Ghostwritten (7 page)

‘What a romantic story,’ I said wistfully. ‘I shall love
writing about it. We’ll also talk about your life in Cornwall. Does that all sound okay?’

‘It sounds fine,’ Klara replied. ‘Except for one thing.’

‘Yes?’

‘I’ll find it extremely difficult to talk about some of the things that happened during the occupation. I’ll talk about the historical facts, of course, and about the kinds of things that people suffered.’

‘During internment, you mean? In the camps?’

‘Yes. But there are some things … particularly towards the end, in the last camp that we were in, Tjideng. I don’t think I’d be able to find the words to describe what we … what I …’ She inhaled, judderingly.

‘Klara,’ I said gently, ‘you don’t have to talk about anything you don’t want to. Memoirs can take people into quite dark emotional territory. But it’s up to you how far, or how deep, you want to go. You have to feel comfortable with what you say.’

‘Yes.’ She swallowed. ‘I do.’

‘So you’ll see the manuscript before it’s printed, and you can add any further stories or reflections; and I can delete anything that you’re unhappy about, or regret having said.’

‘Really?’

‘Yes. So don’t worry. This is
your
story. You’ll be in control.’

Klara gave a little sigh of relief. ‘I’d been feeling quite apprehensive, but that does make me feel … better.’

‘I’m glad. I want you to be comfortable. So …’ I put my pad on my lap, then turned off my phone. ‘Are you ready to start?’

Klara took a deep breath and folded her hands in her lap. Her eyes were steady on me. ‘I’m ready.’

As I pressed ‘Record’ I felt the frisson that I always feel when I begin a new memoir.

‘Klara, could you tell me what your earliest memory is?’

Klara

My earliest memory is of the little
tjik-tjaks
, dainty beige lizards that used to run across our sitting room walls. I used to stare at them as they zipped about, mesmerised by their miraculous ability to cling to vertical surfaces, and even ceilings, without falling off. They were called
tjik-tjaks
because that was the noise that they made, and we loved them, because every night, when the lamps were lit, they would eat the mosquitos that might otherwise have given us malaria. Less welcome were the snakes that would sometimes slither across our verandah, especially during the rains. I remember once seeing my mother throw boiling water over a deadly black-and-yellow krait. I stood in the doorway while she did this and, with appalled delight, watched it writhe.

My mother told me, before we left Holland, that we were going to live in a faraway land that was warm and colourful – an ‘earthly Paradise’, I remember she said.
To me this description seemed to be true. From our windows we could see mountains that were swathed in jungle that was every shade of green, yet was also filled with the hot pinks and reds of hibiscus, bougainvillea and oleander. These flowers not only looked gorgeous, they attracted butterflies – scarlet and yellow, emerald and black, burnt orange and shimmering blue.

When we first got there, I’d lie in bed, unable to sleep because of all the weird noises of the tropics – the trilling of crickets, which was always especially loud at night, or the sudden shriek of a bird or a
boedung
, one of the monkeys in the rubber forest that surrounded our house. Sometimes there’d be the howling of pye-dogs, and the strange, guttural cries of the
tokeh
, large stripy salamanders that sounded like frogs. If you heard the
tokeh
seven times in a row you could make a wish; so I’d listen to their croaks, and would get upset if I lost count and had to start all over again.

Our house was large, single storey, like most houses in the East Indies, and built of brown brick with a roof made of curved red tiles. It had a circular drive and low, wide steps on which my mother placed pink and white orchids in big pots. All the rooms had high ceilings and ceramic floors, which were polished with slices of coconut tightly wrapped in muslin. I still think of this house as my childhood home.

Around the sides of the house were covered walkways called
empers
, and behind it was a smaller house called a ‘pavilion’ in which were the kitchen, the
gudang
or storeroom, plus the washing facilities, bathroom and loo. We had an enormous garden, in which was a banana palm, a mango tree, a cherimoya and, at the end, a big
waringin
– an Indian fig, with a thick, rippled trunk and long aerial roots. Bats roosted in that tree. At dusk we’d see them spread their cloak-like wings and swoop out.

My mother loved gardening and created wonderful flowerbeds in which she grew roses, gerbera and lilies, and I’d make the petals into dresses for my dolls. The garden was full of exotic birds – hoopoes, golden orioles, bulbuls and humming birds, which hovered over the jasmine like iridescent bees. But my favourite bird was the Java sparrow because it looked like a puffin.

As Dutch colonials we had a privileged life. We employed a gardener, Ismail, who I thought of as extremely old, because his hair was grey, but he was probably only in his forties. We had a maid named Jasmine, who was married to the plantation’s head foreman, Suliman. They were in their mid-thirties but had no children, which caused them great sadness. Because of this, I think, Jasmine was very affectionate to my little brother, Peter, and me.

Jasmine and my mother were always cleaning, because in the tropics mould and mildew take hold very quickly. They’d hang the rugs up in the sun and bang the weevils out of them. They’d take books off the shelves and wipe the covers and give all the clothes a vigorous shake. I remember once my mother being very upset about a favourite dress of hers that Peter, ill with typhus, had thrown up on. She had taken it off and left it in the pavilion: when she went to wash it the following morning, the part he’d been sick on had been eaten away.

Every week the floors had to be disinfected or the insects would move in. If termites showed up we’d have to place the furniture legs in saucers of carbolic acid. Once, we forgot to do this with our piano, and they destroyed it
from inside, leaving hillocks of sawdust beneath. And I remember, once, seeing a huge bird spider scuttle across my bedroom floor. It was so large that I could hear its feet clicking on the tiles, a memory that still makes me shudder seventy years later! So I remember this constant battle we all waged against bugs – cockroaches and moths, stick insects and giant centipedes the length of a forearm; creatures that I could never even have imagined back home. But I always thought of the East Indies – never the Netherlands – as
home.

Although I’m Dutch, I have almost no childhood memories of Holland. I know about my early years there only from my parents, Anneke and Hans, and from my grandparents, ‘Oma’ and ‘Opa’, who lived near to us in Rotterdam. My grandfather worked on the canals, leading the horses along the towpath as they pulled the barges. I’m sad to say that I can barely remember him, because by the time we’d returned home he had died, in the terrible ‘hunger winter’, before Holland was liberated from the Nazis. I know that Opa was a simple man, with little learning, while Oma was well-educated, well-read, and determined for her daughter to be the same. So my mother went to high school, then on to college where she studied to be a teacher. She met my father ice-skating and they were married within a few months.

My father worked for an electrical engineering company but he was laid off because of the slump. According to my mother, he was in despair, especially as by that time they had two children; but then he got a job as the manager of a rubber plantation in West Java. He went out there first. Three months later my mother, Peter and I followed.

We left for Java on New Year’s Eve. I know this because my mother used to say that it had seemed such an auspicious day for us to be setting off for our new life. But she could never have imagined that the ‘earthly paradise’ to which we were sailing would, within a few years, become a living hell. But to Java we went, taking with us a single crate that contained my parents’ wedding china, their books and our clothes.

We sailed from Amsterdam on the
MS Indrapoora
, which was a wonderful white steamship, like a floating castle. I remember the icy cold as we stood on the deck waiting to leave. My mother held Peter, who wasn’t yet two, in her arms, and she and I waved hankies at my grandparents – two dark-coated specks on the quay far below. Some passengers had brought white towels to wave and I wished that we had done so too, as I was certain that it must have been hard for Oma and Opa to spot us in the crowd. My mother was smiling and crying, and as the foghorn sounded our departure, she called out to her parents, ‘Goodbye … we’ll miss you … we love you’, even though they couldn’t possibly have heard. As a goodbye gift they had given her an expensive new Agfa camera, and she’d promised to send them photos whenever she could.

The journey to Java took four weeks. It must have been hard for my mother, because she had to cope with a toddler while also looking after me. I remember how rough it was as we went through the Atlantic, becoming warm and calm as we turned into the Mediterranean. It was strange going through the Suez Canal and seeing the palm-tree-dotted desert stretching away on either side, as though we were sailing across the land.

There were games and entertainments on board. I remember the children’s fancy-dress parade. My mother said that I was to be
Assepoester
, or Cinderella. I thought I’d be wearing a wonderful gown; but my mother explained that as she didn’t have any fine material with which to make me one, I was to be Cinderella in her everyday rags. So she cut down an old green petticoat of hers, shredded the hem, then tied string round my waist for a belt. She messed up my hair, dabbed smuts on my face with her mascara and found a brush for me to hold. Then she took a photo of me to send to Oma and Opa. Years later, when we really
were
in rags, filthy and barefoot, my mother told me that she had come to see that costume as an omen; and I remember, after the war, when we returned to Holland, and my mother saw that photo of me again, she cried.

At the end of January we sailed into Batavia, the old name for Jakarta, and as we walked down the gangway we saw my father waving at us. I was so excited! I remember him kissing my mother, passionately, and in that instant I realised how much he loved and needed her. He kissed and hugged Peter and me, then carrying Peter in one arm, he picked up our case and shepherded Mum and me through the crowd.

We travelled to Bandung in order to buy the things that we’d need. The buildings there were different from any I’d ever seen: mosques with oriental domes, elegant tea-houses and gorgeous emporiums. There were beautiful women, dressed in batik sarongs and
kebayas
, an elegant, fitted blouse, with frangipani flowers pinned into their hair. There were expensive cars, but we went everywhere by
deleman
, a pony trap, a mode of transport I adored.
After a few days in Bandung we drove up into the mountains, to the plantation, which was called Tempat Sungai, which means ‘place of streams’.

I often think how brave my parents were to go halfway across the world to start a new life, in a place they had never even seen – especially as neither had ever travelled outside Holland. On Java they had to get used to so many new things, not least the local language, Malay, which they both had to learn. There was the constant threat of malaria, typhoid, cholera and dysentery: adjusting to the equatorial climate must have been hard. There were two seasons – wet, when we were often deluged, and dry, when it could be blisteringly hot. But against these hazards and discomforts my parents weighed the freedom of not having to wear winter clothes, and the bliss of seeing blue skies for much of the year. Added to which they loved the Javanese landscape with its mountains, waterfalls and shining rice fields.

I find it strange, to think that I’ve lived for so much longer than either of my parents. They’re so often in my thoughts, and I see them as they were when I was a child. My father was big and strong with fair hair and deep brown eyes; my mother was short and plump, with moss-green eyes and long auburn hair that she’d twist into a bun. She was always wonderfully calm. I remember once, she was reading to me when Jasmine came running, screaming, with Peter, then two, in her arms. She’d found a python curled around the toilet. When my mother went to look at it she didn’t even cry out; she simply called Ismail, who killed it, then stretched it out on the lawn. It was, he said, a ‘baby’; five feet long.

Another time I lifted a rock in our garden and a scorpion ran towards me, its stinger raised. But my mother just stamped on it then warned me not to lift up rocks again. She had terrific sangfroid. She was also very good at first aid. She’d never scold me for my cuts and grazes, usually sustained doing things that I’d been told
not
to do; she’d just get out the iodine and dressings, bandage me up, then firmly tell me not to do it another time. During the war she was going to need those healing skills, and every bit of that inner calm as, like thousands of women, she would be tested to destruction.

My father was full of energy and drive. I used to love going out into the forest with him to watch him supervise the rubber harvest. Sometimes he’d let
me
cut the diagonal line into the tree and tie the coconut shell beneath it to catch the milky-white drips. Then we’d go back a few hours later and collect the latex and take it to the shed where it was mixed with acid to make it congeal. It was then pressed into dark yellow sheets, which were hung up on wooden ceiling racks to dry. Peter and I used to scour the floor for bits of ‘scrap’ and try to make balls by binding them with raffia, but they never bounced very well.

My father also managed the forest, planting saplings, disinfecting the diseased trees and clearing the dead or dying ones. He walked miles every day and worked from dawn until dusk. He was a gentle, good-humoured man. But if he thought that a worker wasn’t pulling his weight, he would take him to task. He could also be tough with me. I remember once – I must have been about six – I found a pair of scissors and impulsively cut off my long
fair hair. When my father saw me, he marched me to the barber and asked him to give me a short back and sides, like a boy, to punish me for trying to make myself look like one. But I adored my new, cropped style and I have worn my hair short ever since.

I used to love going with my mother to the market in the local village or
kampong.
The stalls would be piled high with mangoes, papaya and spiky red lychees, the air filled with the scent of cinnamon, vanilla and coffee beans, and the delicious smell of nasi goreng. Often there’d be
gamelan
music playing, and the shopkeepers would stand outside their stores, enticing us in. Sometimes vendors would cycle up to our house with bales of batik, silks and shantung, and we’d sit with them on the verandah and look through their wares.

I remember how excited Peter and I were when our father bought his first car. It was a dark green Ford and at weekends we’d all get in it and drive into the forest. Dad would turn off the engine and we’d sit very still, hardly daring to breathe as the wildlife came out – troops of grey monkeys with rust-coloured babies clinging to their chests and tiny deer called
kidang
, as well as peacocks and toucans. Just once, when I was eight, we saw a panther. I can still see its dark beauty as it slinked past us in the shadow of the trees.

My favourite place at Tempat Sungai was the swimming pool. It was high up, and commanded a wonderful view of the mountains all around us and, below us, of the forest, the plantation buildings, the houses and
kampong.
On Sundays we’d spend the whole day at the pool, usually with the Jochens, who were the only other
Europeans at Tempat Sungai. Wil Jochen was the boss. He did the general administration and the rubber exporting, while my father supervised the day-to-day agricultural work.