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| ISBN-13: | 9781742242668 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | UNSW Press |
| Publication date: | 05/19/2017 |
| Sold by: | Barnes & Noble |
| Format: | eBook |
| Pages: | 240 |
| File size: | 2 MB |
About the Author
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White Butterflies
By Colin McPhedran
University of New South Wales Press Ltd
Copyright © 2002 Colin McPhedranAll rights reserved.
ISBN: 978-1-74224-266-8
CHAPTER 1
The Beginning, or Was It the End?
I remember the moment. We had disposed hungrily of our school breakfast of porridge and limp toast thinly coated with Palmboter, a dairy substitute made from palm oil. We waited silently for the white-sheeted Brother of the Sacred Heart Order to finish his meal.
It was December 1941.
Brother Fulbert sat on a dais at the end of the refectory eating his traditional breakfast of German sausages and fried eggs. Then he mopped his tobacco-stained moustache and beard and looked up.
In a gargling voice, typical of the German brothers at St Paul's, he announced, 'All students are summoned to the courtyard for an important announcement by the principal Father.'
I turned to my closest friends, a Burmese boy named Alfie and an Indian Muslim called Huq, who shared my misery at boarding school in Rangoon.
'What's this all about?'
They shrugged their shoulders. It was not unusual for the principal to appear on the balcony to address the school. He loved the sound of his own voice. The dining room emptied and we took up our positions to march in Indian file to the courtyard. One thousand thoroughly bored students stood, eyes fixed on the head in front, and waited for the proclamation from on high. I looked about and noticed a few of the favoured boys – the teachers' pets who sneaked about the school gathering information on the rest of us – looking upwards in anticipation of a stimulating announcement from the principal master.
It seemed an eternity before he strode out on to the balcony. The proceedings began with everyone chanting the customary, 'In the name of the Father ...' and crossing our chests. He talked about the dedication of the brothers and teachers, then rambled on about the war.
'You are all aware that the war being waged in the peninsula south of the country has taken a turn for the worse. Now we are informed by the military authorities of the threat of a Japanese invasion of Burma, and the probability of air raids over Rangoon.'
This grabbed our attention. We all knew that the Japanese had bombed Pearl Harbour, in Hawaii, on 7 December. Two days later, the pride of the British navy, the battleships Prince of Wales and Repulse, had been sunk in the Straits of Malacca, off Singapore.
'In view of the present situation,' he said, 'we have decided to close the school. Your families have been informed.'
A huge cheer arose, but I couldn't help glancing quickly in the direction of the favoured boys. I nudged Alfie.
'I get the impression they aren't displaying quite the same enthusiasm as the rest of us,' I whispered.
Then I realised that this meant the end of my worst experience of schooling. The world was being torn apart but I, aged 11, was simply overwhelmed with the joy of escaping St Paul's and going home.
The school was known to every school pupil in Burma as the 'chota [small] gaol'. It was strict and regimented like an army barrack. The slightest freedom of speech or action was never tolerated. The rules seemed designed to produce zombies. The school also pandered to wealthy parents, with boarders segregated into three distinct classes.
My older brother Robert and I were first-class boarders, the privileged ones with separate dormitories and dining rooms. The meals were of poor quality and anybody who complained was spoken to sternly. I felt sorry for the boys who were less fortunate than we were. Boys in the second and third classes often had to put up with eating our leftovers. They pleaded with us to eat everything in our dining room.
'We're so tired of being fed on stale bread and reconstituted curries. If you eat all yours, they might give us something fresh.'
The most loathsome aspect of St Paul's was the ritual of the morning bath time. The ablutions block was a long tin shed with a concrete floor. In the middle, a trough full of cold water stretched from one end to another. Each boy was supplied with a tin bucket.
Every morning, even in the coldest weather, we had to line up naked and at the sound of a whistle from the priest overseeing all the naked boys, we dipped into the water and wet ourselves. Another whistle and we had to stop and soap our bodies. The last whistle permitted us to dip into the trough and wash the soap off. Any boy going beyond the whistle was punished. It was a ridiculous and cruel ritual, and we were helpless. The priest in charge leered at our naked bodies as he regulated every movement by the whistle.
Our class mistress was an Anglo–Indian lay teacher called Miss Stevens. She had a sharp tongue and I was often the victim of her broadsides. I suffered her barbed criticisms of my work, but most of the time I let them go over my head and drifted along with my schoolwork.
Having two good friends in Alfie and Huq made my life just bearable. Boredom overwhelmed me most of the time. The only time I was happy was in the playground.
My brother Robert was an adaptable person and had settled in to the school much better than I. He seldom complained. He was a top student and the family was justifiably proud of him, as was the school. Since the exams in the higher grades were public, the Protestant and Catholic schools competed to produce the brightest students. Robert was a prize as far as the Catholics were concerned and they showed him special attention. The fuss did not concern him at all. He did what he had to do.
One day when he returned from a public scholarship exam I asked, 'What was it like?'
'It was as easy as pissing off a bridge,' he told me and my awed friends. He did not mean to brag, but he did truly find school lessons easy and interesting. Robert was held in high esteem by the priests.
'Why can't you be more like your brother?' they asked me.
I did not like the constant comparisons, but I was never jealous of Robert's achievements. I was proud of him and looked up to him.
We dispersed enthusiastically, without waiting for instructions from the grimfaced wardens who had lorded it over our very souls. As the three of us walked back to the dormitory together I had a premonition that our lives would change forever. Yet I would have laughed in disbelief had anyone told me that the day's events would lead me to live my adult life and raise a family in Australia, a country I knew only as part of a geography lesson.
I did not think about the fact that history was being made or what the war meant for our country. My spirit rallied. I would soon be reunited with the person I loved most – my mother – and the many friends I had been forced to leave behind in Central Burma when my father had decided arbitrarily to move Robert and me away from our mother's influence to the strict jurisdiction of a Catholic boarding school.
Born in September 1930, I was just 11 years and three months old when the school closed down. I had been at St Paul's for just over a year.
We were an Anglo–Burmese family. Our father, Archie, was a Scot who had come to Burma in the 1920s with the Shell Burmah Oil Company. Soon afterwards he married my mother, Daw Ni, a young, educated woman from a scholarly and well-regarded Burmese family whom he had met through the strict Plymouth Brethren church, to which they both belonged.
At first the family had lived in Insein, a suburb out of Rangoon, in the south of Burma. The oil company frowned on European employees who had native wives and families and did not permit them to share the company houses at Syriam. This was the company's base across the river from Rangoon, where there was a huge oil refinery.
Donald was the eldest child. Ethel was second, Robert third and I was the youngest. After I was born the family moved to Maymyo, a hill town about 3000 feet above sea level in Central Burma, not far from the old capital of Mandalay.
Maymyo was the summer seat of government, an affluent hill station where the British governor and his officials went to escape the heat of Rangoon summers.
Jamshed Villa, the house our father bought in Maymyo, had once been the summer residence of an Indian industrialist, Tata, whose business was based in the Indian city of Jamshedpur.
It was a comfortable brick dwelling, surrounded by beautiful gardens and with a sweeping curved driveway. There was a big oak tree at the front, and purple bougainvillea trailed over a shelter a little way from the house. Canna lilies, African daisies and Arum lilies grew like wildfire, and I remember dahlias flowering every year. My mother's pride and joy was her rose garden, where she cultivated many species. She always said, 'I love roses the best.'
My father remained living and working in the south. He travelled the 400 miles to the Shan States several times a year to see us. We visited him in Rangoon at least once a year. The arrangement did not seem to worry my mother and I never questioned it.
'I prefer to be away from the social scene,' she always said. 'I am content to raise my family with the country people of my home province.'
Before marrying my father, she had graduated in Arts at the University of Calcutta. Pushed to decide on a career by her two cousins, one a lawyer and another an academic at the University of Rangoon, she had chosen to go into education and, as she put it, to 'help the masses'.
She thus followed in the footsteps of her forebears, the Mon tribe, who for centuries had been the educators in Burma. Although she gave up her job with the Department of Education when Donald was born, she never really stopped teaching. In her spare moments she gave English lessons to her servants' children and those of her less well-off relatives.
My father, on the other hand, never stopped learning. He was a compulsive student of languages and spoke and wrote in many. It was in expressing himself in the spoken Burmese that he had the greatest difficulty. Whenever he spoke at a Gospel service in the native tongue, even I had a problem grasping everything he said. It was no fault of his that the burring speech of a Scot did not suit the soft tonal sounds of Burmese. Their most pronounced consonant, 'R', does not feature in the Burmese alphabet.
'If you had been born a Welshman, we would all understand you better!' my mother used to say.
He was single-minded and loved setting benchmarks in achievement for those around him, but whether he set the same standards for himself was another matter. Early on he had mapped out the future careers of his children and he kept closely in touch with our development by correspondence.
'Och, Donald will become a doctor,' he used to tell people. 'Ethel will go into education and Robert will join the Foreign Office.'
I had been left out of the calculations until I grew older.
My mother travelled the 400 miles down to Rangoon to accompany us safely home from school. She looked young and beautiful as she stepped out of the oil company car and greeted Robert and me with tears in her eyes. She tossed back her long black hair.
'I'll never let you children go again,' she said as she hugged us.
She added afterwards, 'Apay [father] couldn't come to see you off. He has a pressing engagement.'
Ethel's boarding school in Rangoon, the Diocesan girls' school, had also closed down. She did not travel with us by train, because a young man who was sweet on her had offered to drive her home to Maymyo. He was a young cadet officer called Noel whom she had met in Maymyo. His family too were Anglo–Burmese, very nice people. He was Ethel's first boyfriend and the arrangement to drive her home was made without my father's knowledge.
When he found out a day or so later, he was furious. He wrote sternly to my mother in Maymyo.
'Ethel is not to see Noel again. His family is unsuitable.' I remember Ethel crying her heart out.
'Why would he say that?' she kept saying.
We spent the night with our relations in Rangoon and caught the morning train to Maymyo. The train was packed with people fleeing the impending attacks by Japanese planes. This was the first time I had seen refugees and it never occurred to me that I might become one myself. Observing their sense of urgency gave me my first inkling that the situation in Rangoon was truly ominous, but I barely noticed it in my eagerness to get home. My mother was brimming with happiness, and so was I.
Our reserved compartment was roomy and comfortable. Before the train departed, Mother felt sorry for the poor passengers fighting for a place on the train. She spotted two women with young children on the platform trying to get on board. One, carrying a baby, was barely more than a child herself.
My mother leant out of the window and said in Burmese, 'Where are you going?'
'To the country, to get away from the bombs,' the older one replied.
'Well then, we have plenty of room. We would be delighted if you would join us.'
They did.
The baby was crying and restless and the young mother did not seem to know what to do.
My mother gently said, 'Perhaps you would like to feed your baby.'
Straight away, like an obedient child, the young girl pulled out a breast and gave it to the baby, who drank happily and then fell fast asleep.
After that we all travelled comfortably together. They got out somewhere in Central Burma and we went on to Maymyo.
We arrived at night and were greeted by a host of my mother's servants and their friends. They were overjoyed to have us back in town.
'We have all missed you very much!' our cook said with a broad smile, and added quietly, 'But not as much as your mother did.'
The first air raid hit Rangoon at 10 am on 23 December, within days of our departure. Seventy Japanese bombers attacked the airport, the docks and the city. The school building survived the war.
CHAPTER 2Maymyo
'Since the schools in the Shan States have not closed,' my mother said, 'I have enrolled you in your old school, to start when the new term begins.'
In the meantime, I was back in my beloved Maymyo and our house came alive. Friends flocked back and the holidays were full of adventure.
The Japanese army was winning every battle against the British and Indian troops, but it meant very little to me. I was just a happy lad who had returned home at long last.
The British had built government offices and stately homes for themselves in Maymyo. The town was also a fashionable summer retreat for rich Burmese and Indian families. The British had established beautiful botanical gardens and the well-to-do part of the town was set in gentle, rolling green hills.
Our house was in Circular Road on the edge of the jungle. Occasionally tigers prowled right inside our back garden. They helped themselves to our dogs on more than one occasion, much to Robert's distress.
The familiar surroundings and faces I loved and had missed so much were all there. Everything moved along comfortably, despite the gloomy news from the war front. The garden looked beautiful. The Japanese cherry trees lining our driveway were blossoming and soon there was a massed backdrop of pink. Even the animals seemed happy to have us back. The ducks, geese and chickens were all getting fat and the ponies had been well groomed and fed. Robert's favourites were Molly and her foal, Cross Bun, who had been born on Good Friday. Robert, who was 13, and Ethel, 16, were both keen riders.
Picnics were the order of the day and we took trips with our friends to Anisakan, Elephants Falls and many other favourite spots. Our cousins on our mother's side, the Thwins, were staying with us and every room in our house was full.
The Thwins came from Namtu, a mining town on the Chinese border. Their father was the district commissioner of police and active in the fight against the opium traders. Uncle Thwin was my mother's only brother and she educated his seven children, one after another. Whoever was of the right age would come and live with us. She taught them to read and write English well enough to gain entry to an excellent English-language school, St Michael's. She also taught them music, and they became a fine bunch of musicians. Ethel, too, had remarkable musical talent. I remember her as a young girl of 10 or 12 sitting beside my mother at our old German walnut piano, the candle holders swung out to light the music for their duets.
Another favourite spot was the Goteik Gorge. The bridge across it was reputedly the highest rail bridge in the world and was on the rail link to the Chinese border. Viewed from the caves below, the trains appeared like tiny toys as they slowly crawled overhead.
In the markets the familiar shopkeepers were delighted to see the family back in town. The old Indian rice-seller was still there, sitting cross-legged and beaming at his customers. He was very fat and never seemed to move from his position among the bags of rice. Buying rice is an art.
'Smell this one, Memsahib, this is very special,' he would say to my mother in Hindustani, offering her handfuls of the different types of rice he had on display in big, open sacks. She would put the grains to her nose thoughtfully before making her purchase.
'Always smell the rice before buying it. The older the rice, the better the quality,' she had told me ever since I could remember.
Home was a short distance away but we always rode in a horse-drawn carriage. Fights would break out frequently among the drivers, to see who could win my mother's business.
Yet the appearance of normality around the town was deceptive. People in the streets whispered to one another.
(Continues...)
Excerpted from White Butterflies by Colin McPhedran. Copyright © 2002 Colin McPhedran. Excerpted by permission of University of New South Wales Press Ltd.
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Table of Contents
Contents
Acknowledgments,Maps,
Foreword,
PART I: THE TREK,
1 The Beginning, or Was It the End?,
2 Maymyo,
3 To Myitkyina,
4 At the Airstrip,
5 The Walk Begins,
6 The Last Outpost,
7 To the Patkoi Range,
8 Monsoon,
9 The Naga Village,
10 Looking Back,
11 Moving On,
12 White Butterflies,
PART II: MOTHER INDIA,
13 Hospital,
14 Calcutta,
15 Getting Away,
16 Bangalore,
17 Family Life,
18 Growing Pains,
19 A Fresh Start,
20 School Days,
21 War Is Over,
22 White Flowers,
23 Out of India,
PART III: EAST TO WEST,
24 Father's Land,
25 My Father's Other Life,
26 Bound for Botany Bay,
27 Australia,
28 Another Hill Station,
Afterword,
About the Author,