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After the Japanese invasion of Malaya on December 8, 1941 he accepted an invitation by The Times to become its war correspondent. His wife, Maria, and other expatriates were evacuated to Batavia (Jakarta) in January 1942. Mr. Morrison covered the Malayan campaign through to the surrender of Singapore on February 15, 1942, leaving the city for Batavia on February 10, where he rejoined his wife. He was in Melbourne by May of 1942, and appears to have spent the rest of the war in Australia as a war correspondent, although there is some evidence that he was in New Guinea for a period.
After the war he and his wife returned to Singapore where he continued as a correspondent for The Times. He met Han Suyin in Hong Kong in June 1949. He went to Korea in July, 1950 to cover the Korean War and was killed on August 12, near Taegu, when the jeep in which he was travelling was blown up by a land mine. He had a brother, Alastair, in the Diplomatic Service and another brother, Colin, in the colonial service in Hong Kong.
Cloud service in
And now I've seen the pavilion where Ian and Suyin sat together under the stars, and the tree, and the steps that Mark ran down (in the motion picture) after saying his final goodbye to Suyin, on his way to the airport (the book is much less romantic — they say goodbye on the street and Mark boards a 'bus for the airport). What an incredibly poignant experience!
Pavilion behind Realty Gardens
I made my visit to the pavilion with my two young children (my wife was otherwise engaged) and understand, perhaps for the first time, that passage in Han Suyin's book where she quotes Mark as saying that life's greatest tragedy is not to be loved, which he promptly amends to not to love.
And then, of course, there is the passage central to the book's theme and from which the title is taken: