When all else failed humor seemed effective. To him it was worth the risk of making a fool of himself. What was acceptable depended on the social setting and applied to how Mr. Flint treated his hosts. He seized on the Kelabit’s general geniality. He proceeded on and was genial himself. In comparison with his wife, he was cheerful. That came directly from his many years of experience in the field and his knowledge of natives. Whether his assumptions were correct or not, there was no one who could help him around.
Mrs. Flint wouldn’t allow Mr. Flint to forget that she was an educated woman, who enjoyed music, dancing, and could speak two or three European languages, while he was not at all cultured. She always played on his emotions and claimed he tricked her into coming to Borneo. According to her, he lied about what she would have to face. Nothing in her mind supplanted her hatred of the heat and the clamminess she could only escape at night. She didn’t even appreciate tropical fruits, the mangoes, the mangosteens, and a fruit called soursop.
She would’ve preferred living in Aden, Ceylon, Penang, or Singapore, places where she wouldn’t have had to bathe in a river and where people wouldn’t spy on her so much. Away from the world she knew and loved as a child (and also far from the royal gardens, peacocks, flowers and perfumes of her imagination), she was forced to live in primitive places.
Still the Kelabit weren’t totally primitive. No description did justice to their singing with fine mandolins. See them in the moonlight singing until after midnight. Hear their stories and their secrets. In spite of all of the beauty, Mrs. Flint’s mind was set.
No one was given so much attention and disliked it as much as she did. No one could show so much disdain and at the same time had so many admirers. While appearing so helpless, no one hated help more. Born into the aristocracy, she got angry with her husband for not understanding that.
How could she be faulted for missing her friends in Moscow, or England where she met her husband? Or why she couldn’t reconcile the loss of so much time? Or why she missed Christmas and Easter, the Russian spring and painted eggshells? She couldn’t forget the seaside dacha where she lived as a youth. She yearned for London and wanted to return to Paris. So, after loving London and Paris, she made the biggest mistake of her life.
Some mistakes seemed right at the time, but with hindsight were obviously mistakes. She soon wished she had never met Mr. Flint. With all of her heart, she wished she had said no, and especially after he mentioned the idea of going into government service.
As a government officer, Mr. Flint had to be a jack-of-all trades: a policeman, Chief of Public Works, Land Revenue Officer, magistrate, accountant, treasurer, and sometimes coroner; but the prestige of the job hardly matched the magnitude of his sacrifices. This brave man thrived on a change of scenery and loved adventure. So he jumped at the chance, when he got a shot at Foreign Service.
As a young man in England, he concentrated on cricket and polo. He seemed more interest in ponies than a career. But though he seemed to lack ambition, he turned into an able administrator. Except for Brunei and Sandakan, he could count on being shifted to almost every station. Consequently, he trekked through much of the jungle interior, where the practice of head hunting had not been totally curtailed.
Thus adapting to an illogical and tortuous landscape, to snakes, leeches, and parasites, to the jungle, the cliffs, and the crevasses, he felt at home where few white men rarely went. At home in the small and remote villages, he was always honored with the best floor space.
Mr. Flint had a great respect for native peoples. That was something he passed on to his son. In fact, Crockett became widely known for his kinship with the natives, something he easily established and continued to cultivate through his trade in petrol, blue jeans and tee shirts, Guinness Stout and cheap parangs.
After so many years of service, and regardless of his wife’s feelings, Mr. Flint couldn’t imagine living in England. He loved the wilds, and life away from them would’ve seemed unfulfilling to him. Wherever he went, he was accepted. He signed on for the duration and, subsequently, would be buried on the island, in a small cemetery set aside for British civil servants.
Mr. Flint was a great gentleman, a dedicated public servant, a loyal subject of the Crown, and a credit to the human race. He was one of many Englishmen overseas, united by regulations and policy, men who helped the Crown maintain its valued empire.
The geography here defied description and included the never faltering spirit of the falcon, the otter, and the rhinoceros. For Westerners, this spirit was hard to comprehend. Spirits were everywhere, and everything was a sign, such as the cry of the hornbill and even a falling rock. Was it necessary to understand it? Was it necessary to have clarity? ” The wild waters tremble lest the river turn to stone. ” Moving under such influences, the Kelabit rarely worried about the outside world. They gain strength from an unspecific pantheon of spirits. They believed that as long as they were generous, the spirits wouldn’t disturb the peace.
Before the war, the Kelabit knew Mr. Flint and thought he was a very generous man. From a small monthly allowance, he purchased the salt, tobacco, beads, and so on that he gave them. Out of necessity they also gave him gifts. Such exchanges pleased them greatly and helped placed them at ease, whereupon the Englishman had to accept the chickens, the rice, and the eggs (and perhaps a sword, a battle headdress, sun hats, or maybe a mat) that they gave him. To refuse anything would’ve been an unfortunate and unnecessary insult. In order for the colonial to do his job, he had to anticipate what the native would like, which called for great skill, because different people and whole tribes had different expectations. A mistake could’ve meant disaster. Nothing in England prepared him, but he soon found that even people who weren’t advanced liked hair-lotion and scented-soap.
Hoping that the men in the big planes didn’t really care about them, the Kelabit often waved at the Japanese, while Natasha Flint considered that very unsafe. From the air, the jungle canopy gave only the faintest hint of human activity. The Japs believed that this green hell was the last places on earth where they would find Europeans. Given that assumption, searching the jungle was considered unnecessary. The Japanese could no longer afford to waste valuable men and time subjugating a few backward tribes, when they had to concentrate on a growing headache.
For the first time during the occupation, the Japanese had to protect themselves and recover from American air attacks. Also, around this time, the tempo of life around the long houses quickened, as the “Z” Special Unit, made up of Australians, dropped into the island’s interior. This would be rightfully noted, along with many Japanese errors, as what eventually change the course of the war. The Japanese showed utter contempt toward the inland people, but were the first to later appreciate this mistake.
Had she been in her native Russia, and as part of the great Soviet experiment, Natasha would’ve had her baby in a clean maternity ward and without anesthesia. Regardless where she lived, either in Georgia or Moscow, she would’ve given her son a proper named by naming him after one of her papa’s relatives. And for all of her effort, she would’ve won a Motherhood Glory medal.
Had she not left Moscow, she would’ve been, as part of the Great Patriotic War effort, working in a factory, and having a baby would’ve earned her a grant and a monthly bonus. The Soviet State had a great interest in a woman’s drive to have more babies, and before Soviet children could ever leave the nursery, they had to learn how to do useful things with their toys.
Randy Ford
The Brainpan 