Return to Rangoon
How many people can say their house tells the story of a country’s tragic history? That the dining-room walls bear marks of the massacre of almost 200 people and the garden testifies to the devastation of a cyclone that killed 140,000? These were the chilling discoveries I made when I revisited our Rangoon home after half a century. But another – very pleasant – surprise was to come.
I was aged nine, and living on the campus of Rangoon University, where my parents taught and our father was chaplain of the university church, when the Army ousted the government on 2 March 1962. Along with other Westerners, my family – parents Mary and Trevor and sisters Elspeth, Kate and I – was expelled from Burma at six weeks’ notice. None of us had returned until I went this February, after the tourism embargo was lifted.
And I had an extraordinary time. Not just because of the places I saw on a tour organised by the Britain-Burma Society in London and Green Leaf Travels in Rangoon, but because of the welcome I received at my old home. And the shocks and surprise awaiting me there.
1 Pongyis (monks) resting outside a pagoda. Right: Temples at Bagan, an ancient city near Mandalay. 2 Temples at Bagan, an ancient city near Mandalay. 3 Arthur, the present minister, introduces Ruth to members of the church choir in the sitting room of her old house. 4 The Hsaungdan (covered stairway) to the temple caves at Pindaya in the Shan state, which house more than 8,000 statues of Buddha, dating back to the 18th century
An enormous house and 12 servants came with our parents’ posting, but there was nothing luxurious about it. Chattering ‘tuctoo’ lizards clung to interior walls. There were snakes on the veranda, rats in the kitchen and henhouses, and cockroaches everywhere. We washed under a cold-water tin shower and our Indian cook Ramaswami produced all our meals – and, for our father, a large helping of near-fatal amoebic dysentery – on a primitive charcoal-red clay stove in an outhouse kitchen.
Kate was two when we went to Burma, our mother was only 33, and from Wimbledon. What had our parents been thinking of when we’d left the leafy suburbs for all this?
Our road comprised just two houses, the church and a female students’ hall of residence, with iron gates secluding us from the highway that ran from the airport into the city. We would watch convoys of visiting dignitaries drive past, including the Chinese and Russian leaders Chou En Lai and Khrushchev. In 1961, when Princess Alexandra arrived on a visit, the British Ambassador chose me (as the chattiest Commonwealth child in Rangoon) to present a posy to her. We had quite a natter, HRH and I. A week later, when she returned from a trip up-country, those Lings were hanging around the airport again in their best frocks, clearly with nothing but celeb-spotting to ll their Saturday afternoons, and she hared over to ask me how school had been that week. My pal, the Queen’s cousin…
All this came ooding back on Day Two of my 2013 trip, as we drove past Opposition Leader Aung San Suu Kyi’s house close to my childhood home. Our guide agreed to a detour, and gave me 10 minutes. Leaving everyone else waiting on the coach, I ran to the house. All I’d intended was to look at it from the gate. Perhaps take a photo if no one was watching. But, swayed by emotion the heat and the thought that I’d come 5,600 miles, I approached the front door. An elderly Burmese lady opened it. I told her about my connection with the house and church and we arranged that I would return on my free day nine days later.
We set off to tour Burma, visiting Bagan, with its 2,229 temples, the former capital, Mandalay, with its Royal Palace, the colonial-era British hill station of Maymyo (now called Pyin Oo Lwin), with its Botanical Gardens and horse-drawn carriages, and Inle Lake where the people live in floating log houses much as they have for 400 years.
On our last day, I returned to the house with two friends, Jane and Mark. Buddhist custom requires shoes to be left at the front door. About 20 pairs of flip- flops filled the steps: the church choir was rehearsing in the living room. The minister, a tall man in his 70s, greeted us and asked who my father was.
5 The ramshackle outhouse kitchen of the Rangoon house. 6 Washday at the Post Offi ce on Inle Lake. 7 The market at Kalaw in the Shan highlands. 8 The Ling family with Burmese friends (1961)
‘Trevor Ling,’ I said, thinking his name would mean nothing 50-odd years on. So I was astonished at what came next. ‘Ah. TO Ling,’ he murmured. ‘We were always impressed that he gave us the topics of his sermons three months ahead.’ He recalled my father’s American buddy, Paul. ‘They were like brothers,’ he said. ‘Always talking.’
When he told me his own name, I remembered it – and him – from 50 years before. He was the lanky student sitting next but one to my father in a framed photograph that has hung in my hall for two decades. Back in 1962, Arthur was the auditor for the university’s Christian Students’ Union Executive Committee. He became the church minister in 2002. Arthur’s wife Joan very kindly showed us round the house and garden and gave us lunch. Their daughter, son-in-law and grandchild live in what had been our father’s study and veranda, and their two sons in my sister's and my former bedrooms.
But in 2008, Cyclone Nargis hit climb and ripping up the lawn, which will not grow back. Most distressingly, two enormous cracks in the dining-room walls are a permanent reminder that in July 1962, just three months after we left, the Army massacred some 200 students, dynamiting the Students’ Union building behind our house, and shooting dead demonstrators outside it.
We all walked to church for the Sunday service, where Arthur asked me to speak for a few minutes. I stood at the lectern where my father had delivered those long-anticipated sermons half a century earlier, and told the congregation how happy my family had been in Burma and how thrilled I was to be back.
The welcome and hospitality Joan and Arthur gave us were exactly what we had come to expect of the smiling, good-natured Burmese. The house was a little shabby, the outhouse kitchen as ramshackle as ever, and the garden unkempt. But it was a loved family house – reborn and at peace again after the tragedies it had witnessed. I felt I’d come home.
9 ‘Downtown’ on Inle Lake. The Intha people have lived on this freshwater lake for at least 400 years. 10 The Rangoon University Students’ Christian Union Executive Committee, 1961. Arthur is third from the right on the front row, next but one to Ruth’s father. 11 The Taukkyan War Cemetery. 12 Pagodas are everywhere to be seen around Inle Lake, a 116 square-kilometer freshwater lake in the Shan hills
Several of us were so captivated by Burma that we have pledged to return. As Rudyard Kipling wrote in Letters From The East in 1898, Burma is ‘quite unlike any land you know about’. One thing’s for sure. I won’t leave it another 51 years until my next visit.
Britain-Burma Society: www.shwepla.net
Green Leaf Travels & Tours: www.travelstomyanmar.com
I was aged nine, and living on the campus of Rangoon University, where my parents taught and our father was chaplain of the university church, when the Army ousted the government on 2 March 1962. Along with other Westerners, my family – parents Mary and Trevor and sisters Elspeth, Kate and I – was expelled from Burma at six weeks’ notice. None of us had returned until I went this February, after the tourism embargo was lifted.
And I had an extraordinary time. Not just because of the places I saw on a tour organised by the Britain-Burma Society in London and Green Leaf Travels in Rangoon, but because of the welcome I received at my old home. And the shocks and surprise awaiting me there.
1 Pongyis (monks) resting outside a pagoda. Right: Temples at Bagan, an ancient city near Mandalay. 2 Temples at Bagan, an ancient city near Mandalay. 3 Arthur, the present minister, introduces Ruth to members of the church choir in the sitting room of her old house. 4 The Hsaungdan (covered stairway) to the temple caves at Pindaya in the Shan state, which house more than 8,000 statues of Buddha, dating back to the 18th centuryAn enormous house and 12 servants came with our parents’ posting, but there was nothing luxurious about it. Chattering ‘tuctoo’ lizards clung to interior walls. There were snakes on the veranda, rats in the kitchen and henhouses, and cockroaches everywhere. We washed under a cold-water tin shower and our Indian cook Ramaswami produced all our meals – and, for our father, a large helping of near-fatal amoebic dysentery – on a primitive charcoal-red clay stove in an outhouse kitchen.
Kate was two when we went to Burma, our mother was only 33, and from Wimbledon. What had our parents been thinking of when we’d left the leafy suburbs for all this?
Our road comprised just two houses, the church and a female students’ hall of residence, with iron gates secluding us from the highway that ran from the airport into the city. We would watch convoys of visiting dignitaries drive past, including the Chinese and Russian leaders Chou En Lai and Khrushchev. In 1961, when Princess Alexandra arrived on a visit, the British Ambassador chose me (as the chattiest Commonwealth child in Rangoon) to present a posy to her. We had quite a natter, HRH and I. A week later, when she returned from a trip up-country, those Lings were hanging around the airport again in their best frocks, clearly with nothing but celeb-spotting to ll their Saturday afternoons, and she hared over to ask me how school had been that week. My pal, the Queen’s cousin…
All this came ooding back on Day Two of my 2013 trip, as we drove past Opposition Leader Aung San Suu Kyi’s house close to my childhood home. Our guide agreed to a detour, and gave me 10 minutes. Leaving everyone else waiting on the coach, I ran to the house. All I’d intended was to look at it from the gate. Perhaps take a photo if no one was watching. But, swayed by emotion the heat and the thought that I’d come 5,600 miles, I approached the front door. An elderly Burmese lady opened it. I told her about my connection with the house and church and we arranged that I would return on my free day nine days later.
We set off to tour Burma, visiting Bagan, with its 2,229 temples, the former capital, Mandalay, with its Royal Palace, the colonial-era British hill station of Maymyo (now called Pyin Oo Lwin), with its Botanical Gardens and horse-drawn carriages, and Inle Lake where the people live in floating log houses much as they have for 400 years.
On our last day, I returned to the house with two friends, Jane and Mark. Buddhist custom requires shoes to be left at the front door. About 20 pairs of flip- flops filled the steps: the church choir was rehearsing in the living room. The minister, a tall man in his 70s, greeted us and asked who my father was.
5 The ramshackle outhouse kitchen of the Rangoon house. 6 Washday at the Post Offi ce on Inle Lake. 7 The market at Kalaw in the Shan highlands. 8 The Ling family with Burmese friends (1961)‘Trevor Ling,’ I said, thinking his name would mean nothing 50-odd years on. So I was astonished at what came next. ‘Ah. TO Ling,’ he murmured. ‘We were always impressed that he gave us the topics of his sermons three months ahead.’ He recalled my father’s American buddy, Paul. ‘They were like brothers,’ he said. ‘Always talking.’
When he told me his own name, I remembered it – and him – from 50 years before. He was the lanky student sitting next but one to my father in a framed photograph that has hung in my hall for two decades. Back in 1962, Arthur was the auditor for the university’s Christian Students’ Union Executive Committee. He became the church minister in 2002. Arthur’s wife Joan very kindly showed us round the house and garden and gave us lunch. Their daughter, son-in-law and grandchild live in what had been our father’s study and veranda, and their two sons in my sister's and my former bedrooms.
But in 2008, Cyclone Nargis hit climb and ripping up the lawn, which will not grow back. Most distressingly, two enormous cracks in the dining-room walls are a permanent reminder that in July 1962, just three months after we left, the Army massacred some 200 students, dynamiting the Students’ Union building behind our house, and shooting dead demonstrators outside it.
We all walked to church for the Sunday service, where Arthur asked me to speak for a few minutes. I stood at the lectern where my father had delivered those long-anticipated sermons half a century earlier, and told the congregation how happy my family had been in Burma and how thrilled I was to be back.
The welcome and hospitality Joan and Arthur gave us were exactly what we had come to expect of the smiling, good-natured Burmese. The house was a little shabby, the outhouse kitchen as ramshackle as ever, and the garden unkempt. But it was a loved family house – reborn and at peace again after the tragedies it had witnessed. I felt I’d come home.
9 ‘Downtown’ on Inle Lake. The Intha people have lived on this freshwater lake for at least 400 years. 10 The Rangoon University Students’ Christian Union Executive Committee, 1961. Arthur is third from the right on the front row, next but one to Ruth’s father. 11 The Taukkyan War Cemetery. 12 Pagodas are everywhere to be seen around Inle Lake, a 116 square-kilometer freshwater lake in the Shan hillsSeveral of us were so captivated by Burma that we have pledged to return. As Rudyard Kipling wrote in Letters From The East in 1898, Burma is ‘quite unlike any land you know about’. One thing’s for sure. I won’t leave it another 51 years until my next visit.
Britain-Burma Society: www.shwepla.net
Green Leaf Travels & Tours: www.travelstomyanmar.com