A Chance Encounter

Rhona Aitken’s life was a whirl of parties, the theatre, and that most exciting of modern inventions—talking pictures. The young girl had moved to London from Edinburgh with her parents, and had soon felt at home in the vibrant, bustling capital city. At some point she had changed her name from Florence, perhaps as part of her transformation from Scottish doctor’s daughter to fun-loving London ‘gal’. Rhona met and fell in love with a handsome actor named Bertie. But the First World War was just around the corner. When the time came, Rhona’s beau duly went off to fight for his country. Bertie was among the many young men who never came back.
    Charles Waite’s father managed the Pavilion Hotel in Folkestone. An ambitious lad, Charles had begun  training to be a naval architect before the war began.While he was studying, Charles became betrothed to a young girl but his fiancée broke off the engagement. One day, a friend informed Charles that he was leaving for Malaya (then under British control) where he was going to run a rubber plantation. This young man told Charles that he would earn far more as a rubber planter in Malaya than he ever would as a naval architect in Britain. The argument must have been a convincing one: Charles gave up his studies, paid for his passage, and set sail for Southeast Asia. When war broke out in Europe, not long afterwards, Charles travelled back to Britain to join up.
    Like most ladies of her era, Rhona believed that men and women should be formally introduced. Against this convention, she and Charles met at a tea dance in Brighton. Rhona was there with a girlfriend or two, so decency was preserved. The pretty young girl seemed to twinkle when she spoke to Charles. Rhona, in turn, was enchanted by the dashing soldier, as well as the idea of life on a plantation—in her imagination an endless string of lively parties in a tropical climate. The pair quickly married before Charles headed off to France to face the horrors of a brutal and bloody war.
    Before marriage, Rhona had been working as a clerk for the Prudential Insurance Company and had become used to having an income of her own and the independence that comes with it. When she married  she gave up her job to concentrate on her new role as a wife, becoming financially dependent on her husband.
    Charles survived the Battle of the Somme but never wanted to talk about the war, like so many of the returned soldiers. An officer in the West Kent Regiment, he received a Military Cross when he came home. Years later, his granddaughter Jane contacted the Ministry of Defence in a bid to discover precisely what the award was for. She was surprised to learn that it was not for anything specific: the medal had been given to any officer lucky enough to survive the conflict.
    By the time Charles came home, Rhona had given birth to the couple’s first child—a daughter named Hazel. But Charles barely spoke and did not want to look at his baby. His face was haunted, his manner cold. Rhona was devastated to realise that the man who returned from the war was a different person to the one she had married. She did not know then that the old Charles would never return.
    Rhona and Charles sailed off to their new life together on Carey Island in Malaya, a small piece of land separated from the Selangor coast by the Langat River and only accessible by launch. The island was named after Edward Valentine John Carey, an Englishman who acquired the island from Sultan Sulaiman of Selangor. The island was by then dense with the rubber trees that had first been planted there at the beginning of the century.
     Rhona had packed her party dresses, jewellery, dancing shoes and make-up. It was to her great disappointment that she found that the expat club on Carey Island was mostly frequented by a few Calvinistic Scots planters. It was far from the hedonistic, gay environment of Rhona’s imagination. The limited social life did not worry Charles, who was happy at home quietly reading a book, but Rhona thrived on human interaction. She needed to dance to feel alive, like one of Carey Island’s many butterflies, which flitted from flower to flower on fragile iridescent wings. Although the expats did all they could to recreate their British lives in a tropical climate, including planting rose gardens and taking afternoon tea, Rhona longed to be back in London.
    When she moved in, Rhona discovered that Charles’s bungalow was already occupied by a number of cats. Rhona suggested that the females be spayed, but Charles strictly forbade her from getting this done, seeing it as utterly unnatural. Inevitably, the cats bred like rabbits, and it would be left to Rhona to find homes for all the kittens—or to see to it that the cook drowned them.
    Charles’s belief in letting nature take its course extended to human fertility. He would not allow Rhona to use any form of contraception, and the babies kept coming. After Hazel came Peter. In 1923 Rhona returned to London to give birth to her third child, in  a nursing home in Islington. Rhona’s second daughter was born on 19 December. Officially named Jean, the little girl was always Rosemary to her family. As a young woman she would change her name again—to Lesley, the name that she has been known by ever since. Felicity, usually just called Baby, arrived in hospital in Malaya on 9 February 1927. Bangsar Hospital in Kuala Lumpur had been condemned as being unfit for use. Happily mother and baby lived to tell the tale.