Something about myself

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Something about myself

Born in a clinic in Barr Street, Rangoon, when movie theatres were bioscopes boasting silent, black and white images, and one could have any colour for your car as long as it was black, I was sixteen when Japan invaded Burma and lucky to leave for Calcutta, India, with my grandmother, mother and brother on one of the last vessels to sail to safety. Father worked in the Oil Refinery across the river in Syriam, and was part of a skeleton crew charged with destroying the installation before Rangoon fell to the Japs.

My schools were St George's, Syriam and Diocesan Boys' High, Rangoon, and my family's foreign holidays every three years lasted three months. The earliest I can recall was Ceylon (now Sri Lanka), then Vizagapatnam near Madras, South India, where I nearly drowned in the Indian Ocean, finally in 1937, Malaya, Singapore, Hong Kong, Shanghai and Japan. We got back just before Japan invaded China.

The tubby twelve-year old I was then, found it hard to believe that the gentle courteous people we met in Kobe, Tokyo and Yokohama were even remotely related to the murderous monsters we saw on cinema newsreels. Four years later Japanese Imperialism caught up with me and my family.

The prestigious La Martiniere College in Lucknow, became my finishing school in 1942 India. In 1943 I read Science at Lucknow University where "quit India" chanting was far more popular with my Indian friends than the British National Anthem. It was with relief the following year that I sailed to England on a Government Scholarship to read Electrical Engineering at what is now Manchester's Institute of Science and Technology.

This colonial boy had never seen snow, nor experienced the dank cold of an October morning in Liverpool, and the heavy winter overcoat, greyer than the skies over England, hung like a mantle of medieval armour on my shoulders. After the successful D-day landings that July, confidence in the outcome of the war during the winter of 1944 in Manchester could not have been higher.

Flat feet and radar research saved me from the army in the four years that followed. Studying became a way of life. Marriage and children did not stop me gaining a PhD in nuclear physics from GlasgowUniversity in the mid- fifties. A liftetimes career in Power Engineering followed first in Britain and finally in Saudi Arabia.

My wife died two weeks after I retired in the mid-eighties. I now live in Cornwall over-looking the sea with my second wife, a beautiful American, and returned to my boyhood love of writing, flirting with romantic novels and a psychological thriller. But my youth in Burma was a magnet sucking me back in both time and space.

Dramatic developments in Burma following the 1988 massacres and the subsequent General Election in 1990, in which its democratic results - the overwhelming mandate of over 82% of the people's vote cast for Daw Aung San Suu Kyi's Party, the National League for Democracy - were ignored by the ruling military junta, demanded some action from me. The incredible news was that Dictator-General, Ne Win, had refused to hand over the reins of government to the daughter of the national hero of his country, Bogyoke Aung San, who was tragically assassinated in 1947 on the brink of independence.

I began with a phone call to the Burmese Embassy in London."What's the result of your recent election?" I asked a Burmese spokesman after the usual pleasantries. There was no reply.

"Who will be your Prime Minister?" I persisted patiently.

"General Saw Maung," came the hesitant reply.

"But didn't Daw Aung San Suu Kyi win the election by a large majority?" I asked as politely as I could.

"Her husband is English," the man at the far end of the line snapped. "She cannot be trusted."

The line went dead and I slammed the phone down in disgust. The Burmese Dictators were adopting Britain's colonial taboo in reverse. Before World War 2 when Burma was a British colony, a European who married an Asian was a social and political outcast. Now an Asian who married a European was suffering the same fate. Wrong then, it is wrong now, but far more tragic.

Then it was personal, foreigners pilloried by their own kind for following their hearts and not their heads, or sacrificing the joys of true love by letting their heads rule their hearts. Now it is little short of catastrophic for all Burmese citizens who showed wisdom in their 1990 election verdict by rejecting that sterile racial taboo.

"Colonization of the people, by the people, ...for the people?"

This parody of the famous phrase used by US President Abraham Lincoln came to mind. How else could you describe the brutal regime of a military junta, imposed on the people of their own country? That has been Burma for 35 years.

The word, "colonia", a millenia old was used by the Romans to describe the settlement of a minority amongst a hostile majority in recently conquered territory. How else could you describe the Dictators controlling Burma with its army and acolytes since 1962? They allowed a General Election in 1990, arrogantly confident that the Burmese majority was bound to anoint its hold on their country with their democratic approval, torn apart as it was by civil war since gaining independence from Britain in 1948. But the military junta, SLORC, lost their gamble against the beautiful, brave lady opposing them. Daw Aung San Suu Kyi's party - the National League for Democracy - won handsomely.

It was at that moment in Burma's history that I decided to write my BURMA RUBY QUARTET and RUBY CAMERON found life on my pages. EPILOGUE TO EMPIRE was the first book of my BURMA RUBY quartet. A second volume, THE GOLDEN ROCK OF KYAIK-TIYO, was published a year later in 1997.

I also have a handsome son, a lovely daughter, and seven grandchildren.

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