In the last month I have had two very weird experiences that have made me wonder how small the world actually is or is it just fate, which my buddhist friend insists it is.
I was sitting on the random seat on my Air Asia flight getting ready for take off in Kuala Lumpur to return home in December, when a Malaysian gentleman sat down and proceeded to introduce himself and shake hands with the row of passengers in our section. With an ice breaker like that, before long we were all chatting like old friends. Sayed was from Penang and was a great source of knowledge of anything to do with Malaysia but his passion was collecting memorabilia and history of the Second World War. Did we know about the Japanese invasion of Malaya he asked? At that point the last thing I was going to do was tell him that actually I did. He proceeded to give us a brief account of the Japanese invasion of Malaya in 1941, recounting their progress down the Malayan peninsula, onto the Singapore “fortress” but when he started telling us about the brutal invasion of the British Military hospital and the massacre that followed I felt that I had to stop him. I told him and fellow passenger, Eric, that my father was in the horrific massacre in the hospital and that he was the young doctor who was saved by his cigarette case while being attacked with a bayonet thrust aimed at his heart. Sayed was speechless at this stage but eventually managed to utter my father’s name “Tom Smiley was your father ? I have read the story of your father and I know his name.” At this stage we all felt rather stunned but to cut the long 12 hour flight short, the section 34 DEF, arrived at Paris airport exchanging email addresses and promising to keep in touch after a memorable flight.
On my return to Malaysia I was invited to a colleague’s house for New Year’s Eve just south of Kuala Lumpur airport. Jane had been working in Sabah for 4 months replacing someone on maternity leave and had now returned to her home in Port Dickson. Strangely I knew about Port Dickson because my father had been stationed there in 1941 as a Medical Officer and I have the letters he wrote from there. Anyway, I arrived at her house and met her parents, who were visiting from England. After chatting over breakfast I discovered that Jane’s parents had lived in Kuala Lumpur in the 1980’s and I told them that my parents had too for a short time. We talked about life in the tropics in general and I mentioned that my mother had not enjoyed her time in KL as she hadn’t had enough to do and wasn’t allowed to work etc… Margaret replied “Yes I had a good friend like that and it was terribly sad that shortly after they returned to England, her husband had a heart attack in church and died.” That was my father I said. It is a very strange feeling when someone that you have never met before starts to tell you part of your very own family history. It turns out that Margaret had been in the choir with my father and then Kurt and she had befriended my parents and taken them on outings and had introduced Mummy to the silk patchwork class. Mummy had written to Margaret after my father’s death and then they lost touch.
So you bloggers are these just amazing coincidences are am I in some reality TV programme version of “Who do you think you are?”.
