The Englishman’s Room With A View
Jeanette on Apr 25th 2008
We are pleased to welcome Mr. Tony Brownlow as a guest writer here on the Sagunto Star. In the following essay, he shares with us what makes the Philippines, and Sagunto in particular, so special to him. He and his wife, Helen Bongog Brownlow, have a home on the foothills of Palina, overlooking Sagunto and the surrounding areas.
THE PHILIPPINE ENIGMA BY AN ENGLISHMAN
by Tony Brownlow
As a boy thumbing through a book of knowledge, I happened upon a photograph which portrayed a carabao being worked in the rice field. The farmer behind was clean and tidy, wearing a wide brimmed white sombrero. What I could not understand of this photography from a tropical clime was that the man was clearly white and this image stayed with me.
Some twelve years later, I had been a soldier in the Korean War, and by a twist of fate, instead of a troopship return to England, I was a passenger in an R.A.F. two-engined Valetta to take me from Japan to Singapore. This meant refueling three times. The first or was it the second stop over, we landed in some obvious tropical country. It was in the dark of the night, lightning was flashing in the night sky – this was end of May, 1953. It felt humid as though we had landed in the middle of jungle. “Where are we?” I asked. “The Philippines!” replied someone. Amazingly, the enigma remained because we took off and I never saw the country at all.
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