In June 1959, at the age of 21, Jennifer Venner went on a trip to Japan.
There is a black-and-white photograph of her from the time, standing in a colonial forecourt in British Malaya with one foot on the running board of Bertha, her smart Ford car. Fresh from a fee-paying girls’ school and a secretarial job in London for the Secret Service, she is wearing a cap-sleeved floral dress. It is smooth at the bodice and waist and splays out to a three-quarter-circle skirt cut modestly to just below the knee, a post-war extravagance of fabric no longer required for black-outs and the war effort. Layers of petticoats hold the skirt out in shape under the tropical sun.
It has not been long since Jennifer met Jack Dalmeny, a security guard on the post-war plantations extracting rubber to pay off British war debts to the US. Fresh from serving as a young police officer in a town on the outskirts of Glasgow, his job is to protect the wages of the plantation workers from being snatched by jungle communists. His car is armour-plated and he carries a pistol. Jennifer’s friend Elizabeth, working with Jennifer as secretaries to the British High Commission, nicknames Jack the Shire Horse for his thick woollen socks, worn under a full kilt at sweltering Scottish country dances held at the Selangor Club in Kuala Lumpur, the social meeting place for colonialists. Dancing is what Jennifer adores.
There is a bundle of letters, handwritten on lined writing pads or paper headed with the insignia of the Blue Funnel Line, tied together with a tartan ribbon crackled by time. The knot responds stiffly as if not undone in the more than sixty years since they were written. They are his letters to her, sent from the rubber plantation to her government office in KL. They come from a time when Jennifer took part in the chorus for an ex-pat production of Gilbert and Sullivan’s The Mikado. They come from a time when Jack took Jennifer on road trips, out across the Malay Peninsula in armour plate, stopping to see exotic butterflies, listen to the howler monkeys and watch the moon come up over the endless green ocean of jungle. Perhaps in KL, or perhaps under the jungle moon, he asked her to marry him.
The letters do not speak of trips or trysts. They describe the obsessional love of a 22-year-old working class young man and his tumult of feelings for his “darling little girl with a sweet face”, longing for her telephone calls and letters, pacing restlessly to-and-fro in his plantation house 240 miles away from where she lives. He apologises for outbursts of suspicion, jealousy, fears and anxieties. “I know that I have been very difficult to you in many ways, darling,” he says, and promises it will be different once they are married.
The letters contain plans for their return to Britain. Jack will go back a few weeks early to meet her family and ask her father Keith Venner for his elder daughter’s hand in wedlock. He will get a job in car sales, arrange a mortgage, book a Langleybury church and pave the way for their future life together. Jennifer will return a few weeks later, after her trip to Japan. Something about her planned journey, her absence and her striking out alone make him anxious. “Just come back to me,” he writes.
One letter in the tartan-tied bundle is from after Japan, after the marriage vows, after the return to post-war Britain, and after the first child has been born. It scorches with the anger, blistering anxiety and the need to control that would characterise the decades of their marriage yet to come. Solo travel would not be permitted again. But before that letter – before wedlock became padlock – Jennifer, at the age of 21, goes on her own on a three-week trip to Japan.
What did she see? What did she think? Did she walk the cherry-tree lined paths of Tokyo parks in her petticoats and three-quarter circle skirt? Did she marvel at stupas, pagodas and the masks of demons and gods? Did she inhale the incense of Shinto Buddhist temples? Did she ride on a Tokyo tram or take a train across the countryside to glimpse buffalo and rice paddies? Did she visit restaurants and street-food vendors? Did she try to speak Japanese? Did she revel in the sight of Japanese women in bright sashes and kimonos? Family history recalls only that she ate eel, went to Japanese Noh theatre and came back with souvenir fans, fabrics and two little inch-high wooden dolls. The visit to Japan was rarely referred to in future years, but when it was, a tantalising energy suffused the room. Jennifer’s eyes sparkled and Jack clammed into resentful silence and turned up the volume on the incessant TV.
Over sixty years later, Jennifer’s eight-year-old grand-daughter Eleanor receives a Japanese dolls’ house kit for Christmas from her mother Kath, Jennifer’s daughter. Toys, film-watching and artwork are already awash with Japanalia. Studio Ghibli movies are family favourites. Eleanor’s profuse drawings are full of Manga superheroes and elegant Japanese women with parasols and flowing kimonos. Jennifer lived to meet this grand-daughter only a handful of times in babyhood, but the scent of cherry blossom and temple incense have seeped down through the years, caught in mementoes, fabric folds and a 1950s programme for an ex-pat performance of The Mikado.
It takes month upon month to build the Japanese dolls’ house. After work and school, mother and daughter sit side by side gluing together paper screens and roof beams, bento plates and sushi platters; twisting a wire cherry tree to be adorned with paper blossom; making little flowers and bushes for the garden; and stitching pillows, bedcovers, and tiny cushions no bigger than a thumbnail for dolls’ house occupants and guests to kneel on.
One evening, the last pieces of sushi, roofing and garden fence are finally in place. Eleanor ties a wish to the cherry tree, just as they do for the Tanabata festival in Japan. She makes a ‘welcome’ sign with invented Japanese symbols to hang from the roofed gateway. With a sense of occasion, excitement and ceremony, Eleanor turns on the dolls’ house lights, and mother and daughter sit back together and marvel at the magical beauty of its detail and completeness.
Yet in that moment, Jennifer’s daughter Kath knows that there is something missing. She goes to fetch two little inch-high wooden dolls brought back from a long ago solo trip to Japan, so carefully treasured. They have been her own travelling companions on recent trips launching a solo life after three decades of marriage. They have sat on mantelpieces and in guesthouse bedrooms, creating shrinehood wherever they go. The little dolls are painted in traditional dress – the man in vibrant green and the woman in bright red – both with glossy black hair.
She places them together in the gateway under the ‘welcome’ sign, where they settle with a sense of proprietorial rightness. Their painted eyebrows are raised in a look of polite amazement. They have become the perfect hosts of a roadhouse, waiting to bow and offer steaming bowls of noodles to honoured guests. And to listen appreciatively to liberating tales of travel to faraway places and new horizons.