Publisher's Synopsis
Kenelm Digby and Mutal Fielder met on a P & O liner returning to the Far East from England on the eve of the Second World War. As a 21-year-old undergraduate, Kenelm had made headlines when he took part in the notorious 1933 'King and Country' debate at the Oxford Union. Now he was returning to Kuching as legal adviser to Sir Vyner Brooke, last of the legendary White Rajahs of Sarawak.Mutal, who had trained as a ballet dancer in London and Paris, was on her way back to Hong Kong where she and her parents enjoyed a life of privilege and comfort, waited on by Chinese servants in their home on The Peak, then the exclusive preserve of the upper ranks of the British expatriate community.The young couple's shipboard romance led to their engagement in Singapore, celebrated with champagne at Raffles Hotel. But their idyllic world soon came crashing around them when the Japanese invaded Hong Kong and Sarawak at Christmas 1941. Kenelm spent the next three and a half years interned in Kuching. Mutal, with her parents, spent the war in the humiliating and squalid conditions at Stanley Internment Camp, separated from her fiance by barbed wire and the South China Sea.Constantly hungry and often;But her courage and resourcefulness helped her to obtain desperately needed food for herself and her ailing parents. She survived to be reunited with Kenelm after the war and the couple eventually made their home in New Zealand.Derek Round spent much of his 20 year career as a foreign correspondent in Hong Kong where he was bureau chief of Reuters news agency and later Asia correspondent of the New Zealand Press Association.He and his family lived in Stonycroft, the old colonial mansion on The Peak which had once been the home of Mutal Digby and her parents.Earlier, as Reuters bureau chief in Singapore he also covered Sarawak and was a correspondent in Vietnam during the war. He was later NZPA's political editor and Fleet Street-based chief European correspondent before returning to Wellington as Editor of NZPA. He lives in Christchurch where he began his career in journalism on the Star-Sun.