Whatever Remains

by Penny F. Graham

  Part Five

  We had reached the very last toe. With a dramatic tweak of my very littlest digit, Father would grin at me and then recite:

  And this little piggie went wee, wee, wee, wee…

  Chapter 18

  The other side of the world, 1993

  The white wisteria vine flowered magnificently in the spring of 1992. As the morning kettle gently misted the kitchen window, I would look at the white blossoms spilling over and around the window and think of my ‘other’ family in Britain. As spring turned to summer and the blossoms dropped, carpeting the patio floor with drifting white petals, I became restless. I wanted to put a face to the name of my older sister Pat. I wanted to know if she looked like ‘us’. It was surely time to visit, even if this meant a journey to the other side of the world.

  Now that our four sons had left home to either further their education or travel, we were free to do our own thing. We had not been overseas since our year-long sojourn in the USA and Britain in 1984. I was 51, Lindsay a year older. It was time to pack up the house, air out the backpacks and make travel plans. Lindsay and I negotiated extended leave from our employers, organised a tenant for our home, packed a couple of large backpacks and by mid-March we were ready to go.

  We were off to the United Kingdom to meet my newly acquired half-sister and as many of my new cousins as I could find, and who wanted to talk to me. We would also stop off in Kuala Lumpur, the capital of Malaysia, to visit some of the places relevant to my family history. After Britain, we were to travel on to Ireland, France, Germany, the Czech Republic, Slovakia, Italy, the Greek islands, Turkey and then home to Australia. When I look back on that five-month trip, I wonder at our stamina, so many countries in such a short space of time.

  Kuala Lumpur was oppressively humid and very hot. I had not been back to the tropics since we had had a brief holiday in Bali and Singapore some 15 years before, and the almost solid wall of humidity that hit as we left the air-conditioned airport nearly stopped me in my tracks. As a child growing up in Singapore, I had never noticed the heat. I had obviously been too long in the relative cool dryness of eastern Australia.

  But the smells! The mixture of spices, frangipani blossom, damp earth and cooking smells from the roadside food stalls brought childhood memories rushing back. It was wonderful to just stand and let the aromas of my childhood waft around me.

  Kuala Lumpur is now a colourful and vibrant city. It was not always so. It had its origins in the 1850s, when a Malay Chief brought in Chinese labourers to open new and larger tin mines. They landed at the muddy confluence of two rivers, the Sungai Gombak and Sungai Klang and a shanty tin mining town sprang up. It was called Pengkalan Lumpur, which means literally ‘bundle of mud’. As time passed, the name changed to Kuala Lumpur meaning ‘muddy confluence’.

  Kuala Lumpur grew to become a busy trading post and frontier town. In its early days, it was plagued by diseases and constant fires and floods. Around the 1870s, the Chinese Kapitan of Kuala Lumpur, Yap Ah Loy, emerged as leader, and became responsible for the survival and subsequent systematic growth of this town. He is the one who began to develop Kuala Lumpur into an economic boom town.

  In 1881, a flood swept through the town following a fire which had earlier engulfed it. These successive problems destroyed the town’s structures of wood and attap thatching. From then on, all government and major buildings were constructed of brick and tile. A railway line increased accessibility for goods and people in and out of town. By 1896, Kuala Lumpur was chosen as the capital of the newly formed Federated Malay States. The now thriving city has not looked back.

  After settling into our hotel and sleeping off some of our jet lag, we started to explore the streets around our hotel. I would have passed through KL many times as a child, but I had never lived here. Tony, my eldest brother, was born here and it was here, or very close by, that my parents had first met.

  We first tried to find Rifle Range Lane. No recent map listed it, nor could anybody tell us where it may have been. I would love to have seen the house though I realised that, after all these years, it was unlikely to be still standing. Many of the street names had been changed after Malaysia threw off the cloak of British imperialism. Expansion of the city could also have eaten up many of the smaller roads. With new subdivisions, skyscrapers and its ultra-modern business centre, the old KL was hard to find.

  We wandered through the many open markets, taking in the glorious smells of the dried fish, the strange looking pickled vegetables and the mounds of dried mushrooms, lentils and unknown things lying in many coloured heaps. The smells would ultimately drive us with watering mouths to the nearest street food seller for a fix of fresh cooked pancake dipped in curry sauce, or a noodle or rice dish steaming on a banana leaf.

  Though most of the city was unrecognisable to me, I did remember the railway station, with its very distinctive ornate Victorian architecture. It looked a little shabby but a familiar sight from my childhood when the family would arrive from Singapore on our way to the hill stations of the Cameron Highlands. When the heat and build-up of humidity became too much to bear, many families travelled to the hill stations for relief. The mountain air was milder, the nights cool and prickly heat rashes and frayed tempers dissipated in the fresh mountain air.

  After a day or so looking around the city, we got a bit more adventurous. I wanted to see the old part of town, the not so flash parts away from the big modern apartment blocks and busy shopping precincts. So we took a bus trip to visit the Batu Caves some kilometres out of the city, passing through small villages with dirt roads and the old traditional houses of timber and attap. Most of the older, poorer, village houses are raised a few feet off the ground by timber poles to keep dry in times of flood and to help air circulate and keep the house cooler. It is these villages where chickens wandered at will, the women worked the small dusty vegetable gardens and the old men of the village sat on the front steps of their houses in shirt and sarong, smoking small aromatic cigarettes — this is the Malaya that my parents would have known.

  We arranged for a small tour operator at our hotel to drive us to Cameron Highlands where we were to spend a few days. We were to drive there in a small bus, our tour guide had said, but when the bus arrived it was more like an ancient rust-speckled dusty Kombi van. It was not until we had left the city behind us that we realised we were to be the only passengers. And later on, how glad I was of that. By midday, we had passed through the lowlands around KL and started the climb into the mountains. The old bus rattled and shook. On this bus there was no such thing as air-conditioning, just open windows that let in blasts of hot dusty air tainted with diesel fumes. No wonder we had been able to negotiate such a good price.

  As the roads got steeper, with many hairpin bends, twists and turns, my head started to ache and waves of nausea swept over me. The journey became a nightmare. With every shake and turn, my stomach would rebel and send wave upon wave of bitter-tasting nausea up my throat. By the end of that dreadful drive I had given up any pretence of modesty — when I could stand it no longer I would simply crawl to the permanently open door at the front of the van and vomit out onto the dusty road. How glad I was then that we were the only passengers!

  By late afternoon, we arrived at the small inn where we were to stay and I asked if there was a doctor who would see me. There was, and yes, he would see me even though the hour was late. His practice was not far from the hotel. By hanging on to Lindsay’s arm, I just managed to walk the few hundred metres to his rooms. He was in his middle years, pleasant looking and, I guessed, of Chinese origin. His English was excellent and when I asked him where he had learned such good English, he told me he had done his medical training at Sydney University. It is indeed a small world. I left his rooms clutching a small packet of pink pills which he assured me would, if two were taken an hour before travelling, do the job and get me back down the mountain.

  Next morning, despite the assurances of the kind doctor, I flatly refus
ed to get back into that horror of a van to do the ‘tour of tea plantations and places of local interest’ that we had paid for. Lindsay had to go alone. I went for a pleasant and nausea-free walk around the village instead.

  Nestled in green tranquillity, the three townships of Tanah Rata, Brinchang and Ringlet that make up Cameron Highlands are interspersed with dense jungle or terraced vegetable gardens and tea plantations. At a height of 1500 metres above sea level, the higher peaks of the Highlands are often swathed in mist and clouds. With its many farms, the area is also known as a major supplier of vegetables to both Malaysia and Singapore and is one of Malaysia’s prime tourist destinations.

  I enjoyed my leisurely walk, and Lindsay enjoyed his visit to the tourist attractions of the butterfly farm, strawberry farms, rose gardens, tea plantations and vegetable gardens. Each to his own, I thought, seeing him stepping jauntily out of yesterday’s instrument of torture. I had been quite content to stroll through the village and down to the magnificent golf course that I used to play on as a child.

  After lunch, I felt the need to do a bit of time travel — to take a walk down memory lane. So we walked to the end of a narrow lane, tucked away in a quiet corner of Tanah Rata, to visit a couple of beautiful old cottages that our family had stayed in many years ago. Starlight and Moonlight were mock Tudor double-storey cottages, dark beamed and mullion windowed. Each cottage is set in its own gardens, now neglected but still attractive. The hills above and surrounding the two isolated cottages are clad with dark thick jungle.

  We had stayed in both, but the one we children favoured was the closer to the lane, Starlight. As a child, we would roam the spacious gardens playing hide and seek and other children’s games. One morning, we came across large paw prints in the damp earth of the flower beds. They looked rather like the prints of a very, very large cat. Our parents told us they were the footprints of a tiger that had been on the prowl in our garden during the night. We were a little more cautious about venturing far from the house after that.

  We had another encounter with a tiger on that particular visit. While the whole family was out for a morning walk through a nearby tea plantation, we came across a large tiger resting among the tea bushes. Although he was lying on the ground, he was very much awake, watching us with interest through his golden brown eyes. We all froze in our tracks. Then Denis led us on, walking quietly and steadily to one side of the large beast. It had obviously fed recently because apart from a few twitches of its ears it made no motion to follow us.

  It was when we were staying at Starlight that we came across another smaller, but just as deadly, member of the jungle’s wildlife. A light brown snake lay snugly coiled in our bath one evening as we were herded in for our evening wash. It was a small but very lethal krait. We shuddered with dread as Denis told us that we were never to touch or go near this deadly little creature because, if bitten, we could be dead in minutes.

  After the war, when the family would make regular trips to the Highlands, there was an extensive British military presence in Tanah Rata. The soldiers were there to protect the large British-owned tea plantations and the European farmers and visitors from the rag-tag remainder of the once substantial communist army. Although the communists had been Britain’s allies during the Japanese occupation, they were now a thorn in her side. With Japan no longer the enemy, they were now hell bent on destabilising British rule. Many small pockets of men still roamed the Highlands causing mischief where, and when, they could. The small kindergarten and primary school that we all attended spasmodically always had military guards posted strategically around the playing fields and classrooms.

  On our last visit to Cameron Highlands in 1948, our car had been fired on by a group of communist guerrillas as we drove down the winding mountain road to KL. The Highlands may well have been a healthy place to take in the cooler mountain air, but it was a dangerous place to be in those turbulent years following the end of World War II.

  By the time my stomach had completely stabilised and I was feeling fit and well again, it was time to make the journey back down the mountain. I dreaded it! I took the pink pills, as prescribed, an hour or so before leaving, limited my liquids and hoped for the best. The best happened and the pills worked. I was relatively unaffected by the journey back to KL and kept those magic pills for other difficult occasions over the next few years.

  Chapter 19

  A pearl in a sapphire sea, 1993

  Our next port of call was Penang, a small island off the north-west coast of Malaysia. I had visited it only once as a small child many years ago. Penang had been a part of my mother’s, aunts’ and grandmother’s past and I wanted to return now, as an adult, to see the island and some of the places that had been important to them. After the experience of the bus trip from hell, this time we did it the easy way and flew. Looking down as we came in to land, the island of Penang sat like a pearl in a sapphire sea.

  In the 16th century, Portuguese traders from India sailing to the Far East in search of that precious commodity, spice, found a small island where they replenished their water supplies. They named it Pulo Pinaom. In the 17th century, Penang Island provided a sheltered harbour for Chinese, Indian, Arabian and European ships during the monsoon months; this, in turn, inevitably made it fertile hunting ground for pirates.

  Originally part of the Malay sultanate of Kedah, Penang was ceded to the British East India Company in 1786 by the Sultan of Kedah, in exchange for military protection from Siamese and Burmese armies who were threatening Kedah. In the same year, Captain Francis Light, to be known as the founder of Penang, hoisted the Union Jack thereby taking formal possession of Penang. He became the first Superintendent of the island and it is said that, to encourage jungle clearing, Light fired silver coins from his ship cannons into the dense vegetation, and the land was cleared in no time.

  Why is it that conquering nations inevitably despoil the countries they overrun? By the 19th century, Penang was used as a staging post for the opium trade between India and China. The East India Company auctioned off licences to gambling dens, brothels and opium traders.

  Same old story — extract the maximum profit you can, no matter the cost to the indigenous population.

  By 1826, Penang, along with Malacca and Singapore, became part of the Straits Settlements under the British administration in India, later coming under direct British rule in 1867 as a Crown Colony. Georgetown became the capital of the Straits Settlements but its status was soon supplanted by rapidly developing Singapore, whose importance eventually eclipsed Penang’s. Colonial Penang prospered through tin and rubber that fed the relentless demands of the Industrial Revolution in Britain. Penang’s prosperity attracted people from far and wide, making Penang truly a melting pot of diverse cultures.

  In 1941, with news of the imminent attack of the Japanese, the European population was evacuated, leaving the rest of Penang’s population to suffer under the Japanese occupation. This inevitably caused much disillusionment and injury to the British prestige and image of invincibility. Three and a half years of rule under the Japanese saw many of the local populace flee to the interior and the plantations to try to escape the oppressive rule.

  Despite its eventful history, the island has done well for itself in the last 40 or so years. It is a manufacturing hub with a strong and growing tourist industry. With its warm and sunny climate, beautiful beaches, great food and many scenic attractions, who wouldn’t want to spend time there?

  We stayed at a resort in Batu Ferringhi. Apart from its rather touristy aspect, it was a wonderful place to relax and enjoy the island. We would catch the local bus into the city to spend the day wandering the streets of Georgetown. Remarkably, its historic buildings survived virtually unscathed, despite heavy Allied bombings. Certainly the Georgetown of 1993 was a very gracious-looking city. Its ‘hawker food’, sold and eaten on the roadside, strongly featured noodles and fresh seafood and was delicious.

  One of the places I was particularly intereste
d in visiting was the Catholic convent and orphanage that my mother Nona and her two sisters had attended as children. Also, a friend of mine had, quite literally, been left on the steps of the side entrance when she was only hours old. Both my aunts and friend had horror stories of their treatment there, so I was interested to see if it was still in existence.

  It was, and is still, run by the same order of French nuns that first came to ‘save the souls of the little heathen children’ of this small tropical island so many years ago. Although some of the buildings were still being used as school rooms, many of the older buildings were closed as they had deteriorated to such an extent that the classroom ceilings were collapsing and the timber windows rotting away. One of the teaching nuns welcomed us and gave us a tour of the buildings that were still being used. The Order was, she told us, desperately in need of money to restore the condemned sections of the buildings and maintain the school, if not in the same manner as in its heyday, then at least in a small semblance of what it had been.

  We were shown through the large still stately main entrance and hallway to some of the functioning classrooms, then on to the school library. A musty damp smell shrouded the buildings, the walls peeling and patched with mould showed the extent of the lack of funds. I will never know whether my mother was happy at the school as she never spoke of it, but my eldest aunt had hated it with a vengeance. The stories she told of the cold impersonal way the nuns had treated my aunts as poor, possibly non-fee-paying children, were distressing. The years they had spent at the convent had been an unhappy experience with little learnt and a lot of misery remembered.