My Tiger Cowrie Shell - the only thing I brought back from Australia in 1942

My Tiger Cowrie Shell. (Pic. 1) (Pic. 2 &3 Kilner Black's 1941 diary)

...the only thing I brought back from Australia in 1942.

I was born in Kuching, Sarawak on Dec. 24th 1937. So when War was declared against Germany on 3.9.39. my family and I were all living safely in the Far East. My father, Kilner Black, was the chief shipping agent for the Blue Funnel Line in Kuching port. Then the Japanese threatened war too. A unit of the British Army was sent over to help in the defence of independent Sarawak and all women and children were asked to leave. "Does that mean me?" asked my mother, Joan Black, who had got herself a job as the newly arrived Colonel's secretary. "Oh no!" says the Colonel"and your children are at boarding school." Well, my sister was, at Khabenjai, a Dutch school for foreigners up in the cooler Sumatran mountains, but I was still at home. So I was sent off as well, aged three.

Every holidays the school took all the children back to Singapore for their parents to collect. So early in Dec. 1941 my mother took a ship from Borneo to pick us up and as the Marudu sailed into Singapore harbour it was plain that it had just been bombed. It was the same night as Pearl Harbour.

It's a long story how we all escaped. My dad and a colleague, having trashed all the company papers and disabled as many ships and small boats up and down the Rejang river as possible, walked out from Kuching into the jungle on Christmas Day morning. The Japanese moved in in the afternoon"¦ He and his group took a week to get down to Pontianak on the south coast and from there, a ship over to Batavia. So lucky to get out alive.

Even luckier the whole family. My mother, in Singapore, having had to get all the relevant visas and money whilst everything was in uproar, sailed over to Sumatra and bussed up into the mountains to collect my sister Barbara and myself from the school. She joined up with another mum with 2 kids and found a local taxi driver who said he could/would drive us down the non-roads, across rope bridges and along cattle tracks to the nearest railway head. I lost my Teddy Bear, we were all horribly car-sick, but he bribed us onto a packed train that took us down to the port opposite Java. The ship, overloaded with merchandise, crates of beer, and people all covered in coal dust, sailed to Batavia that night. Who should be on the pier to meet us but my dad, Kilner!

From there we went to Australia by boat, and eventually, on Dec 24th 1942, arrived in Liverpool on the Blue Funnel Ship S.S. Nestor. She was sunk in the convoy going back.

We always called ourselves"the lucky Blacks".

Margaret (nee) Black, now Hopkins. 21.3.24.