Books: Back to Borneo

• Tweet
• Digg

WHITE MAN RETURNS (3 10 pp.)—Agnes Newton Keith—Little, Brown ($4).

It took a moment for returning white men to recognize the little town on the Sulu Sea. All the wood-framed, tin-roofed, prewar houses were gone; sleazy palm-leaf shacks swayed in their places. The flies were thicker, the natives were thinner; only the charring equatorial heat was the same. Nevertheless, Harry and Agnes Keith were glad to be back. Before war and Japanese prison camps, the "dirty, stinking little town" of Sandakan, British North Borneo, was home.

Why the Keiths went back and what they found in postwar Borneo make for a chatty, cheerful saunter through life in a jungle suburbia.

Pyramid Intact. Author Keith (Land Below the Wind, Three Came Home) got her first peek at Sandakan as a young bride in 1934. Then she had felt the lure "of a country where elephants roamed free, fish flew . . . ladies wore evening dresses every evening, and I had no dishes to do, no clothes or babies to wash."

It was demi-paradise until the Japanese army invaded early in 1942. Three and a half years in prison camps taught her "that there were just two things which could break a heart; one is the terrible harshness of man, the other is his transfiguring mercy." While the Japs gave her rib-cracking beatings and starved her to a gaunt 80 Ibs., friendly Borneans took long chances smuggling packets of food to her and her two-year-old son.

In 1946, when her husband went back to his job as director of agriculture for North Borneo, Mrs. Keith was still too weak to go. A year later, when she rejoined him, friends called her a-"poor sap." But she was determined to help "those who had saved our lives at the risk of their own." She got a quick taste of change at a stopover in Hong Kong. "The place was overflowing with Chinese gold and jewels, and the Asiatic class which these possessions now represented looked confident and opulent in contrast to the threadbare Anglo-Saxons who had only their white skins left."

In conservative Sandakan, the social pyramid was still intact, with 25,000 Chinese, Malays, Indians and natives at the base, 80 Europeans at the top. The only revolutionary the Keiths had to keep tab on was little Georgie Keith, 7. To Mrs. Keith's dismay, he began spouting pidgin English: "Aw, Ma, dey all spik like dat!" "But that's not English you are talking. You must stop." "O.K., Mum. I no talk like dat any more, eh?"

Hardened Saliva. Georgie found plenty of compensations, notably when he could go on jungle safari with the natives to gather birds' nests. In the land where the orchids grow wild, the men have grown tame, but collecting birds' nests still requires skill and daring. Slithering over masses of cockroaches, the natives enter bat-infested limestone caves. On rattan ladders, they climb 100 feet or so to gather the nests of swiftlets. These contain the birds' hardened saliva, basic ingredient of bird's-nest soup. The $100,000-a-year take from this export (to China) does its bit to pull British North Borneo out of the soup economically.