A colonial ceremony, a brutal assassination, and a little girl who took 70 years to get over it
Kirsteen was just eight when her father was murdered in Borneo. In a moving interview, she tells how writing her first book at 78 unlocked a lifetime of pain
IT WAS a typically balmy day in Sarawak when newly appointed British governor Duncan Stewart made his way to the town of Sibu on December 4, 1949, for his first official engagement. In his post for just weeks, the colonial administrator enjoyed a warm welcome from large crowds. The Scotsman’s last posting had been Palestine – then one of the most dangerous places in the world – and Stewart should have had little to fear in the comparatively sleepy backwater of Sarawak, on the mostly peaceful island of Borneo.
Resplendent in his uniform, with ceremonial sword and plumed pith helmet, His Majesty’s representative inspected a guard of honour, flanked by happy schoolchildren.
It was then a young man asked the governor if he could take a photograph. As Stewart posed, a second youth stabbed him without warning.
With a commendable stiff upper lip, Stewart attempted to carry on, but blood seeped through his starched white uniform and he was rushed to hospital, where he died, aged 45, a few days later. The two men were arrested and the impact of his killing resonated for years.
SOME 7,000 miles away in England, his eight-year-old daughter Kirsteen was about to board a boat to join him at their new home. It was a trauma that was to define her remarkable life and has now helped to inspire the autobiographical debut novel she has written at the age of 78.
“My mother, typically of the time, told us we should draw a veil and move on. I wanted to know about my father; I felt starved of him,” says Kirsteen today.
Asking questions about the tragedy was unthinkable. “It would have been considered rude, like asking about sex,” she says.
While her cousins became debutantes, she went to St Hilda’s College, Oxford, where she read history but she never felt truly at peace – even when she got a first and entered the civil service through the competitive exam system, a rare thing for a woman at that time. She married a diplomat at the age of 27 and had four children in five years but the unexamined loss of her father continued to plague her. “There was something about his death that made me feel set apart from others – a sort of vivid and violent public drama, which was not to be talked about, yet in a horrible way, glamorous,” she explains.
“My novel features a girl who also had a fractured childhood and a missing father – ‘missing presumed dead’. It’s the book I wanted to write all my life.” Kirsteen believes her emotional problems, including a series of deeply “dysfunctional” relationships with unsuitable men, stemmed from his death. “Looking back, I had a problem with commitment,” she says. “And this clashed with the old-fashioned values in which I’d been raised. My heroine also struggles with a changing society in 1960s London, while trying to reconcile them with her childhood trauma. “I, too, wanted a career but wanted to go to bed with almost every man I met. Even I could see that something was wrong. “I wondered about psychoanalysis but when I told my mother about my plans to see a therapist she said, ‘I wouldn’t do that darling, I’d do a bit of social work instead’.”
In the wake of the assassination, the Foreign Office arranged a grace-andfavour apartment in the chilly grandeur of Hampton Court Palace for her mother, still only 32, Kirsteen, her sister Catriona and brother David. Here the children would upset their elderly neighbours, racing down the long corridors hunting for the ghost of Anne Boleyn – who lived there during her doomed marriage to HenryVIII.
But for Kirsteen, the pain of losing her father never really went away. It was a pain amplified by having seen so little of him during his three years in Palestine where he was posted during the declaration of the state of
Israel. Born in London in 1941, she lived in the Bahamas between the ages of two and five where her father had been assistant to the Governor, the Duke of Windsor.
She carries indelible, carefree mental snapshots of this time.
“I have vivid pictures of him in certain settings. As a result of writing my novel I see now that I had a problem knowing who I was and where to draw the line. I’m sure it was because of my father’s death.
“There is a strong cause and effect between unresolved childhood trauma, and emotional and sexual behaviour. I didn’t know where ‘the edges’ were. It makes sense if you didn’t have a secure father offering you unconditional love.Writing the book has helped me to make peace with some of this. “For the first time, I feel I am doing the thing I am supposed to be doing.” Although she gained a caring stepfather when she was 10, and left Hampton Court for the Surrey stockbroker belt, she admits that he “couldn’t be a substitute for the bits that were missing from my own father”.
And then there was sexual guilt informed by the social mores of the time. “My mother believed you should be a virgin when you married and that sexual liberation was a bad thing. It was quite difficult to reconcile my life in London with that.” Her mother was horrified when she announced she planned to flat-share in Covent Garden with several friends, including a couple of young men. “So I didn’t do it. I still had no idea who I was. In those days you would go home for the weekend and be more or less the daughter she expected.”
Meanwhile, back in London, was the secret series of unsuitable boyfriends.
“It wasn’t that I was wildly promiscuous, but I was certainly not going to be a virgin on marriage,” she explains quietly. “I had come from such a socially narrow world.”
HER first marriage was to a diplomat whom she accompanied, together with their children, on postings to Yugoslavia, Jordan, Iraq and Abu Dhabi for 20 years until divorce took her into the world of social reform where she continues to work for several youth-based charities.
But always, despite her love for her children and the good she has done for many through her charitable endeavours, hangs the thought of the unlived life. Not only the plans to join her father that were derailed in so horrific a fashion, but also a lost future in Scotland.
“My father had this small run-down estate in the Highlands. He was going to retire early after the posting in Sarawak, before his 50th birthday, move to Scotland and put a roof on his castle. We would have lived there and my life would have been completely different. I would have been a Scottish lass.”
Castle Stalker was inherited by her brother, and featured in Monty Python and the Holy Grail and various adverts before it was sold.
“All this shows up in my never having known who I really wanted to be. University is the last time I knew absolutely that I was doing what I was supposed to be doing – until I started to write this book. It has taken me until now because I was scared of my truths.
“I am now married to someone who has encouraged me every step of the way. I’m very lucky. For all the excitement it was challenging being a young woman in the 1960s.”
●Break These Chains by Kirsteen Stewart (Whitefox, £9.99) is out now. Call Express Bookshop on 01872 562310 or order via expressbookshop.co. uk. UK delivery is £2.95 per order, orders over £12.99 free. Delivery may be up to 28 days