Playing for Malaya: A Eurasian Family in the Pacific War

By Rebecca Kenneison

Reggie, according to his niece Wendy, 'only told you what Reggie wanted you to know.' Reggie was my father. He had honed the technique of talking with apparent openness and using that talk as a decoy duck: while you were listening to it quack around the pond, you weren't noticing all the others hiding in the reeds. What follows includes tales that Reggie told repeatedly but, on the whole, it's about what Reggie didn't tell me.




 


So begins a stunning personal account of a Eurasian family living in Malaya. One of the many gaps in Reggie's account of his family was that his mother was Eurasian. When Rebecca Kenneison discovered this omission after his death, she set out to learn more about her extended family on the other side of the world. Her voyage of discovery is compelling in itself, but Playing for Malaya has a much larger purpose. Set in the 1930s and 1940s, it recounts the experiences of an extended Eurasian family during the invasion and occupation of Malaya by the Japanese. Colonial society considered Eurasians insufficiently European to be treated as British, but they seemed all too European to the Japanese, who subjected the Eurasian community to discrimination and considerable violence. Because many Eurasians, including members of the Kenneison family, supported the Allied cause, their wartime experiences are an extraordinary account of tragedy, heroism and endurance, presented here with great consequence and clarity.

• Language: English
• Publisher: National University of Singapore Press
• Release date: Jul 15, 2013
• ISBN: 9789971697327

Book preview

To

my daughters

Contents

Acknowledgements

Preface

…what Reggie wanted you to know

CHAPTER 1     Them, and Everybody Else

CHAPTER 2     Save the Bones for Gyp, Boys!

CHAPTER 3     Black or White or Green

CHAPTER 4     Your Sons are not English

CHAPTER 5     As British Soldiers

CHAPTER 6     What a Bloody Mess

CHAPTER 7     Us and Our Clothes

CHAPTER 8     A Headstrong, Stubborn Man

CHAPTER 9     … and Not to Leave Any Traces

CHAPTER 10    The Moss off the Stones

CHAPTER 11    Until You Get Caught

CHAPTER 12    The Blukar Hidden Graves

CHAPTER 13    The Indignities of a Coloured Skin

CHAPTER 14    Chopped Up in Johore

Notes

Index

Acknowledgements

Without the help and hospitality of numerous people, this book would never have been written.

I am particularly grateful to those members of the extended family who recounted their memories for me, and who fed and watered me when I was in Australia: Ray and Maureen Kenneison, Peter and Pam Mayo, Jacky and David Russell, George and Hyacinth Hess’e, Eileen and Lourenz Martenstyn, Jill and Des Woodford, Win Devlin, Noreen and Ian Fraser, Wendy Russell and Pam Hind. They gave me the key to a part of the story that I had never had access to before: I am always in their debt. I should also like to thank Mary Lourdes for her warmth and hospitality.

I am also grateful for the help, advice and encouragement of innumerable people, and for the information many of them generously provided. Two clearly stand out: Jonathan Moffatt for the promptness of his replies to appeals for assistance and for being such a fount of knowledge, and Mary Harris, who gave me extensive editorial advice as well as sharing her relevant research. Thanks are also due to Len Abbs, Felix Bakker, Kevin Blackburn, Peter Buxton, Chung Chee Min, Patrick Clancey, Don Clark, Di Elliott, Angela Frank, Rosemary Fell, J.E. Fisher, Tim Harper, John Hay, Fiona Hodgkins, Andrew Hwang, Robin Kalhorn, Damien Kenneison, Jennifer Kenneison, Don Kindell, Errol Leembruggen, David and Deanna Lloyd, David Man, Lynn Mayo, Beta O’Herne, Michael Pether, Matthew Richardson, Mary Anne Schooling, Peter Spence, Lynette Ramsay Silver, Jan Visser, Kirsty Walker, Derek Whatmore, Robin Wilshaw, Paul Wittmer, Dennis de Witt and Mervyn and Phyllis Woulfe. A letter, a book, a story, information posted on a website, a snippet of data, a contact: it might not seem much to the sender or lender or teller, but without all these sources, what I wrote would not have done the story justice. If I have overlooked anyone, I can only apologise.

The staff of Manningtree Library went beyond the call of duty, as did Rod Suddaby and his staff at the Department of Documents at the Imperial War Museum. I should also like to acknowledge the use of Crown copyright items held at the National Archives, and permission to quote papers held at the Imperial War Museum. I am also grateful to Paul Kratoska and Lena Qua at the NUS Press.

Every effort has been made, without success, to trace the holder of the copyright in the papers of Maj. I.A. McDonald and both the author and the Imperial War Museum, where the collection is held, would always be grateful for any information about this matter.

Without some help with photo scanning from Kath Lees and Ro Smith, and the toleration and patience of my husband and daughters, this would never have been completed.

Map of Place Names

The Kenneisons

The Whatmores, the Franks and the Mayos

Other Connections

Ernest Kenneison at Batu Caves, in the uniform of the bandmaster of the Federated Malay States Volunteer Force. (Reggie’s personal collection)

Ernest Kenneison, late 1930s. (Reggie’s personal collection)

Edith Joyce, Ernest’s first wife. (Photograph courtesy of Ray Kenneison)

L to R: Charlie, Donald and Bonnie Kenneison, c1935. (Reggie’s personal collection)

Violet and Ernest, probably mid-1930s. (Photograph courtesy of Ray Kenneison)

Ernest and Violet Kenneison with their first child, Reggie, in 1926. (Photograph courtesy of Damien Kenneison)

Ernest’s house at the Kenneison Brothers compound, Batu Caves. (Photograph courtesy of Lynn Mayo)

At Batu Caves, L to R: Maurice Mayo, Betty Kenneison, Winsome Mayo, Maurice Kenneison, Reggie Kenneison, Ronnie Kenneison, Geoffrey Frank. (Photograph courtesy of Winsome Devlin)

Freda Frank with seven of her ten children, Colombo, 1924. L to R: Merle, Eileen, Esme, Freda with Geoffrey on her knee, Barbara, Mignonne and Phyllis. (Photograph courtesy of Winsome Devlin)

Ronald Wilshaw, OC of the Light Artillery Battery of the FMSVF, in Trinidad before coming to Malaya. (Photograph courtesy of Robin Wilshaw)

L to R, Esme, Ray, Kit and Noreen, c 1940. (Photograph courtesy of Damien Kenneison)

Donald’s children: Betty and Ronnie stand behind Jack and Jill. (Photograph courtesy of Gillian Woodford)

Marriage of Charlie Kenneison to Doris Cropley, 1934. Back row, L to R: Ernest and Violet, Milly and Charles Oehlers. Middle row: Karl Cropley and Ivy Oehlers flank the bride and groom. Front row: Reggie and Maurice stand either side of the flowergirl. (Reggie’s personal collection)

Harry Buxton with three Iban, Sarawak, c1941. (Photograph courtesy of Peter Buxton)

Charlie with Jim, his eldest child. (Photograph courtesy of James (Jim) Kenneison)

Hyacinth La Faber and George Hess’e, c1946. (Photograph courtesy of George and Hyacinth Hess’e)

L to R: an officer identified only as ‘Hugh’ on the reverse of the photo, Ian McDonald and Jock Hunter, with Sgt. Henney’s legs in the background. Note the bottle of Johnnie Walker on the table. (Photograph by permission of The Imperial War Museum)

13 September 1945: the surrender is signed in the school hall of the Victoria Institution, Kuala Lumpur. (Photograph courtesy of Chung Chee Min)

Geoffrey Frank, complete with parachutist’s wings, 1945. (Photograph courtesy of Angela Frank)

Patrick Whatmore, c1925. (Photograph courtesy of Eileen Martenstyn)

Tilly Whatmore, c1925. (Photograph courtesy of Eileen Martenstyn)

Preface

…what Reggie wanted you to know

(Wendy Russell, nee Kenneison)

Reggie, according to his niece Wendy, only told you what Reggie wanted you to know.

This is the story of what Reggie didn’t want me to know, and an attempt to work out why he thought the way he did. It is also the story of an extended family, almost of a community, on which Reggie turned his back. The severance was not complete, but he must have been grateful for the patterns of migration that cast most of them ashore in Australia, while he was based in England.

Reggie was my father. He had honed the technique of talking with apparent openness and using that talk as a decoy duck: while you were listening to it quack around the pond, you weren’t noticing all the others hiding in the reeds. I only knew that his family had called him Reggie because it was written on the back of a single photograph, and because it was his half-brother Donald’s name for him. I met Donald exactly once.

My father made no sense at all: bad-tempered, extreme in his politics, intolerant and unpredictable. After he died, I started to gather the pieces and to put them together. I was helped in this by individuals too numerous to mention, who were generous with their time and their scholarship and their stories. Some of them were members of the extended family; others were total strangers whose lives lapped across with mine: a shared interest in the Malayan Volunteers, a witness to an execution. Everything from copperplate to emails.

I heard stories of my grandfather that my father had never so much as hinted at. He idolised his father, but the moment of my grandfather’s greatest heroism went untold. Reggie had his reasons for not telling me about that.

What follows includes tales that Reggie told repeatedly but, on the whole, it’s about what Reggie didn’t tell me.

Chapter 1

THEM, AND EVERYBODY ELSE

— Peter Mayo

My father knew many things that he never mentioned, particularly about his mother. Her given names were Lilian Violet, and he let me believe that she was known as Lilian, though he knew — it is impossible that he did not — that she was almost invariably known as Vi. Aunty Vi, Granny Vi, just Vi. He also must have known that she had a brother named Patrick; he might even have known the detail that Patrick was her half-brother but, curious as he knew me to be about his natal family and his early life, he never mentioned Patrick once. Patrick’s life would have been too revealing, Patrick would have told me far too much, and so he was, with utter finality, erased from my father’s stories of his life, just one erasure of several that Patrick suffered, for he had no children and he met his end in early middle age. Bar a couple of photographs, a few faded memories and a scatter of mentions in the newspapers, Patrick is gone, dissipated like blown dust. Hardly even a ghost, though the place where he died should be haunted like Hiroshima. Patrick’s death illuminates my father’s motives: it presented him with an equation he could not balance. But that comes later.

Although my father talked a lot about his childhood, he never told me that as a child, his family had always called him Reggie: as an adult, he had remade himself as Reg. He told his tales, and I slowly focused on the fact that he went around and around the same worn track. Paths led off in different directions, but he couldn’t be persuaded to follow them. My mother gave me a clear, coherent narrative of her family and herself; it wasn’t photographically accurate, but it was a good line drawing, coloured in and neatly labelled: here rural Sussex, here — c1900 — the pony Joey between the shafts of the dogcart, here — the 1940s — evacuation, rationing, thwarted academic hopes.

My mother would never have called herself a feminist (she was alarmed when I defined myself as such) yet, when forced to a decision, she was one. By example and direct instruction she impressed upon me that I should always use my vote; as she took me, so I now take my daughters when I walk through town to the polling booth. As she said to me, so I say to them: women were prepared to die that you should be able to do this, that you should be this free.

She was intelligent, kind, brisk and sometimes astringent. She had wanted to go to university, but her father put a stop to that: the household, he said, required her income, and that was the end of school. To this incident she traced many of the troubles of her life, including the destruction of her confidence by her husband, my father: social expectation, the certainty of utter penury and a strong sense of duty kept her tied to him when it was clear to her that any woman in a position to would have gathered up her pride and her child and left him.

So, despite her belief that a mother’s place was by the cradle, she informed me that I should seek for myself the best education that I could, and then acquire a skill or a profession, so that I would always be able to do what she had not felt herself equal to doing: to gather up my children and go. Stuck within range of the unpredictable volcano of my father’s temper, caught in the pyroclastic flows of his rages, and witness to his ruthless manipulation of her, I could see exactly what she meant.

She was kind to him, and I learned from her example that kindness can destroy its giver. It took me years to absorb this simple lesson and in the meantime I wasted a lot of effort trying to please and placate my father, before I realised that nothing I offered could ever be enough. Then I blamed myself for my incompetence as a daughter. I was approaching thirty before I stopped staring at the trees, stepped back and saw the woods, and realised that the problem wasn’t me. It was him.

Reggie told me all sorts of stories. He told me his half-brother Charlie had been killed by the Japanese on Java, but he didn’t tell me that the day of Charlie’s death was also his own sixteenth birthday. He was fond of co-incidences (the long arm of co-incidence was a phrase he liked to use) but he never pointed this one out to me. The facts of Charlie’s death are painful to live with. You can ignore them, or you can dwell on them, but neither course is the route to salvation, because there isn’t any, not from this.

Keen as my father was on co-incidence, neither did he make the observation that my eldest daughter was born on the anniversary of his father’s death, when the Giang Bee was shelled in the Banka Strait and a lifeboat, caught on a current, swept his mother and his niece away from the shipwreck and the drowning and, eventually, onto the beach at Djaboes and into more than three years internment on Sumatra.¹ But he didn’t know — of this I am sure — that my second child chose to make her appearance in this world on the anniversary of his parents’ marriage, Ernest James Kenneison to Lilian Violet Whatmore, 11 April 1925, in St. Andrew’s Cathedral, Singapore.²

I am also sure that he didn’t really know what had become of his eldest nephew, Ronnie, the one who was slightly older than he was: no one can be sure of that. But even so, Ronnie’s ghost must have been at his shoulder, whispering in his ear: "You too, Reggie, could have walked up the gangplank of the SS de Klerk." Like Reggie, who took forty years to make the journey, I have stood in the shade of the memorial at Kranji and studied the eleven letters and the two full stops, the stone remembrance of a man who was too young to have been in uniform in the first place, and who has no known grave. No survivor stories came out of Labuan, because there were no survivors.

He told me about his cousin Douglas, I am certain, because Douglas’s name set big bells echoing in my head when I heard it again, but he never told me what had happened to Douglas in Johore Bahru in the dark depths of the Japanese occupation. He would have known: everybody else does, Vi would have done. Vi would have said, Reggie…. And Reggie would have listened and heard and abolished. Douglas behaved with extraordinary determination and exemplary courage, but in my father’s narrative, that was not to be permitted.

He also told me one or two things about Douglas’s youngest brother, Geoffrey, but not the great heroic fact of Geoffrey jumping from the belly of a plane in 1945, into the empty air, back into Malaya, the surrender still unsigned, all bets still off. When I first heard the story I wondered if it could possibly be true: that Douglas was sent to Bahau by the Japanese, and Geoffrey by Force 136, the Asian arm of the SOE. Sure as hell, I thought, if they were both there, Douglas wouldn’t have been standing watching the white silk billowing open above his little brother: that’s just too cinematic to be true. Geoffrey would have come down to a drop zone on the fringe of the jungle, by night and the light of bonfires, and gone to the malarial hellhole of Bahau by land.

Whatever my father had told me of the two brothers, of Douglas and Geoffrey, it did not encompass this. He picked and chose his stories, testing them before he opened them up with his words, making sure that whatever would fly out when he lifted the lid would flap about in the pattern and the colours he required.

Reggie was always fulsome about his father, his hero, the man he lost when he was still a child. There never seemed to be any doubt, any queries, about his father’s background. Close investigation, though, revealed the inaccuracies of my father’s assumptions: the Old Man, Ernest Kenneison, was not, as my father had often claimed, of Scots extraction at all, but of solid Hampshire stock. Kennison is sometimes a Scots surname, but Kenneison never is: my father’s assumptions were fair enough, but they were wrong. My father’s facts about his father (born in Surrey, fought with the Leicesters in the Boer War, went to India with the army) were spot on.

About his mother, Reggie had far less to say, although she didn’t die until he was nearly thirty. I’d ask; he’d sit back in his chair, fag in hand, legs extended, and start off. Well, of course, she was born in Ceylon — in Colombo, I believe — but her father was a Protestant Ulsterman, worked on the railways, and her mother came from Wiltshire.

And I’d bat back: Did she have any brothers and sisters?

Oh, yes. There was Freda of course, and Ethel. They were in Kuala Lumpur too…

And who did they marry?

Freda married Harris Frank, Eurasian, black as the ace of bloody spades, damn great brood of kids they had, Mignonne, Merle, Barbara, Eileen. Couple of boys. And Esme, of course, married Bonnie — you know, the Old Man’s son by his first marriage. Gorgeous-looking girls they were. I can remember, as a little lad —

Uncle Bonnie? Esme married Uncle Bonnie?

Yes, him.

And where’s Uncle Bonnie?

God knows. KL, I suppose. Haven’t seen him since before the war. [In other words, for over forty years.]

And Ethel? Who did Ethel marry?

Ethel?

Your mother’s sister Ethel. You said she had…?

Oh, Ethel. Max Atwell.

Was he English?

No… He was Eurasian, I believe. Four girls, they had.

And their names?

Now you’re asking… Yvonne? Was Yvonne one?

And did she have any other sisters? Brothers? Dad? Your mother! Did she…?

Um… Maybe… back in Ceylon… Ruby? Don’t know.

When did she die?

Oh, God… 55, 56, somewhere round there. Buggered off to old Freda in Australia, and that was that. I said to her, you know you’re dying, so why not stay here with us, but she had to bloody go to bloody Freda.

And where are her kids? Freda’s kids?

No idea.

Even Esme?

No idea.

And Ethel and Max?

How would I know something like that? Go on, enough now.

Dad…?

Oh God, now what?

Your mum and her sisters… were they white?

Of course they were, I told you, their father —

I mean, if Ethel and Freda were white, why did they marry Eurasians?

God knows. No accounting for that bloody lot. Now push off.

And off I would push, thinking, and wondering. He had answered my questions, but he seemed to know frustratingly little. How could he have so few facts about his own mother? Probably born in Colombo. Probably married in Singapore. Probably died in Brisbane. Or Melbourne. Or somewhere, in bloody Australia. With bloody Freda.

I didn’t understand him. He kept us away from my mother’s family as much as he could, and the same applied to his own, even to my half-sisters, his older daughters: he ceased contact with them when I was five or six, and that was it for us, until he died when I was thirty-five. He made no sense to me at all. He was unpredictable in almost everything except his selfishness and even in that there were exceptions. The Christmas after my mother died, having just about lasted to the silver wedding, he was uncommonly kind and thoughtful. Ever after, he could not be relied upon to remember my birthday, or my husband’s, or those of our children, but erupted, spewing fury, if I forgot that of the woman with whom he had taken up within less than a year of my mother’s death. He charmed her: he could be extremely charming, so now I slit my eyes at charm, suspicious of what it might be being used to conceal. My father could paste up his charm like a clean sheet of paper, over the mess behind. He could lead and guide a conversation, pulling me off course until I lost my own thread.

I didn’t start making enquiries about his mother, serious enquiries, until he’d died. I put a feeler out, investigating her maiden name of Whatmore, and within a matter of weeks I picked up an email from a total stranger who happened to be making a study of the surname. He wrote of Violet, born in Ceylon, who had married a Kennison.… They sent their two sons, Morris (Maurice) and Reggie to England…. Is it possible that these names mean something to you and are you a descendant?³

Morris and Reggie. Reg and Maurice. My father and my uncle. A few letters and emails later, I stood staring into the mirror. I was thirty-six, and thinking, surely not? Me? Me? I held out my freckled arm for my own inspection, the news I had just received impossible to reconcile with the colour of my skin. You lying old bastard. You. Lying. Old. Bastard. Trust you to die before I could come to you with this. Tell me, Dad, about Emily de Silva. About Tilly Toussaint. About Patrick Whatmore. What happened to Patrick? Dad? Dad!

I had years of work ahead of me, letters and cards and emails and phone calls, to fit the bits together, to understand not just the family and community I belong to, but to try and comprehend him, his motives, his lies, the rot at the very core of our relationship. No wonder we had never got on, when he had set out, from the very start, to deceive me. And if, by some tiny chance, he wasn’t deceiving me on purpose then he was deceiving himself. Either way, it was rotten.

He never told you about us? said Win, all the way from Australia, the hurt in her voice coming the thousands of miles.

No, I said, hating having to make the admission and at the same time gratified to have found someone who would believe what I had to tell her about him for, even as I spoke, I was furious.

Well, said Win, with pain and disgust and an almost personal shame mingling in her voice. Much as neither of us liked the truth, I couldn’t lie to her, not after my father had lied so steadily to me. The names Palmer and Ross had rung around Reggie’s stories of his father’s compound, but the name Mayo, so far as I could recall, had never been mentioned at all.

Mayo was Win’s maiden name. While Palmer had been my grandfather’s business partner, and Ross had been his accountant, Bertie Mayo, Win’s father, had been the company secretary. His wife was my father’s cousin Phyllis, who had been born in Ceylon in about 1905. She had never featured in my father’s erratic lists of Freda’s children; Bertie Mayo had never been mentioned; their children had never been mentioned. Yet Phyllis had been there, living in Kuala Lumpur, all through my father’s childhood, and he would not have remembered a time before Win: Phyllis had delivered Win when he had been eight months old, late in the January of 1927. Win had been turning fifteen the day the bomb dropped away from the Japanese plane, right above her head, but Reggie had never told me anything about all that. When Win had been in her late twenties his mother (Vi, not Lilian) had lived with her; it had been Win who had accompanied Vi to Australia; Vi had been very frail by then, and Win cared for her diligently before surrendering her to Freda in Brisbane. All this was a part of the backstory to our conversation.

Why do you want to know all this? she asked me, tough and stringy and almost inquisitorial. It was the first time we had ever spoken to each other, and she wanted to get things straight. I felt my mind being cranked open far wider than I had expected, for her inspection.

Because … because there’s so much he didn’t tell me. He was just…. Nothing makes any sense. I need to know.

She didn’t say if she understood or not, but she started answering my questions.

In the end, though, I had to go to Australia: you can’t do these things over the phone.

We held each other, hand on forearm, and her face was far gentler than her direct questions had led to me to expect. We looked into each other’s eyes and the comfort was instantaneous. I knew then, without the words coming into my mind until months later, that blood was far thicker than water. Blood was like glue.

By the time I got to Melbourne, I’d had enough of queues, and there I was in yet another, waiting to be asked some quarantine questions, for my shoes had trampled English fields full of English cattle. I was exhausted, but excited: the threads were all starting to weave into a pattern. I was slowly finding out all the things I should have always known. Australia was the great leap, from theory into reality, from emails and letters and cards to actual people.

Out of customs and into Australia proper, and there was a welcome committee waiting for me, headed by my cousin Ray — who is also, confusingly, my second cousin.EN1 This is the tightest knot of all the family’s inter-relationships, and as I met Ray and his wife and one of his daughters for the first time, I was right in the middle, drawn up snug inside it.

Australia was an onslaught of relations, such as I had never known in my life before. I looked at hundreds of black-and-white photos, their owners sometimes worried that I would be bored by what they produced from handbags or pockets. I was never bored. I laughed a lot. Sometimes I nearly cried. Sometimes the family likenesses, of a jaw-line, of a hairline, of a whole face, were almost alarming.

Ray sat at the table exactly as my father used to, used his hands in precisely the same way when he spoke. He even looked like my father: taller, darker, but with the same face. Through the mannerisms he and my father shared, I could begin to discern my grandfather: his posture is visible in photographs of him and now I look at those photos and can see how that would translate into movement. Ray can remember him, Ernest, the Old Man, Kenno, Mr. Kenneison, but he died almost twenty-five years before I was born. Granddad, Ray called him, the pitch of his voice reminding me again of my father, though Ray is far more even-tempered and better natured than my father ever was. He spoke of our grandfather’s compound at Batu Caves as if it had been some sort of Shangri-La. Home, Ray said. I have always thought of Batu Caves as home.

I counted up when I left Melbourne: I’d met well over a dozen blood relations and even more by marriage, in the space of three days. On the plane to Brisbane, the man in the next seat made polite conversation with me. Visiting relations, was I? And a second cousin in Brisbane too? How long had he been in Australia? Since the late sixties, I said. Oh, said the man, he’ll be a dinkum Aussie now, then. Er, no. Not Peter.

Peter is passionate about his Australian nationality, but he’ll never sound nor think like a dinkum Aussie. Too much happened in his previous life for that ever to happen, and it was his previous life that he told me about one evening, in the comfortable living room of his house. We started off with a particular story about the years before the war, one of the most telling little tales, one that set the child Peter back on his heels.⁴

Colonial Malaya, mid-1930s: a number of cars were drawn up around the edge of the Kuala Lumpur padang, in front of the Selangor Club, waiting for a cricket match to start. Amongst the small crowd were Phyllis Mayo and her young son, Peter. The English touring team was returning from Australia and they had stopped off in Malaya to play a team put up by the Federated Malay States. The Malayan team was almost as white as the English one: it consisted of rubber planters, colonial administrators, tin miners, a school teacher and an accountant.

The accountant was Peter’s father, Bertie, the company secretary of Kenneison Brothers, a firm named by my grandfather in great hope for the future of his sons. The company compound lay 8m north of Kuala Lumpur, about a mile from the main road which ran on, through a gap in the hills, to Ipoh and Penang. Peter and his family lived there, and enjoyed the full use of the facilities, including a clubhouse and a large sports field. Peter was to carry his passion for cricket into his adult life and whatever differences of opinion he was to have with his father, he would always respect his prowess on the pitch. Bertie was an exceptional bowler: he was — to quote his son — reputed to be able to land the ball on a five cent piece and swing it both ways.

Life for Peter was comfortable and secure. For the first seven years of his life he was cared for by his amah, who loved him and whom he loved in return. He, his siblings and the children of the other salaried employees had the run of the company compound. There was no shortage of playmates, no shortage of space: like Ray, he loved the life at Batu Caves: an absolute pristine place to grow up in.⁵ There was even a river nearby, in which the boys went to swim, although they were not allowed to. He went to school in Kuala Lumpur and enjoyed it enormously. By the day of the cricket match, if any clouds had crossed his firmament, they had not been big ones. He considered that no human in the history of the world was born better than me.

His mother, Phyllis, was a loving and affectionate woman; she wanted to see Bertie play, and she knew that cricket-mad Peter did as well, so she left her other children behind, put Peter in the car and drove him into town to watch.

England won the toss and elected to bat. The hard red ball and the honour of the Federated Malay States were in the hands of Bertie Mayo. Bertie, feeling the settling heat of the day, would have weighed up the opposition, looked around him at the green grass, at the elaborate Moorish domes of the enormous Federal Secretariat along the edge of the padang, and the mock-Tudor architecture of the Selangor Club, at the dust lifting from unsurfaced laterite roads. It’s quite possible that he took none of it in, that he didn’t notice his wife by the family car, and the young son who was so eagerly watching him. His focus had to be the ball and the batsman. He steadied his grip on the red leather, and he started to run.

By the end of the morning, he had dispatched three wickets, both the openers and the number three. A break was called, and the cricketers trailed towards the Selangor Club to eat their lunch.

A few minutes later, young Peter got the shock of his life. He noticed that all the cricketers had gone inside, to the laid tables and the white linen. All, that is, except two: his father and one other man were eating on the steps outside. He turned to his mother and demanded that she tell him what was going on, why they were not allowed in the clubhouse even though they were playing for Malaya.

Phyllis must have been expecting this question, out of the shelter of the company compound. This is the system we live under, she told him. We have no choice, we must accept it, this is how things are.

One of the men on the steps, the teacher Lall Singh, was an Indian. The other, Bertie Mayo, was a Dutch Burgher. Everyone who had gone inside to eat was white, and the two on the steps were not.

British Malaya was brutally stratified by race. This stratification, and the attitudes which underpinned it, was to shape the fate of the family in ways that no one could ever have expected. Had the family been white, Peter’s grandmother, Freda, would not have had to travel south from Kuala Lumpur a decade later to identify the bodies of her younger brother and her sister-in-law.

Family is a tricky concept, once you decide to look beyond that tight little nuclear knot of parents and children. When do you move from family to clan? Do you count relations by marriage? Do you include their relations? And no matter how you decide to define it, where a family begins and ends is a moveable feast, depending entirely on who you put in the middle. It’s like shifting a paper pattern across a piece of fabric, or selecting which part of a detailed aerial photograph you intend to simplify into a map.

The family that figures here has been defined in the widest terms, with my grandparents at the core. It seems to me fair enough to do it that way, since the community of which they were a part was interconnected and close: people knew each other, worked with each other, played sports together, some of them went to school together. They were often related, by marriage if not by blood: surname links to surname, Kenneison to Cropley to Oehlers to Aviet