"The Emergency in Malaya was a communist inspired rebellion. I suppose you don't know what one of those is, do you?"
The girl's face looked puzzled, more of child than adult – a charming youthfulness that would not depart her until she was advanced into her late-40s.
"Of course not. Why should you?” She paused. “But you really must answer when I put a question to you."
She was not aware that a question had been formally asked. These weren't the sorts of questions she'd been used to at school. In class the teachers would have made sure she'd be softly prepped in some way about a particular subject before announcing a question or two on it. Such good teaching had helped her achieve above-average grades at tests, but had not yet enabled her to break out into novel thinking or abstraction.
She thought on her feet: "What was a Malaya?"
"At last!" The great aunt’s austere and thoughtful face broke into a broad smile. "Excellent, although it was not so much a what, as in an object or thing, so much as a place. It used to be the place from which came all of our rubber and a jolly lot of tea. It is a country in Asia, quite near Siam and Indo-China, but that place is called Vietnam now."
"I've heard of Vietnam…" she eagerly added.
"Have you, dear? Because of that wretched war, no doubt."
The real reason was because of the Ha Noi Vietnamese Takeaway by the village shops, but she wisely kept this information to herself. She nodded.
"As I said, the Emergency of Malaya (she said each with a firm emphasis) had already begun by the time Violet and I arrived in Georgetown. The place was still a bit of a mess from the way the Japanese had kicked it over. They'd left much of it almost unusable. So we were quickly put to use working at the General Hospital. Well, there was a lot to do. And she was an excellent nurse, Violet. Once she'd shown me the ropes, I simply got stuck in to it. We did wonders, putting together a midwifery team to visit the poorer Malays and Chinese."
She interrupted. "You worked in an Emergency Hospital?"
The great aunt winced a little, and took another sip of sherry. She did not very much like being interrupted, especially by a young girl who should know better and had clearly not been listening.
"Tamara, allow me to repeat the information, and each time you remember what I have already said then you nod your head. Is that clear? I sailed to Malaya. With my friend, Violet. We worked at the General Hospital. The Emergency had already begun."
With each of these there was a short nod of acknowledgement.
"Good. Now, about that Emergency. Some of the Chinese got it into their heads that not only were the British a bad lot intent on stealing every last penny from the place, which may have been true for some of course, but also that the whole country should be transformed into a communist state. A chap called Chin Peng was behind it all. He decided the best way to make it all happen was to terrorise the locals – you know, bump a few of 'em off before breakfast, blow up the odd bridge, let a few rounds off as the police come past, let 'em know who's boss, that sort of thing."
"Isn't that a war?" the girl politely asked during the pause at the end.
"Yes it is, dear.” She smiled. “But the chaps who ran things, the mines and the tea plantations, couldn't claim a penny in insurance from a war: those were the rules, at least as far as the insurance companies were concerned. So it wasn’t ever called what it truly was, and instead was given this silly name, the one you've had trouble with."
She wasn’t sure if she really understood all that was being said to her. The old woman’s serious face had darkened with the telling of all these details. She had a feeling this was only part of the story. And indeed it was.
“And then after things became a little better organised, Violet and I went up country – by train to Ipoh to have a little holiday in the Cameron Highlands. Truly beautiful place. A lot of tea. And we were wined and dined by the estate managers and their rather ghastly wives. It was there I met Peter. He was a particularly dashing young man from Brisbane who flew a bomber. He’d been in Singapore, was imprisoned in Formosa. They treated him dreadfully – because he was so very tall, you see? Tall and incredibly good looking. Perfect all-rounder…”
She drifted. The music changed to some party poppy dance music, and more people joined the throng of jigging bodies already tearing up the floor. She continued, submerged in her reverie for a while longer, as a short smile turned her face into sadness.
“But he and Violet, you see... She and I had been getting on well enough, but working back at Penang we’d not given a single thought to sex. And there he was. At one moment dancing with me, the next dancing with Violet.”
The old lady looked over to her charge. Slowly, the sub-meanings of the last few sentences dawned upon her. Her mouth dropped.
“You mean he was with you and her?”
“Well, no, not exactly, dear. I only really found out about it afterwards, you see?”
“After what?”
Again she frowned a little. “Do you know, it would have been better if you had asked, ‘What happened?’ or ‘Do please continue’. Yes, questions are important launch pads for someone to give an answer, or to provide some sort of information, but you get a awful lot more from a directed question.”
“Do. Please. Continue.” The girl was, by now, a little irritated by the stuffy manners of her great aunt, but the story…
“Do you mind, dear, if we continue this outside? I’m afraid the music is a little too loud, and it is such a pretty evening.”
The girl helped the older lady to her feet and guided her stick thin body around the abandoned top table to the double doors that led to the formal garden. At once, the bouquet of a summer’s evening doused by late afternoon rain filled their nostrils. Linked arm in arm, they slowly let the doors close on the party and stepped into the last hour of sunlight as they walked noisily onto the gravel of the formal garden.
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