Looking Back With Pa - Part 6

The Emergency

In 1945 the war brought to us by the Japanese was over.  But for Pa and his fellow country folks trouble was far from over.  The British returned to Malaya and found themselves faced with another war, this time with the Communist Party.

I think it was called a guerrilla (gorilla) war probably because it was fought mostly in the jungles or rural places.  Pa was then tending to his farm in foothills of Tanjung Bungah.  He'd built the farmhouse facing a ravine with a stream running deep along the bottom.

Right across the ravine was an old rubber estate which had become a jungle due to the lack of maintenance because of the war.

One day, Pa was sitting on his verandah while my eldest brother, then a year old, was playing outside.  He'd noticed a group of soldiers in jungle green, armed to the teeth, crawling through the bushes up from the ravine and slowly made their way towards the farmhouse.

He was anxious about the baby but he didn't dare to make any sudden move.  He waited until they made it to the clearing in front of the house.  There were more than a dozen gun muzzles pointed at him when he slowly stood up, walked out to the yard and picked up the baby.   It was only then that they lowered their guns.

They checked out Pa's identification papers.  Then they relaxed and soon were playing with the kid and taking their lunch and some even had a little siesta right there on the verandah.


Later in the afternoon, they hitched up their battle gear and disappeared into the jungle.

Some time later another group of armed jungle green men with red stars on their caps appeared in the clearing in front of the farmhouse.  They only wanted to know where the other group went.