by Mark Colvin
Upstairs, there was a long room that stretched from the rear of the house to directly above the portico. Here there was a gramophone, though we had few records that were particularly attractive to children. I liked The Man from Laramie: ‘The West will never see a man with so many notches on his gun.’ For some reason, my sister and I listened again and again to the original soundtrack of The Boy Friend, a West End musical my parents had seen in 1953, and which I would recognise with hilarity, years later, in a Monty Python sketch which reimagined it as directed by Sam Peckinpah, with massively bloody consequences. And there was an EP of Pablo Casals playing the cello, chiefly memorable because my father would point out gleefully that in the quiet passage in the middle you could hear the great man fart.
There was no television in Malaysia then, and I don’t recall hearing any radio. You played indoor games or read, or went outside and played in the garden. For my mother, who had been missing the presence of horses since she left the family sheep station in Victoria a decade or so before, living by the racecourse meant she could ride again regularly, and she made sure I took riding lessons, too, on a pony called Merah.
School in Kuala Lumpur started in the early morning and ended at lunchtime. In the afternoon we would go to the Royal Selangor Golf Club, not far away, where there was an Olympic pool. I was taught by a tall, rangy Australian called Miss Cairns to swim breaststroke, backstroke and freestyle, which was still called the Australian Crawl. Mum would sometimes take us shopping in the central markets, where there was the noise of shouting hawkers, and the mixed smells of South-East Asia: spices and herbs, coriander and chilli and fish, glorious arrays of tropical fruit, and the open-sewer smell of durian.
At weekends we’d go for walks around the reservoir above the city. There were caves, one of which was huge and contained a religious shrine and stank of the guano of millions of bats. At one place on the reservoir walk there was a small cave outlet through which, towards sunset, thousands of swifts would fly in great sky-darkening flocks.
Once, Dad took me with a friend of his who was a butterfly hunter on a trek through thick jungle. Another boy on the walk started screaming: he had a leech on his penis. The treatment—holding a lighted cigarette to the leech’s tail so it would let go—seemed almost as terrifying as the leech itself. The butterflies were huge and exotic, some with gorgeous colours, others with long, trailing, almost tasselled wings. I never liked the idea of collecting them: they seemed too beautiful to kill.
More than once, we visited the kampongs, villages set among the rubber tree plantations. Village relocation and close political engagement with key local figures had been central to British tactics in the so-called Malayan Emergency, a guerrilla war against communist insurgents which had raged for most of the 1950s, but which was essentially almost over by the time we arrived. Independence in 1957 had deprived the communist MRLA forces of their strongest selling point in what they saw as a ‘war of national liberation’. The gravitas and political savvy of the new prime minister, Tunku Abdul Rahman, had also helped neutralise the threat. As far as I can make out, one of my father’s tasks was simply to consolidate the victory, ensuring that the jungle warfare of the past few years would not return.
I have a clear memory of him taking me on a drive into the jungle. I was six or seven, and we were in quite a remote part of the highlands. We walked into a clearing and there was a tribal longhouse, where we took off our shoes and sat on the floor to eat. My father was meeting a man called Colonel Dick Noone, and after lunch, he ‘reviewed the troops’. They were hill tribesmen, who marched in soldierly fashion up and down the clearing, shouldering arms and demonstrating their skill in dismantling and reassembling their weapons. Small, wiry brown men, they looked disciplined and fierce.
Noone was a sinewy character in well-pressed khaki who could have stepped from the pages of an H Rider Haggard or John Buchan novel. He’s a shadowy figure in the historical documents of the time, but my researches have revealed that Dick Noone had a long track record in guerrilla warfare. When Singapore fell to the Japanese, he made his way to Australia, where he served in the Z Special Unit, an Australian secret operations force which ran raids against the Japanese in occupied territories in Papua New Guinea and South-East Asia. According to Leon Comber’s Malaya’s Secret Police 1945–60: The Role of the Special Branch in the Malayan Emergency, Noone was instructed in 1956 to form and command a fighting force of Orang Asli (hill tribesmen). The British Army’s 22 Special Air Service (SAS) Regiment was brought in to train them. Comber says Noone’s job involved passing any intelligence he collected to the Special Branch. One of these troops of Orang Asli men must have been what I saw that day.
There is also what’s on the record about what Noone did afterwards. From 1960–65 in Bangkok, he was the rural border security adviser with the Southeast Asia Treaty Organization. In that role, Comber says, Noone led ‘an MI6 team of Malays, Bornean tribesmen and ethnically similar Montagnard tribesmen in operations against the Vietcong’. This was part of the little known British Advisory Mission to South Vietnam. So one of my father’s jobs was clearly coordinating that kind of secret police and counterintelligence work.
Although independence had formally come to what was then the Federation of Malaya, there was more to be done. The federation consisted of the mainland peninsular states, but along with the British, Malaya had a larger plan: for a federation with North Borneo, Sarawak and Singapore, to be called Malaysia. This was prompted partly by arguments for strength in numbers and territory (though Singapore, which joined initially, would eventually decide to go it alone), but also by gradually rising alarm at the actions of Indonesia’s founding president, Sukarno, who’d been getting increasing amounts of aid from Mao’s China and the Soviet Union. For centuries, the Straits of Malacca, a classic strategic chokepoint for shipping, had been one of the fulcrums of world trade: now they were shaping as a potential Cold War flash-point. The secret war in Borneo, when Sukarno decided to challenge the whole integrity of the Malaysian Federation, in what became known as Konfrontasi, would later, along with the fate of West Papua, become my father’s central preoccupations. But for now, he was mostly working in peninsular Malaya itself.
In mid-August 1959, we went on a cruise on a motor yacht around Malaysia’s southern islands. It wasn’t technically a holiday: my father was officially acting as an election observer in the country’s first post-independence national poll. I assumed for a long time that he’d swung the trip as a junket, but I now believe that he was intelligence-gathering too: with signs of Sukarno’s incipient expansionism, it would have been useful to know what people in these outlying parts thought.
Many of these islands are now luxury tourist resorts, but then they were simple villages with houses on stilts and few resources except coconuts and the abundant fish on the reefs. I went snorkelling one afternoon while my father was working, and I still dream sometimes about the intensity of colour in the coral and the tropical fish. It was the last time for a while that I would feel so gloriously free.
* * *
I had an accident-prone streak in 1958 and 1959. It started on our first day in the new house, when I picked up a cat and tripped over, cracking open my head. Five stitches. Then my mother was in the changing room at the pool when a woman came in and said, ‘The pool’s full of blood, a boy’s just cut his chin open.’ Mum’s intuition was instant and correct: yes, of course it was me. I’d been standing with my back to the water, about to try a backflip, when a schoolmate called Johnny Callaghan ran past and gave me a push in the chest. Instead of leaping, I went straight down, hitting the underside of my chin on the pool’s edge. Straight to the doctor. Six stitches.
Another day, I was playing in the empty racecourse grandstand when I sprinted across what I thought was a shortcut, not noticing a thin band of metal at face level. Upper lip cut open, four stitches. My seventh birthday present was a bicycle. High-speed race down the Lorong Kuda hill with Roddy from next door, brakes on
too hard, hurtle into ditch. Three stitches, left knee. I think it was that time that, when my mother rang the doctor, he answered wearily, ‘Is it Mark? Does he need stitches?’
This was just normal boy stuff, though, even if slightly extreme. It was about to be eclipsed by a real disaster. It was just after we got back from the election-observer jaunt around the islands, and it happened on the racecourse.
I’d had enough time in the saddle to be a fairly confident rider. I could get Merah to walk, trot, canter and even gallop, and I’d had quite a lot of practice taking small jumps without falling off. She was only a small, fat pony, and adults trusted me enough to let me go around the racecourse on my own. We were in an inner ring of the course, quite close to my house, when I urged Merah into a canter. I was feeling the breeze on my face and enjoying the speed when disaster struck. A Malay boy had been flying a kite and its string had come down across the track, dangling at waist height. The pony saw it and jumped over it. I didn’t see it and so was not braced for the jump. I was thrown, landing hard on my right arm. In the total shock that followed, only one thing was in my mind, the safety advice I’d always been given: if you fall off, get out of the horse’s way, so you don’t get kicked or trampled. I staggered towards the fence, to find that although I could crawl under it, there was a monsoon ditch between me and the next track. I stopped.
Merah, no danger to me or anyone else, was standing cropping the grass as though nothing had happened. I looked down at my arm. For the first time I noticed it was covered with blood. I could see something white sticking out of the elbow, and more of it sticking out at the wrist: bone and blood were about all that was visible from the elbow down. I started to scream. My mother came out—Dad was away that day, I think—and I was carried back to the house. I lay on the back seat of the car as I was driven to the hospital. In my confusion and pain, I couldn’t remember the word for ‘stretcher’. I asked my mother instead, ‘Will they put me on a coffin?’ which brought her to tears: ‘No, darling, of course not.’
At Kuala Lumpur’s British Army hospital I remember the nurses giving me the standard line that I was a ‘very brave boy’ as they wheeled me along a corridor, the pattern of ceiling tiles and lights flashing past my vision as they raced towards the operating theatre. Then an anaesthetist saying, ‘I bet you can’t count to a hundred before you go to sleep.’ ‘Bet I can. One, two, three, four, five …’ Then nothing. I woke up in bed with my arm in plaster from fingers to shoulder. It had been a nasty accident, but in normal circumstances I should have been home within a week or two. Instead, that hospital room was to become my prison for the next six weeks.
Children’s hospitals have changed a lot for the better since the 1950s. They needed to. Visiting hours, even for parents, were restricted to once a day for an hour or so. The idea of setting up camp beds so a parent could stay with a child overnight hadn’t been thought of. There was no TV in the country, and being an army hospital, there were few other children I was allowed to play with. I think there were two others in my ward for the first week or so, but after that I was mostly alone, and I wasn’t allowed to talk to children in several other wards because they had infectious diseases. So the compendiums of games I was given—Ludo, Snakes and Ladders, Draughts—weren’t much use, because I had no-one to play them with. I was very, very lonely, and my arm would not heal. The Chinese woman who came to clean my room every day mocked me because I had a teddy bear: ‘How old you? Seven? Too old for toy like that.’ I had no comeback, except to guiltily hide Teddy every time she came around.
The heavy plaster itched horribly in the humidity. How long was this going to go on? I wasn’t feeling well, either: sickly and occasionally feverish, I didn’t seem to be getting better as expected. Then, when I’d had my arm in plaster for about three weeks, my mother and the doctor came to tell me I was going to have to have another operation, to re-break and reset the arm. The reason was something called osteomyelitis, an infection of the bone and bone marrow, more common in the tropics. It turns the bone soft and brittle. My arm was not healing at all as a consequence. As well as another general anaesthetic and weeks more in plaster, I was going to need a lot of penicillin, then still pretty much the only drug in the antibiotic arsenal.
I woke up again after the second operation, in the same room, feeling worse if anything. I missed home and school, and cricket in the garden, and the swimming pool, and my little sister. My only escape, as had been the case ever since the accident, was into the world of books. I’d already read the first few Billabong stories by the Australian Mary Grant Bruce, which my mother had had as a child: now I read my way through all fifteen. This was interspersed with the Tintin series, which in the late 1950s was gradually coming out in English translations; Arthur Ransome’s Swallows and Amazons titles; most of the Greyfriars series featuring Billy Bunter; RL Stevenson’s Treasure Island and Kidnapped; a whole series of Edwardian animal novels with titles like ‘I’m Nick: A Yorkshire Terrier’s Story’, ‘Jerry: The Story of an Exmoor Pony’ and ‘Bellman the Beagle’; and André Maurois’ wonderful anti-war allegory of an underground world where the skinny take up arms against the obese, Fattypuffs and Thinifers.
I was still bored and lonely, though, and after six weeks in hospital, still not getting any better. I was pale and ill and losing weight. My mother asked the doctors to let me come home. They also decided that I seemed to have become immune to penicillin: she thought it was actively making me worse.
It was wonderful to be home, and my mother was right: I put on weight and started to look less deathly pale, though as it turned out my arm would still be in a sling for a long while. The plaster eventually came off, replaced with a splint, but the osteomyelitis had done its damage. The arm would never straighten again at the elbow, and the wrist end of the ulna was pretty much gone. It would become clear over the years that the radius continued to grow while the ulna remained foreshortened, so X-rays of my forearm show it as looking like a tensed longbow, with the ulna as the string.
I had just begun physiotherapy when the news came through from Australia: my beloved grandfather, Walford Manifold, had died suddenly while gardening at home in Victoria. He was sixty-seven, and there had been no warning. I had only known grandfather during a brief holiday he took with us in London, but I was devoted to him, and I remember crying for hours. So my poor mother, grief-stricken and in shock herself, also had to cope with a sobbing seven-year-old who would not be consoled. Soon we were on our way south to Australia, a country I half-belonged to in my mind but where I had never been.
Chapter 11
Not-So-Elysian Fields
MY IDEA OF Australia before my first trip there had been almost entirely shaped by old books: Mary Grant Bruce’s early-twentieth-century outback adventures, CJ Dennis’ A Book for Kids, We of the Never Never, The Magic Pudding, Blinky Bill, Snugglepot and Cuddlepie and more. My voice was that of a little English boy, but several of my friends and schoolmates were Australian, and, knowing I was half-Australian by birth and dreaming of a far-off literary Australian past, part of me wanted to be more like them.
I’d been bursting with anticipation of our first visit as we’d been planning a family Christmas, but the suddenness of my grandfather’s death changed everything. My mother’s youngest sister, Bindy (Belinda), had had coffee with him after lunch on the verandah of the family house, Mondilibi, that day, and told him she was just going to pop into the nearest town, Mortlake, to go shopping. She came back to find the place in shock, the men who worked on the farm embarrassed and not knowing how to tell her.
Grandfather had been working with Paul, the Yugoslav gardener, when he sat down with his back to a tree, said he didn’t feel too good, and asked Paul to fetch some water. When Paul came back with a glass, Grandfather was dead. We would all wish for ourselves a sudden and painless death, when it comes, but few of us would wish the attendant shock and grief on our loved ones. I know that myself now, having lost my own father that way.
&n
bsp; Mondilibi was a beautiful old homestead in the lee of a hill, with old trees and a large, well-tended garden designed by my grandmother, who had died in the year of my birth. By the time we arrived it was nearly November, warm and far drier than I was used to after Kuala Lumpur. It was very much outback Australia as I had imagined it reading books: horses and cattle and sheep, a big old shearing shed, a hot summer landscape. The paddocks stretched out across the Western District landscape, with only distant landmarks like Mount Elephant to orient you. It was my first taste of farm life, and I wanted to stay forever. Paul the gardener used to welcome me and my sister into his shed to eat buttered toast, drink from enamel mugs of hot sweet tea, and talk about Grandfather. Zoë remembers how Paul pulled his own tooth out when it got too painful, a lurid detail I can’t work out how I’d forgotten.
My mother’s other sister, Jill, had come up from Melbourne with her four children, Richard, Sarah, Margaret and David. And one day we went to meet older cousins nearby, who thrillingly had an ‘old bomb’—a 1930s car that was too old to register on the road, but which still ran—and they were allowed to drive it around the property, with us on the back. Dad, who’d stayed in KL to work, flew down for Christmas: my present was a complete cowboy outfit: Stetson, waistcoat with sheriff’s badge, chaps, and two chrome-plated plastic six-guns in their holsters.
But hanging over it all was a pervading sense of sadness and impending loss, which even at seven I could feel. This place I’d fallen in love with at first sight, my mother’s childhood home, had to be sold. Grandfather had had a son, Derek, but he’d died of meningitis when he was fourteen and my mother was just eleven, leaving her and her parents grief-stricken. Now Mondilibi was left equally to his three remaining children, all daughters. There were state and Commonwealth death duties to pay, and no way to keep the place going, so their only option was to divide up the assets and sell the property. So the months we spent there were tinged with melancholy: not just the grief of bereavement after the death of a much-loved parent and grandparent, but the sense of an ending for my mother and my aunts. After we went back to Kuala Lumpur, there would be no coming back to Mondilibi.
