U3A Writing: No Turning Back
Thea Sloane describes the feelings of a young married couple as they sail away from the Indonesian island of Java.
The Dutch passenger ship 'Volendam' was slowly making its way into the open sea and increasing the distance between itself and Java, the main island of Indonesia. The ship was being used as a troop carrier and was taking units of the British Army and Indian Army from Indonesia to India.
The young couple, both in their early twenties, standing at the railing on one of the upper decks, each had their own thoughts about the world they were leaving behind. They were married a few months earlier and were on their way to India where they would probably spend some months before travelling to Britain. He probably had no regrets leaving an area, which could hold on great attraction for him, where he had been sent, together with the rest of Punjabi regiment in which he was serving, to help establish some kind of order after Japan's capitulation, which ended World War II.
The Indonesians' quest to free themselves from their Dutch colonial masters had made the whole episode one of tension and constant vigilance. It was understood that the departing Japanese had supplied the Indonesians with plenty of modern weapons, which made the whole situation even more hazardous. There had been some deaths in ambush among the British and Indian military personnel. It was good to get away from the place.
She had different sentiments. She was watching the disappearing coastline of the land of her birth, the land of her childhood and adolescence, her home ground. It had been a good land until the outbreak of the war, when everything had changed forever. And now she was leaving it all behind and was on her way to an unknown future. She had been out of the country before a few times, when the whole family had gone leave to Europe, but this time it was different. She would probably never be back. But it was all a great adventure. She was convinced that life would be wonderful.
Marrying someone, not only a stranger, but also of a different nationality, had not been without its obstacles. Some of her friends had warned her that 'those wartime marriages' hardly ever worked out. Once the novelty wears off, he'll shoot through and you'll never see him again, they had said. One of her favourite aunts, born and raised in South Africa, and whose family had suffered greatly at the hands of the British during the Boer War, had questioned her sanity. You'd be better off marrying a Jap, she had said. But an Englishman! I always thought you were a pretty sensible girl. But it was her father who had raised the strongest objections. We don't know anything about his background, his family, or his prospects, he had argued. In the end, realising that she was determined to go through with it, he had insisted on an interview with one of his prospective son-in-law's senior officers before he, still rather reluctantly, had given his consent. After the interview he had grudgingly announced that he had, as he put it, no good reason for preventing them from marrying, which he, under existing law at that time, would have been able to do. Some weeks before the actual wedding she had farewelled the whole family before they embarked on another ship, to be repatriated to Europe.
The wedding had been very much a military affair, with only three women present, she herself being one of them. While she was going over all that had happened during the past few months, one of the crew members approached her and asked if she would be kind enough to talk to a very distraught young woman on the deck below. There she found a young Javanese woman, heavily pregnant, who was sobbing uncontrollably while watching the disappearing coastline. The girl, hardly out of her teens, was overcome by grief at seeing all that was dear and familiar to her getting further and further away. Her young, handsome, Indian soldier husband stood by rather awkwardly, obviously unable to comfort his young wife. She was a pitiful sight, tears streaming down her face, and not even trying to stop them.
The young woman who had been brought to attempt consolation and who, although not very fluently, could at least address her in her own language, put her arm around the younger woman's shoulders and somehow managed to gradually calm her down. She pointed out that she, too, was going to a foreign country to live, with a husband of different nationality, and that she also had spent all her earlier days in the land that had meant everything to them both, and the other was so sad to leave.
It somehow did help make the poor girl feel better and they stayed together for quite a while, watching the last of the country they had loved so well disappear in the distance and realising that, whatever their anxieties or expectations, whatever the future held for them, there was one thing they both had to face - THERE WAS NO TURNING BACK.
