The Outsider Read online

  Dawn was close to breaking some hours later when he rolled into the forecourt of Changi General Hospital, yelling for someone to come and help him. Nursing staff appeared and wheeled the child away. By luck, a British doctor was coming off night shift, but took one look at the boy and rushed him to surgery.

  The doctor joined my father for tiffin in the canteen and told him he had been just in time. The appendix was just about to burst, with probably lethal results. But the boy would live and was even then asleep. My father gave the obi back.

  After refueling, my father rode back to his estate to reassure the impassive but hollow-eyed parents and catch up with the delayed day’s work. A fortnight later, the riverboat brought the mail package, the usual stores, and a small Japanese boy with a shy smile and a scar.

  Four days later, the carpenter appeared again, this time in daylight. He was waiting near the bungalow when Dad returned from the latex store for tea. He kept his eyes on the ground as he spoke.

  “Tuan, my son will live. In my culture when a man owes what I owe you, he must offer the most valuable thing that he has. But I am a poor man and have nothing to offer save one thing. Advice.”

  Then he raised his eyes and stared my father in the face.

  “Leave Malaya, tuan. If you value your life, leave Malaya.”

  To the end of his days in 1991, my father never knew if those words caused his decision or merely reinforced it. But the next year, 1936, instead of sending for his fiancée, he resigned and came home. In 1941, Imperial Japanese forces invaded Malaya. In 1945, of all his contemporaries, not one came home from the camps.

  There was nothing spontaneous about the Japanese invasion of Malaya. It was meticulously planned and the imperial forces swept down the peninsula as an unstoppable tide. British and Australian troops were rushed up the spine of the colony to man defensive points along the main roads south. But the Japanese had not come that way.

  Out of the rubber estates came scores of sleeper agents, infiltrated years before. On hundreds of bicycles, the Japanese rode south along tiny, unknown jungle tracks, guided by the agents. Others came by sea, leapfrogging down the coast, guided inshore by winking lanterns held by fellow countrymen who knew the coast and all the inlets.

  The British and Australians were outflanked over and over again as the Japanese appeared behind them, and in strength, always guided by the agents. It was all over in days and the supposedly impregnable fortress of Singapore was taken from the landward side, her massive guns facing out to sea.

  When I was a child but old enough to understand, my father told me this story and swore it was absolutely true and it happened nearly seven years before the invasion of December 1941. But he was never quite certain that his village carpenter was one of those agents, only that had he been taken, he, too, would have died. So perhaps only a few whispered words from a grateful carpenter caused me to appear on this earth at all. Since 1945, the Japanese have been held responsible for many things, but surely not this as well?

  A LARGE JAR OF TALC

  The spring of 1940 was not a relaxing time to be in East Kent. Hitler had swept across Europe. France was overrun in three weeks. Denmark and Norway were gone; Belgium, Luxembourg, and Holland were swallowed.

  The outflanked British army in France had been driven into the sea off Dunkirk and Calais, and only rescued, minus all their equipment, by a miracle of small inshore boats manned by civilians who chugged across the Channel from the English coast and, against all the odds, brought 330,000 of them off the sand dunes.

  All Europe was either occupied by Hitler, putting into office servile collaborator governments, or sheltering in their neutrality. The British prime minister had been tossed out, to be replaced by Winston Churchill, who vowed we would fight on. But with what? Britain was completely isolated and alone.

  All Kent waited for the invasion, the famed Operation Sea Lion, which, on Eagle Day, would see the German army roar up the beaches to invade, conquer, and occupy.

  My father had already volunteered for the army, but was still based in his native Kent and living at home. He and my mother decided that if the invasion came, they would not survive. They would use the last gallon of petrol in the old Wolseley and, with a length of hose, end their lives. But they did not want to take me with them. With my crown of blond curls, I would be accepted by the Nazis as of good Aryan stock and raised in an orphanage. But how to see me safely evacuated somewhere else?

  The solution came in one of the customers at my mother’s dress shop. She was the principal of the Norland College, the training school of the famous Norland nannies who for decades had gone out to raise the children of the rich and royal worldwide. The institute was at Hothfield, a village outside Ashford. It was going to evacuate to Devon, far away in the southwest. My mother put it to her client: Would they take me with them?

  The principal was dubious, but her deputy proposed to her that nannies in training would always need babies to practice on, so why not this one? The deal was done. When the train bearing the Norland Institute steamed out of Ashford, I went with them. May 1940: I was twenty months old.

  It is hard to describe in the modern world, or explain to the new generation, the anguish of those parents as Ashford was emptied of its evacuees, seen off by weeping mothers and a few fathers who thought never to see them again. But that was the way it was at Ashford station.

  I cannot recall those five months I was in Devon, as class after class of eager young nannies experimented at putting me to bed, getting me up, and constantly changing my nappies. That was before Velcro fastenings and absorbent padding. It was all terry toweling and pins back then.

  It seems I could hardly pass wind or let go a few drops before the whole lot came off to be replaced by a new one. And the standby was talc: lots and lots of talc. I must have had the most talc-dusted rear end in the kingdom.

  But the Few in their Spitfires and Hurricanes did the job. On September 17, Adolf simply gave up. His vast army on the French coast turned around, took a last look at the white cliffs across the Channel that they would not conquer after all, and marched east. Hitler was preparing his June 1941 invasion of Russia. The landing barges bobbed uselessly at their moorings off Boulogne and Calais.

  Sea Lion was off.

  Our photographic recce planes noted this and reported back. England was saved, or at least saved to struggle on. But the Luftwaffe bombing raids on London and the southeast would not cease. Most of the evacuated children would stay far from their parents, but at least with a good chance of reunification one day.

  My own parents had had enough. They sent for me, and back I came, to spend the rest of the war in the family home in Elwick Road, Ashford. I recall none of this, not the going away, or the ceaseless attention to the nether parts in Devon, or the return. But something must have struck in the subconscious. It took years until I ceased to feel trepidation every time I was approached by a beaming young lady with a large jar of talc.

  A LITTLE BOY’S DREAM

  The summer of 1944 brought two great excitements to a small boy of five in East Kent. The nightly droning of German bombers overhead, heading from the French coast for the target of London, had ceased as the Royal Air Force won back control of the skies. The rhythmic throb-throb of the V-1 rockets, or “doodlebugs,” Hitler’s pilotless drones packed with explosives, had not yet started. But by May all the grown-ups were tense. They were expecting the long-awaited Allied invasion of occupied France. That was when the Texan came and parked his tank on my parents’ lawn.

  At the breakfast hour, he was not there, but when I returned in the midafternoon from kindergarten, there he was. I thought the tank, which turned out to be a Sherman, was immense and hugely exciting. Its tracks were half on the parental lawn, the fence reduced to matchwood, and half on Elwick Road. It simply had to be explored.

  It took a chair from the kitchen and a lot of climbing to reach the t
op of the tracks, and then there was the turret, with its formidable gun. Having reached the top of the turret, I found the hatch open and stared down. A face stared up and there was a muttered conversation down below and a head began to climb toward the light. When a tall, lanky figure detached himself from the metal and towered over me, I recognized that he had to be a cowboy. I had seen them in the Saturday-morning film shows and they all wore tall hats. I was looking at my first Texan in a Stetson.

  He sat on the turret, coming eye to eye with me, and said, “Hiya, kid.” I replied, “Good afternoon.” He seemed to be speaking through his nose, like the cowboys in the movies. He nodded at our home.

  “Your house?”

  I nodded.

  “Waal, tell your paw I’m real sorry about the fence.”

  He reached into the top pocket of his combat fatigues, produced a wafer of something, unwrapped it, and offered it to me. I did not know what it was, but I took it, as it would have been rude to refuse. He produced another piece, put it in his mouth, and began to chew. I did the same. It tasted of peppermint, but unlike British toffee, it refused to dissolve for swallowing. I had just been introduced to chewing gum.

  That tank and its entire crew were convinced that in a few days they would be part of the invasion force that would try to storm Hitler’s Atlantic Wall in the massively fortified Pas-de-Calais. Many must have thought they would never come back. In fact they were all wrong.

  My Texan was part of a huge decoy army that the Allied commanders had stuffed into East Kent to dupe the German High Command. Secretly they were planning to invade via Normandy, way down south, with another army then crouching under camouflaged canvas miles away from Kent.

  The soldiers of the decoy army might go over later, but not on D-Day. Thinking they would be the first shock wave, with terrible casualties, thousands of them were jamming every bar in Kent to the doors, drinking in the final saloon. A week later, a solemn voice on the radio, which was then called the wireless, announced that British, American, and Canadian troops had landed in strength on five beaches in Normandy and were fighting their way inland.

  Two days after that, there was an earsplitting rumble from the front garden and the Sherman rolled away. My Texan was gone. No more chewing gum. Under the guidance of my mother, I knelt at the bedside and prayed to Jesus to look after him. It was a month later that I was taken to Hawkinge.

  My father was a major in the army, but for the past ten years he had been a member of Ashford’s amateur fire brigade. Despite his protests, this put him in a “restricted occupation,” meaning he could not be posted abroad and go into combat. The country needed every fireman it had. He insisted on a job and was made a welfare officer, answerable to the War Office and charged with overseeing the living conditions of all the soldiers based in East Kent.

  I do not know when he ever slept for those five years. My mother ran the family furrier’s shop while Dad spent his days in a khaki uniform and his nights on a fire truck, racing around putting out fires. My point is, he had a car and a cherished petrol allowance, without which he could not have done his day job. Hence the trip across the Weald of Kent to visit the grass-field fighter strip at Hawkinge. It was the base of two squadrons of Spitfires.

  Back then the Spitfire was not just a fighter plane, it was a national icon. It still is. And for every small boy, the men who flew them were heroes to surpass any footballer or showbiz personality. While my father conducted his business with the base commander, I was handed over to the pilots.

  They made a great fuss of me, thinking perhaps of their own children or kid brothers far away. One of them picked me up under the armpits, swung me high, and dropped me into the cockpit of a Mark 9 Spitfire. I sat on the parachute, overawed, dumbfounded. I sniffed in the odors of petrol, oil, webbing, leather, sweat, and fear—for fear also has an aroma. I studied the controls, the firing button, the instruments; I gripped the control stick. I stared ahead along the endless cowling masking the great Rolls-Royce Merlin engine to the four-bladed propeller, stark against a duck-egg-blue Kentish sky. And in the manner of little boys, I swore a little boy’s oath.

  Most small boys swear to something they want to be when they grow up, but usually the promise fades and the dream dies. I swore that one day I was going to be one of them. I was going to wear the pale blue uniform with wings on the chest, and fly single-seaters for the RAF. When I was hoisted back out of the cockpit, I had made up my mind what I was going to do: I would be a fighter pilot, and I would fly a Spitfire.

  I could not foresee the years of discouragement from schools and peer groups, the mockery and disbelief. When my father drove his little Wolseley saloon back to Ashford, I was lost in thought. A month later, I turned six and the dream did not die.

  LEARNING FRENCH

  Before the war, my father had been a pillar of the Rotary Club of Ashford. With the departure of so many men into the armed forces or to war work, that was all suspended for the duration. But in 1946 it was restarted, and the next year saw a program of “twinning” with our newly freed neighbors in France. Ashford, beginning with the letter A, was twinned with Amiens in Picardy.

  My parents were matched with a French doctor, the Resistance war hero Dr. Colin and his wife. Throughout the occupation, he had remained the doctor assigned to the hundreds of railwaymen living and working in the great rail hub of the Amiens marshaling yards. Permitted his own car and free movement, he had observed many things useful to the Allies across the Channel, and at risk of discovery and execution, had passed them on to the Resistance.

  The Colins came to visit in 1947, and the following year invited my parents back. But the shop came first, and they could not take the time off, so I went instead, a pattern that would be repeated for the next four years. Not just for a weekend, but for most of the eight-week summer school vacation.

  Like many families of the French bourgeoisie, the Colins had a country house far from the city fumes, buried deep in the countryside of Corrèze in the Massif Central in the middle of France. Thus in July 1948, aged nine, in short trousers and school cap, I accompanied my father on the adventure of crossing the Channel on a ferry. Only at the other side, looking back, could I see for the first time the towering white cliffs of Dover, which the German army had been staring at so longingly eight years earlier. Dr. Colin met us at Calais, and my father, pink with embarrassment, was duly embraced and kissed on both cheeks. Then he patted me on the head and reboarded the ferry for home. Real men did not kiss in those days.

  Dr. Colin and I boarded the train for Amiens, and I saw for the first time wooden seats in a railway carriage. The doctor had a complimentary ticket for first class, but he preferred to travel in third with the working-class people he served.

  At Amiens, I met Madame Colin again, and their four children, all in their early twenties and late teens. François, then seventeen, was the wild one, arrested several times by the Gestapo during the occupation and reason for his mother’s snow-white hair. Not one of them spoke a word of English, and after three terms at a British prep school, I could just about manage bonjour and merci. Sign language was coming into its own, but I had been given a primer textbook for the grammar and began to work out what they were saying. Two days later, we all left for Paris and Corrèze.

  “Abroad” seemed a very strange but fascinating place. Everything was different—the language, the food, the mannerisms, the customs, and those massive French railway engines. But children, in the manner of learning things, are like blotting paper. They can soak up information. Today, sixty-five years later, stumped by the new Internet-connected, digitalized world, I marvel at children little more than toddlers who can do twenty things with an iPhone that I have a problem switching on.

  Dr. Colin was not with us. He had to stay in Amiens and tend to his patients. So Madame and the teenagers traveled south to fulfill the sacred French summer holiday in the country with a small and slightly overwh
elmed English boy. We changed trains at Ussel onto a branch line to Egletons and thence by wheezing country bus to the ancient village of Lamazière Basse. It was like going back to the Middle Ages.

  The family home was large, old, and decrepit, with falling plaster, a leaky roof, and many rooms, one of which became mine, and where mice ran freely over me as I slept. The lady who lived there was the old family nanny, pensioned off but given a home for the rest of her days. Amazingly, she was English, but had been in France since her girlhood.

  A lifelong spinster, Mimi Tunc had served the Colin family for many years, and throughout the entire war had passed for French under the noses of the German authorities, thus escaping internment.

  Lamazière Basse was, as said, very old and almost medieval. A few homes, but not many, had electricity. For most, oil lamps sufficed. There were one or two archaic tractors, but no combine harvesters. The crops were scythed by hand and brought home in carts hauled by yoked oxen. In the fields, the peasants at midday would stand to murmur the Angelus, like figures from a Millet painting. Both men and women wore wooden clogs, or sabots.

  There was a church, packed with attendance by the women and children, while the men discussed the important things of life in the bar-café across the square. The village priest, always called Monsieur l’Abbé, was friendly to me but slightly distant, convinced that as a Protestant I was tragically destined for hell. Up at the château on the hill dwelled Madame de Lamazière, the very old matriarch of the surrounding land. She did not come to church; it came to her in the form of poor Monsieur l’Abbé, sweating up the hill in the summer sun to bring her Mass in her private chapel. The pecking order was very rigid, and even God had to recognize the distinctions.