Victor was a darling, with chubby cheeks and big, brown eyes. I could not understand why he had been taken away from Serena in the first place. Nothing at this point made any sense. But I cared about him and, knowing that I had no choice, agreed to go.
The night before I left, Armi and I made a pact. It was not long before the Great Tribulation, and no matter where we were in the world we would meet at the edge of the jungle outside Manila. I was an avid reader of the ‘Survival Sam’ Comix series that described how to set traps, live off the land and get clean water in the wild. We drew up a list of essentials we would need, like rope, matches, water-purification tablets and a Swiss army knife.
‘I’ll be there, waiting for you,’ I said. ‘No matter what happens, do you promise to be there?’
‘I promise,’ Armi assured me.
It might have been a fanciful dream, but I believed it with all my heart, and somehow it made me feel better.
I arrived late in the evening at my new destination – Dan and Tina’s Home – with baby Victor in my arms. I was uncertain of my future; my stomach tied in knots.
Serena came flying into the living room with Mariana and Juliana, beside herself with joy. ‘Victor! He’s grown so big!’ she exclaimed. I handed him to her but he didn’t recognize his own mother and screamed and his chubby arms flailed at her face.
He continued to struggle and turned to me, his little face red and blotched and held out his arms. I took him and rocked him, while Serena looked on distressed. I was the one familiar face he knew, but still he cried and cried late into the night. I tried my best to comfort him, but he wanted the only mother he knew – Claire.
Eventually I was shown to my bed, the top of a triple-bunk bed in the enclosed porch that had been turned into a children’s bedroom. Emotionally worn out, I lay in the dark with the other children, wondering why I was being punished by being sent into exile. It was total banishment. No contact, no telephone calls, no visits.
Dan and Tina had four children: Peter, who was ten like me, two younger brothers and a little sister. The house had four bedrooms, and in addition to Serena and my sisters, two other couples lived there – Peter Pioneer and Rachel, whom I knew from Music with Meaning, and Joseph and Talitha, a German couple who spoke English with a heavy accent. Juliana had made friends with their four-year-old daughter Vera and they spent most of the day with Talitha.
I found it hard to adjust to being with Serena again after so many months of being apart. She felt a virtual stranger to me and I spent most of my time at first caring for Victor. It took two weeks for him to stop crying, and by six weeks he showed no signs of missing his former foster family.
For the first time I began to sympathize with Serena, who had struggled for many years with a debilitating condition that made it very painful for her to walk, especially when she was pregnant, which she was at the time with her third child by Dad. Her knees swelled up to twice their normal size and this crippled her ability to help in the Home. Then Victor contracted tuberculosis, which was endemic in many parts of the East. Medical care was expensive. Finally, it was decided that they both had to go to Germany to get proper medical attention. Being sent back to the West was a mark of dishonour, and to have to resort to doctors meant she was weak in faith and had spiritual problems. Everything was hush, hush, and Serena never said goodbye. The day she left, Tina asked me to distract Juliana.
‘She’s not going with them?’ I asked.
‘No. It would be too much for Serena. She’s eight months pregnant, and Victor is sick. Mariana is the oldest so she’ll be able to help with Victor.’ Mariana was only five.
I felt terrible for Juliana, the middle child, who was now left without a mother just like me, only Dad wasn’t here either. Immediately I felt I had to try and protect her and be a ‘mother’ to her. Dan and Tina were appointed our legal guardians. I was ten and Juliana was four. I didn’t mind Tina, but I was afraid of Dan and tried my best to stay out of his way. He beat his boys with a metal flyswatter, sometimes a hundred swats at a time. Their shrieks made my blood run cold. After a beating, their bottoms would be bloody and swollen for days.
There was always the fear hanging over me that one day he would beat me too, but I was lucky he never did. It was his two younger boys that were beaten the most, and they often behaved violently themselves, attacking me as if passing on their pain. Once they even tried to strangle me. That scared me even more and I began to withdraw into myself. Juliana moved in with Joseph and Talitha, but, unlike me, she did not escape Dan’s violent outbursts. There was little I could do to prevent the beatings he inflicted on her every day, mostly for wetting her bed, something I thought was completely unfair. When anyone would get a beating, the screams would resound through the house and a terrible feeling in the pit of my stomach would grip me until it was finally over.
I’d close my eyes and grit my teeth and mentally beg, Dad – please come, please come. The hope that he would somehow hear my silent prayers and come to take us away soon kept me going through the days.
It was one long year later, when I was eleven, that without warning, Dad arrived suddenly at the doorstep of our home with Jeremy Spencer. Now I knew how Serena had felt when she’d seen baby Victor again. I screamed, ‘Dad!’ and flung my arms tightly about him.
He gave me a big hug. ‘How’s my girl?’
‘Oh Dad – I missed you.’
‘Well, we’re together now. We’re going to live on a farm!’ he said.
‘A farm? Where?’
‘In Macau.’
‘Where’s Macau, Dad?’
‘It’s a Portuguese colony near Hong Kong. We’re going to live on Hosea’s farm. You know who Hosea is, don’t you?’ He didn’t wait for me to say that I did. Everyone knew who the entire Royal Family was by heart.
There was a part of me that was curious to meet Hosea – Mo’s youngest son. I had read about him in the Mo Letters, but even more, I didn’t care where we were as long as I stayed with Dad.
Hosea’s farm was located in a little Chinese village called Hac Sa. The property included a fifteen-room cottage, two smaller cottages, stables and farmland, where some forty-five members lived. Hosea had two wives, Esther and Ruth, with seven children – two girls and five boys – between them. The evening we arrived, I was unwell and had been throwing up all day. The temperature was 10 degrees – and that was cold compared to the Philippines where it is hot all year round. Esther immediately wrapped me up warm and soaked my feet in a bucket of warm water.
‘You might have a fever,’ she said, concerned, and took my temperature, which was just slightly higher than normal. ‘Just have a good rest tomorrow,’ she cooed.
I hadn’t been made such a fuss over in a long time, and Esther was the warm, motherly type, the way I had dreamed my mother would be.
Dad, Juliana and I were shown to our room in one of the smaller cottages. It was cosy, and I liked the idea of staying in a smaller house apart from the main commune.
The next morning I had a better look around. There were no walls around the houses like the Homes in the Philippines. Chinese families lived next door to us and I would see them playing table tennis or cards outside. Because of the language barrier I was unable to talk with them. I also met Crystal and her husband, Michael. This woman was the same Crystal who had been my nanny in Greece many years earlier.
‘Welcome,’ she said, smiling at my father. ‘And I remember you,’ she said, giving me a wink.
It