Quite like the musical von Trapps who escaped the advancing Nazis at the start of World War II in Europe, the Isaac family from Kochi braved Japanese bombings in Rangoon and trekked their way out to safety. They arrived in Kochi by train, in three batches, in 1942, with just their clothes on, heads full of stories of loss and survival, with malaria and typhoid and memories of songs sung on boats on moonlit nights.
Joyce Isaac, of the family, turned 90 last week and her sister Dorell Nunes, 84 a month earlier. The two distinctly remember the day, December 23, 1941, when the first bomb was dropped on Rangoon.
“It was Christmas time. Mummy and I had gone to the church in the morning for confession when we heard planes flying low. We knew something was going to happen. We headed home and mummy distributed cotton balls to everyone to stuff into the ears. The first bomb fell at nine,” recalls Dorell who was 11 then.
Today, she is sought after for her first-hand account of life in old Myanmar and as the maker of waffles, the famous Dutch snack that she learnt to make thanks to her maternal Dutch ancestry.
At 90 Joyce is living out her deepest yearning - a desire to spend her years in a convent. For the last 12 years she has been living at Saint Agnes Old Age Home in Pandikudy, close to the chapel, and at easy distance from her sister. She was born in Rangoon after her parents Patrick Isaac and Winifred Powell moved there in the early 1920s.
The relocation to Rangoon was because Patrick wished to fight in the War. He left his job in Aspinwall here and joined the army during the WW I. He was posted in Basra. With the war coming to an end Patrick was called across to Rangoon by his brother Charles who worked there. The Isaacs moved to Rangoon and Patrick found work as a supervisor in the port. Joyce was born there in 1925. “Rangoon was a beautiful place. I left my home, my dog Dickey, two parrots, a canary…. I remember I learnt The Merchant Of Venice in Burmese,” recalls Joyce who was 17 when she arrived.
She is one of the first teachers of the English School that was started by the British in Fort Cochin. In Rangoon the Isaacs lived in a flat surrounded by the dock, the GEC office and the shopping area. Dorell remembers the place ablaze on the fateful day when the sirens went off at nine and when the ‘all clear’ was sounded at three in the afternoon. A horrific image of a gutted shoe shop with a Chinese man in flames, plastered against the wall, flashes in her mind even now.
“It was a nightmare,” she says. As full-fledged war broke out Charles ordered his brother and family to assemble at a shelter across his home. Evacuees began to gather and compulsory evacuation began a month later. The Isaac extended family, by now 20, boarded the train to Mandalay and was guided to a camp, from where they took two sampans (boats). The boats sailed for a month or so, which is when the children began enjoying the displacement as adventure.
“Mind you, we were kids. We would sing on the boat,” says Dorell recalling that her youngest brother, Neville was so little that her elder sisters Joyce and Sheila carried him piggyback. Their mother was recovering from consumption and was weak.
Their boat journey ended in a camp from where the trek began. It was a camp to camp trek that took 12 to 14 hours daily. They would begin early by four and walk through jungles cleared by elephants that walked ahead and carried their small bags in receptacles called ‘paars’. The invalids and weak were carried on makeshift bamboo palanquins called dhulis .
“Aunty Helen was completely blind. She and my mother went on these. They broke off from the rest of the trekkers, so my father went with them,” says Joyce. As they trekked through harsh conditions and thick undergrowth they saw roads being constructed at a height for the military. The construction caused landslides. They lost an aunt during the trek. She died of cholera.
“There was no burial; she was just thrown down, off the track.”
The camps were thatched structures where rice and egg or sardine curry was served for food. Later, as they moved into Nagaland, the children remember being fascinated by the dressing of the Nagas. “They wore beautiful beaded jewellery, with furs and feathers but only a loin cloth below.”
Dorell remembers the shivering cold weather and the welcome bowls of hot soup given to them by the Nagas. Through all the hardships the children found moments of enjoyment. “We used to sing on the boats and play Salts in the camps. We saw beautiful wildlife, the annoyed geckos with their colourful fans at the neck.”
Joyce remembers her father as a tough man, full of humour. “He made things light for us by cracking jokes.”
Other memories of the trek the sisters speak of are of a false tiger scare and of one Mrs Cann who stopped the group to search for her hairpin that had fallen off.
Once they arrived in Kolkata the group stayed at Loyola School, which was a camp at the time. “We stayed for five days. The officials handling the evacuation were organising groups to different parts of the country. We boarded the train to Cochin and arrived here on April 11, 1942.”
On arrival the Isaacs found Fort Cochin to be completely deserted. Their home on Lilly Street was closed and their grandmother Faustina with other relatives had moved to Kottayam to take shelter from impending shelling.
Rumours of war hung high-Rangoon had fallen; the Japanese had entered East Pakistan.
