The few nuns who were still teaching, our host explained, were preparing to leave the school and return to their Order in France, as there were no funds forthcoming to sustain them. No doubt the Mother Church did not see the saving of little brown souls as important as it had been some 150 years ago.
Our host was both helpful and knowledgeable and over the next hour she told us the history of the school as we sat in that dank and dusty library, enjoying welcome cups of tea in fine china cups.
The Convent of the Holy Infant Jesus, or Light Street Convent as it’s now more commonly known, is a girls’ school that was established in 1852 by six French nuns who had arrived from Antwerp in Belgium a year earlier to start the school. The founder, Mother Pauline Marie Rodot, who died in 1852, is buried in the old Catholic burial ground near here, along with seven other sisters from the convent who died in the 1890s. Most of the nuns died at a very early age attesting to the hardships and sacrifice made by those from another land for the school, its students, and orphans.
The history of the walled complex that encompasses the school goes back much further. Within the walls is one of the oldest buildings in Georgetown, the Francis Light bungalow that was built in 1793. The bungalow was later leased to the East India Company in 1803 to be used for Government House, the seat of the Penang Government. Stamford Raffles, founder of Singapore, worked here from 1805 to 1810 as Deputy Secretary to the Governor of Penang.
When the convent took over the site in 1852, the additions included a chapel, cloisters for the sisters, an orphanage, a boarding house for student boarders and many classrooms. Light Street Convent is the oldest school complex in the country, having remained on this site for almost one and a half centuries.
And it had all come to this. No money to repair the roof or the crumbling walls of some of the older buildings and no money to continue to take in the orphans still being left on the steps of the side entrance.
Not only had I heard of some pretty unhappy experiences that my aunts had had here, but coincidentally a neighbour friend in Canberra, had survived 16 miserable years as an orphan here. It was her recollections of the hardship and neglect that had made me view the school with such horror. She was obviously of mixed race as her skin is a beautiful pale chocolate. I suspect her colour made the difference in her care.
My friend had been taken in by the nuns as a baby but instead of being given an education, she was brought up as a servant. No, worse than a servant, a slave. She was put to work in the kitchens and laundry at a pitiably early age. She knew no love, was given no schooling and only enough food to sustain life. But she was one of the lucky ones. She left the convent at 16, uneducated and with skills only in rough cleaning, basic cooking and needlework. She was lucky enough to get a job at the Butterworth Air Force Base as a maid. Butterworth is just a short ferry trip across the straits to the Malayan mainland. Here she met a young Australian mechanic, they married and he brought her to Australia. With the limited options she was dealt in life, she has done well. With two lovely daughters and a loving husband, my friend now lives a comfortable and secure life.
As we took our leave of the friendly nun and wished her well, I felt glad that we had been able to visit the school. Who knows how long the school buildings would last in their present state of decay.
Many years after our visit to Penang, I was to hear that the Light Street Convent had a piece of good luck. At the very last minute, the convent was saved. It received funding from a major benefactor and other sources. Repairs were made and the school is now in good condition with an active web site where many past pupils share stories and memories of their school days. For some past pupils, the school has enriched their lives and left them with fond memories. A good luck story indeed, as today it is one of the most important inner city schools in Georgetown.
Our last important mission in Penang was to visit the ancient Christian cemetery at the end of Jalan Utama, or Western Road, as it used to be called. I wanted to pay my respects to Ernest Arthur Roberts, or Robbie as he was called by my two Russian aunts. Robbie and Julia were married in a simple ceremony in Singapore only days before Roberts died very suddenly in Penang. They were on their way to start a new life at a new tin mine. Roberts’s new position was at Rahman Hydraulic tin mine, but he died before he could take up his appointment. We weren’t here just paying our respects to Robbie, for Julia’s ashes are scattered here too.
On our last day in Penang, we walked out of the city along what had been Western Road, hopeful of identifying the house belonging to the Joachims where Nona, Daisy and Irene had boarded while Julia was living with Robbie in the Malayan jungle. There were many large old two-storey homes fitting Daisy’s description, some in need of urgent repair and most having seen better days. Even with Daisy’s verbal sketch in mind it was hard to pin-point the exact house. They all looked rather large and spooky. Many were run down and many had been turned into separate flats used by many families. This was obviously not the posh side of town.
As we entered the gates of the cemetery, the sharp rays of the mid-afternoon sun faded as the shade overhead deepened. The smell of decaying vegetation seeped up from the cool soil as we searched along the rows of graves. The damp earth was strewn with slowly rotting blossoms from the large old frangipani trees that arched their magnificent branches over us. It was pleasant to be here in this quiet peaceful place. It was also many degrees cooler under those leafy dark branches.
We had been told that Robbie had no headstone, just a small unmarked plaque set into the ground. We were instead looking for a very distinctive grave that was, we had been told, close by Robbie’s resting place. We were looking for a dog. Not just any dog, but a large hound carved in white marble that sat forever on his master’s grave. Robbie had no upright marker, but we knew the marble dog would lead us to the spot.
Robbie had died of malignant malaria at the relatively young age of 38. We have newspaper reports telling of his tragic death. Working, as he did, at an isolated mine in the depths of the Malayan jungle, both malaria and dysentery were occupational hazards of the job. Daisy remembers that he suffered many bouts of malaria during the time she knew him, as so many did in those days of limited preventive medicines. Apart from Julia, Roberts had no family in Malaya, only a mother back home in Britain. In this sort of tropical heat, you did not linger with your burial arrangements so Robbie was buried here, on this beautiful island in this peaceful plot of land.
Here he lies under Penang’s cool brown earth. Many years later, the ashes of his much-loved wife Julia were scattered over his grave site. Shirley, one of my newly found Russian cousins and Julia’s granddaughter, had brought the ashes to Penang. She came to fulfil what she believed were Julia’s wishes that her ashes be scattered over the place where Robbie lay.
I stood in quiet contemplation, thinking of the grandmother that I could so easily have known but never did. There had been one period of my life when we, she and I, had both been living in Perth at the same time. Who knows, we may have passed each other in the street, sat next to each other in a bus. Perth is not a large city, so it is quite conceivable that we may have seen each other. Anger boiled up in me at Denis’s decision to not only alienate Nona from her mother and her two sisters, but to keep hidden from us, his children, a grandmother and two aunts. How dare he think he had the right to conceal his children’s history?
As evening approached, I murmured my goodbyes to Robbie and my unknown grandmother and walked away. We left the quiet cemetery and made our way back to the noisy bustling town, back to the present, back to the here and now.
We have agreed, my Russian cousins and I, that one day soon we will return to Penang together and have a headstone erected. Nothing elaborate; just a simple plinth with both Robbie’s and Julia’s names and their birth and death dates. We think even our very private grandmother would approve of that.
Our stay in Penang had been brief, five days in all. I had come to see a part of Malaya that had been an impo
rtant part of my mother’s childhood. It was now time to move on.
By the time we flew into London’s Heathrow Airport, it was late May. I had hoped for the warmth of an early spring as our bodies were now accustomed to Malaysia’s moist heat. I was destined to be disappointed; it was cold, very cold. Winter had obviously decided to stay around for a bit longer this year. Still, despite the brisk wind and temperatures in the low 50s, Fahrenheit that is, it still had its charm. Even seen through a streaked and grubby British Rail window on the trip between Heathrow and London, I could see why I had always thought of Britain as a beautiful country. The corridors of land designated for rail use are never the most attractive of views. Despite the busy grey roads, clusters of noisy light industry and the not-so-upmarket concrete rendered apartment blocks, there was still enough open space where trees with soft new leaves arched and spread over drifts of pink blue and white crocuses, bluebells and snowdrops to soften the landscape. Even the relatively dreary outskirts of London have a certain charm.
We were to meet my cousin Eileen in London. Eileen, the ‘Keeper of the Family Stories’, had agreed to meet us to discuss my new-found family after the many letters and tapes we had exchanged over the past year. There was cautiousness about Eileen. I sensed that she was not going to accept us into the family with open arms. Not yet awhile. She needed to meet this pair of Aussies who had materialised out of her family’s past.
Our first meeting was to be on neutral territory, lunch at the café in the Museum of Garden History on Lambeth Palace Road. The museum was founded in 1977 and its creation also succeeded in saving the historic church of St Mary-at-Lambeth. The church was marked for demolition until the discovery of the long forgotten tomb of the famous 17th-century plant hunters, the John Tradescants, father and son, in the overgrown graveyard. The founders of the museum use the now restored church as the centrepiece for their displays and as an educational centre. It seemed a very appropriate meeting place, as St Mary-at-Lambeth was the church where Denis’s parents married.
The old church building stands in a dominant position on the banks of the River Thames, opposite the Houses of Parliament and next door to Lambeth Palace. As St Mary-at-Lambeth, it served as the parish church for 900 years before being deconsecrated in 1972 when congregation numbers dropped to an unsustainable level. Now, as a museum, the building has come into its own again as an important hub of learning on gardening topics, historical and new, from Royal Gardens to allotments.
She was sitting at one of the café tables. Neat in her dark blue skirt and cardigan with a capacious black handbag on her lap and sensible shoes tucked under the table. It had to be Eileen and it was.
We introduced ourselves and sat. Where do you start in a situation like this? Now, years later, it all seems a bit of a jumble. What we talked about on that very first meeting and two subsequent meetings over the next few years blurs in my memory. We have met just three times and we are both getting on in years, so who knows if we will meet again. Eileen is a Londoner through and through. From childhood to old age, she has lived within the limits prescribed by her family’s history. Her knowledge of ‘her part of London’ is vast. Her knowledge of the doings of the Emerson family is patchy. Stories she heard as a child from family gatherings are all well remembered. Then, time and the movement of family out of the city broke the thread of easy communication and the ability to keep track of marriages, births and deaths.
She, of all the Emersons of her generation, had kept in regular contact with my half-sister Pat. They had their first child at the same hospital within days of each other. Their friendship had continued through the years they had both been young wives and mums. When Pat had remarried and moved to West Sussex they had maintained the relationship through occasional letters and phone calls. There seems to have been a strong affection between the two cousins that time has not dulled.
Eileen was also in sporadic touch with most of her aunts and uncles, while they had been alive, and with some of her cousins. Keeping in touch with such a diverse group of people who, sometimes, did not want to be kept in touch with, had not been easy. Many of the Emersons had had various ‘feuds’ and Eileen seemed to know who was talking to whom, or not, as the case may be, at any given time.
Eileen helped to fill in many gaps in my understanding of who and what the Emersons were. But, like shifting sand, many family members slipped from her sight, some by design, some by war or natural disaster and some by geography. For me, making sense of the Emersons was like trying to hold on to shadows. Just when you thought you had a grasp of the situation, the story changed or another version presented itself and I was left with more questions to ask than had been answered. The comings and goings, ducking and weaving, the very complexity of the Emerson family relationships was a challenge. Even acknowledging that all families have their peculiarities, oddballs and eccentrics, the Emersons were a diverse and complicated lot. Coming late to discovering the family has made understanding them an almost impossible task. Maybe you had to live their lives to know them.
Eileen was also to give us what was to become another important document in our quest to put together a list of as many of the Emersons as we could. She gave us a detailed handwritten tree of the immediate family, or the members she knew of. This, with the hand-drawn family tree that Daphne had sent us some months before, was to become the backbone of our family research.
I was amazed at her calm acceptance of Len’s disappearance from the family and his subsequent change of name and background. It was, it appeared, just another of those Emerson boys’ unusual lifestyle decisions! In fact, over the next few years and after meeting more of my many cousins, I found this attitude an almost universal one. Was it only me who thought it odd to ditch your family and all your past history and make up your own? There was often an amused laugh and a whimsical, ‘Well, he was a rum one, was your father’ attitude. Maybe among the Emersons, his self-styled elevation to a mythical and upper class family was to be admired rather than condemned.
We sipped our tea, ate our lunch, exchanged life stories, photos and other family members’ names and agreed to meet again and definitely stay in touch.
After our simple lunch, we strolled together looking at the amazing displays of gardening tools and implements from down the ages. Then, braving the brisk spring wind, we donned our coats and went for a wander through the small cemetery and old fashion ‘Knot’ gardens that surround the old church building. After inspecting the tomb of the John Tradescants, we spent a few minutes contemplating the connection of this cemetery with our own country. Captain William Bligh’s tomb lies next to the Tradescants. Bligh’s most famous connection is through the mutiny on the Bounty. But he was more than just the unlucky captain of the Bounty; he was a keen amateur botanist and had been commissioned by Sir Joseph Banks to bring plants from the Pacific region for the newly formed botanic gardens in Kew. Even more importantly, in 1806 he was offered the post of Governor of the fledgling state of New South Wales in the Great Southern Land. There he spent a troubled few years before being sent back under duress to Britain to once again clear his name.
The wind was turning bitter and evening coming on, so we parted from my sensible, kindly cousin Eileen. She to return home to her ailing husband Archie a few streets away, we to continue on our journey to meet more of my new-found family.
After picking up a car we were to borrow from a friend who lived just outside Ingatestone, the village where we had lived so happily in 1984, we explored some of the familiar places from our sojourn in East Anglia all those years ago. We spent the next few days reacquainting ourselves with ‘our part of England’. Meeting old acquaintances and walking the streets of our once familiar market town of Chelmsford. It was fun to spend time sightseeing but I knew it was putting off the inevitable — the real reason we were here.
It was now time to head to West Sussex to meet my Pat, with whom we were to stay for a few days. Winter had finally capitulated and given way to spring. The count
ryside took on a new, much brighter, persona. As we headed back round the outskirts of Greater London and into Surrey the chill wind dropped, the hedgerows looked plump with a mixture of new green leaves and small twittering birds, while the cottage gardens had become a blaze of colour. Spring was no longer ‘on the way’; it had arrived.
Driving over the rolling green pastures and wooded hills of the High Downs into West Sussex, we could see the patchwork of fields, woods and villages below us with the distant ocean beyond. We dropped down onto the mainly flat lands that rolled through smallholdings and picturesque villages to the English Channel. This was countryside that had been tamed. No rugged mountain peaks or raging rivers here. This pleasant part of England, warmed with mild ocean currents and protected from the fury of the Atlantic Ocean, was retirement country. The closer we got to the coast, the tamer the landscape. A narrow strip of country, running from Brighton to Bognor Regis along the pebbly beaches of the Channel, was apparently many people’s idea of the perfect place to spend their later years. New subdivisions of smart new bungalows with small manageable gardens had sprung up between and around the older fishing villages. Well-maintained houses with potted colour on the doorsteps and neatly trimmed hedges out the front — middle-class retirees had settled in quite comfortably.
My sister and brother-in-law lived just outside the small village of Goring-by-Sea. We drove past their place, an older double-storey house set in pretty gardens with an imposing gravel drive sweeping up to their front door. Suddenly I was terrified, and begged Lindsay to drive on.
My palms were sweaty with anxiety, my throat dry. I had conversed with this woman for over a year, by post, voice tapes and phone calls but did I really know her? We drove round the block a couple of times then pulled up just past their house while I waited for my heart beat to slow. I knew once I met her face to face life would never be the same again. I would either have the sister of my childhood dreams or my hopes would crumble to dust.
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