The year was 1959 and a young nurse was about to set sail from London’s Tilbury Docks to a place called Kuching, on the west coast of Borneo.

The journey, she was told, would take about a month.

Born Wendy Grey in the city of Newcastle upon Tyne in northeast England, she spent most of her childhood in the small town of Amble, where her father was an Anglican priest.

She loved reading, dreamt of adventures in other countries and hoped that one day, she might have some of her own.

Fortunately for the trained district nurse, that dream did come true.

“When I was in my late 20s, I attended a talk where I heard how in some parts of the world, there were no doctors or nurses,” Grey told FMT.

“I also read in a copy of the ‘Borneo Chronicle’ about a new mission — the first in the interior of North Borneo. They were in urgent need of a doctor or nurse to run a clinic there.”

A sentence in that article struck her: “Whom shall we send and who will go for us?” — words from Isaiah. She knew it was a sign.

The first thing Grey experienced upon her arrival in Kuching was the “heat and humidity”.

“I spent a few weeks in and around Kuching, learning the ropes with two British nurses who, like me, were volunteering. I had my first taste of what was to come when I accompanied one of them, Gwynnedd, to see a man who had broken his leg,” recounted Grey.

She related that they had walked for hours, climbed up and scrambled down mountains, waded through rivers and crossed narrow log bridges — in tropical heat and rain — before reaching the patient in a traditional longhouse.

However, Grey was only allowed to see the patient the next day, once the village witchdoctor’s work was done.

The natives, who were friendly and hospitable, lived in fear of evil spirits and tried to appease them with various rituals and practices.

“We did not attempt to change their culture except in the area of hygiene. Malaria was rife, as were tuberculosis, malnutrition and yaws.”

That aside, Grey was also in charge of delivering babies, extracting teeth and performing surgeries.

Once, Grey had to stitch up a man’s wounds after he’d been mauled by a bear while climbing a tree to collect honey.

But despite the differences in background, Grey said that there was a strong element of trust and respect between them.

Grey then sailed up the Kinabatangan River to the Anglican mission in Tongud, where she settled for the next two and a half years.

“It was beautiful, wild and unspoiled. Today, you can reach Tongud by road, but when I was there it was only accessible by boat.”

“I suppose that was when it hit me how isolated I was going to be from urban life. The journey of 560km took five days, and we passed no settlements along the way, just timber camps.”

Isolated was an understatement. Grey’s only contact with the outside world was via teleradio, at pre-arranged times twice a week, or post which arrived intermittently when someone was travelling upriver.

“But even that failed sometimes. Once, a canoe bringing our Christmas mail and presents capsized and everything was lost!”

Her home back then was a hut in a clearing in the jungle, raised about a metre from the ground, with walls made of bark, a palm-leaf roof and a floor of slatted branches of wood.

She shared the house with Joan, an Australian teacher.

“There was no electricity in Tongud, and no running water. We used kerosene oil lamps, a Primus stove and a tiny oven,” said Grey.

“Water was collected from the roof via bamboo channels into a large drum. We had to boil and filter it. Our bath was the river.”

Despite the elevation of their shared home, it did not keep out unwanted visitors; she once spotted a scorpion on the wall and even caught a snake living in the walls.

But not all was dreary. Grey often travelled to Sandakan, where she lodged in the boarding house of St Monica’s School.

“I became very friendly with the teachers there, some of whom were nuns. I enjoyed some of the pleasures we usually take for granted in Sandakan — which were not available in Tongud,” said Grey, who enjoyed tennis, picnics on the beach, coffee with friends, shopping, and the cinema in the small town.

She would even partake in a game of Scrabble with the nuns in the evenings. They were, as Grey remembered, “very happy times”.

Grey also made friends with a young local man named Samuel, who became her clinic assistant and then a devoted friend.

“For a week every month, I would venture to even more remote parts of the jungle where I would hold clinics. I often travelled by canoe and on foot, and the journeys were difficult and dangerous at times,” recalled Grey.

Having been bitten by mosquitoes and sandflies, Grey offered a priceless tip for hikers and deep jungle campers: a bar of soap rubbed onto sweaty limbs will help to deter leeches.

But Grey found herself in dangerous situations more than once. She was in a capsizing boat full of people, including a patient they were taking to the hospital.

“The engine broke down and we got lost in one of the most complicated waterways near the sea! We had to make the decision to either stay put or allow ourselves to drift, hoping to attract the attention of a passing boat.”

Grey’s last year in Borneo was in 1962, which was also the year before North Borneo ceased to be a British colony as it became part of a new, independent Malaysia.

“I would have loved to stay. I loved the people and I loved the work I was doing,” confessed Grey.

“But I found the climate debilitating and was almost continually ill from a variety of infections. I wept many tears when I left, shed more when Samuel, my assistant, wrote to me begging me to return!”

Today, Grey is 91 but still keeps in touch with her fellow mission staff and friends from Sandakan, though most have already passed away.

She even met Bishop Melter Tais, the first indigenous Bishop of Sabah during the Borneo Mission Association meetings until it folded in 2015.

She preserved every single memory of her Borneo adventures by writing in her diary every night by the light of her oil lamp.

These memories have been turned into a book she co-authored with Barbara Fox, “Midwife of Borneo”, and published in 2018.

She returned to Sabah twice, once in 1985 and then in 2003.

Things have changed so much, said Grey, citing a logging track all the way to Tongud, making the village reachable within hours instead of days, air-conditioning and television sets.

But one thing she said that never changed was how various nationalities, just like back then, lived together in peace and harmony.

“Midwife of Borneo” is published by Society for Promoting Christian Knowledge (SPCK) and is available as a paperback and an ebook.