My grandfather’s notebook 10: One of the ‘DC Brothers’ takes over the House Register and one family comes together

D.C. John, Agnes and their children Dennis, Audrey, Barbara and Alan.

My grandfather Michael Bastian John was not the only one who wrote in the small notebook he called his House Register.

My father also filled a few of its pages. I recognise his handwriting, from the similarity to captions at the back of some photographs from the 1950s.

He was the second of five “D.C. brothers”, the sons of Michael’s younger sister Louisa, who died in 1922 aged 36. Louisa Bastian John was 20 when she married Davis Colundasamy on August 31, 1906, and was already widowed when she died 16 years later.

Their sons, all under 14 when they were orphaned, moved in with their uncle Michael, his wife Isabella and their growing family.

Davis Colundasamy was Tamil from Tanjore, now Thanjavur in Tamil Nadu, and used a different convention for naming his sons. He placed both his names first, and their given names last. Later, the brothers initialised their father’s name and were known as D.C. Joseph, D.C. John, D.C. Albert, D.C. Jacob and D.C. Michael.

That made for some confusion in the next generation, when the brothers used their own names as their children’s surnames, leaving all the D.C. cousins with different last names.

Davis Colundasamy and his bride, Louisa Bastian John. My father was the second of their five sons.

In the mess of living arrangements following my grandfather Michael Bastian John’s death in 1934, his nephews continued to be part of his widow Isabella’s household.

One day in 1937, my father D.C. John picked up the House Register to record an item of sad news, just like his uncle Michael had done before.

Joseph, the eldest D.C. brother, died on April 20 that year, only 16 months after marrying Elsie Gomez on December 31 1935.

Joseph was 29. He lived to see the birth of his son Eustace Ronald Joseph on November 29 1936, but not his daughter Estelle Clementine Joseph, who was born on October 25 1937, six months after his death.

My aunt Elsie Gomez was a teacher everyone called “B.A.” because she was the only one in the family who was a graduate with a Bachelor of Arts degree. I have a vague recollection of a woman always plainly dressed in a dark skirt and light-coloured blouse, quiet and somewhat unapproachable when she appeared at family gatherings.

I had never grasped the devastation in her life until I saw my father’s note in the House Register, revealing that she had been married less than two years and pregnant with her second child when she was widowed. That had happened long before I was born.

Eustace ‘Dumpo’ Ronald Joseph, who died helping a stranger.

But more tragedy was to come her way, and I have a vivid memory of Auntie B.A., inconsolable by the casket of her son, Eustace, who was called Dumpo.

He was 21 and an engineering student when he died in a freak accident in Kuala Lumpur in 1958 while helping a stranger fix a stalled car. He was under the vehicle’s bonnet when one of the blades from the engine fan broke loose, shot up and killed him instantaneously.

One of my earliest memories is of being five years old and clinging to my mother at his wake, as my aunt wailed and called out her son’s name over and over, speaking to him, imploring him to come back.

By all accounts, Dumpo was a well-loved young man, his mother’s pride, on the brink of adulthood and a bright future. The tragedy of his sudden death was a family story repeated countless times over the years.

Auntie B.A. and her daughter Estelle, nicknamed Kako, gradually disappeared from our lives. It was decades before we heard that Kako had settled in Sydney, Australia. 

But all that would unfold two decades after my father recorded his brother Joseph’s death in 1937. 

Most of this page is in my father’s handwriting. But the last line, ‘Came to our house on the 8th February 1947’ looks a lot like my mother’s handwriting.

D.C. John’s next entry noted the death of Agnes B. John on October 13 1944. This was my grandfather Michael’s unmarried sister who had lived with the family and helped raise his and Isabella’s children.

We have no photograph of the woman everyone referred to as Amachi. She outlived Michael and Isabella, who had named their youngest daughter Agnes after her.

Amachi died on the very day that her nephew Justin John’s first child was born.

Justin John died a week after his sister Agnes married D.C. John, and just weeks before his daughter Audrey was born.

Michael and Isabella’s eldest son Justin was said to have been a handsome fellow and something of a ladies’ man before he married Mary Magdalene Tan Soon Neo, a woman who already had a daughter.

Their son, Dennis Michael John, was born on October 13, 1944.

In a tragic replay of the circumstances around D.C. Joseph’s death, Justin was 29 when he died of tuberculosis on February 24, 1946 while his wife Mary Magdalene was pregnant with their second child.

Justin did not live to see his daughter, Audrey Theresa John, who was born seven weeks later, on April 14, 1946.

My father took out the House Register to add the latest death, but only wrote down the bare details, describing nothing of what must have been days of sorrow and tears, omitting to mention that Justin died a week after his own marriage.

On the next page of the House Register, my father reported that he had married Agnes, Michael and Isabella’s youngest daughter. 

D.C. John merely noted his date of birth, April 4 1909, and my mother’s, March 24 1929, and that their marriage took place at 7am on Saturday, February 16 1946, at St Joseph’s Church, Sentul. He was 37, she was 17, and they were married by a French priest, Father Belet.

It took some poring over the House Register before I realised that Justin died only a week after his youngest sister Agnes, my mother, married their cousin John, my father. That was never mentioned over the years.

What was talked about instead, and perhaps mattered more, was how Justin’s widow Mary Magdalene turned up at my parents’ home before the first anniversary of his death, saying she could no longer keep her half-Indian children and wanted to give them up for adoption.

Dennis was a toddler and Audrey, not yet a year old.

My father decided right away that he and my mother would take both children to raise as their own. He went back to the House Register and, below his note of Justin’s death, added the children’s names and, “Came to our house on the 8^th February 1947”.

A year after getting married, Agnes found herself mother to two young children, her nephew and niece. She was not yet 18.

My mother always said she married my father reluctantly because he was her first cousin and so much older. One story was that as Justin lay dying, he had pleaded with Agnes to marry their cousin so that John would qualify for Malayan Railways married quarters and their unmarried siblings would have a roof over their heads.

Pressured by everyone around her, she married John and they lived in Sentul, on the outskirts of Kuala Lumpur, in the sprawling Railways enclave of employees’ quarters.

The Sentul housing complex was hierarchical, from the smallest, most pitiful rows of quarters for the lowest-level workers, to different grades of terraced and semi-detached houses and bungalows. The finest two-storey brick homes nearest a golf course were mainly for the British bosses.

My parents started married life with a full house. Her brothers Cyril, Alex, Teddy and Charlie shared a room and her sister Beatrice had another. Sometimes my father’s brothers turned up too.

My mother recalled bitterly, many a time, that the early years of her marriage were a misery, complaining that she felt no better than a servant to the household, cooking, cleaning, washing and ironing for the others sharing the house.

In some photographs from that time, after Dennis and Audrey arrived, my mother looks harried, exhausted.

She also spoke of feeling controlled excessively by her husband, who made all decisions.

Nobody left her feeling more resentful than her older sister Beatrice, because Bee had a job as a teacher and did not have to do housework.

Bee also left my mother feeling insecure. “Why didn’t John just marry Bee?” she would say. Bee later married John’s youngest brother, D.C. Michael, but the bad blood between the sisters lasted decades.

My mother Agnes was 18 when she became mum to her brother Justin’s children Dennis and Audrey. With them is her sister Bee.

A year after Dennis and Audrey came, my father recorded the birth of his and Agnes’s first child, my sister Barbara. He made the entry in the style of my grandfather Michael Bastian John.

Child a girl was born on Tuesday the 17^th February in the year 1948 at 11.05am at Imbi Road, and was baptised at St Joseph’s Church on Saturday the 13^th March 1948. Her name Barbara Marianne John. Godparents Mr & Mrs G.L. D’Silva. Rev. Fr. Belet officiated.

Agnes and her first child, Barbara Marianne John.

More than five years passed before D.C. John took out the House Register one last time to fill in the record his second child’s arrival.

Child a boy was born on Thursday the 24^th September in the year 1953 at 5.15am at the Maternity Home behind KL Singapore Cold Storage and was baptised at St Joseph’s Church, Sentul, on Saturday the 10^th October, 1953. His name Alan Robert John. Godparents: Mr & Mrs J.D. Peris. Rev. Fr. Belet officiated.

That is where the House Register begun by my grandfather Michael Bastian John ends.

I was born the youngest of John and Agnes’s four children, after Dennis, Audrey and Barbara. Following the D.C. way of naming children, Barbara and I were surnamed John, after our father. Dennis and Audrey, as the children of Justin John, had the same surname. There was no line between us.

There are other photographs from that time, taken at a studio, and my mother always looks good in them.

When she spoke of John more kindly, she would say he liked seeing her well turned out, took her to a well-known Shanghai tailor to have stylish dresses made to measure, and bought her nice jewellery too.

Then, just as she felt he had begun treating her better, he died. They were married 10 years and he was 47 when his heart failed on August 31 1956. Agnes was now 27, and a widow with four young children.

If all my mother said was true, that my father controlled everything in their marriage and she had little say, he must have decided on his own to take in her brother’s children.

For D.C. John, opening his heart and home to Dennis and Audrey that day proved to be the  single momentous action that made his life worth living. Everything else mattered less.

Photograph of Davis Colundasamy and Louisa John, courtesy of my ‘DC cousin’ Marianne Jacob Steele. Some of the other photos are from my cousins Lillian Sivaram and Patrick John.

To be continued.