Derek Round: Barbed wire between us

By JACK LEIGH

This book promises "a story of love and war" but delivers a tale of internment. Romance hardly gets a chance and warfare keeps its distance as the lovers languish in Japanese prison camps, far apart.

Both English, they meet in 1940 travelling P&O to the Far East. Mutal Fielder is 19, pretty, a trained dancer, whose family belong to Hong Kong's elite. Kenelm Digby, late 20s, is returning to Sarawak where his next job will be legal adviser to Sir Vyner Brooke, last of the White Rajahs.

The friendship survives the trip and he sends her flowers in Hong Kong, the card inscribed by a Chinese florist, "love from Ken Elm". They meet in Singapore, he proposes and she says, "Of course".

It is now 1941 and Japanese invasion intervenes. They are behind barbed wire for four years - he in Sarawak, she in Hong Kong.

They marry after the war, and Kenelm becomes Sarawak attorney-general then practises law in London before emigrating in 1955 to Wellington, where the couple raise their three children.

In bare outline it is not a startling story, but several things fill out the picture. One is author Derek Round's depiction of the prewar panoply of empire in which Kenelm and Mutal had distinctive if minor roles.

She lived in Stonycroft, the top house on Hong Kong's exclusive Victoria Peak, getting there first by funicular railway in a first-class seat then by sedan chair.

So rare was the social atmosphere that non-whites other than servants were barred from living there. Her world was one of privilege and comfort, home schooling, calling cards and cocktails.

Kenelm, descended from a Guy Fawkes plotter, was sent white feathers and otherwise maligned for being on the winning side in the 1933 Oxford Union debate for the motion "That this House would in no circumstances fight for King and Country".

"It was just a debate," he would say many years later, but the bitterness it aroused in Britain lingered even after the war.

Kenelm already had a seven-year association with Sarawak when conflict reached the Far East, ending forever the century-long anachronism of the White Rajahs' rule - first granted to the Brooke family by the Sultan of Brunei in 1841.

Charles Brooke, who became the second of the line in 1868, had a hawk-like nose and an eye intended for a stuffed albatross taken from a London taxidermist's. It replaced his own, lost when he galloped into a tree branch.

Kenelm and Mutal are surprisingly forbearing towards the Japanese. Their captors could be scarily erratic; they were "callous to the sick but courteous to corpses", they slapped and beat prisoners, and there were some beheadings. Yet Kenelm was able to say at the end that "we were strictly but not badly treated".

He thought the Sarawak commander who finally killed himself "a well-meaning man", and said persistent brutality was the work of "primitive peasant boys" among the guards.

At Stanley prison, Hong Kong, a Japanese officer warned Mutal that some of his men had seen her combing her hair and advised her to move her mirror - "These are young men and we do not want an incident".

Derek Round studies the minutiae of colonial life and its ultimate reduction to the basic necessities of survival in the internment camps, where people showed extraordinary powers of adaptation. It is a harsh and humane journey, with many insights along the way.

Random House

$24.95