How a girl from Dunstable survived WWII in the jungle
Sixty million people died in World War ii, so when we read a forgotten story about one individual’s personal tragedy, we should hardly be surprised.
Here is the story of Vin Baker and his sister Nona (told by Nona and two ghostwriters), who together hid for more than three years in the Malayan jungle during the conflict.
Vin, the benign manager of a vast tin mine in Malaya in the thirties, sees his whole world crumble before his eyes after the Japanese invade in 1941, and this shocking, gripping story takes us with utmost clarity through the process by which a successful, optimistic man is reduced by war to a depressive, shaking, dysentery-ridden skeleton.
it all starts in Dunstable, of all places. Nona (Nin) is the daughter of the rector of Dunstable. Nin casually tells us that her sister died at boarding school and two brothers died in World War i, so this is a person braced for tragedy.
But when Nin accepts her mother’s suggestion that she travel to Malaya in 1935 to run the household for her adored brother Vin, she can have no idea of the consequences of this merry plan.
Malaya seems dazzlingly exotic after Dunstable. Vin has 5,000 employees working under him. Nin, the perfect spinster younger sister, devotes her life to making his palatial household run smoothly. in the evenings, she plays the grand piano to soothe him after a hard day’s work.
Returning to Malaya from six months’ leave in England in 1937, they sense trouble is looming. But surely the great British Army will defend Singapore and Malaya will be safe from Japanese invasion?
Nin’s crystal-clear recollections take us right back to that sense of optimism and trust — so it’s all the more shocking when they hear the news in December 1941 that Singapore has fallen to the Japanese.
the unthinkable has happened and Vin must do the unthinkable himself: flood his own mine, putting it out of use for the Japanese. ‘the disintegration of his life’s work,’ Nin calls this act. From that moment, the two of them go into hiding in makeshift huts in the jungle.
this book will cure any Kipling-inspired romantic notions about life in the jungle. No cascades of coconuts, just sheets of rain falling on to the rank, steamy ground, leeches, jungle rats, hairy spiders, malarial mosquitoes, scorpions, snakes and suffocating boredom mingled with fear and diarrhoea.
What i found most affecting was the
devastating effect of loss of morale on Vin. it’s the shame of it all: of the British defeat, as well as the sense of being useless after years of being the top man.
it’s easier for nin: her raison d’être has always been to look after her brother, and this she now does with even more devotion as he gradually sinks into black depression and illness.
in 1943, for safety’s sake, they join a jungle camp of Chinese communists, who are the only people fighting a guerrilla war against the Japanese. every morning, they must salute the hammer-and-sickle flag and chant Communist songs.
nin is appointed as music teacher and teaches everyone to sing The red Flag ‘to cathedral standard’. People caught stealing food are slowly tortured in front of a forced audience and killed.
There’s a terrible scene when, alone in their leaking hut, Vin is too weak with dysentery to move. he’s shivering uncontrollably and begging nin to light a fire, but she only has two wet matches left and wastes one of them, and tells him she can’t risk wasting the other. . .and then . . .
What keeps nin alive is her inner determination to get back to Dunstable and tell her mother what happened. she would later find out that she was the only recorded white woman to have survived the War by living in the jungle.
in the final pages, nin gives a glimpse of how hard it was to reintegrate into normal British life: getting used to wearing shoes after four years of living in the jungle, she writes, ‘became my greatest trial’.
her wartime exploits behind her, she went on to get a mundane job with the electrical association for Women. Few of her colleagues had any idea of the horrors she had endured.
When she was awarded the MBe, her reaction — typical, perhaps, for a selfeffacing rector’s daughter — was that she didn’t deserve it, ‘after four years of saving my own skin’.