Tales of courage

The sun is shining. My washing hangs outside for once. I can’t imagine it will do much more this year.

I’ve started a new novel, “A Flower that’s Free’ by Sarah Harrison. It’s a sequel to her novel “The Flowers of the Field”, which was set in the 1910s and the build up to, & subsequent horrors, of the First World War. I found that a fascinating book, the more so as it was partly set in Austria & Vienna, where I was looking forward to visiting at the time. This second book is clearly going to be a similar thing. The main action starts in 1936 & presumably will continue through to the Second World War.

The story begins in Kenya. A child arrives in this unfamiliar country to be adopted by a white couple, the main characters in the previous novel. As the child makes the long sea, rail & cart journey, only accompanied by a woman she’d never met before she was despatched on the journey, I find myself thinking back about my mother.

 

She set off for Malaya in 1938 to marry a man she was engaged to but hadn’t seen for a full year. The company my father worked for were only prepared to ship out already married wives. Fiancé(e)s had to establish that their relationship would survive a full year with only written communication before they were shipped out. Engagements don’t always end up in marriages even in the most benign conditions & Malaya was a very different country from England. It was felt most women would just turn round & come straight back, unable to cope with the climate & life in Malaya.

I can’t help thinking it must have taken some courage to set off, just in your twenties, to travel for months alone to marry a man you haven’t seen for a year in a country you had no real idea of what it would be like. In those days there weren’t innumerable films & TV programmes set in such far off countries. Even books were illustrated in black and white. Although that might give you an idea of what lay ahead, it wouldn’t give you the impression of the vibrancy of colour, the humid heat, that is Malaya. It can’t of helped when she first re-met my father, who was by then just over 5 stone, having had a bad bout of yellow fever, with a letter from England to tell her that her beloved father had died while she was sailing half way across the world. I wish she had lived until I was of an age to appreciate such courage. Unfortunately she died when I was just 23.