Prisoner from Penang: The moving sequel to The Pearl of Penang

by Clare Flynn

  One of the routines forced upon every prisoner in every internment and military POW camp throughout the growing Japanese empire was the daily roll call we came to know as tenko. While every POW camp everywhere has an understandable requirement to check that all inmates are present and no one has managed to escape, the Japanese version was custom-made to extract the highest level of humiliation. We were compelled to stand in line under the blazing sun at least once every day – or as often as our tormentors saw fit – and perform a kind of kowtow to them. Our bows of obeisance had to be as low and deep as possible – literally bending on a ninety-degree angle at the waist, with our arms at our sides. For older women and the sick this was a terrible ordeal. My mother, who suffered with her joints, was often breathless, and when she entered captivity was overweight, found the bowing onerous. There were others who initially resisted this ritual humiliation and near deification of our captors – until they were beaten so viciously that they were compelled to comply.

  Our daily life at Muntok was harsh. The benches in the central covered area were insufficient to accommodate our growing numbers, and there was little or no natural shade, so we often had to sit on the floor or the concrete slabs of the huts. Plagues of flies and mosquitoes added to our ills, aiding the spread of disease and causing many to suffer badly infected bites.

  Those of us who had arrived on the Royal Crown were more fortunate than the women who had been shipwrecked. We had the possessions that we’d carried on our trek through the jungle. The others had only the clothes they stood up in, often stained with engine oil, stiff from sea water and in tatters. We became adept at creative solutions to clothing shortages. The most pressing problem of lack of protection from the fierce tropical sun was solved by making hats and footwear from straw matting or banana leaves.

  One morning I awoke to Veronica shaking my shoulder. ‘The latrines are overflowing,’ she said, folding her arms and wrinkling her nose in disgust. ‘The stench is foul. We’re going to have to empty them.’

  I gagged at the thought.

  ’There are too many people in here. It’s inhumane,’ Marjorie chipped in, her voice full of righteous indignation.

  ‘I’ve spoken to one of the guards. We’re going to have to do it ourselves,’ added Veronica.

  ‘We need to do it soon. It’s already pouring over the sides. It’s a serious health hazard.’ The speaker was an Australian nurse. ‘We’ll have to draw up a rota.’

  Marjorie was about to protest, when Mum put a hand on her arm. ‘I’ll volunteer,’ she said.

  Shocked at her friend, Marjorie shook her head in disbelief. ‘Janet! You can’t be serious? You’re on your own then.’ She curled up her lip and grimaced her disgust.

  ‘We’ll all do our bit,’ Veronica said, pointedly. ‘We all contribute to the problem so we can all deal with the solution.’

  I overcame my squeamishness and added my name.

  Every morning, we had to use whatever containers were available to scoop out the foul-smelling contents of the toilets, carry them across the camp and dump them outside the perimeter fence, while the Japs kept their guns trained on us in case anyone should attempt escape.

  Marjorie had reluctantly agreed to be included in the rota – but I never actually saw her undertake any of the work.

  Keeping the children amused was another challenge. The Japanese strictly forbade any form of schooling or possession of pencils and paper, so, with a young nun, I had to exercise ingenuity to find ways to keep them occupied and learning something. Mostly this took the form of telling stories. The smallest children were too young to understand what was happening to them – why they were separated from their daddies, why they were in this terrible place with no food, no beds, no toys, no amah to care for them. As long as I live, I will never forgive the cruelty of making so many innocent children spend their most tender years under a reign of terror and deprivation.

  Our stay at Muntok was not to be a long one. When we had been in the camp for about a month, it was decided to designate it as a POW camp for servicemen. Our future was to be elsewhere – in a camp on the main island of Dutch Sumatra.

  5

  A House but not a Home

  March 1942

  We had been at the camp for less than three weeks when we were woken at three o’clock in the morning and ordered to assemble. Everyone, except for the most gravely ill and some of the nurses, was given a handful of rice wrapped in a banana skin, and we set off in a crocodile to walk back through the jungle to the jetty. There, after walking its interminable length carrying our personal goods, we were packed onto an ancient rusting freight boat to depart for the main island of Sumatra.

  I was sitting, on the deck, knees bent, Mum beside me, when someone tapped my shoulder.

  ‘Look,’ Veronica said, her voice uncharacteristically soft. ‘Have you ever seen such a beautiful sunrise?’

  I turned to look eastward. It was breathtaking, suffused with pink, turning to a brilliant orange close to the line where the sea met the sky. The reflected light of the sun shone onto the water, creating a spear of fire cutting through the surface to meet our craft. Beyond, and in contrast, the dark grey striations of the Straits of Malacca were broken by the black silhouettes of rocks and small islets. Vast sweeps of cloud raced towards us, lowering the ceiling of the sky. Edged with black, their centres took on the colour of the rising sun. It had rained torrentially before dawn and a rainbow arced above the water to greet the rising sun.

  It struck me as deeply ironic that we were witnessing a vision that reflected the majesty of God and the artistry of nature, just as we were facing such suffering, cruelty and deprivation. Perhaps this was God’s joke? Didn’t the Japanese refer to their homeland as the land of the rising sun? It was the symbol of their national flag. Was God sending us a message with this celestial display? Was our subjugation a divine punishment? Retribution for past wrongs?

  Seeing the tousled heads of the small children in our ragtag mob, I told myself that had to be wrong. Those children had done nothing to deserve their incarceration. The brave British and Australian nurses had done nothing but good and had selflessly helped others, working tirelessly to support those who were sick.

  No. I decided to interpret the scene before me as a reminder of the need to maintain hope, to put my faith and trust in God and my own resilience. I would take all this heart-stopping beauty as a sign that, one day, life would begin again for us. One day, we might again enjoy freedom. In the meantime, I must hold onto hope, draw strength from it, and try to pass that strength on to help sustain my mother.

  Our arrival on the island of Sumatra marked a significant change in our surroundings. Instead of the spartan squalor of the coolie barracks, we were taken to occupy newly-built ordinary houses on an ordinary street.

  If we were harbouring any hope that our situation was improving, we were soon disabused of it. Unlike the intended occupants – Dutch or Eurasian families – we were crammed into the small bungalows so that around twenty-five to thirty of us shared a space intended for a family of three or four. And the further bad news was that we were expected to remove any furniture and transport it on handcarts, which we had to drag down the road ourselves, to furnish the houses where our captors would be living in significantly more comfort. This included cooking stoves, where any were present.

  Mum and I ended up in a house with Veronica Leighton, Mum’s friend Marjorie, half a dozen Dutch nuns who had been shipped in to join us from a convent in a nearby town, a gang of Australian nurses, a couple of Mum’s and Marjorie’s bridge cronies from Penang, a newly-married British couple, a Eurasian brother and sister who had lost their parents in a shipwreck, an elderly matron, Mrs Hopkins, and her unmarried daughter, Laura, who was about my age. Our complement was made up by a Dutch family, the Van den Boschs, consisting of husband, wife and three children, who were the rightful occupants of our new abode, and were less than thrilled about the transformation of their family home into a concent
ration camp.

  One of the consequences of imprisonment was the throwing together of different nationalities and ethnic groupings. Our bungalow held a particularly diverse mix, as generally there had been a scurry for people to stay together, bagging space for friends. Back in our lives before the war, while Eurasians were tolerated by expatriate Europeans, an unvoiced hierarchy placed them a level below the Europeans in the pecking order. Even among the Eurasians themselves, there were tensions between those of part Chinese origin and those of Malayan. But all the Eurasians saw themselves as superior to the indigenous peoples. Among the Europeans, the Dutch had been later arriving into captivity and hence had come prepared for it – better clothed and shod and with the funds with which to barter for food whenever opportunity arose. These Dutch people considered themselves a cut above the threadbare and penniless shipwrecked British and Australians.

  Almost as soon as we moved into the house, the tensions began. Mr Van den Bosch insisted that he and his wife and children must retain what had been their bedroom and no one else was to be admitted. Needless to say, this immediately became a point of contention.

  Marjorie was first into the fray. ‘Look here, my good man. It is completely unreasonable for the four of you to expect to have exclusive use of the largest bedroom while two dozen of us have to sleep in two much smaller bedrooms and the living room.’

  ‘This is my home,’ he insisted, arms crossed over his chest in obstinate defiance.

  ‘None of us has a home anymore, dear boy. We are all guests of these… these…terrible people. My home in Penang could well be a pile of rubble as far as I know.’ She puffed out her chest, facing up to him. ‘But I can assure you, Mr Van den Bosch, that it was a far grander residence than this place. In fact my servants’ quarters were larger.’ She gave an imperious sniff.

  Outraged but outmanoeuvred, Mr Van den Bosch was offered two choices. One of the Australian nurses proposed that he and his family, if they wished to stay as a unit, might use what had served as their daughter’s bedroom – little more than a box room. Faced with the alternative of sharing their original bedroom with the young British couple and three of the Dutch nuns, Mr Van den Bosch capitulated.

  I was to sleep in what had been the sitting room. Our bedding consisted of straw mats on the tiled floor and some threadbare sheets. I shared this modest space with Mum, Marjorie and their two Penang friends – Daphne and Beryl, Veronica, Mrs Hopkins and Laura, and three of the nuns. The Australian nurses crammed into the former bedroom of the two Van den Bosch boys while the remaining nuns, the newly-weds and the Eurasian siblings took the main bedroom.

  Triumphant over winning the battle of the bedrooms, Marjorie took it upon herself to assume the role of unelected Head of the house. I bet she’d been head girl at school. She gathered us all together in the area outside what had once been the kitchen, but now had only a sink and a single tap. This had been the garden, but was destined to be our cooking, eating and wood-chopping space. Using the kitchen for cooking was out of the question as we would need to build an open fire.

  The first battle began almost immediately.

  ‘We need a rota. If we identify what needs to be done each day, we can take it in turns to do each task.’ Marjorie stood with her hands on her hips. ‘I’ll draw one up.’

  ‘Not a good idea.’ The naysayer was the newlywed husband, Terry Henderson who had been a clerk for the Ministry of Works. ‘Better to allocate tasks according to capabilities. We have three men among us, and it makes sense that we take on the heavier jobs like chopping wood.’ He glanced around him, looking for a reaction.

  The Eurasian brother, who must have been about seventeen, nodded his agreement.

  ‘Makes sense to me,’ said Mr Van den Bosch, keen to support any proposal that was counter to Marjorie’s.

  Marjorie was seething. ‘Not to me. Everyone should be trained to do all the necessary tasks. You never know when we may need to perform them. If someone is ill, someone else will need to pick up the slack.’

  The nuns and nurses jumped in, supporting the men.

  ‘I suspect we will have our hands full caring for the sick, but I for one am happy to pitch in with anything else if it’s needed,’ said one of the nurses.

  ‘Why don’t we start by identifying what the tasks are? Then we can decide how to allocate them.’ The voice was my mother’s.

  I was surprised but encouraged. She had not shown much initiative since volunteering for the latrine clearing and had been in very low spirits while we were in Muntok. I think it was easier for her that we were in houses that, at least from the outside, had a semblance of normality, no longer in a penitential camp. Her intervention seemed to pacify Marjorie and distracted from her immediate loss of face.

  As it happened, any illusion of normality was short-lived as, within days, lorries pulled up outside our row of houses and disgorged a cargo of barbed wire which local Indonesians were ordered to erect around the immediate area, thus separating us from the nearby town. While we had never been permitted to enter the town, the addition of this visible manifestation of our imprisonment had an immediate negative effect on morale.

  We got into a regular pattern of activity. As in Muntok, we were up at six-thirty, and summoned to the daily roll call at eight. In between, we washed as best we could, using the single tap in what had been the kitchen – devoid of a cooker and most of its equipment, all appropriated by our oppressors.

  The men chopped wood and we women took turns to prepare our breakfast of a tasteless gruel-like porridge made from ground up rice, washed down with ‘coffee’ – also made from the ubiquitous rice that was our staple diet. To make it, we burnt grains to provide the requisite brown colour, then boiled them in water. This rice-based diet was supplemented with vegetables when we could get them and – a rare treat – the very occasional inclusion of a scrap of meat. This would be scrupulously divided between us into tiny portions and had often been thrown to us by a guard, so we had to pick it up from the ground. Such behaviour by our captors was designed to make us feel like animals, degraded and humiliated. We all tried to rise above it, but it was hard not to let our spirits slip.

  The inevitable bickering as we adjusted to living in such close proximity with people who had until recently been strangers, made adapting to the new regime even harder. In those first days, we had another territorial battle with the Van den Boschs. We had run out of fuel to heat the improvised stove we had created in the garden. To boil water, we used a large tin can suspended from a makeshift metal frame constructed by Terry, his wife and one of the nuns. Terry suggested removing the back door and using it for firewood.

  ‘Godverdomme!’ Mr Van den Bosch was red in the face. I spoke no Dutch, but it was apparent he was cursing. ‘This is my home. Houd je bek! How dare you suggest burning my door you… you–’

  Before he could finish his insult, Veronica stepped into the fray. ‘Look, sir, no one is suggesting your door is sacrificed for their own benefit. It will ensure that we are all able to eat for the next few days – including your lovely wife and your delightful children. Unless, dear boy, you have some alternative source of fuel secreted away somewhere, I think it’s time to do the decent thing.’

  I don’t think Mr Van den Bosch registered the heavy sarcasm in Veronica’s reference to his wife and children, so dazzled was he by her smile. He looked over at his family, then nodded slowly in resignation.

  This was how Veronica operated. She would remain quiet in the background and then make a small but significant intervention to resolve a problem. I found it hard to reconcile this practical and capable woman with the harpy I had known in Penang. I was coming to realise that captivity brought out the best and the worst in people. The war gave Veronica a sense of purpose she had lacked in peacetime, when she had filled her days with games of tennis, cocktail parties and gossip. Back then, she had been languid, often giving the impression of boredom. Despite its horrors, I am convinced she was more at home in internmen
t than at liberty.

  I saw my priority in the camp as being a support to Mum. I knew how frail she was and how hard she would be finding the separation from Dad. Until we left Penang ahead of him, I don’t think Dad had ever been parted from her. I suspect he hadn’t risen higher in the hierarchy in his career because of this. The few weeks he was out of touch while travelling to join us in Singapore had taken a heavy toll on Mum.

  In our shared conversations we both set out to reassure each other and ourselves that Dad was thriving.

  ‘What do you think your father’s up to today?’ Mum would say. ‘I hope he’s found himself a nice administrative role. All that trench-digging is no good at all for a man of his age.’

  As the days became weeks and months, she persisted in this fantasy, in spite of the fact that not long after we were captured, while we were still at Banka Island, we’d heard the news that General Percival had surrendered Singapore in a humiliating manner and the European and most of the Eurasian population were now incarcerated as well.

  Our scant rations were supplemented through the kindness of local Malays who, from time to time, would appear at the barbed wire and pass us their cast-off clothing and surplus vegetables. As we sat eating our meals around the improvised cooking pot, someone would inevitably say ‘Not quite Raffles, but it will do,’ or, as we sipped our ersatz burnt rice coffee, ‘Standards are slipping at Robinson’s, don’t you think?’

  Humour was an essential ingredient to our ability to sustain our esprit de corps. It also astonished and irritated the Japanese. We had been brought low, lost face and should have been consumed with so much shame that laughter would be impossible. Finding something, however trivial, to laugh at made life bearable, whether it was inventing silly names for our Japanese tormentors or playing up the irony in our situation.