Empire of the Sun (29 page)

Jim walked at the head of the procession, trying to listen to the men and women behind him. All he could hear was the sound of their breathing, as if the experience of freedom had left them speechless. Jim ignored his own rackety breath. Despite the ceaseless activity in Lunghua, he had never undertaken a task like this shuffling walk burdened by his wooden case. For the first hour he was too concerned about Mr Maxted’s exhaustion to notice his own. But soon after reaching the Shanghai-Hangchow railway line Mr Maxted was forced to stop, defeated by the shallow gradient that led up to the level crossing.

‘We’re climbing, Jim…feels like the Shanghai Hills.’

‘We ought to keep going, Mr Maxted.’

‘Yes, Jim…you’re like your father.’

Jim stayed with Mr Maxted, annoyed with him but unable to help. Mr Maxted stood in the centre of the road, hands on the bowl-like crests of his pelvis, nodding at the people stepping past. He patted Jim on the shoulder and waved him forward.

‘You go on, Jim. Get to the head of the queue.’

‘I’ll save your place, Mr Maxted.’

By then several hundred people had passed Jim, and it took him half an hour to return to the head of the column. Within minutes he had fallen back, lungs aching as he gasped at the humid air. Only the lengthy halt at a canal checkpoint saved him from having to join Mr Maxted.

They had reached an industrial canal that ran westwards from the river to Soochow. Two young Japanese soldiers forgotten by the war, guarded the sandbag emplacement beside the wooden bridge. Their faces were as pinched as those of the prisoners whose clogs dragged over the scored planks.

While the trucks edged across the rotting timbers, the eighteen hundred prisoners sat on the embankment, occupying the deep grass for a quarter of a mile. Around them they settled their baggage of suitcases, tennis racquets and cricket bats. Like drowsy spectators at a rowing regatta, they stared at the algae-filled water. The current drifted past the burnt-out hulk of an armoured junk beached against the opposite bank.

Jim was glad to lie down. He felt sleepy in a feverish way, his brain irritated by the hot sun and the hard light reflected from the yellow grass. He could see Dr Ransome standing in the last of the three trucks, swaying unsteadily among the patients on their stretchers. Jim thought of his Latin prep, now a week overdue, but Dr Ransome was a hundred yards away.

Watched by the Japanese soldiers on the road above them, many of the men walked down to the water’s edge. They filled their mess-tins and stood drinking together in the shallows. Jim was wary of the water, remembering the black creeks at Nantao, and the thousands of gallons he had boiled for Basie. Was there a crew of corpses in the armoured junk? Inside the iron turret, now washed by the green waters of the canal, perhaps lay the captain of this puppet Chinese naval vessel, Jim could almost see the dead blood running out into the canal, slaking the thirst of these British prisoners, on its way to nourish the roots of the rice crops raised for another generation of Chinese turncoats.

Jim opened his wooden case and took out his mess-tin. He walked down the bank between the resting women and their exhausted children. Squatting on the narrow beach, he carefully filled his mess-tin with the surface water, hoping that the algae might sustain him. He drank the tepid fluid, watching the dissolving patterns of his golf shoes in the fine sand.

Filling the mess-tin, Jim climbed the bank to his case. On his right was the wife of a Shell engineer in D Block. She lay weakly in the long grass, whose blades had already sprung through the rents in her cotton frock. Her husband sat beside her, dipping his fingers into his mess-tin and moistening her large, carious teeth with the green water.

Lying on Jim’s left was Mrs Philips. It irked Jim that she had seen him drinking on the bank and decided to rest beside him. No doubt she had some little chore in mind, and would nag him about his Latin prep. Although he had left Lunghua, Jim felt imprisoned by the camp. Everyone he had ever helped was still clinging to him. He almost expected to see Basie emerge from the turret of the armoured junk and call out: ‘Jobs, Jim…’

But Mrs Philips did not look as if she was about to set him a task. The walk from Lunghua had exhausted her. She lay in the bright grass with her wicker suitcase, all that survived of the decades she had spent in the Chinese hinterland. Her face was now the palest mother-of-pearl, as if she had been drowned and then lifted from the water on to this quiet bank. Her eyes were fixed on a remote point in the sky. Jim touched her cheeks, wondering if she was dead.

‘Mrs Philips – I’ve brought you some water.’

She smiled at him and sipped the water, her small fists clinging to the handles of her suitcase like a pair of white mice. ‘Thank you, Jim. Are you very hungry?’

‘I was this morning.’ Jim tried to think of a joke that would cheer Mrs Philips. ‘It’s air I’m short of after all that walking, not food.’

‘Yes, Jim…’ Mrs Philips opened her case. She felt inside and produced a small potato. ‘There you are. Remember to pray for us all.’

‘Oh, I will!’ Jim bit into the potato before she had a chance to change her mind. ‘I’ll pay you back when we get to Nantao. All our rations are there.’

‘You’ve already paid me back, Jim. Many times.’ Mrs Philips resumed her pinpoint scrutiny of the sky. ‘Could you eat the potato?’

‘It was really good.’ As Jim finished the potato he noticed the old woman’s eyes move fractionally. ‘Mrs Philips, are you looking for God?’

‘Yes, Jim.’

‘Say…’ Jim was impressed. He was keen to repay Mrs Philips’ generosity, if only with a modest discussion of theology. He followed the angle of the old woman’s gaze. ‘Do you mean God is right above us?’

‘Of course, Jim.’

‘Above the 31st Parallel? Mrs Philips, wouldn’t God be above the magnetic pole? You ought to look at the ground, under Shanghai…’ Intoxicated by the fermenting potato, Jim giggled at the thought of the deity trapped in the bowels of the earth below Shanghai, perhaps in the basement of the Sincere Company department store.

Mrs Philips held his hand, trying to comfort him. Still staring at the sky, she decided: ‘Nantao – then they’re taking us up-country…’

‘No…our rations…’ Jim turned towards the Japanese guards. The three trucks had crossed the bridge, and he could see Dr Ransome moving among his patients with a small child in his arms. Its cries sounded through the overbright sun. The hundreds of prisoners sat in the feverish light like figures in the lurid paintings that advertised the Chinese film spectacles. The Japanese squatted beside the trucks eating a boiled rice paste which they took from their haversacks. They made no attempt to share their food with the young soldiers defending the bridge.

Up-country…? There were docks at Nantao, but why would the Japanese want to move them from Shanghai? Jim watched Mrs Vincent paddling at the water’s edge fifty yards away. Finding a portion of the current that satisfied her, she filled a mess-tin for her husband and child. Dr Ransome had recruited a human chain from the men sitting on the embankment below the trucks, and they passed pails of water up to the patients.

Jim shook his head, puzzled by all this effort. Obviously they were being taken up-country so that the Japanese could kill them without being seen by the American pilots. He listened to the Shell man’s wife crying in the yellow grass. The sunlight charged the air above the canal, an intense aura of hunger that stung his retinas, and reminded him of the halo formed by the exploding Mustang. The burning body of the American pilot had quickened the dead land. It would be for the best if they all died; it would bring their lives to an end that had been implicit ever since the
Idzumo
had sunk the
Petrel
and the British had surrendered at Singapore without a fight.

Perhaps they were already dead? Jim lay back and tried to count the motes of light. This simple truth was known to every Chinese from birth. Once the British internees had accepted it they would no longer fear their journey to the killing-ground…

‘Mrs Philips…I’ve thought about the war.’ Jim rolled over in the grass. He was about to explain to Mrs Philips that she was dead but the old missionary was asleep. Jim studied her blanched eyes, her mouth open to reveal a broken dental plate. ‘Mrs Philips, we mustn’t worry any more…’

Headlamps flared through the dust. The gendarmerie staff car trundled along the road. Japanese soldiers strode down the bank, waving their rifles and beckoning the prisoners to their feet. The trucks at the rear of the column had started their engines. Men and women were climbing the embankment, children and suitcases in hand. Others remained in the trampled grass, unwilling to leave this placid canal.

Jim lay on his side, making a pillow of his arm. He felt drowsy after Mrs Philips’ potato, and the rumble of bombing and the voices of the British wives seemed far away. He stared at the blades of grass, trying to work out the speed at which the leaves grew – an eighth of an inch each day, a millionth of a mile per hour…?

Then he noticed a Japanese soldier standing in the grass beside him. All but a hundred of the prisoners had climbed the slope and formed a procession behind the staff car. Around Jim a few people lay quietly. Mrs Philips clasped her wicker suitcase, and the woman from D Block whimpered as her husband pressed his hands to her shoulders.

Grains of rice clung to the stubble around the Japanese soldier’s lips. They moved like lice as he assessed Jim’s condition. His expression was one that Jim had seen before, at the detention centre in Shanghai, but for the first time Jim felt unconcerned. He would remain here beside the unhurried water and help Mrs Philips to look for God.

‘Come on, Jim! We’re waiting for you!’

An emaciated figure tottered down the bank. Mr Maxted bowed and smiled to the Japanese soldier, as if glad to recognize him. He collapsed in the grass and pulled Jim’s shoulder.

‘Good boy, Jim. We’re moving on to Nantao.’

‘They’re taking us up-country, Mr Maxted. I might stay here with Mrs Philips.’

‘I think Mrs Philips wants to rest. They’re holding our rations in Nantao, Jim. We need you to lead the way.’

Hitching up his shorts, Mr Maxted bowed again to the Japanese soldier and helped Jim to his feet.

The column shuffled forward, following the staff car. Jim looked back at the hundred or so prisoners left behind on the embankment. As the soldier licked the rice grains from his chin, Mrs Philips lay at his feet in the yellow grass, beside the woman from D Block and her kneeling husband. Other soldiers moved along the bank, rifles slung while they stepped among the resting prisoners. Would they later help Mrs Philips and the others to Nantao?

Jim doubted it. Shutting Mrs Philips from his mind, he gripped his wooden case and placed his feet in the dusty imprints left by the man limping in front of him. Already Mr Maxted had fallen behind. The brief rest on the embankment had fatigued everyone. Half a mile from the bridge, by a burnt-out shell of an ammunition truck, the Nantao road turned at right angles from the canal and ran along a causeway between two paddy fields. The procession came to a halt. Watched by the Japanese, who made no attempt to hurry them along, the prisoners waited limply in the sun. Jim listened to the tired breathing. Then there was a shuffle of clogs, and the procession moved forward again.

He looked back at the ammunition truck. He was startled to see that hundreds of suitcases lay on the empty road. Exhausted by the effort of carrying their possessions, the prisoners had abandoned them without a spoken word. The suitcases and wicker baskets, the tennis racquets, cricket bats and pierrot costumes lay in the sunlight, like the luggage of a party of holidaymakers who had vanished into the sky.

Holding tight to his case, Jim increased his stride. After so many years without any belongings, he did not intend to discard them now. He thought of Mrs Philips and their talk together by the sunny canal, a setting so much more pleasant than the camp cemetery where he had usually questioned her about matters of life and death. It had been kind of Mrs Philips to give him her last potato, and he remembered his dreamy thoughts of having died. But he had not died. Jim stamped his shoes in the dust, surprised by his own weakness. Death, with her mother-of-pear! skin, had almost seduced him with a sweet potato.

30
The Olympic Stadium

All afternoon they moved northwards across the plain of the Whangpoo River, through the maze of creeks and canals that separated the paddy fields. Lunghua Airfield fell behind them, and the apartment houses of the French Concession rose like advertisement hoardings in the August sunlight. The river was a few hundred yards to their right, its brown surface broken by the wrecks of patrol boats and motorized junks that sat in the shallows.

Here, in the approaches to the Nantao district, the devastation caused by the American bombing lay on all sides. Craters like circular swimming-pools covered the paddy fields, in which floated the carcasses of water buffaloes. They passed the remains of a convoy that had been attacked by the Mustang and Lightning fighters. A line of military trucks and staff cars sat under the trees, as if dismantled in an outdoor workshop. Wheels, doors and axles were scattered around the vehicles, whose fenders and body panels had been torn away by the cannon fire.

Swarms of flies rose from the bloodstained windshields as the prisoners stopped to relieve themselves. A few steps behind Jim, Mr Maxted left the procession and sat on the running board of an ammunition wagon. Still carrying his case, Jim went back for him.

‘We’re nearly there, Mr Maxted. I can smell the docks.’

‘Don’t worry, Jim. I’m keeping an eye on us.’

‘Our rations…’

Mr Maxted reached out and held Jim’s wrist. Gutted by malaria and malnutrition, his body was about to merge with the derelict vehicle behind him. The three trucks moved past, their tyres crushing the broken glass that covered the ground. The hospital patients lay across each other like rolls of carpet. Dr Ransome stood in the last truck, his back to the driver’s cabin, feet hidden among the packed bodies. Seeing Jim, he gripped the side bar of the truck.