The Naked Past

The Naked Past

To say we’re a product of our past and therefore unaccountable in some way for our present seems to be too ready and easy an excuse nowadays. But you know, sometimes you get the chance to sit back and observe the roll of the dice and wonder what difference you might have played even if you could. Sure, it doesn’t mean you have to wallow in it but it also doesn’t mean everybody is going to stand and applaud as you flick off the mud and begin again all fresh and clean.

Picture if you can, a young family. The mother, demure in her manner yet defiant in her beauty and its impact on those around her. Her husband, tall and straight shouldered with kind eyes, a gentle presence and a purposeful air. There are two children as well. Identical twin girls. Five years old with long blonde curls tumbling down to their waists and an overflow of mischievous energy.

The family lives in a big white house on the edge of a city that resonates with movement day in and day out. Of late the movement has been getting increasingly jagged, almost frenetic in its energy. The children can sense something and the parents have put off thinking about what they know they must but can’t bring themselves to do. This is Singapore, a few weeks shy of the fall. It is 1942.

Eventually, action is forced on them. All non-essential personnel, women and children are to leave the country. An invasion by the Japanese army is imminent. The wife worries about their family, their house, their friends and their lifestyle. She worries about these things because in doing so she distracts herself from worrying about her husband. As a senior engineer in the power plant, he is required to stay. To contemplate that makes her ill, so she doesn’t.
When he stands at the dock and reassures her and the children he will see them in Australia she pretends not to hear him. Instead she continues to issue orders to him as to the contents of the house, how to package them correctly and which family member in Malaysia to send them to. He nods at her whilst committing to memory images of his children playing hide and seek on the ship’s filthy deck amidst the trunks and luggage of other disrupted lives. It is an ineffectual and disturbed parting for him punctuated only by the ship’s languid movement away from the dock and the twins excited waving of “Papa, bye Papa” over the railing. His wife’s eyes just stare at him with sadness and knowing.

They did all see each other again but not in the manner they had hoped. The ship carrying the wife and children did set sail in a southerly direction towards Australia and the mother did actually start to entertain thoughts of a strange desert land at the bottom of the world and how it might be to live in it. Its strange animals even started to find their way into her children’s bed-time stories which had the children squealing with excitement and fantasising about having a baby kangaroo for a pet. But, then the ship was bombed outside Java and its passengers were roughly hurried ashore by Japanese soldiers and made to walk until their feet blistered and their lips and skin burnt and they’d reached an internment camp near Bandung. They lived in that camp for three years. They’d pick fleas and lice off each other to pass the time and occasionally during bouts of beriberi in the camp they’d poke each other’s bloated skin and count the seconds it would take for the indentation of their fingers to rise. They made games and just made do as children are wont and able to in such situations.

A few weeks after liberation when the allied planes had flown overhead and dropped leaflets at their feet warning them not to leave the camp until allied soldiers had arrived, POW men from a neighbouring camp started appearing at their camp’s fence. They would shout the names of their wives and children and wait in dreadful anticipation for a response.
One day a man appeared calling for “Gertie and the twins”. His call was heard by someone who shared a cabin with them and, because the man was sick, he arranged with the person to get Gertie and the girls to meet him at that point in the fence at the same time the next day.

The next day at the arranged time, my mother and my aunt saw their father again. My grandmother kissed her husband’s lips. My mother tells me that now, with the wisdom of reflection and age she recognises how very sick and mistreated he had been. In fact he had been tortured and starved and was feverish with the beginnings of malaria. Yet, for that moment in her child-like perception of the world, her dad was a super-hero. He still stood tall and strong and ripped the bamboo barriers out of his way so his children could jump into his arms. She tells me she can still remember that feeling of being wrapped up in them and that they felt as strong as they had in the memories of him that had filled her days in the camp.

I’d like to say they all lived happily ever after but, as we all know, real life doesn’t often work like that. War stained my family. It left its mark in mental illness, depression and alienation. It influenced dangerous choices in marriage partners and life, it left a legacy of guilt, shame and sorrow and it still provokes pain over disclosures that are only able to be aired when the person for whom it involved, is dead. I wish it could have been different in how its effects played out for my family but it isn’t. To even wish it hadn’t happened, in the face of those who survived, seems wrong. Such is the double bind of the violent past with its impressions on our present. It doesn’t heal and it doesn’t get better. It does however, eventually, go numb.