that you can wrap soiled diapers in waxed paper and then tuck them back into your suitcase.

On our return to the Far East, in December 1949, we left the
beautiful home that Dad had built on The Peak in Hong Kong and moved to Singapore, where Dad became manager. Mum was now pregnant with her third child—my brother Robin.

The house was bigger—it had its own tennis court—the climate less humid, the stores better stocked, the social life easier, and the pace more relaxed. In the Malay countryside expanses of paddy fields were plowed by water buffalo, and bullock carts with steep attap roofs lumbered past doll-like teak houses built on stilts with hand-carved fretwork designs around the windows. Fowl and goats roamed under the palms, and monkeys were trained to clamber up the trees to bring down the coconuts. In summer we flew to Fraser’s Hill, high on a peak near Kuala Lumpur, to find relief from the heat of the lowlands. It was surrounded by jungle and ancient forest, and the colonial government maintained a country club and golf course there.

Mum had a full-time Malay chauffeur, Soho. He dressed in a white uniform and took her to the American Club in the morning for swimming and mahjong, the Botanical Gardens for tea, and the Tanglin Club or Raffles Hotel for dancing in the evenings with Dad. I read about their friends, an interesting mix of journalists, authors, and influential politicians. Mum seemed happy that she could still get “the inside scoop.”

The political climate, however, began to heat up. One month after my brother Robin was born in May 1950, North Korea attacked South Korea and there was growing talk of a new war between the U.S. and China. As the year progressed, tensions between east and west drifted towards Singapore, too.

There were curfews at night. I read that whenever we drove up to Malacca, we went in convoys for fear of armed bandits. I have another flashback: a memory of taking a car ride down a
winding mountain road. Daddy is in the front seat beside our driver and Mummy is in the back with Sandy and me, holding Robin in her arms. Suddenly Mum shouts, “Oh, God, Alex!” and shoves me down onto the floor. But I’ve already seen the burned-up car in the ditch with an arm sticking out. Daddy shouts, “Faster!”

In September, Mum writes that intruders attempt to smash through our living-room shutters late one night, and Mum and Dad begin sleeping with a big stick under their mosquito net—along with glass bottles of soda water that they’re told will have “a fine explosive effect” when dropped out the window onto the brick path below. But when a British soldier is dragged unconscious from a bus into a ditch and set alight by an angry mob, Mum becomes anxious to leave. Dad reluctantly agrees, thinking of it as a “temporary solution to safeguard the children until everything blows over.” He books passage for Mum on a ship leaving in January.

By November, however, tensions between Muslims and Christians have escalated, sparked by the famous Maria Hertogh case: the thirteen-year-old Dutch girl whose parents had been trying to retrieve her from her Muslim foster mother since their release from internment camps at the end of the war. Malay and Chinese mobs start killing Europeans on sight, and troops are called in. By December 12th, 1950, eighteen people are dead and almost two hundred wounded. Hundreds of vehicles are damaged and many buildings set ablaze. The American Consul advises all American citizens to leave immediately, but Dad tells Mum the evacuation order doesn’t apply to her: she’s
British
now, he reminds her, since she’s married to him.

Mum pays no heed to Dad. The very next day she packs
hastily and bundles us onto the last plane out. With stopovers, the flight takes four days. This time she’s travelling alone with three young children, including Robin, who’s just an infant.

Dad was left behind. He spent Christmas alone in the big house, surrounded by unopened toys. Enduring two weeks of twenty-four-hour curfews, he had two servants sleep at the bottom of the stairs during the nights to guard against intruders. His letters are full of longing, enough to break my heart. He begins each one “To My Own Precious Wife” and signs them “Your Devoted Husband.” The following October, the British High Commissioner, Sir Henry Gurney, is assassinated at Fraser’s Hill.

Mum arrived in Virginia just in time to see her ailing mother, who died shortly after. The large red-brick mansion at 500 West Franklin Street that had always been their city home in Richmond had already been emptied and sold, and the family traditions continued at Rokeby Farm.

It’s obvious from all her letters what a close relationship Mum had with her own mother—she tells her everything—and I’m envious. This must have been her expectation of me, too. It makes me wonder what Granny was like as a mother. She supported all Mum’s choices, like going away to college, going overseas during the war, and moving halfway across the world to live in the Far East with Dad. Mum was so independent and adventurous, in ways I had never imagined. How do I square this with the mother I knew, who was so intrusive, demanding, and possessive of me? Then I notice how many letters were written by Granny to Mum
when she was a child.
There are many letters written to Mum on her birthdays—her eighth, her ninth, her tenth—and it dawns on me: perhaps Granny was an
absentee
mother! Since Mum was her eighth and last child, I conclude
that Granny may have spent much of Mum’s childhood away— travelling to doctors in New York and Boston, trying to find a cure for her eldest daughter’s diabetes. On these occasions, Mum would have been left behind with her father and siblings, achieving independence from her mother early, an independence that even allowed her to hold her wedding in England— without her mother there. Their relationship would have developed almost exclusively through letters.