by Clare Flynn
A Painter in Penang
A Gripping Story of the Malayan Emergency
Clare Flynn
Cranbrook Press
Copyright © 2020 by Clare Flynn
All rights reserved.
No part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any electronic or mechanical means, including information storage and retrieval systems, without written permission from the author, except for the use of brief quotations in a book review.
ISBN: 978-1-9164692-6-6
Contents
Chapter 1
Chapter 2
Chapter 3
Chapter 4
Chapter 5
Chapter 6
Chapter 7
Chapter 8
Chapter 9
Chapter 10
Chapter 11
Chapter 12
Chapter 13
Chapter 14
Chapter 15
Chapter 16
Chapter 17
Chapter 18
Chapter 19
Chapter 20
Chapter 21
Chapter 22
Chapter 23
Chapter 24
Chapter 25
Chapter 26
Chapter 27
Chapter 28
Chapter 29
Chapter 30
Chapter 31
Chapter 32
Chapter 33
Chapter 34
If you enjoyed A Painter in Penang
Author’s Notes and Acknowledgements
Glossary
About the Author
Also by Clare Flynn
“Come out of the dangerous and malignant jungle to see the light again”
Extract from a propaganda leaflet dropped from the sky over the Malayan jungle by the British.
“The mistake is that though we lived in Malaya, we didn’t understand the real situation in Malaya.”
Chin Peng, leader of the Malayan communists in a television interview with the BBC in 1998
Dedicated to my fellow members of The Sanctuary group – Alison, Amie, Carol, Debbie, Helena, the Janes D and DS, Jean, Jessica, Jill, Karen, Laura, Linda, Liza, Lorna, and Roz. Thanks for keeping me sane!
1
January 1948, Nairobi
Evie took another sip of mango juice and gazed towards the distant Ngong hills. Arthur had been right when he’d said all those years ago that she would love Africa. He had promised the majestic continent would seep into her bones and possess her, so that afterwards everywhere else would be a poor substitute – smaller, less significant. He’d also been right that she would sense its age, its primeval history, a land where if you were to see a dinosaur lumbering towards you it wouldn’t surprise. After only nine months living here, Evie didn’t want to be anywhere else.
She leaned back in her chair, letting the sun touch her face, bathing her skin with its dry sensuous heat. Still only ten in the morning and it was already hot. Instead of making her lethargic, the heat revitalised her, endowing her with strength and energy. Evie loved quiet moments of reflection like these when she would count her blessings and recognise that, after the years of sorrow, loss and war, she had so much to be thankful for. She’d lost her first husband after forgiving his infidelity, been forced to flee her home as the Japanese invaded Penang, endured years of loneliness, refusing to accept that Arthur, the love of her life had not survived the war. But he had and here they were.
At the edge of the paved terrace a lizard stretched out on the stone wall, basking in the morning sunshine. Evie watched its heavy-lidded eye open lazily as its tongue darted out and snagged a passing insect. Turning her head, she could see Gichinga, the houseboy, was hanging sheets out to dry, their whiteness blinding under the power of the sun. He flipped the sheets with a snapping action to get the creases out as he pegged them on the line. The name Gichinga meant firebrand, but the boy was gentle and shy, like a young deer.
The sheets flapped gently as the breeze caught them. Laundry dried in moments here, unlike in the sultry humidity when she lived in Penang, Malaya. There the heat had been oppressive, like a steam bath, and she’d had to change her clothes several times a day.
Thoughts of Penang made her think of her stepdaughter. Jasmine had loved her island birthplace in a way that Evie was only now beginning to comprehend. Here in Africa, Jasmine was like a young plant, pulled up and replanted in ground too shallow for her roots to gain purchase. She appeared to be wilting, listless and etiolated, despite the constant sunshine.
Evie’s own love affair with Kenya made it hard for her to understand what her daughter was going through. While Evie had loved Penang, her connection to East Africa was deeper, almost visceral. Living anywhere else would never come close. Jasmine had been born in Penang, spent four years in Australia and several months in England and appeared unmoved by the majesty and vastness of Kenya. Her brother, Hugh, eight years younger, had adapted immediately – all previous mentions of his desire to go to boarding school forgotten, as he marvelled at the zebra grazing at the end of the lawn, gazelles and impalas jumping over the hedge and nibbling at the garden plants, and brightly plumed birds chirruping as they patrolled the terrace in the early morning. Hugh had been a baby when they left Malaya, so had known nothing of the tropical island his half-sister still yearned for.
It was not that Jasmine had ever complained about being in Kenya. Jasmine never complained about anything. She rarely voiced her own needs or aspirations. Evie had tried to coax her stepdaughter into telling her what was amiss, but Jasmine only smiled and said she was perfectly happy.
Arthur suggested that Jasmine might prefer to finish her schooldays in England as a boarder. When Evie had mooted this idea to the girl, Jasmine’s eyes had widened in horror.
‘No thank you!’ she said emphatically, shivering to underline the point. ‘I can picture it – cold draughty buildings, inedible food and being surrounded by strangers. Please don’t ever make me go back to England.’
She now attended a convent grammar school in Nairobi, half-heartedly serving her time.
Evie swatted away a fly as she gazed out over the open grasslands beyond the extensive lawns of the property. Everything here was so huge. Big skies, with clouds casting shadows across the enormous landscape as heat haze distorted and blurred the outline of the distant hills. She could happily sit here for hours, sipping her freshly pressed mango juice, listening to the birds singing in the nearby trees. But she also had tasks to do: menus to plan for the frequent dinners she and Arthur were obliged to host as a consequence of his role in the colonial administration, lists to draw up for a charity event she had been roped in to help organise, name labels to sew into the new sports kit she had just bought for Hugh – who grew out of his shorts so fast she could barely keep up.
Her reverie was interrupted by Gichinga, bearing a silver plate with the mail on it.
‘Many letters today, Ma’am.’
She smiled at the servant and took the letters from the tray. Thumbing through, she saw most were household bills, with one or two stiff white envelopes containing invitations to official functions or social events. An envelope caught her eye. It was embossed with the name of Jasmine’s convent school.
Evie frowned. She sliced the paperknife across the top and unfolded the contents, her frown deepening as she read. This was so much worse than she had feared. Her eyes welled up as she tried to focus on the words – repeated complaints from Jasmine’s class teachers…habitual truanting…refusal to accept the necessary rules of the school…failure to undertake homework…It couldn’t be true
. Jasmine had always been a well-behaved and compliant pupil. Yes, Evie was all too aware that she showed little interest in her schoolwork but that was a far cry from refusing to do it at all and skipping lessons. What had happened? She read the final paragraph with mounting distress.
It is with much reluctance, and after a great deal of thought and prayer, that we find ourselves with no choice but to insist on Jasmine’s removal from our school immediately. Please make alternative arrangements for the completion of her education. Her continued presence would serve as a bad example to the other pupils and her lack of discipline has become a disruptive influence.
There were no examples offered to illustrate this disruptive behaviour. It was so out of character with the Jasmine she knew – a warm, caring and gentle soul who always thought of others before herself. How she must have hated the convent to have rebelled so strongly against its constraints that her expulsion was necessary.
Jasmine was not yet seventeen and had been studying for her School Certificate. Evie and Arthur had both wanted to ensure she had a full education before she followed her own path – whether that was into a career, further education – or marriage.
Neither she nor Arthur had for even a moment treated her in any way other than as their beloved daughter. Jasmine was the child of Evie’s late first husband and his former wife. Her mother had died when Jasmine was small. Evie and Arthur loved her as if she were their own. Her heart constricted. Arthur would be devastated. He was so proud of Jasmine – and as a senior member of the colonial administration, he would now have to face the shame of his daughter being expelled from school. There was no possibility her disgrace would escape the inevitable gossip and rumours.
Agitated, Evie left the remaining pile of letters on the table and went to pace up and down the garden. Had the nuns already told Jasmine? Was she at school now – or wherever she went when she played truant? Why had Jasmine felt unable to confide in her that she was so unhappy?
2
It had been three days since Jasmine had been hauled before the school principal and she’d still not summoned up the courage to tell her mother about her absenteeism, let alone that Reverend Mother had warned her that further infractions would lead to her expulsion. Every morning, she left the house and took the school bus to the convent, but didn’t attend classes, hiding out in the grounds until it was time to go home again.
Jasmine knew it was only a matter of time before the school contacted her parents. Her guilt was compounded by the exorbitant cost of the school fees. All that money going to waste while she frittered away her time lying on her back on the empty hockey pitch staring up at the sky or hiding out in the disused potting shed at the rear of the school grounds if a game was being played.
Jasmine was not a natural rebel but she couldn’t face being in class any longer. What had begun as the occasional skipped lesson had now become wholesale truanting. Right now, she should be listening to the droning voice of Sister Angelica as she bored her pupils to death with an uninspiring explanation of the Long Parliament and something called The Grand Remonstrance. What possible relevance did the politics of Stuart England have to a sixteen-year-old’s life? To anyone’s life, three hundred years later? It was all so pointless. So meaningless. So tedious.
The sun was getting hotter, so she rolled onto her side, and shuffled into the shade of a sausage tree. Fallen red blossoms carpeted the ground underneath the tree and Jasmine watched a procession of ants moving over them like a well-drilled regiment advancing into battle. Above her, dangling down were the as yet unripe ‘sausages’, the eponymous fruits which were much loved by baboons.
Jasmine gave in to an expansive yawn. She’d forgotten her sketch book. Not that she’d be drawing ugly old sausage trees. Besides, she was too anxious to concentrate right now.
School had been bearable at the beginning – when Katy Grenville had been there. Jasmine and Katy had both been new girls and formed an instant bond – possibly because they both felt like exiles who didn’t belong here. Katy had grown up in Bombay and missed India with the same nostalgic longing that Jasmine felt for Penang. Perhaps it was Katy who had incited Jasmine’s dissatisfaction and growing unhappiness, but over time they had each fed off the other’s misery, adopting a sense of superiority towards Kenya, their daily life at school and their fellow pupils.
And then, without warning, two months ago Katy was gone. Jasmine had never got to the bottom of exactly what happened. Never had a chance to ask Katy. The rumour circulating at school was that Katy’s parents, Nigel and Gwendoline, had been mixed up in a scandal. The sort of thing spoken of in hushed tones and causing uncontrollable smutty giggles. One of Jasmine’s classmates claimed Mrs Grenville had been having an adulterous liaison with several other men while her husband had been carrying on with the wives. Funny how the wife’s crime was widely acknowledged to be more heinous. This arrangement had apparently ballooned into a regular free-for-all among a group of married couples, who spent weekend house parties hopping in and out of each other’s beds. Knowledge of exactly what this bed-hopping entailed was, to say the least, patchy among the members of the Lower Sixth and the subject of much fevered debate.
According to one of Jasmine’s classmates, who had overheard her parents talking about it, the whole sordid business had blown up in the Grenvilles’ faces when Katy had walked in on them one afternoon. Katy, like the majority of girls at the convent, was a boarder and wouldn’t normally have been at home during the week, but she’d been running a temperature and the school, suspecting chickenpox, had sent her home.
That was the last time Jasmine had ever seen her friend. They hadn’t even had a chance to say goodbye. Jasmine couldn’t begin to imagine how mortified Katy must have been if the stories were true.
Jasmine had written daily to Katy, begging to know what was happening and when she would be returning to school. After a fortnight, her letters were returned to her in a bundle, marked ‘Gone Away’. Desperate, she had asked Arthur whether he knew what had happened to the Grenvilles. Her stepfather, being something important in the colonial government, knew everyone. He had lowered his eyes, coughed and muttered something about Mr Grenville being recalled to his firm’s London office. There was no point asking Mummy as she never paid the slightest attention to gossip and, while never overtly criticising Jasmine’s friendship with Katy, always gave the impression that the Grenvilles were not the sort of people she chose to socialise with.
After Katy disappeared, everything went sour at school for Jasmine. The other girls made catty remarks about Katy and when Jasmine rushed to her absent friend’s defence they started to pick on her too. Jasmine became the target of a relentless campaign of bullying and ostracism. Her friendship with Katy had been an exclusive one – they’d so enjoyed each other’s company that they never sought the company of others. But now, without the mutual protection they had afforded each other, hitherto invisible resentments surfaced in plain sight.
Jasmine’s misery and isolation mounted until it transferred into her feelings about Kenya in general. It had become a place where she knew only misery, where she felt an outsider, a misfit, a broken-winged bird.
Jasmine sat upright, brushing the dust off her uniform cotton dress. It was time to face the music. Time to go home and find the courage to tell Mummy and Arthur what was going on. What choice did she have? She couldn’t run away. There was nowhere to run to. No one else to turn to. Jasmine glanced at her wristwatch. Double Maths would be finishing in ten minutes. If she left now, she’d be able to slip through the convent gates unnoticed while everyone was piling into the dining room for lunch. It would mean walking the five miles home in the hottest part of the day, but that had to be better than waiting around all afternoon and braving the school bus.
* * *
Evie sipped her coffee, savouring the rich flavour. Only since being in Nairobi had she begun to drink coffee, finding the locally-grown beans so much more to her taste than the ersatz bottled Camp coffe
e everyone still had to drink back in England.
The hot liquid sent a rush to her head – she only allowed herself one cup a day in the late morning. It made her heart race, but she felt better for it, stronger, more able to face whatever problems confronted her.
Remembering she hadn’t finished going through the post, she pushed her anxiety about Jasmine to the back of her mind and picked up the stack of envelopes, sorting them into piles: bills to be paid, invitations to be answered, items for Arthur. She pushed the letter from the Reverend Mother into a position on its own, as though she were quarantining it. Leaning back in her chair, she noticed another envelope had fallen onto the ground so she bent down to pick it up. With a joyful cry, she saw the Malayan postage stamp and the familiar handwriting. A letter from her friend Mary.
* * *
My dear Evie,
It’s been a while since I wrote, and I mislaid your last letter, so please forgive me if I fail to answer any questions you had. I’m bursting to know how you are all settling into your new lives in Kenya. How long is it now? It must be almost nine months? Are you finding plenty to do? I imagine Nairobi is quite the social whirl. I picture you at parties, looking as beautiful and elegant as always! Reggie and I live like hermits here, so I’d never be able to cope were I in your place – but you’ve always been frightfully skilled at entertaining people and looking after them so well. I was often grateful for your particular skill in seating people at dinner next to others they’d find congenial company.