Life-story, part 1

I want to tell the story of my entire life up to the present: the bare-bones series of events, with no fanciful embroidery. Let it be like a series of chess moves without the expert commentary. Let it be like a dispassionate ship’s log. Let the facts tell their own story. As far as possible, I will leave out feelings, impressions, memories, motives. Perhaps some of these may be deduced by an astute reader. In any case some of this ground has been covered years ago in other posts.

I owe this effort to posterity, or rather that tiny section of it which might take an interest; and most of all to myself, so I may belatedly grasp my true identity and nature; then devote myself to being that person.

Gensing Manor, watercolour by my great-aunt Olwen
Here is a photo of Iris Ward aged 4, with her parents on August 13th, 1913, at a family gathering at Gensing Manor. She wants to sit on her mother’s lap, but my future grandmother is big with a second child. A second photo  shows that she gets her way.

Click to see the full group photo

She is a wilful and determined child.
Click to enlarge
As soon as she reaches 21, old enough to escape parental jurisdiction, she books a passage to Malaya, invited by Doris Holdsworth who’s gone before, and invites her to join her dancing academy. Both ladies have been influenced by Isadora Duncan, that fast-living dancing queen who took Europe by storm in the Twenties. Both are doubtless swayed by the lack of eligible young men in England after the Great War. Up to the nineteen-seventies and beyond, St Leonards-on-sea was notable for the number of its elderly spinsters, many still dressed in mourning for the loss of a first love decades before.

In Singapore she meets a Dutchman and marries him in St Andrews Cathedral

Jacobus Jan Mulder (b. Jan 4th 1904) & Iris Gwendolen Ward (b. Aug 31st 1909)

He wants her to give up being a dancing teacher. Together they run an outlet of Ciro Pearls, then acquire The Gap RoadHouse, on the East Coast Road. It was an idyllic life: servants, white privilege, tall handsome husband, dancing in the midst of society, everything she’s dreamed of.

But the Japanese are threatening Malaya, Singapore is the cherry on top. Jan Jacobus is called outstation to other islands, does secret work under cover of a job in the radio network. He’s in the loop of what’s going on, tells Iris to get out while she can, go stay with someone they know in Perth, Australia. He gets caught up in hostilities. They never find his body: he was either shot or drowned. Iris doesn’t get confirmation till the war ends.

In Perth she meets a boy. She’s 32, he’s 18, lives with his parents on a farm. They meet at a dance in a community hall, where the boys are one side, the girls on the other till shyness is overcome. He takes her on to the floor, they converse, he talks about horses, they agree he’ll give her lessons. I piece this together from what I’ve been told. All I know for certain is that I popped out on March 3rd, 1942, “the day that Java fell”, as she used to say. Her husband was probably in Java at the time. I never heard of Larry till I was 48, from a friend of my mother’s who’d promised never to tell but felt she ought to, just before she died.

Harold Laurence Amey, my real father, enlisted as soon as he was 21. Before that he would have needed his parents’ permission, which I guess under the circumstances they would not have granted. I met them when I was three, with no understanding of who they were, nor was I ever introduced to him, when he was eventually demobbed and returned to Perth. Learning of my mother’s widowhood, he offered marriage. He’d had time to think about it while while half-starved in the Malayan jungle, wondering if he’d survive.

My mother said no. She couldn’t wait to get back to what she saw as civilization, longed to see her parents again. She’d sent numerous letters and photos of me, to show how bonny I was. Surely they knew the truth? I’ve been told that but now I doubt everything. My birth certificate showed I was the son of Jan Jacobus Mulder.

My mother and I came back on the Rangitata, heavily loaded after being hastily converted back from its wartime role of transporting troops. We were on the Aliens list, being technically Dutch:
click to enlarge. Note that H/D stands for Household/Domestic—or in my mother’s case “housewife”, I guess
Lacking maternal instinct, my mother had largely left me in the care of other women during her time in Perth. I had no idea corresponding to “father”. I wasn’t exactly an orphan, but my grandparents were shocked when they met us at Tilbury and first first heard me speak. This wild child of a wilful mother must be baptized, and taught manners.