The compassion of Kenny Woodworth

 

From Terence Netto

Though his life as a police officer had been marked by heroism, Kenny Woodworth’s funeral rites proceeded without a bugler playing Taps, which would signal the waning of the day for the officer corps, nor the Reveille, which would have indicated his readiness as a Christian to meet his creator.

To Woodworth, who owned up to both descriptors, the one would have gone appropriately with the other.

This news portal has lamented the conspicuous absence of trappings that should have marked the passage of a hero who could have lost his life in a shootout with the notorious criminal Botak Chin at a sawmill in Jalan Ipoh in 1975.

Self-effacement, the stiff upper lip, were hallmarks of his character, a type who would consider grouses over their anonymity such bad form.

I saw quite a lot of Kenny, as he was commonly referred to, while I was a reporter with the crime desk of the New Straits Times Press between 1973 and 1975.

But I did not interface with him; he was one of those whose cordiality stopped short of inviting intimacy.

Kenny was an assistant superintendent with the Kuala Lumpur CID at the time, under the supervision of deputy superintendent S Kulasingam. They had the task of dealing with hardcore criminals, of which Botak Chin was the most notorious at that time.

Often, during my rounds of CID headquarters in High Street (now Jalan Tun HS Lee), I would hear bloodcurdling screams emanating from the interrogation rooms of the station.

These sent shivers down my spine. I briefly wondered about the type of person dealing out such excruciation and mused over the foolhardiness of recipients whose conduct invited such treatment.

It was only much later that my slow-developing intellect would come to grapple with the morality of such questions, amid the graver issues of crime and punishment.

I am one of those who grope to conclusions, not quite capable of the linear reasoning that leaps to them.

At the time when I was a neophyte reporter, simple, uncomplicated gestures had a better chance of registering on me.

One such involved Kenny. Occurring in 1974, it left a vivid impress on memory’s eye that endures to this day.

One afternoon a middle-aged man was being led out of the recesses of one of the dark rooms in the High Street station into a lighted place where a press conference was to be held.

The man was involved in what had been a crime of passion and had just confessed to it. Kulasingam was going to disclose to the press that the crime had been solved, the perpetrator having confessed.

The confessor bore on his countenance the telltale signs of the duress he had endured. I pitied him the same way that I had felt the agonising screams from brutalised suspects.

As he sat on a chair next to Kulasingam, he looked like he was the loneliest man in the universe.

Just then from within an inner room emerged Kenny who proceeded to place a compassionate squeeze of his right palm on the left shoulder of the confessor.

The distraught man’s shoulder sloped in two palpable spasms of emotive reaction to the sympathy shown him.

“At least, I have one friend in this whole blessed place,” must have been his thoughts at the gesture.

It was a beatific gesture. I was blessed to have witnessed it — its beauty, its panache and the reaction it occasioned.

It was the sort of gesture that reminds one of the line from Dostoevsky: “Beauty will save the world,” that Alexander Solzhenitsyn quoted in his acceptance speech as Nobel literary laureate in 1972.

As I said I did not know Kenny and, strangely, after I witnessed the incident, I felt no need to know him though it was one of the most memorable little gestures I chanced to see in my life.

However, 18 years later, sitting in Holy Rosary Church waiting for the service to begin in five minutes, I saw Kenny enter with his wife through a side door to take their place in the pews.

“Now, I know where that gesture came from,” I mused as I took in the scene of the couple’s entrance.

Kenneth James Woodworth was eminently a national worthy, more so when it’s clear that he did not receive his just desserts from the state he served with quiet valour and admirable loyalty.

“If we had a keen vision and feeling of all ordinary human life, it would be like hearing the grass grow and the squirrel’s heartbeat, and we should die of that roar which lies on the other side of silence,” wrote George Eliot in Middlemarch, that great 19th century novel of English provincial manners and morals.

I felt something of the roar that lies on the other side of that silent gesture from Kenny to the murder suspect whose shoulder he squeezed. It shone of the good, the true and the beautiful that Kenny’s life paid heed to. - FMT

The views expressed are those of the writer and do not necessarily reflect those of MMKtT.