Wilfred C-R

WILFRED C-R - By Ross Pickford - short synopsis

Wilfred Clunies-Ross (1874-1927) is a fifth-generation member of the Scottish-Malay family that ruled the remote Cocos-Keeling atoll in the Indian Ocean for over a century. Born on the island but schooled in Scotland, he has made himself into a careful, self-contained canal engineer in the Punjab, his life ordered around competence and his one close attachment, his sister May.

In 1902 his father George, the autocratic "Guv'nor," summons him home. Wilfred resigns and returns, only to find the promised work does not exist; his father wants him present, not useful. Given menial estate tasks, he drifts into a lonely life and forms an attachment to Edap, a young Malay woman, with whom he has two children.

A long voyage to England with his father forms the heart of the book. In London he finds May dying of consumption and takes her to New Zealand to marry; a colonial certificate, issued because his mixed blood places him outside the law's definition of white, marks him in silence. Returning to Cocos, he is held there nursing his ailing father until a moral rupture, his brother Sydney's refusal to marry the cousin he has got with child, drives him to break with the family for good.

In Edwardian London, independent at last on phosphate dividends, Wilfred travels to Dublin to meet Frances Burne, a woman he has corresponded with since girlhood. He proposes, confesses his island children, and is accepted; they marry within a fortnight, unacknowledged by his father.

The Epilogue carries them to a settled life at Hastings and four children, against the decline of the dynasty and the deaths that close his world. Wilfred, an engineer without a canal, dies at fifty-two, caught always between two worlds.