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

by Clare Flynn

  ‘Miss Helston.’ It was all she said. She was listless, as though she had no will to keep on living, but had already had enough of her all too brief life.

  ‘How did you come to be here? Where are your parents?’

  Her face was expressionless, revealing no emotion. ‘We were on a ship that got bombed. Mummy was drowned. I don’t know what happened to Daddy. He’s probably dead too. There was a big explosion.’

  I felt a surge of sorrow and anger on behalf of this little girl whose childhood had been wrested from her, who had seen so much suffering and grief at such a tender age. I held her against me, feeling her warm breath against the thin cotton of my dress. ‘I’ll take care of you, Penny. We’ll get through this together, I promise you.’

  As I comforted her, I wondered if the promise was within my power to keep. How could I be certain we’d survive? Every day, conditions in the camp got worse. The food situation was desperate, with our Japanese jailers making no attempt to provide us with the minimum necessary for survival. The funds afforded to the local suppliers of our paltry rations were constantly cut; the food needed to be stretched further and the portions became smaller. Every day, we had to use more ingenuity to stretch the tiny allocation of rice and find things we could add to the cooking pot – insects, birds, leaves and grasses, scraps the children managed to salvage from under the Japs’ table.

  That night, somehow I found room for Penny to sleep next to me in my hut. Space was already tight, but I prevailed upon my co-habitees to take pity on the child since she was completely alone. We were all crammed together, bodies touching, so that it was impossible to turn over, and sleep brought us no comfort other than a few hours of oblivion.

  I woke that first night to the sound of Penny crying out. She was having a nightmare.

  ‘It’s all right, my darling,’ I said, gathering her into my arms, knowing that of course it wasn’t all right. ‘It was only a dream. You’re safe.’

  That was when she told me that, night after night, she relived the horror of what she had gone through in the shipwreck.

  ‘Mummy and I were blown into the sea. The ship was burning. It sank. We were in the water for ages. I thought we would drown. Then two nurses pulled us onto their life raft.’ She began to cry. ‘The sun was really hot and we had no water and no shade.’

  ‘Sshh! Some of us are trying to sleep.’ A voice from several feet away.

  I took Penny’s hand, leading her outside the hut. I needed to hear her story and I had a feeling she had had no opportunity to tell anyone until now.

  We sat together on the ground, our backs against the wooden wall of the hut, keeping our voices low so we didn’t attract the attention of a passing guard.

  ‘Tell me what happened, Penny.’

  ‘The Japanese planes kept shooting at us in the sea. Mummy fell off the raft.’

  I felt sick to the pit of my stomach. Penny should not have had to witness that.

  ‘I don’t think she was even hurt, but she was so weak and burnt by the sun and she went under the water. I was screaming and the nurses were trying to find her but she disappeared.’

  I thought that was the end of the story but Penny continued.

  ‘She floated up again. Away from us. We tried to paddle towards her, but the current was too strong.’

  Penny bit her lip and I could see in the darkness that she was trembling.

  ‘She got swept away. She was trying to reach us. Her hand was up in the air. Even though we couldn’t see the rest of her. I kept screaming but we couldn’t get to her. Then she wasn’t there anymore.’

  I pulled the little girl against me, cradling her in my arms. How was a child ever to get over such an experience? I was so angry I wanted to scream and shout and rail against the evil that had descended on our once safe and happy world.

  I don’t know how long we sat there, side-by-side, hand-in-hand, against the wooden hut wall, but we must have fallen asleep, as when I awoke, Penny was sleeping with her head in my lap. I stroked her hair. It felt rough and matted under my fingers, where once she had been crowned with hair as glossy and shiny as silk.

  My thoughts drifted to Penny’s mother, Rowena Cameron. We had never been particular friends – she had been one of Veronica’s acolytes – but we had been cordial neighbours. I had grown fond of Penny because of the benign neglect her parents had shown her. Completely absorbed in their own constant battling over Bertie’s infidelities, they’d had little time for poor Penny. Rowena spent days in bed, the worse for drink after the binges she indulged in every time she and Bertie rowed. The gap in the hedge between their grand colonial house and our more modest dwelling was used regularly by Penny when she came to sit in our kitchen and eat the cakes my mother baked. It had always surprised me that the child had such a sunny disposition and a sense of mischief when she received so little attention at home.

  I wondered why Bertie Cameron hadn’t sent his wife and daughter out of Malaya before it was too late. Penny and Rowena could have been out of harm’s way in Australia, as I presumed Evie and Jasmine were. As indeed we all should have been. But Bertie was the powerful and wealthy tuan of a shipping company and probably put his business interests ahead of his family’s welfare. But perhaps that was too harsh a judgement to make. Bertie would have been no different from all the others who blithely assumed that a Japanese invasion – and a rapid British capitulation – was in the realms of fantasy. And poor Bertie was probably lying in a watery grave in the Malacca Straits.

  Penny’s apathy continued, until gradually, as the weeks turned to months, she began to trust and eventually made friends among the other children in the camp. I kept her under my wing, giving her little tasks to do and encouraging her to participate in the improvised lessons that Sister Monica, one of the Dutch nuns, and I gave to the junior children. We had organised all the children into three age-based groupings and three other nuns supervised the smaller children, while two young teachers from one of the secondary schools in Singapore oversaw the teaching of the older ones. By rights, Penny should have been in the last group, but she was so fearful of losing sight of me that I let her stay in my class, where she was an invaluable help with the younger children.

  Lessons were fraught with problems. For a start they were forbidden. Our prison guards banned any kind of education, as well as the use of paper, pencils and books. These exceptionally rare commodities were secreted and used extremely carefully. Even the oral teaching, which was the core of our methods, was not without danger. My mother was one of those who were appointed to keep watch and pass on a warning sign to us if the Japanese were near and likely to discover us. This was a task she took seriously – whenever she was well enough to perform it.

  I had expected Veronica, as a friend of Rowena, to be pleased to see Penny and to show her kindness. But Veronica had never had time for children. Not until they were older – young adults like Cynthia. Even though Penny was the daughter of her friend, Veronica offered her no affection and barely acknowledged their connection. That was part of the enigma of Veronica that I will never understand. A woman who could move between great compassion and self-sacrifice through indifference to downright vindictiveness. And I had in my time experienced all of these from her.

  9

  Back to Banka Island

  For the past few months we had been warned by our captors that we were now under risk from Allied air raids. To be frank, there were some of us who thought that friendly fire would be a fast, easy escape from the endless endurance of our life in camp.

  By now there were no more regular deliveries of rice, and we were ordered to convert every available square foot of the camp into arable land to grow plants and root crops to keep us alive. The Japanese would take small parties of us into the jungle to forage for ferns, grasses and leaves. Any individual plots we had cultivated were now banned and had to be incorporated into the larger project of feeding the entire camp. This was a heavy blow to Marjorie, who had proved adept and green-f
ingered in turning vegetable scraps into new growth which she shared with Mum, and their friends Daphne and Beryl.

  One morning, I was working at the back-breaking job of tilling the soil in preparation for the planting of sweet potatoes and tapioca roots.

  ‘This is ridiculous.’ The complainer was Mrs Van den Bosch. ‘The ground is baked hard. We’ve had no rain in weeks. It’s like concrete.’

  ‘Do shut up,’ said Marjorie, testily. ‘Even the Japs are digging now. It’s do it or die.’ Around their own dwellings, the guards had begun cultivating the land.

  ‘What’s the point of breaking up the soil when we have nothing to water it with?’ The question from Beryl was a reasonable one, as all the wells were now almost dry, and we were down to a few inches of dirty water at the depths. We got the answer the following day.

  ‘Get container for water. Everyone.’ The instructions, relayed from the commandant via his translator, came at the end of a particularly long drawn out tenko in blistering heat.

  We went around the camp searching for anything that could serve to carry water. On our return, more orders were barked at us to form groups of three and walk in file.

  We were escorted by the guards about half a mile down a steep hill leading away from the camp, past the houses where the Japanese lived. At the bottom was a water hydrant, already surrounded by local Indonesian people. The Japanese guards enforced strict queuing in the rising morning heat. Around the pump was heavy mud where the water spilled from the hydrant and we had to tramp through it to fill our containers, the mud dragging on our feet, before trudging back up the steep and stony hill to the camp. There, we were ordered to water the crops we had planted.

  ‘Excuse me?’ a small voice piped up. It was Laura Hopkins. ‘I wonder might we instead use the dirty water from the wells here on the crops and utilise this cleaner supply for drinking?’

  ‘No! Do as say. Water on ground. Now.’ The angry tone brooked no argument.

  Eyes rolled. We had become accustomed to the illogical near madness of our jailers and had lost the capacity or energy to get angry about it.

  The following day, things got worse. After the interminable tenko – as usual protracted by the guards’ evident lack of facility at simple maths, making even a basic counting exercise one that required endless repetition – Sergeant Shoei stepped forward.

  He barked out orders and his translator repeated them. ‘First water Japanese gardens. After fill Japanese baths. Then water crops here.’ He pointed his stick at the plot we had dug.

  A collective groan went up and I looked anxiously at Mum. She was only just recovering from a spell in the sick bay after a bad malaria attack and she was seriously debilitated. She intercepted my look and gave a little shake of her head to indicate I mustn’t make a fuss on her behalf. Mum was not the only one who would find these additional trials overwhelming. The whole camp was getting weaker by the day.

  After our exertions, absorbed with concern for Mum as Marjorie and I supported her back into the hut, I failed to notice the camp commandant as we passed him. The constant deterioration in the fortunes of Japan, under what even we in our closed environment knew to be the growing Allied advance, had made the Japanese even more petty and cruel towards us. We were supposed to be the shameful losers, and our persecutors did not want to lose sight of that. They now insisted we bow every time we happened to pass one of them as we went about our daily business. I had failed to do this and –crime of crimes – I had failed to do it to the highest-ranking man present. My punishment for this heinous misdemeanour was to stand hatless for an hour in the midday sun, after my face was slapped so hard my lip bled.

  Another punishment often meted out was the spreading of manure upon the crops. I was fortunate that it never happened to me. The ordure in question was our own. The hapless miscreants were expected to gather the waste from the latrines in tin cans and spread our foul-smelling excrement over the rows where we had planted sweet potatoes and tapioca roots. The stench was indescribable – not just for the spreaders but for the entire camp population. We had descended to the lowest form of humiliation. It was also a guaranteed way to spread disease more rapidly through our already weak defences.

  The misery of the worsening regime was alleviated for a brief moment when we saw parcels with Red Cross labels being unloaded from a lorry. We knew enough though not to show our jubilance, as it might prove premature. There was a delay of several days before the supplies were apportioned out – the Japanese had first taken the lion’s share of the contents intended for us. Most of the medicines and almost all the tinned foods were taken. They also pillaged all the cigarettes and smoked them in front of us, throwing the half-smoked butts to the ground for us to scrabble over and divide up. Most of the chocolate was gone, leaving only a small quantity on which the bloom of mould had appeared, along with a tiny quantity of near-rancid cheese. We divided it between us, but unlike the loaves and fishes, all the minuscule portions did was make our normally dormant taste buds long for more, without in any way sating our hunger.

  It was not long after the Red Cross delivery that Mum took ill again. By now my once roly-poly mother was a tiny, skeletal creature, barely able to muster the strength to speak. Suffering from another of her recurrent malaria attacks, she was showing the signs of it developing into dengue fever. Her body was covered with an itchy red rash; she developed a raging fever and complained of blinding headaches. Her gums were bleeding badly, and she was vomiting frequently – often with blood. In normal circumstances, rest and plenty of water would have seen her recover, but these were far from normal circumstances. Severe malnutrition and the lack of clean water were making her so weak her body had little or no resistance to fight the disease.

  Mum’s friend Marjorie had swollen from her legs and ankles to the middle of her torso, giving her the strange lopsided appearance of a woman who was hugely obese in her lower half with an emaciated upper body.

  ’What’s the matter with Marjorie?’ I asked the nursing sister who was caring for Marjorie and Mum. ‘Why is she ballooning up like that?’

  The nurse gave me a sad look. ‘Beriberi. It’s caused by severe vitamin deficiency and there’s no way to reverse it without high doses of Vitamin B.’

  She didn’t need to tell me there was none.

  ‘What will happen to her?’ I was speaking in a hushed voice. I didn’t want either Mum or Marjorie to hear. While I was no fan of Marjorie, I knew how fond Mum was of her.

  The nurse, Sister Becky, one of the Australians, stretched her mouth into a thin line and said, ‘You want the hard facts?’

  I nodded, although I could tell I wasn’t going to find what she had to say easy.

  ‘There are two forms of beriberi – dry and wet. With the dry version the body shrivels up and seems to be shrinking until eventually the organs collapse. With the wet, it causes a weak heart and poor circulation and the body’s tissues fill with oedema until the whole system fails. Basically, you drown in your own poisonous fluid.’ She gave me a sad smile. ‘It’s not a pretty ending, Mary.’

  I felt desperately sorry for Marjorie. At times she had been irritating and strident, but she had been a good and faithful friend to Mum and if she were to die, it would devastate Mum.

  ‘And my mother?’

  ‘I hope she’ll get over the dengue, but you have to understand, Mary, that every time she gets sick her body gets weaker and her resistance and capacity to fight reduce too. Your mum is badly undernourished, and her heart is under a lot of strain.’ She sucked her lips inwards. ‘Look, I’m going to be honest with you. Unless our circumstances change radically, I doubt your mother will be strong enough to last another bout of this type of sickness. She’s just too frail.’

  I had let Mum down. I wanted to help her to get through this terrible time and return to Dad when it was over. With Sister Becky’s words I knew that was now highly improbable.

  My visits to Mum’s bedside were as often and as long as allowed –
which was not very much – the nurses were very strict. I held her hand and tried to keep her cool whenever her fever raged. She was in a lot of pain with the headaches and I sensed she was giving up the struggle. At night I lay awake, weeping silent tears that Mum’s life was ending in such a miserable manner.

  There was little time left for her.

  When I thought it couldn’t possibly get any worse, it did.

  If we had believed that the men’s camp would be our final place of imprisonment until the day we hoped to be liberated, we were to be proved wrong. And we did all believe it, so it came as a terrible shock when we were told that we were to be moved again just over a year after we arrived in the men’s camp.

  The increased level of cruelty on the part of our oppressors, the further diminishing rations and the growing number of rumours, fuelled our hope and belief that the war must be drawing to a close and an Allied victory was in sight. Being told we were to be transferred to another place filled us with terror. It could well mean that the Japanese wished to hide us away in some remote area where we might never be found should an Allied victory come. Or worse still, they would take us deep into the jungle and execute us.

  We were divided into groups to make the journey separately. I was worried I would be separated from my ailing mother but thanks to Veronica, who swapped with me, I was in the group who would accompany the occupants of the hospital hut and their nurses. We were to be the last of four groups to leave.

  After travelling by truck – distressing enough for seriously ill and dying patients – we carried the stretcher-bound patients onto the deck of an old tanker boat. There were no sanitary arrangements on board and the only way anyone could use the lavatory was by passing around a single rice bowl donated by one of the nurses to serve as an inadequate chamber pot among about a hundred of us.