Ghostwritten by Isabel Wolff Page A

what my own parents would say if I’d been Susan’s age and it had been me. Idecided that they wouldn’t mind. They’d never tried to stop Peter and me being friends with the local children. Peter’s best friend was a boy named Jaya who lived in the
kampong.
He and Peter fished together in the pond, digging up ant eggs for bait. Jaya would bring his wooden chess set up to our house and they’d set it out on the verandah and play. Because Peter was too young to start school, Mum taught him his letters and numbers. If Jaya was around, he’d join in, and my mother used to say how good he was at maths.
    A few of the Dutch people we knew had criticised my parents for their ‘naive’ attitude towards the local people. Wil Jochen sometimes muttered about it. Ralph and Marleen Dekker, tea planters at Tasikmalaya, a few miles away, openly disapproved. Their son, Herman, was two years older than Peter, and our families occasionally visited each other, though my mother disliked Mrs Dekker’s air of superiority; her mother had been a lady-in-waiting to Queen Wilhelmina, and Mrs Dekker made sure that everyone knew it. But my dad wanted to be on good terms with the other planters in the area; and so one April Sunday – it was Peter’s birthday – the Dekkers came over for lunch.
    I remember Mrs Dekker’s expression as she watched Jaya splashing about in the pool with Peter and Herman. Then she turned to my mother. Was it ‘quite wise’ she asked her, to ‘cross the social boundaries’?
    ‘Jaya’s a dear little boy, Marleen,’ my mother responded quietly. ‘He and Peter are great friends.’
    ‘But Anneke – to let him
swim!
’
    ‘Herman and Peter don’t seem to mind, Marleen. Why should you?’
    ‘Because this sort of familiarity isn’t … right.’
    ‘It’s “right” in our home,’ my mother retorted calmly.
    ‘No good can come of it,’ Mrs Dekker insisted. ‘It’s my belief that you’ll regret it.’
    My mother’s face flushed. ‘What is there to regret about a happy friendship? As for no good coming of it, I believe that you’re wrong. It surely
is
good for children of different cultures to have fun together, because that builds understanding which, heaven knows, the world needs more than ever at the moment.’
    ‘But the fact is—’
    ‘Don’t
tell
me,’ my mother interrupted, ‘that “east is east and west is west”. How often have I heard
that
in this country?’
    ‘That’s because it’s true,’ Mrs Dekker insisted. ‘We’re not the same as the
inlanders
, Anneke. You shouldn’t pretend that we are.’
    My mother flinched. ‘I’m not pretending anything, Marleen. I’m simply surprised that you would object to a nice little boy having fun – especially as it’s
my
home that he’s having fun in, not yours. And to be frank, I find your high-and-mighty attitude rather ridiculous, given that we planters are really no more than glorified farmers!’
    Mrs Dekker didn’t answer, but I remember being aware of a sudden chill in the air and, shortly afterwards, the Dekkers left.
    This incident seemed, on the surface, a trivial matter, but afterwards my mother said she felt bad about it and wished that she’d restrained herself. My father assured her that it would soon be forgotten. It wasn’t, and it would come back to haunt my mother in a devastating way.
    As for the views that she had expressed, they were consistent with what she and my father had always taught Peter and me – that we were no better or worse than anyone else on Java. We were simply lucky to be living in such a beautiful and bountiful country – over which a shadow was falling.
    As children we were vaguely aware that war was coming to Europe – a place that, to us, seemed so remote, it might as well have been another planet. But the grown-ups talked of little else. At that time everyone listened to the Dutch East Indies radio station. From this we knew that Austria, Britain and France had declared war on