Guerilla Wife
I finished this book, Guerilla Wife, by Louise Reid Spencer, on October 29, 2024. It's 80 years old. The Filipinos she met, who kept her and other Americans alive for years during the Japanese occupation, are gone now, as is she. I marvel that they cared so much for the Americans, and yet... the Filipinos were not the aggressors in this war. Neither were they pacifists. Many of them were instrumental in fighting off the Japanese with the Americans. I wonder how their descendants feel about Americans now.
Louise Spencer was the wife of a mining engineer from a large company; throughout her life in the Philippines, including when she was fleeing for her life across country, she had at least one servant/cook/cargadore--carrier of all the stuff she could not carry. This was alongside her husband and his man-of-all-work; his man was killed by the Japanese for helping Americans. She and her husband were well educated--she wrote a book about it afterwards--yet many of the people she met had no formal education at all. One head man had never held a pencil before.
She stayed in many, many people's homes, in heat, in cold, with rats, with cockroaches, with children who gave her no privacy. She admired some for their cleanliness and neat arrangements, then discovered they were alive with roaches. She slept in some places where only four people could cram themselves under a leaky roof; invariably she got a good spot, as a woman, as a white woman, and later as a pregnant woman. They slept close together sharing one blanket and in the mountains they still shivered with cold. Their cargadores, baggage haulers, slept outdoors without any blankets, because there were no blankets to be found.
They ate rice every day for years, with greens and sometimes pork. For the first year or so they had chicken eggs and occasionally killed a chicken to eat. During their last long march across the island of Panay they ran out of rice, so they ate camotes, a kind of yam, with pork. She did a lot of work for herself early in the almost two years they were there. Later she moved in with a friend who had two servants. These two servants did everything, literally, and Louise complained of boredom, almost more deadly than doing everything herself. It hurt morale to have nothing to do.
Her friend Laverne went all through pregnancy and birth while there; infections were a constant risk and all they had was water they boiled themselves, worn out clothing they cleaned themselves, and a little medicine smuggled up to them, aspirin, sulfa drugs. The baby thrived, however, and Laverne recovered in time. Louise said her friend was in bed eleven days after the birth.
My mother told me that when she was expecting in the 1950s, they were told to lay down for several days while your body knit back together. I can see some benefit in that, though eleven days seems a lot. It's true that in the Philippine mountains they did not have enough food and they had to hike to a new hiding place every few weeks; lying down probably was necessary. The doctor hired for Laverne's lying in, traveled with them to two or three hiding places over the month he stayed.
Louise didn't talk about how much things cost but said their money ran very, very low. There was a printing press printing a sort of emergency currency, constantly being moved to keep it away from the Japanese. They rejoiced to find, at one point, a banker who would accept a check. At the start of their hiding they moved to a specific spot, built a hidden settlement, and contracted with the Teniente, or head man of the nearest town, to provide them with necessaries and bearers to bring it to them. They survived this way for a long time, over a year I think, but the Japanese found their base and killed everyone who had not fled.
One night an enormous python got into their chicken coop; one of the men fought it in the coop doorway, using only pointed sticks. It was all they had that was long enough to prevent him being stricken while striking. If they fired a gun, it would be heard far away. I wondered if, after the fight, they ate the python. She didn't say.
Able-bodied American men joined the guerillas fighting against the Japanese. There were one or two pacifists who did not, and a group of missionaries, there to teach the Filipinos. Louise was friendly with them, but supported her husband. He immediately joined in the fight as an officer setting up and manning radio communications. He kept a .22 and a pistol on him whenever they traveled; she knew he was serious when they suddenly fled one of their bases without his long gun. That time they barely escaped.
She referred to the mountain dwelling people as Bukidnons who spoke differently; I gather they were in the Philippine equivalent of Appalachia, far from cities, isolated from the outside world by rough terrain. They stared at her constantly, especially the children. They allowed her into their homes, communal dwellings where 50 people might gather for a ceremony and 20 sleep in one room. Her servant--she didn't call him a servant but said he was her man or referred to him by name throughout the book--cooked and carried, gathered supplies, fed the fire. They cooked separately from the family in the homes they stayed in. One family her man warned her about; they welcomed her and her retinue but stole some of their food. They stayed with that family for a couple months and she found she couldn't get angry about the theft, because they allowed these strangers to stay with them, in danger the whole time.
She learned which direction to lie down on bamboo slats; one way the bumpy surface would hurt and the other way one's hips could fit into the grooves. When they stayed briefly with a family that had soft beds, she found it hard to sleep!
I enjoyed learning from this book; it's well written and edited, straightforward and forthright. It's not pretentious but tells what she was thinking without a lot of sentimentality; there's enough emotion expressed to know she went the gamut of everything, but it isn't maudlin. I'm glad she tacked on the results of her pregnancy. On the way out of the Philippines she rejoiced over coffee with real cream, and lots of cigarettes available... I had forgotten that nearly everyone smoked or lived with someone who smoked, in the 1940s. On the submarine I winced at the arrival of, her term, "an American Negro". It felt like, everything she had been through, all the working with whomever was willing to work with her and her husband, all the equality and almost begging for help in any form, was about to fall away. The slots people fit into in America, were still there, waiting for her to get back.
