Prisoner from Penang

Prologue

Prologue

George Town, Penang, December, 1945

She’s gone. I think I made her uncomfortable. The sight of me. My refusal to talk about what happened to me during the occupation. Evie’s my best friend – now my only friend – and I’ve just pushed her away.

I know I ought to feel bad about it, but I don’t. I merely feel numb. Seeing her with her glossy hair and strong nails, her firm tanned skin, healthy from the Australian sunshine and daily swimming, made me want to shrink away and hide.

I’m a wrinkled, half-dead crone, a bag of bones, broken, soiled, damaged by what I’ve seen and what I had to do. And I’m only a few years older than she is – I’ll be thirty-five next birthday and already an old woman. That’s what war does to you.

No. That’s what the Japanese have done to me.

When we were freed from the last internment camp, one of the doctors said that talking about what we’d been through would help us eventually come to terms with it. He was a big jolly Australian and kept spouting platitudes about troubles shared being troubles halved. All very well for him with his well-fed body, fresh out of medical school. His idea of trouble was probably waking up with a hangover when he had to sit an exam, or a dingo getting in among his daddy’s sheep. What could he possibly know about what we were going through? He was in the business of saving lives, not seeing them end prematurely, brutally, savagely.

None of us voiced disagreement with that young doctor though. We just stared at him blankly, as if he were speaking a foreign language. We didn’t even look at each other. We didn’t need to. We were all thinking the same thing – that we would never, ever speak about that place and what had happened to us there.

So, even though she is my dearest friend, I will never tell Evie about it. How could she possibly understand? How could she recognise her friend, her daughter’s teacher, in the creature I have become?

No. My memories are mine alone.

Yet maybe that Australian doctor had a point. I might not be able to tell anyone else, but perhaps one day, I could write it down. I can push it out of my brain and onto paper, then lock it away where it won’t be found – or burn it – and try to get on with the rest of my life. My ruined, broken life.

Part I

Mary’s Memoir