Evacuation days
by Violeta P. Hughes

To avoid what they feared would be a horrible life in wartime Manila and at the urging of relatives who had migrated to Bicol earlier, my mother sold the family home and her drug store in Sta. Mesa and "evacuated". The natural choice fell on Bicol as my mother succumbed to those relatives' beguiling descriptions of the region as the land of plenty. Consequently, living in a remote Bicol barrio shielded me from the traumas of war experienced by my peers in Manila. We lived a bucolic existence, protected by the feared Bicolano guerillas and nurtured by the dense forest of the mountains of Tankungbaka. I recall with fondness the few snatches of images that remain with me from that period when I was a toddler. I find, however, that every year, my memory of that life diminishes with age like the frothy surf that recedes from the shore and disappears into the sea.

We lived in a two-story frame house within walking distance of the railroad station. Our household consisted of my mother, her 50-year old father, my older brother and a younger sister, two teen-aged cousins, a maid and my sister's yaya. My father passed away the year before, which is why my memory of him is completely blank. The major regret I have about the war is that it cost me my father. He had tuberculosis and my mother explained to us that at that time, she could not get her hands on either penicillin or a continuous supply of the nutritious food essential for his survival.

From the window of that house, I saw my first casualties: the tall and good-looking teen-aged sons of my mother's friends, also migrants from Quezon. One day, the roar of airplanes punctuated by defeaning bursts that I later learned was gunfire, shattered our quiet morning. Not even knowing that the sounds meant danger, I instinctively scooped up my one-year old sister and ran under a table in the living room. As we slid under the table, I grabbed a salakot lying nearby and gripped it over our heads to reinforce our shelter. We listened immobile for a while and when my grandfather guessed that it was safe, he craned his neck out the window to track the waning roar of the airplane. When he sighted it, he pointed it out to my male teenage cousin, exclaiming, "Japanese!". Moments later, our entire household was leaning out the window, watching in the eerie silence a grim procession of two bloody pallets bearing the lifeless bodies of the boys. I was too young to understand and feel the emotional impact of that sad scene. My mother later said that the boys' father was a suspected guerilla leader in Bicol.

Opposite our house stood the sturdy, federal-style post office built by the Americans in the 1900s and taken over by the Japanese soldiers who made it their headquarters. Every morning, clad in shorts and singing Japanese songs, the soldiers would bathe in the frontyard, oblivious of passersby and the eyes of a curious three-year old. From this house, we took flight in the company of several families from the town to seek refuge inthe mountains of Tankungbaka. I do not remember packing our belongings nor leaving the house; perhaps I was asleep on somebody's shoulder when we took leave. My memory of the trek begins as I was walking with Aida, the pretty teenage daughter of another family friend. She was leading me by the hand as we walked over rough sunbaked paths strewn with carabao dung. Several times, she helped me stoop under the barbed-wire fences ofstrangers' farms. At some point (it might have been mid-day), we stopped to rest. As we sat down, my sister suddenly started crying as she hungrily watched a man stuffing rice into his mouth from a palayok that he held with his legs. I felt very sad and I wanted to cry along with her. Somehow, we must have been fed and we continued our trek. Talia, our able-bodied maid, carried a woven basket almost as big as she was. It contained remnants of my mother's wedding gifts like a soup tureen and other kitchen utensils.

I don't know how long we walked but my memory catches up with me after we were settled on the estate of Mr. Fernandez, the largest landowner in that barrio. Two houses, one substantially bigger than the other and a number of fruit trees, occupied the spacious compound. The smaller house was near a creek, on the other side of which was a sugar cane field, where we used to cut sugar canes to suck on. There was also a hen house where we were allowed to pick up eggs. Sometimes, when we had nothing else to do, we would watch with fascination the hens' bottoms as they laid eggs.

Aside from the time when I saw my sister crying, I never again saw anyone suffer from hunger. The estate had enough rice and fish for the families encamped there, as well as camote, cassava, chicken and eggs to supplement our diet. As children, we were allowed to climb trees and to help ourselves with any fruit we could find. Sometimes, we ate so many guavas that we set our teeth on edge and made ourselvessick to the stomach.

On Sundays when a priest was available and the guerillas deemed it was safe, we would have Mass in the large house, after which we would walk to the nearby river for a picnic lunch. Rice and the ubiquitous adobo, as well as bananas and other fruits, would be spread on banana leaves and we would eat sitting on boulders with the cold waters swirling around our ankles.

The only violence I saw involved one of my playmates who got too close to Mr. Fernandez's pet, a monkey that was tethered to a horizontal bamboo pole in the middle of the yard. We were playing catch and in her excitement the girl strayed into the monkey's domain. In no time, the monkey had grabbed her hair and the two were involved in a tug-of-war. The girl was screaming her lungs off to untangle herself, while the monkey salivated at the prospect of the rich feast of lice in the girl's hair.

Although food was adequate, clothing was not. Underwear, specially panties were scarce. The most common fabric used for panties was the coarse guinaras, a loosely woven abrasive fabric made from abaca. It was embarrassing to be known for wearing guinaras panties so girls kept it a secret. Unfortunately, word somehow leaked that one of my female teen-aged cousins was wearing guinaras panties. That was all the teenagers talked about that day and my cousin was so mortified that she promptly disappeared. We finally tracked her down (or up), perched on a branch of a mango tree, hiding behind its thick foliage. By nightfall, she was still adamantly refusing to descend from her hideout; only when someone threatened her that a kapre (big black gorilla) would take her away during the night did she agree to come down.

Finally, it was time to return to town and resume our life. One day, my mother dressed us in our Sunday best and brought us to a friend's house near the municipio to watch aceremony in the plaza. I saw two flags on their respective poles and felt the excitement of the large crowd as it sang, but I had no idea what they were singing about.

© 2005-2006 Violeta P. Hughes-Davis
All rights reserved.