East of West, West of East E-Book

Hamish Brown

• Herausgeber: Sandstone Press
• Kategorie: Sachliteratur, Reportagen, Biografien
• Sprache: Englisch
• Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2019

Beschreibung

This extraordinary book tells the story of a remarkable family caught in Japan at the outbreak of the Second World War in the Pacific. With letters, journal extracts and notes from Hamish Brown's parents, as well as his own recollections, it brings the era to life: not only life in the dying days of the British Empire, but also the terrible reality of the invasion of Singapore into which they escaped.

Leseprobe

Hamish Brown was born in Colombo, Sri Lanka, in 1934. As World War Two approached he lived in Japan with his parents, eventually returning to Britain by circuitous and dangerous means, as this book recounts. He is the author or editor of many books, a great outdoorsman and traveller who has made more than fifty visits to the Atlas Mountains in Morocco. In recognition of his services to literature, he received an honorary D. Litt. from St. Andrews University in 1997 and a D. Uni in 2007. He was made an MBE in 2001.

Also published by Sandstone Press

Hamish’s Mountain Walk

Hamish’s Groats End Walk

Climbing theCorbetts

The Oldest Post Office in the World and other Scottish Oddities

Walking theSong

As editor

Tom Weir, an anthology

First published in Great Britain by

Sandstone Press Ltd

Dochcarty Road

Dingwall

Ross-shire

IV15 9UG

Scotland

www.sandstonepress.com

All rights reserved.

No part of this publication may be reproduced,

stored or transmitted in any form without the express

written permission of the publisher.

Copyright © Hamish Brown 2018

Editor: Robert Davidson

The moral right of Hamish Brown to be recognised as the

author of this work has been asserted in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.

The publisher acknowledges subsidy from Creative Scotland

towards publication of this volume.

ISBN: 978-1-912240-25-8

ISBNe: 978-1-912240-26-5

Cover design by Two Associates

Maps drawn by Helen Stirling Maps, Inverness

Ebook compilation by Iolaire Typography Ltd, Newtonmore

To rememberIan,

entertain David,

and inform their families

and in thanksfor our stalwart parents.

Contents

Title Page

List of Illustrations

Timeline

Maps

Introduction

1. Family Briefing

2. The Japanese Baby

3. A Boy's Recollections

4. Maiden Voyage

5. Klang, in Sunshine

6. Klang, in Sorrow

7. A Father's Story

8. South Africa

Notes

Additional Notes: Escaping Singapore

Bibliography

Acknowledgements

List Of Illustrations

1.AmahItchisan, Hamish, Nurse Tanaka-san, and baby David. Note frostprotection on the bush behind.

2. Proud parents with David, 15thDecember1940.

3. Mother and Hamish in the Yokohama Garden, 1941.

4.Klang 1941. The flat’sroof garden. Hamish with David and Amah.

5. The view fromthe bank in Klang, 1941.

6. TheKuala, father’s ill fated ship (drawing)

7. Safe! Dickie, Mother, David andHamish on the beach at Durban, 1942.

8. Hamish in Highburyschool uniform, South Africa, 1942.

Timeline

Year

International

Family

1893

Father born, Dunfermline

1909

Mother born, Bankok, Siam (Thailand)

1926

Parents married in Bankok. He, banker. Mother’s father, engineer. Various postings in different countries.

1930

Ian, oldest son, born in Dunfermline

c.1932

Father posted to Ceylon (Sri Lanka)

1934

Hitler becomes Chancellor of Germany.

Hamish born in Colombo

1935

Japan over-runs Northern China. Mao Tse-tung’s ‘Long March’. Mussolini invades Ethiopia. King George V Silver Jubilee.

1936

Edward VIII abdicates. Olympic Games in Berlin. Civil War in Spain. German persecution of Jews intensifies.

Long home leave, Ian left in Scotland with grandparents.

1937

Coronation of George VI. Chamberlain becomes Prime Minister. Concentration camps opened by Germans. Japan occupies Peking, Shanghai, Nanking.

1938

Germany invades Austria. The Munich Agreement. Germany invades Czechoslovakia. Japan occupies Canton.

Oct - Colombo again.

1939

Spanish Civil War ends. Hitler-Stalin pact. Invasion of Poland. 3 Sep: start of World War Two.

Family to Yokohama, Japan. 3 Sep: Parents climb Fuji. Grandfather dies.

1940

Norway and Denmark fall. The Netherlands surrender. Belgium falls. Churchill becomes Prime Minister. Battle of Britain. The Blitz commences.

David born, Yokohama, Dec 15.

1941

June 4: Dunkirk. German soldiers enter Paris. Dec 7-10: Japanese invasion of Malaya. Sinking of Repulse and Prince of Wales. Pearl Harbour. Japanese invasion of Philippines, Java, Wake, Guam, etc. Hong Kong surrenders.

Family transfers to Malaya (Klang). Hamish attends school in Cameron Highlands.

Dec 15: Air raid ‘disturbs’ David’s first birthday.

Dec 26: Family sails to Singapore, but father remains in Klang.

1942

January sees fall of Manila, Borneo, New Guinea and Solomon Islands to Japan. Feb: Sumatra invaded.

Feb 15: Singapore surrenders.

Mar 8: Java capitulates. Nov: Battle of El Alamein.

Jan 1: Mother and boys sail from Singapore to South Africa. Jan 11: Kuala Lumpur falls. Jan 7: Father reaches Singapore. Feb 13: Black Friday. Exodus of ships, most sunk, father’s included, during Feb 15: Fall of Singapore. Mar 27: Father reaches South Africa.

1943

Allies land in Italy.

Family in Natal. Hamish at school: Highbury.Father moved to India.

1944

Burma campaign. Bloody Pacific campaign by USA. June 6: D-Day.

July: Mother and boys repatriated in the Andes, to settle in Dollar. Father in Madras.

1945

7 May: VE Day. End of War in Europe. 14 Aug: VJ Day. Japanese surrender.

Father in Calicut. Mother and David to Karachi. Ian, Hamish with Gran in Dollar.

1946

Cold War begins

Father to Karachi.

1947

British rule in India ends with the Partition of India

Father in Karachi as Pakistan is created.

1948

Father retires, family finally reunited after 9 years.

Maps

Introduction

This is the story of one family’s varying fortunes in Japan and Malaya as the world became engulfed in the Second World War. It is compiled from my mother’s letters ‘home’ to Scotland, my father’s notes and my own memories. The world ‘east of west’ is the least known part of that war, most people knowing little more than Pearl Harbour, the Fall of Singapore, and the Burma Railway horrors, but it engulfed every country on the Pacific rim. This was a world war within the World War. To give some clarification there are informative maps and a brief chronology.

I wondered about using the extensive description in Japan over the birth of David, coming at the start as it does, but female friends were emphatic that the ‘period piece’ had to stay. Without a new baby the story might have been very different. I hope I have used an adequate number of the Malayan letters home to portray the, for many, boring life many faced and, again for many, the almost ostrich’s head in the sand blindness to the coming tragedy.

The ‘chapters’ of this story strike me almost like acts in a stage play, the script written by chance, fate, call it what you will. Before the curtain comes down on my own life I feel a duty to describe these now rare, at-the-time letters in that grim time. The curious can read much more from the titles in the bibliography.

These letters, notes and memories are very much of the period as are my comments on them, but they are portraying what is now history while today’s ideals and attitudes, mine included, have changed beyond imagining since then. So, don’t be too judgemental. I was lucky to have had parents who were quite liberal for their time: strong, caring parents who must have borne constant concerns and, ultimately, very heavy hearts at a separation that could have been final. Life wasn’t all privilege and fun.

Life could feel very isolated with ‘home’ a six week voyage away. Mother’s letters only hint at the reality. Stiff upper lips had to be maintained and letters home clearly understate the reality, an astonishing understating in father’s account of his escape. We are all children of our time after all and, in general, most people, then, now and everywhere, are doing the best their circumstances allow to lead satisfying, peaceful lives. Looking round the world today, with so many inhumanities, shows how little we learn from history. This book, if nothing else, will make us, you and me, realise how lucky we are.

Hamish Brown

Burntisland 2018

1. Family Briefing

My young brother David was born in Yokohama in December 1940. Big brother Ian and Gran were coming out from Scotland to join us in Japan ‘for safety’. What befell thereafter is this book’s matter. Father was not to see Ian for nearly nine years because of what happened. I can remember some things, recall what parents spoke of but am still wary of memory.

Autobiographical memory is variously portrayed as random, capricious, ephemeral, fragile, unreliable, elusive, non-sequential, impermanent, defective, treacherous, illusory even, which should scare off most from ever attempting such. Who, given a paint box, will produce an identical picture of the present, never mind the past, to that of a neighbour sitting alongside, looking at the same scene? That I take the risk is largely because this particular painting of the past is based on what was recorded at the time, something surely modifying the frightening words above?

A Chinese tin miner or a semi-slave worker on a rubber plantation would tell a very different story. They never did of course, the recorders came from the elite, the sahibs and the memsahibs and the pathetic rulers who failed in so many ways. I have my mother’s pocket diary for 1941 which simply records dates for social events: riding, tennis, Mah Jongg, shopping, dentist, hairdresser . . . Nothing about the war in Europe and little between ‘Dec 8: Japan into war’ and ‘Dec 26: Raid. Shop. Port Swettenham’ – our flight. Whether pocket diary, or letters home, the outside reality never seemed to impinge on that world of everyday work and play in an unpleasant climate.

The very ordinariness of these letters written by a mother to her mother or to her son gives them a poignancy which no artifice could match. This is how it was then, for one family, however attitudes, beliefs and language may have changed since. Not that I feel anything other than admiration and gratitude for my parents, feelings deepened on reading their words.

East of West life continued with determined (illusory?) normality. There’s an element of ‘stiff upper lip,’ of following what was proper behaviour, of protecting the children from the reality. Much is glossed over. The letters home were toned-down – but of course were opened and read by the censors. Huge events were happening ‘at home’: Churchill as new Prime Minister, Dunkirk, the Battle of Britain and the start of the Blitz (the last raising those thoughts that Gran and Ian would be safer in Japan!). Through 1941 father ran the bank in Klang, near Kuala Lumpur, mother socialised, I was sent off to school. The day the Japanese invaded I started school holidays and, a week before we fled, brother David’s first birthday was celebrated as if life was normal. ‘Shame David disturbed on his birthday,’ mother recorded me saying. We children were protected from the realities as much as possible of course. Yet David was born in Japan, just a year before Pearl Harbour.

Tensions there were in Japan. Shortly after the fall of France Japanese forces had over-run Indo-China. Britain and America promptly froze all Chinese and Japanese assets. In September 1940 Japan and Germany signed a pact. The British in Japan became steadily more alarmed, many started to leave but the likelihood of real instability seemed to rest on Japan and China. An invasion of Malaya was inconceivable but with an embargo on coal, oil, iron ore, Japan in some ways was forced to attack, to keep going.

Memories can be tactile or olfactory as well as visual, which I have discovered on looking back. Often, though, so-called memories are acquired later through parental stories or looking at family photo albums, and I’ve my ration of such but can usually make a sharp separation between original and acquired memories. My very earliest memory is a case in point.

I’m standing on a pontoon, held by reins, with my mother in a port which I suspect is Port Said, on our way to Japan in 1939, and I am wearing a topee (topi) and shirt and shorts held together by buttons, the shorts green, the top white with large green polka dots. There was a photo of this scene but if the ‘memory’ came later I would surely have been told the name of the port and, while the long lost photo was black and white, my memory is in colour. However our memories drift like smoke to the other end of life, the constant is their random selectivity and having family letters pins down things with useful exactitude.

Young children don’t question. They accept. Father as a banker and being moved about from country to country, one brother a world away and a new one arriving, was simply the natural order of things. My world was family, a secure enclave that needed no supplementing. It was all happenings, seen with ‘the imperious accepting eye of childhood’ (Penelope Lively). I was too young to be judgemental. I was lucky in having that strong family bond. I was not abandoned to amahs and ayas, my absence up in the hills was a parental grief, the days to my return counted by them, as much as by me. Constant change was our constancy. Memory still is elusive and their letters have been a strange discovering of myself as a boy.

Father was born in Dunfermline in Fife in March 1893, the youngest of a family of five: brother Jim (who emigrated to South Africa – usefully for us!), Helen (Nellie), who lived in Cyprus (and whom we’d meet in South Africa), Kathleen, whose family would be India-based, Margaret who married into Ireland and Eliza, the only one who never married nor left the family home in Dunfermline. The Brown name can be traced back in Fife to the eighteenth century but what fascinated me as a till then rootless boy, drawing a family tree, was how completely Scottish our roots were, and how far-distributed, in the Highlands and Lowlands as names indicated: Arthur, Brown (2), Dick, Fisher, Hunter, Lyon, Macmillan, MacPhail, Reid, Robertson, Swanson.

On leaving school father was taken on as a ‘pupil’ in the Bank of Scotland and appears to have had his call-up deferred to complete his training. He was enlisted in the Argyll and Sutherland Highlanders in 1915 and sent to the front where he caught a ‘Blighty one’ on the Somme. In August 1917 he was commissioned into the Border Regiment but in the big German October offensive was taken prisoner and was held in camps at Karlsruhe and Mainz. He survived.

After the war he joined the Chartered Bank of India, Australia and China1 (today’s Standard Chartered) and was sent on the long sea voyage to Bangkok, the capital of Siam (Thailand). He led a fairly active life, enjoying rugby and playing the pipes in a pipe band. He was also a violinist. Like any Scot he was a good dancer and this could well have brought him and mother together. She was a fanatical dancer. (In old age she once told me that, had she not married, she would have been a dancer, despite her diminutive size.) At eighteen she was swept off her feet by thirty year old handsome Billie. Photographs show a very grand, traditional wedding, and they lived happily ever after, despite ‘death do us part’ an alarming possibility. Both lived to a good age. Mother’s last shock must have been waking to find her Billie dead in the bed beside her. She would live on another twenty years. I heard about father’s death in a curious way. I was in remotest Skye, camping and climbing with a school party. We were washed out by a deluge and, having retreated to Portree, found the Police had been trying to find me for some days. They told me my father had died so I set off to hitch, bus, train, train, and bus home. Brother Ian from Hong Kong beat me to it, but he had a 48 hours’ start. In father’s day it would take many weeks to head West-East or vice versa – so they put in years in one posting before a long home leave.