Appreciation

[A. G. Maisey]

Yes Rick, that's exactly where I'm going.

Trying to identify what goes on in our minds.

As I said, you suffer from the Conrad Syndrome. This quote is from Karain, isn't it?

I was born in 1941, in the middle of WWII, so in 1945 when it concluded, I would have been only four years old. My mother's cousin was an inmate of Changi prison camp during WWII, and at the conclusion of hostilities he chose not to return to Australia, but to go back into Malaya (as it was then) and live with a woman he had met before he became an inmate of Changi. Sometime after that, maybe one or two years, I really don't know how long, but I was still a little kid, he came back to Australia to visit his mother, before going back to Malaya again. I was present at the family meeting that celebrated his return, I heard the stories and they made a lasting impression.

During the time he was in Malaya he sent small gifts home to his mother. One of those gifts was a keris. This was the first keris that I handled, and I can still remember it, 60 odd years later.

A lot more experience and knowledge came after that, but my mother's cousin living in Malaya was the beginning, and the physical keris was originally the link to the imagined place from his stories, and the retold stories about him that I overheard from the adults around me.