The Plantation - Di Morrissey [86]
Then events moved more quickly.
The inevitability of the war was brought home to us a couple of days later, when the Winchesters, friends of ours from Penang, arrived at Utopia with just a couple of suitcases. Penang had been savagely bombed and they were fleeing the town, leaving almost everything behind.
‘My dear,’ said the distraught Mrs Winchester, ‘we’ve had to leave everything. I just want to get to Singapore, where we’ll be safe. Hopefully we might be able to get a ship from there to South Africa. I can’t believe what is happening. The planes just came over Penang without any warning and bombed the place. There must be thousands killed. We were lucky, as we live on the hill and the Japs only seemed to be interested in destroying the town and the harbour, so we were able to get away, but still, it’s all such a disaster.’
(They were never to return. They lost their home and all their possessions in subsequent fighting.)
My wife Margaret and her sister Bette comforted Mrs Winchester, but the news that these people were running ahead of the Japanese forces unnerved Margaret.
‘Heavens, Roland,’ she said. ‘We just can’t sit here and wait for the Japs to get to Utopia. We have to do something.’
So I decided then and there that my wife, my son Philip, a mere three years old, and my sister-in-law must also try to get out of Malaya and return to their family home in Australia.
‘Margaret, you’re right. You have to try and get a ship back to Australia. I’m sure that the authorities will be organising some sort of evacuation from Singapore, which I suppose is safe enough. I’m going to have to join my unit straight away, so you’ll have to take Bette, Philip and Father and get to Singapore. But you’ll be fine. Hamid will drive you as far as KL and you can get the train from there.’
My wife stared at me. ‘You can’t be serious. You can’t just abandon us to take our chances.’
‘What choice do I have?’ I tried to explain. ‘I have to stay and fight the Japs.’
‘Margaret, we’ll be fine,’ Bette, her sister, assured her. ‘We’ll have Eugene with us and he knows the country better than anyone, and Gilbert’s in Singapore, trying to ship out rubber for his company. He’ll organise things for us when we get there.’
But my father had other ideas.
‘I’m not leaving the plantation,’ he said. ‘I have built this place from the ground up. It’s been my life’s work. Besides I will not leave my people. They have been faithful and I must remain loyal to them. These people trust me, so what would they think if the tuan besar fled and left them to the Japs. No, it’s simply not on.’
The decision that neither my father Eugene, or myself would be travelling south threw Margaret into a frenzy of organisation and packing. I tried to persuade her to travel as lightly as possible since time was of the essence and petrol could be difficult to get, but she wanted to take everything. Her sister Bette, a more practical young woman, persuaded Margaret to pack a trunk of her valuables and sentimental possessions, and I quietly buried it in the garden, where I hoped it would remain safe from whatever was to occur.
Before they could leave with Hamid we had two other late-night visitors, also fleeing south from Penang. They told us more about the bombing and the evacuation.
‘It has all been such a shambles,’ said Ethel Bourke, an old friend. ‘We were told that we had to leave secretly. No thought was given to our Asian staff, who were just left to face the Japs. I feel so ashamed that we did that. Surely there must have been some way to help them. Anyway, we came over to the mainland on an old Straits Steamship ferry and then we were supposed to be packed into a train heading south. It was impossibly crowded and I was worried all the time about the train being strafed, but it so happened that my friend Mildred here knew where there was a company car, so we left the train and drove down under our own steam.’
Their story made me reassess my original plan