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

by Clare Flynn

  In efforts to counter our see-the-funny-side-of-it demeanour, rumours, presumably initiated by the Japanese, began to circulate around the houses that made up our improvised detention camp. Until now I had no evidence, but I suspected Marjorie as being the culprit of spreading many of the rumours.

  One morning I found Mum weeping. Marjorie was sitting on the floor beside her, arms folded.

  ‘What’s the matter?’ I asked, looking at Marjorie with suspicion. I had never been keen on the woman, finding her arrogant and selfish, and I guessed she was behind Mum’s distress.

  ‘Singapore has been razed to the ground and all the whites are dead,’ said Mum between sniffs and sobs.

  ‘What rubbish!’ I countered, injecting as much confidence into the words as I could muster. ‘That’s propaganda. Why on earth would the Japs destroy the city they’ve wanted to get their hands on for so long?’

  ‘But if they’ve killed all the white people that means … your father will be...’

  ‘Of course, they haven’t killed all the white people. If they had, why would they be keeping us alive? And do you have any idea what it would take to systematically kill everyone left in Singapore?’ I fixed my eyes on Marjorie, summoning up a stern expression. ‘It’s poppycock.’

  ‘I had it on very good authority,’ Marjorie put her hands on her hips and gave me a defiant look.

  ‘Hirohito himself, I imagine. A chum of yours, is he?’ I knew I was being unnecessarily catty, but I was furious with Marjorie. This kind of negative rumour-mongering would sap morale and play right into the hands of our captors. And I knew Marjorie was doing it to self-aggrandise. She liked nothing more than to be treated as the queen bee.

  With a huff and a shrug of one shoulder, the woman walked away.

  Another aspect of life in the Dutch houses, was the way the Japanese guards would enter the buildings without warning or invitation. They did this with no purpose other than to pry, often following us from room to room and standing in doorways to watch us dress or wash – by now all the internal doors had made it to the fuel pile. There was no point objecting as it made them worse, so we developed an ability to pretend they were not there. Many of these guards were little more than adolescents – peasant boys whose motivation to torment us in this way was curiosity rather than malevolence.

  It was around this time that several of the women began disappearing, returning with food and money. In my naivety, I didn’t realise what they were doing at first, until Veronica – who was one of them – enlightened me.

  ‘If it’s going to keep me better fed in this godforsaken place, I’ll do it. Worse things can happen. And better to do it on my terms than on theirs,’ she said. ‘If none of us do, all of us will suffer. If the Japs want to ease their frustrations, it’s better that some of us profit from it. If we don’t, they’ll take it by force from us all.’

  I was horrified. That she, a married woman, albeit an unfaithful one, could so calmly prostitute herself to the enemy for a can of condensed milk or a few guilders. In those days, I was quick to judge.

  Our good humour was further and more severely tested when out of the blue one morning, all the men in the camp, a small but significant minority, were ordered to line up in the street outside the houses. It became clear that they were about to be moved. While the men had been outnumbered by us women, their presence had been a psychological reassurance – even though we all knew they were as powerless as we were and could have done nothing to defend us. Among them were Mr Van den Bosch, Terry Henderson, Cyril Pickering – the Eurasian youth, and Mr Van den Bosch’s older son, Geert, who was only twelve.

  To my surprise, Mrs Van den Bosch took this separation in her stride. She stood stoically, one hand on the shoulders of each of her two remaining children, as her husband and son were led away. This wasn’t the case with either Sharon Henderson, Terry’s wife, or the Eurasian girl, whose name was Cynthia Pickering. Sharon cried big gulping tears, unable to comprehend that her husband of just weeks was being taken from her. Laura and Mrs Hopkins rushed over to support her as she swayed, about to faint.

  No one did this for Cynthia, who fell to her knees, in abject desolation at being parted from her brother. It was Veronica who eventually went to her, helping her onto her feet, saying something I couldn’t hear and taking Cynthia’s hand and squeezing it.

  I admit I stared open-mouthed at this development. For a woman I had always seen to be an arch snob, it was an egalitarian act – as well as one of kindness.

  After the men had left, we gradually readjusted. Some, my mother among them, supplemented the house’s meagre diet by earning money with which to barter for food. The source of the income was the Japanese themselves – but not in this case through prostitution. The guards’ preferred attire, when not going about their official duties, was a kind of white loin cloth and they were prepared to pay us a pittance for these garments to be made. This was obviously neither a reliable nor a long-term source of income, but in those early days it offered a small means of contributing something, for those who had absolutely nothing.

  Bartering with the locals was a dangerous risk. This was brought home to us in a terrible and frightening way one morning when a Malayan man was caught trying to attract our attention with a dead chicken he was holding against the wire fence. Fortunately, noticing that there were several Japanese in the vicinity, none of us approached him. Had anyone done so they may well have suffered the same fate he did. The guards took away the chicken, then, twisting his arms painfully behind him, they tied the man to a post just outside the perimeter fence and left him there for two days in the full blaze of the sun and the cold of the night. I cannot imagine the agonies that man must have suffered. We never discovered his ultimate fate because they took him away at the end of the second day. I suspect he was put to death.

  Our guards no doubt felt humiliated that they were reduced to playing jailers to a collection of women and children, so they treated us with utter contempt. They screamed abuse at the tenko if we failed to make our bows low enough. As we became thinner and dirtier, they appeared to stop seeing us as women. Their eyes showed they despised our tall, white, emaciated bodies, our swollen “rice bellies” and our protuberant bones. To them we were a pointless species, unsuitable as pets, but needing to be held as captives. We were a drain on their resources, a distraction from the true purpose of war and their unfulfilled need to be fighting-men, advancing the glory of the empire and the humiliation of the white man.

  They beat us, tortured us, treated us savagely and did everything they could to bring us low. They starved us of food and withheld the medicine we needed. Day by day they sapped our spirits and many women, accustomed to a life of expatriate ease, found our treatment unbearable. Later, as disease became more rampant and the effects of sustained malnutrition began to take their toll, these women were among the first to die.

  Veronica was not one of these. She was different. In the beginning, the Japs seemed to see this too. It appeared they liked her, even respected her. She was small, slight, graceful, elfin. Not unlike a delicate Japanese geisha. When she flirted, they responded, not with the rifle butts they had used to beat other women, but with shy smiles and knowing grins. Veronica was smart. No one knew how she managed it, but she soon set herself apart from the rest of us. If she was going to have sex with the enemy, it was to be with Sergeant Shoei, the deputy to the camp commandant not with the rank and file guards, and it was done on her terms.

  6

  Adapting

  In peacetime Mum had shown no inclination for singing or for music in general. Yet she became an enthusiastic member of the camp choir. Her pre-war interests had centred around regular bridge games, the voracious consumption of English detective novels, a daily crossword puzzle after breakfast, and baking. Easing aside our cook, Mum would take over the kitchen in a flurry of flour to make delicious scones, Victoria sponges and Dad’s favourite flapjacks. The crossword puzzles, the supply of reading material and
of course the baking, were no longer possible. Singing, on the other hand, was something that puzzled the Japanese, but which they felt powerless to prevent – and eventually came to grudgingly accept and even enjoy.

  Mum and her friends also played bridge, two of them having happened to have packs of cards in their handbags, which escaped confiscation by the guards. They were soon in demand to pass on their card skills to eager learners, keen to find an occupation to distract from ailments and constant hunger.

  ‘What were you and Marjorie up to this afternoon,’ I asked Mum one day. ‘You were huddled together hatching some kind of plot.’

  ‘We’ve decided to create a cookbook,’ she said, as if it were the most natural thing in the world. As though sharing recipes and tasting the results was the normal course of events in this terrible place of hunger and deprivation and we had writing materials, let alone ingredients for dishes.

  I must have looked puzzled, worried even, because Mum rushed on, full of enthusiasm. ‘It’s just a bit of fun, love. Although it’s a bit of a chore having to scratch all the recipes onto bits of roof tile, but Beryl has very tiny handwriting and she’s in charge of recording it all. So far, we’ve done recipes for soup. We’re about to go on to cakes and biscuits and I’m the editor-in-chief for that section.’ She beamed with pride.

  ‘What’s the point? Surely it makes it worse thinking about food when we can’t get hold of any?’ I was incredulous. ‘How can you possibly want to make a recipe book full of food you can’t eat?’

  ‘It’s a vicarious pleasure, Mary. It reminds us of how things used to be and how they will be again. Yes, it’s only a fantasy but believe me, it feels real. We start off by listing all the ingredients and then the method and everyone pictures the steps in their heads. The person who has offered the recipe has to describe the taste and feel and texture of the dish concerned, and we all sit around and pretend we’re eating it.’ She patted me on the arm. ‘Remember my scones? They’ve proved quite a hit.’

  ‘But, Mum...’

  ‘Once all this is over, we’re going to have regular get-togethers to eat our way through the whole cookbook. Can you imagine?’

  She grinned but underneath the broad smile, I noticed how thin and drawn her once round face had become. I placed my palm gently against the soft skin of her cheek. Then I told her that one day soon we would both be eating her fruit scones, warm from the oven, butter melting and dripping down our chins. We laughed, then, looking sad, Mum turned away, hoping I hadn’t noticed the tears at the corners of her eyes. I knew she was thinking about Dad and wondering whether she would ever see him again and whether we three would ever sit around the dining table together or share a sundowner in the garden before supper.

  Rumours abounded in the camp. Whenever the Japanese were particularly vicious or angry with us, the word would race around between the houses that it was due to a significant military setback and that they were losing the war they had so confidently started. We had no concrete evidence for it. Imagination and rumour filled the void and helped to keep our spirits up.

  This optimism about eventual victory was reinforced by the growing number of nationalities present in the camp. Besides British, Dutch, Eurasians and Australians, there were a couple of American missionaries, a Canadian nurse, French, Chinese, Malay, one Indian, an orphaned Russian child, two Italians and eventually a trio of Germans – for the Axis powers had never been as closely knit an alliance as the Allies were. Surely, with almost the entire world ranged against them, the small island nation of Japan could not prevail, and it was only a matter of time before we would be liberated.

  Yet time is an odd commodity. On the one hand, it hung heavily upon us, with hunger, hard labour and lack of entertainment making our days drag. But it was also the enemy as far as our health and wellbeing was concerned – as time passed, we all became weaker – only the very strongest were capable of marshalling the strength to stay alive.

  Mum first became ill while we were living in the Dutch houses. The flesh had fallen away from her and she suffered badly from a series of ailments that we lacked the medicine to treat. A bad bout of malaria saw her laid up for weeks and it was thanks to Veronica, who managed to obtain some quinine from an undeclared source, that she survived. But the malaria left Mum weakened and even more vulnerable.

  In the camp we were not generally sexually abused – the Japs preferred the Malay and Chinese comfort women for that, and those women who slipped away to service their captors’ needs before returning to camp.

  Veronica had the unusual privilege of being the exclusive possession of the deputy camp commandant; their encounters took place behind the closed door of his accommodation, in a bungalow outside the wire. She used this as a means to smuggle in food and medicine whenever she could. It was the kind of risk she appeared to relish.

  For most of us the idea of prostituting ourselves for our ‘masters’ was unthinkable. I do not blame those who did choose this course though. But Veronica’s arrangement was different.

  Sergeant Shoei was the kind of man who would not be happy to use the same women that his subordinates accessed. He was also lazy and rarely left his house, other than in fulfilment of his duties – which mainly consisted of marching around shouting at his men and screaming at us. Not for him the trip into the town to the house of prostitution where the ‘comfort women’ were kept.

  For a long time, I believed that Veronica had recognised this as an opportunity to be the chosen candidate. Because I had always thought so badly of her, I assumed she had betrayed us by consorting with the enemy. I thought of her as little more than a prostitute anyway, after what had happened with Ralph and her callous abandonment of him. I was grateful for the medicines she brought back for my mother and others. But I still believed her real motives were entirely selfish.

  Since the day her brother was separated from her, Cynthia Pickering spent every possible moment with Veronica, following her around like a devoted handmaiden and talking intently with her at any opportunity. It was an unlikely alliance – but Veronica had always operated with a posse of women friends in Penang. Not actually friends, but followers – women who preferred to stay on the right side of her. Cynthia, a quiet Eurasian girl, did not conform to the ‘type’ of Veronica’s Penang posse – shallow, brittle women, obsessed with appearances, thriving on gossip and living to party.

  It seemed to me a shame that a young innocent woman like Cynthia should fall under the corrupting spell of Veronica. I shuddered at the thought of her being encouraged to go down the same route and sell her body for a scrap of meat or a lipstick. But it wasn’t my place to interfere. Cynthia was sixteen and old enough to choose her own friends, but I was sad that she was no longer under the protection of her adored older brother.

  7

  The Men’s Camp

  September 1943

  We had been living in the Dutch houses for more than a year and had begun to settle into the harsh but manageable routine of life there. Out of the blue, we were told we would be moving the following day and must be ready to depart at three o’clock in the morning, with anything we wished to take with us. In fact, we had fewer possessions than when we arrived, our clothes having been worn to shreds. Anything of value, apart from one or two personal treasures, had already been consumed or bartered.

  As always with these moves, we were given no information as to our destination or mode of travel. The idea of relocating filled us with anxiety. Human beings are capable of adapting to almost anything and we had become used to our peculiar suburban prison and recalled with horror those sloping concrete sleeping slabs we had known in Muntok.

  ‘Where do you think they’re taking us?’ Mum’s eyes were full of fear.

  ‘Hopefully, they’ve built a proper place to house us,’ said Marjorie. ‘It had better be somewhere with decent dormitories and toilet facilities.’

  While I thought that unlikely, I said nothing.

  Mum looked bone-tired. ‘I do hope we
won’t have to walk there. My feet couldn’t take another trek through the jungle.’

  As it happened, our next destination was less than a mile away – the camp the men had been occupying. It was absolutely awful. It had been built by the men themselves and, little knowing that the next occupants would be us women, they had sabotaged the place before they left, throwing rubbish into the wells, and causing destruction that made our lives even more uncomfortable than theirs had been.

  The buildings were constructed from wood with roofs thatched with atap. Our arrival coincided with a spell of almost constant rainfall – heavy deluges of an apocalyptic nature that soaked through the thatch and made sleeping akin to taking a cold shower. One of the nuns had evidently missed her true vocation as a steeplejack, as she was constantly employed scrambling across the rooftops, her habit tucked into her waist, dragging the thatching back into position after the wind and rain had disturbed it.

  Our guards had accompanied us to the new camp and their accommodation was in huts inside the perimeter. At this time, Veronica was continuing to service Sergeant Shoei.

  ‘I don’t understand how you can bear it,’ I told her once. In the light of her continuing to supply the nursing staff with much-needed medicines, I didn’t want to be disparaging or moralistic about her choice, but it was an unusual one among the married British women.

  Veronica scuffed at the dusty ground with the edge of her foot. ‘I don’t like men. I don’t enjoy doing it with any of them. Never have. So why not with him? It’s all the same to me. And at least it makes life here a little easier for us.’ She gave a dry laugh. ‘Shoei is a monster but he’d be worse if I wasn’t giving him what he wants, when he wants it.’