Jim & Eve Kennedy
My first husband was Joseph Bruce Kennedy or Bruce as he was called. He was Scottish and his family history was quite something. His father, Jim Kennedy, was orphaned at a very young age due to a car crash in which both his parents were killed. He became a ward of the Marists – a religious organization that ran an orphanage outside Edinburgh. His upbringing was strict and very dour to use the Scottish word. At 17 he was sent off to make his fortune. He chose a rubber plantation in what was then known as Malaya now known as Malaysia. He eventually ended up as manager of a rubber plantation still on the main shore but a short boat ride to the island of Penang where I would visit many years later.
By all reports his father was very successful, very strict and brought his stentorian ways to the running of the plantation. He was rumored to tip over Gerry cans of water if they were from his water source because the natives had their own brackish water in their village. He carried on for many years and finally in his mid-thirties he decided it was time to find a wife. But the first thing he had to do was get dance lessons. So he found a little dance school in Glasgow run by a Miss Eve Chicken. His ship docked in Liverpool and he took the train up to Glasgow. After a few dance lessons he was quite taken with Miss Chicken. All I know about her past is that she wanted to be a ballerina and grew too tall but dancing was her passion so she open a dance school. She was a dead ringer for Barbara Stanwick, the actress. She was full of laughter and gaiety and quite caught his heart instantly.
As he only had a month’s home leave, he had to act quickly and proposed to Eve one night after dinner. She was no spring chicken either and prospects at home were grim with most men gone to fight the war with Germany. She said yes and a few weeks later they were on the ship back to Singapore. There is an old grainy photograph of her being barged upriver to the plantation pushed along by natives with long poles as there were no major roads in those days.
She loved the social life; drinking, partying and having a grand old time compared to bleak Scotland. She also had two children, Harry and then Elspeth, and was pregnant with my husband when the Japanese invaded from the North. The warning had always been that they would come from the sea but the Japanese were clever and had intercepted that warning and changed their plans at the last moment.
Eve packed up the children and she was evacuated by the British to Perth, Western Australia. Jim was caught with a huge group of ex-pats in Singapore and spent the remainder of the war in Changhi Prison, reputed to be one of the worst.
Eve managed well in Perth, had Bruce, ran a dance school, and fell in love. Then eventually the Japanese surrendered. Eve returned to Scotland with her three children. After a short while, she discovered she was pregnant again with her Australian friend’s baby. Meanwhile, Jim was en route to a rehabilitation hospital in India. He was finally released and sailed home by way of Liverpool. Eve and her friend went to meet the ship. Her friend’s husband never turned up and she returned to Edinburgh. Eve waited and waited still no Jim so she returned to the little hotel she had booked for their reunion. Halfway through the evening, the front desk informed her that there was a telephone call for her. She picked up the phone and it was Jim finally disembarked from the ship with hundreds of wounded and maimed, blind and sick former prisoners of war. That night she is supposedly to conceive the child she is already pregnant with. Sadly, the baby miscarried and was never mentioned again.
They returned to their plantation in Malaysia. Cook and all the servants were still there. The Japanese had looted their big house removing all their wedding presents and anything else that seemed useful. The only thing they found was a foot-high ceramic rooster lying in a stream behind the house. They kept that as a memento of those times. It would eventually find a place of pride on their mantelpiece when they retired to the Channel Islands many years later.
Bruce and his sister and brother had been shipped off to boarding school some years before when Bruce was only 6. He would go on to Fetty’s School for Boys and later Edinburgh University with a degree, perversely enough, in the German language. He ended up in London working for a diamond merchant in Hatton Garden and would cover the Far East on buying sprees for the company. It was at this time that we met through mutual friends in London.
We were married in September of 1967. We honeymooned on the Isle of Elba and then immediately took up a posting to Frankfurt. I got a job with US Army for a Major Weimer and his assistant Sgt. whom I found in tears one morning upon learning of Martin Luther King’s assassination. Following Bruce’s desire to live in the Far East again, he found a job with an overseas shipping company. We ended up in Tokyo, originally scheduled to go to Thailand but the British quota was full so Japan it was. Ironic in every sense given his parent’s experience during the war but rather like me living in and enjoying Germany after all that my mother and her family had been through. I suppose typical of our youth and not wanting anything to interfere with the fun of discovery.
We would visit his parents in Jersey a few times a year. They had a little house they called Kampong (Malay for house) and had a good retirement, playing bridge, cocktails, and dinners. They were always very social. They did not approve of me because of being half American. Although our problems eventually had nothing to do with that and everything to do with Bruce’s lifestyle preference. We were 22 and 24 years old respectively when we married and spent the last six years of our marriage growing further and further apart. I finally moved out of our apartment in Tokyo and lived on my own. I had a decent job with McCann Erickson and was immersed in the Tokyo Amateur Dramatic Society where I would meet husband #2, Bill Laws.