In early February, I went to Jesselton to meet Olive and Fiona. On arrival, I was asked to go immediately to the Secretariat to brief the Governor and the Director of Agriculture on the extent of the flood damage. Sir William was anxious to learn if Unilever still intended to continue with the project.
He had just been informed by Cadburys that they had decided to abandon the cocoa plantation they had started only a few months before on the Labuk, a few miles upstream from us. Also, Sir William was fully aware that it was flooding in earlier years which had caused Imperial Tobacco to decide to withdraw from tobacco production in the colony.
With my fingers crossed, I assured him with as much confidence as I could muster, that UPI in London was well used to problems of this nature in other parts of the world, and that Unilever was very unlikely to be put off by an unexpected flood.
Olive and Fiona arrived at Jesselton Airport the next day. It was the first time that Olive had been separated from Catriona since she was born, and she was missing her already. Since Catriona was only six, she was not able to write to us for the first few months. However Olive had given her a tape-recorder and this enabled us to keep in touch.
The next time we were to see Catriona was at the summer holidays. Her first trip as an ‘unaccompanied child’ was to prove something of an Odyssey. She was sent by train from Devon to London, where she was met by one of the secretaries from Plantations Group. That evening she was taken to Heathrow and put on a plane to Singapore, where she was met by a Ground Hostess and accommodated in Raffles Hotel for the night.
The next day, she was put on the Singapore-Jesselton flight. Olive and I tried to get over to Jesselton to meet her, but the flights were full, so Catriona had to change planes in Jesselton for the flight to Sandakan.
When the plane touched down, Olive and I watched eagerly as passenger after passenger disembarked. There was no sign of Catriona. She was not on the plane. The Sandakan Airport staff could tell us nothing except that her name was on the passenger list and she seemed to have gone missing.
We were frantic. We had visions of white slavers or kidnappers having made off with her. We enquired of some of the disembarking passengers. One or two said that a little European girl had been with them as far as Jesselton but she had not joined the Sandakan flight. I phoned the Borneo Airways desk at Jesselton.
Eventually I found an official who said: “Now that you mention it, I did notice a little girl sitting on a suitcase in a corner of the departure lounge. I’ll go and see if she is still there.”
Eventually she was tracked down. Catriona said that she had been told to sit in the corner and not to move until someone came to collect her. Obviously they forgot about her and the plane took off without her. After sitting there for three hours or so, she was beginning to get worried.
There was no plane from Jesselton to Sandakan that night, so one of the Ground Hostesses took her home with her for the night. Catriona trotted off the plane at Sandakan Airport the next morning in her straw hat and school blazer.
She was bright and cheerful although she had by now been four days in transit. She said she’d had a lovely time with the Hostess in Jesselton. They had gone for a moonlight barbeque on the beach with a lot of young Chinese friends.
When I think of some of the mothers in UK nowadays, who will not risk letting children of 11 travel a few hundred yards to school by themselves, it makes me shudder to think of our little six-year-old travelling around the world on her own. In due course all three of the girls became quite blasé about travelling unaccompanied. There was often a crowd of children travelling together and they usually had a wonderful time.
Free fertiliser
Back at the estate, we patched up the Rest House as well as we could. I moved into it for a few weeks until our permanent house could be completed. One evening I was sitting at the bar feeling rather gloomy. Olive and Fiona were still living in Sandakan and I was on my own amidst the ruins of our first two years’ work.
Old Ibrahim paddled across the river to pay me a visit. It reminded me of my first few days in October 1960. We lit up our pipes and discussed the effect of the floods. Ibrahim was as cheerful as ever. His house, being on the other side of the river, had been out of the fiercest flow of the flood waters, and he had already carried out the few repairs that were necessary.
He said he had heard that the Assistant District Officer and all the government officials were to be moved permanently down to Beluran. The Chinese shopkeepers from Klagan were all rich, he said. They could all look after themselves. Tumpeh was already starting to build a new shophouse on the estate.
Had the Tungud Kadazans been badly hit, I asked. Ibrahim laughed. They were grateful, he said, that the company had provided them with free food and shelter during the peak of the floods.
However, by the middle of the year, they would probably be better off than they would be in a year without flooding. They were now frantically busy planting paddy and vegetables. After a flood, Ibrahim said, they always got marvellous crops because of the rich deposits of silt, which were left behind.
“Rich deposits of silt!” Ibrahim had said. This made me think. We had just had millions of tons of rich deposits of silt, distributed free of charge all over our concession to an average depth of more than a foot!
We had estimated that we would spend about $200 per acre on fertilisers during the palms’ three-year-long immature period. If the deposits of silt permitted us to reduce the cost of fertilisers by half, then we could be looking at a saving of perhaps as much as half a million dollars on our fertiliser costs over the next few years.
Against this, the cost of replanting the dead palms, and repairing the roads and drains, would be trivial. After all, the temporary management houses which we had lost were due to be replaced by permanent buildings in the course of the next year anyhow.
I began to think about the wording of my next monthly report to London: ‘In the first three months of 1963, we had a marvellous stroke of luck when the alluvial deposits from an exceptionally high flood helped us reduce our costs to maturity by half a million dollars!’
Well, as our workers used to say in West Africa: “All things by try!”
Datuk Leslie Davidson
Author, East of Kinabalu
Former Chairman, Unilever Plantations International
This is the second part of an edited chapter from the book published in 2007. It can be purchased from the Incorporated Society of Planters; email: isph@tm.net.my
