Memory Lane
On 4th December 1949, I was eight years old and shopping for summer pyjamas with my mother, younger sister and brother. This was strange and exotic in icy Knightsbridge, but I was very excited; we were about to get on a ship to join my father, Duncan Stewart, 45, the new Governor of Sarawak, North Borneo. He had been in Palestine in his last job and we’d hardly seen him. He was heroic, charismatic, much loved and not often around.
On that same day, his 19th in the post, he was inspecting the guard of honour during the ceremonies to welcome him in Sibu province, when suddenly a young Malay separatist stepped forward and stabbed him. His white glove turning red with blood, he stumbled and collapsed; years later, I learnt that he asked for the ceremony to proceed without fuss. After an emergency operation in Sibu Hospital, he was taken to Singapore General Hospital.
At the time I knew little of this. We were told that he’d been hurt, and that my mother had flown to be at his bedside. Photographs of her and us three blond-haired children appeared daily in the press in Singapore and London for the six days he fought for his life.
Back in England, my grandmother, breakfasting in bed, summoned the three of us and told us that his injuries were so severe that ‘God decided to take him to Him’. I stared at the sloping wooden floor of the bedroom. For years afterwards, I believed there were two sorts of death – ordinary ones, and the ones where God decided to relieve someone from unbearable suffering.
He was given a state funeral and buried in Singapore. We never talked about his assassination, but our lives changed for ever. Later we had to sell Castle
Stalker, the ruined island castle my father had vowed to restore when he retired.
In 2000, 50 years after his burial, Bidadari Cemetery was demolished to make way for housing. I watched, stunned, as a gravedigger dug up his remains – visible pieces of the father I’d longed for all those years. They were flown back to Scotland. In a graveside ceremony on a blustery July day, his children, grandchildren and two little great-grandchildren reburied him within sight of his beloved Scottish home.
By Kirsteen Stewart, author of Break These Chains (out now), who receives £50
Readers are invited to send in their own 400-word submissions about the past