Distant and Dangerous Days in Burma and China with Letters, a Diary and Historic Photographs

Germaine, Elizabeth Tebby

ISBN 10: 0992669405 / ISBN 13: 9780992669409

Published by Anona Publications, Leamington Spa, U.K, 2013

About this Item

205 x 145mm. pp. 168. English text. Original material, letters, a diary and extracts from a book (by the author's mother) are quoted in this highly illustrated history of WW2 in the Far East. Stories of danger and survival are told in context of contemporary events, with many high quality photos of Burma taken by the author's aunt and some of China. Author's note to title page reading 'review copy. Nov. 2013. www.elizabethtebbygermaine.com. Black and white photographic illustrations. Bound in original pictorial wraps. Some bumping to edges and corners, otherwise clean. Binding strong. No underlining.

Seller Inventory # 030490

Bibliographic Details

• Title: Distant and Dangerous Days in Burma and China with Letters, a Diary and Historic Photographs
• Publisher: Anona Publications, Leamington Spa, U.K
• Publication Date: 2013
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 0992669405
• ISBN 13: 9780992669409
• Binding: Paperback
• Edition: First Paperback Edition.
• Condition: Very Good -
• Seller catalogs:
  • Asia

About this title

Synopsis

Distant and Dangerous Days in Burma and China: With Letters, a Diary and Historic Photographs

About the Author

ELIZABETH TEBBY GERMAINE I was born in 1951 two months after my parents arrived back in England from Burma. They may have intended to return, but chose not to initially and later were not able to because of the military government and prolonged civil wars which they had experienced first hand. My aunt, Dorothy Lewis (who took most of the photos) had to leave the country in 1966. We grew up with Burma in the background with pretty lacquerware in the house and pictures of Burma on the walls and when they wanted a private conversation they would speak in the soft melodious Burmese language with much laughter and mysterious looks. As a child I absorbed my parents' love for the country and their sadness that they were not able to return. My brother and I heard the story that our mother had walked '200 miles in 17 days' not yet knowing that she had in fact been one of tens of thousands of refugees of many races who fled the Japanese invasion of Burma, along with the forced retreat of what military forces were then available in 1942. As a child I imagined her wading through rivers sparkling in the sunshine, not knowing this was a trek through the harsh inhospitable terrain of the jungles and mountains with the ever present threat of disease, exhaustion and starvation and the fast advancing Japanese armies. In my 20's I trained as an English teacher, wrote stories, draft novels and plays but then left writing for a while, re-trained and followed a career as a pianist and piano and violin teacher. I planned to return to writing at a later time in life. At some stage I read my mother's detailed diary and discussed with her the possibility of publishing it in some way, but this never happened at the time. After she died in 2006, and after the shock of seeing TV reports of the demonstrations in Burma in 2007 when many monks and ordinary people were killed and imprisoned I started to put this book together. I also had a large collection of old slides and photographs of a country which was inaccessible for many years and felt that these were of great interest to a wider audience. My love of literature and history made this writing task enjoyable and rewarding. My life as a vicar's daughter has resulted in a life long interest in comparative religions from an agnostic viewpoint, and so when faced with the task of collecting together material about missionaries the historical and political aspects of this story were what interested me the most. I have at all times sought to be objective and have avoided presenting the story from any specific viewpoint. While collecting material together from my cousins about their family in China I became fascinated by the complexities and contradictions of movements and rebellions in China and the hostile atmosphere into which my aunt travelled. Only 25 years previously many missionaries had been massacred in the Boxer Rebellion. Despite this there are five very interesting old photos that survive showing that it was possible to do some work in the church. My three cousins were born in different places, suggesting the family had an unsettled time during the civil war and Japanese invasion and by 1943 many Europeans had already left the country, but this family seemed particularly vulnerable and disorganised and this made their story all the more compelling. Since writing the book I have had a number of interesting experiences which have brought home even more forcibly what my mother went through and how tough she must have been. There is a lot of detail in her diary but at times she understated the dangers and difficulties of her journey. I felt strongly I wanted to complete my own writing project before reading a number of other books on the subject, and was aware that I could have researched this subject for many months. I decided instead to link the original letters and diary together with history of the times that was already well known and documented and present them alongside significant contemporary events of which there were many. There were several books I had intended to read and finally did when mine was completed. The first was 'Exodus Burma' by Felicity Goodall published in 2011. This is a harrowing book full of highly detailed accounts of many of the refugees, hundreds of whom did not survive the journey. Then on page 135 I had a startling moment - in an extract from the diary of Fred Tizzard, a Irrawaddy Flotilla Company captain there is a description of my own mother. There were details in it connected with children from an orphan's home she was helping which made it unmistakeably her. (In her own diary she mentioned an IFC captain without writing his name - this may well be the same person.) I then read 'Bewitched by Burma' by Anne Carter, and a similar thing happened. In her account of the same time in history Anne wrote that a Miss Chapman accompanied her uncle Padre Garrad on a trip to Sagaing, taking a break from the bombing of Mandalay in 1942. Anne Carter quoted some words written by my mother, and I discovered she had had a carbon copy of a fragment of Josephine's diary in her uncle's papers which she had quoted without asking my permission as she had not previously known of my existence. The surprises were not yet over. I then discovered a book 'Weathering the Storm' that Josephine Chapman had written in 1946. There may have been a copy in our house but I had not noticed it or realised its significance until now. She herself had not mentioned it to me. This was a very exciting find and luckily I was able to get hold of an old copy straight away. I was given permission by the publisher to use extracts and I knew immediately that I had to do a revised edition of DISTANT AND DANGEROUS DAYS IN BURMA AND CHINA. Of particular interest were stories of her own travels, descriptions of Burma after the war, comments comparing Buddhism and Christianity and in particular her accounts of conversations she had with people who had survived the war in Burma which fitted well into my chapter 7 which was renamed - 'Experiences in war-torn Burma 1942-45'. Since then I have discovered yet another account about the thousands of escaping refugees in the book - 'The Story of Burma' by F Tennyson Jesse also published in 1946. This is an author I had already mentioned in my own book as her fascinating and carefully researched historical novel - 'The Lacquer Lady' gives a stunning insight into life in the Burmese Court around the time of the third Anglo-Burmese war in 1885, and when writing an earlier draft of my book an interesting old letter that had been written by my father from Mandalay in 1938 was discovered (by my brother). It was inside an old family copy of 'The Lacquer Lady' which had sat on our bookshelves for many years. I included this letter in my chapter 4 - 'Burma - a clash of cultures and religions'. In her fascinating book 'The Story of Burma' there was information I had not previously seen about the numbers evacuated from the strategic airfield at Myitkyina before it was taken by the Japanese in May 1942. (Descriptions of air raids at this airfield appear in 'Exodus Burma' and my mother's diary). On my website www.elizabethtebbygermaine.co.uk I have copied book reviews I have written on Amazon of 'The Story of Burma" and 'Weathering the Storm' by Josephine Chapman. There is also one of 'Forgotten Voices of Burma' by Julian Thompson which made a vivid impression on me because many details included in the descriptions of soldiers and civilians retreating in Burma were of similar places and conditions that my mother had described in her diary.