Authors: Martin Booth
Sandingham pinched the cigarette out and put the remaining stub in his pocket.
The spring was advancing now, the evenings staying light longer; soon they would be herded into the barracks for the night.
He made to get up once more. The other bent to help him.
‘It’s all right. I can manage.’
They walked slowly towards the hut. A single bird was piping in one of the pines, unanswered.
‘Do you play bezique?’
‘No,’ answered Sandingham. ‘Do you play canasta?’
‘Not very well, but I’ll give you a game. Do you have a second pack? We’ll need one, of course…’ His voice was tight with eager anticipation: another deck of cards would be an asset upon which to found a friendship. Then he said, ‘You’re Sandingham, aren’t you?’ It was unnecessary, for from his manner it was clear he knew. ‘My name’s Pedrick. RN.’
Sandingham’s pack was short of the four of clubs. Whoever was to be dealt the last card had that as a ghost in his hand and stated he was playing it as he laid down nothing in thin air.
The lights flickered briefly and were extinguished just before nine.
* * *
He was woken at half-past four by the sentry whom they had nicknamed ‘Cat-and-Dog’ hammering on the barrack door. He was shouting hoarsely in Japanese. First light was shimmering behind Tai Sheung Tok, promising a hot day, but the early morning air was clean and sharp with no shadows casting themselves on the dirt. He glanced out of the window to see Sally, the Pay Corps’ black-and-white fox terrior, nosing around a patch of weeds; she was oblivious of a tabby-ish cat which was hunched up on the roof ridge of the building above her, watching her every move. Smoke was rising in a vertical plume from the kitchens: it did not disseminate for at least thirty feet, so tranquil and windless was the dawn hour.
Turning into the room once more, Sandingham saw Tom Pedrick bent studiously over a tin can covered with a scrap of grimy cloth. He had his hand in the can and was taking small dots out of it, placing them on a sheet of crumpled paper. He muttered as he did so.
‘How many, Tom?’ croaked an expectantly hopeful voice from the top of a three-tier bank of bunks.
‘Two hundred and sixteen. But there’s more to come. I’ve got three hundred and ninety-one from yesterday. Should make seven hundred…’
Leaning on his bunk, Sandingham grinned ruefully. British officers breeding bluebottles to swap for cigarettes – one fag per hundred flies. The idea was that the prisoners killed flies and thus cut down the risk of disease. The Japanese thought the flies were wild, did not realise that they were being factory-bred by enterprising prisoners on mouldy rice and a dead rat.
Cardiff Joe appeared suddenly at the barrack door but did not see the fly farm being shoved under a bunk. He was the best of the interpreters, a stocky and bow-legged figure who was helpful whenever he found his superiors looking the other way. He gained his monaker because he claimed he had a bank account in Cardiff.
‘Eve’ybody up! Time to go to wuk! Fi’e minits! Fi’e minits!’
He moved on to rouse the next building. It was unusual for him to be about so early. He was normally not to be seen before seven-thirty. Tokunaga, the camp commandant, was obviously having one of his periodic tightenings-up.
The prisoners – eight hundred of them – formed lines at the kitchen and were each issued with the day’s customary ration of a small bun and a clove of garlic. The first five hundred also got a third of a tin can of watery tea and a dollop of cold congealed rice and sweet potato. Sandingham missed this as he was last at the latrines and had to queue before balancing over the hole in the ground that served as a lavatory. As his loose turds fell into the slop containers below, which had not yet been emptied by the morning sanitary rota, he could hear the raucous buzzing of thousands of flies. His stomach was getting better: he had somehow managed to shake off the diarrhoea that had been bothering him for a fortnight. At least he was not a dysentery case. It had had him very worried.
The lines reformed for embarkation on to the ferry. The guards stood in ranks on either side and Cardiff Joe, after receiving the count, marched them off. The ferry took them down the Kowloon peninsula, round the tip by the Star Ferry pier and the landmark of the Kowloon-Canton railway station clock tower and up the other side to Kai Tak. Here they were disembarked and marched through some streets to the site of the airport. It was being extended to take Japanese aircraft.
As they paraded through the few streets between the ferry pier and the aerodrome the guards assumed the formation they had taken at the embarking point. They marched alongside the prisoners, rifles at the ready by their waists, bayonets fitted and their hands firmly grasping stock and barrel. The position each was obliged to take, half-facing inward to the labour column, made walking clumsy and the Japanese soldiers, for the best part short men, waddled and tripped rather than marched in a military fashion. It did not matter: no one dared laugh at the spectacle.
From a few shady shops and doorways, Chinese women and children gawped as the contingent passed. The Europeans – English, Canadians, Dutch, Portuguese – whom they had known as bank officials and businessmen, architects and dentists, police inspectors and customs officers, were now just coolies. This did not cause the onlookers any pleasure. It did not satisfy some obscure colonial rancour, settle any old scores. It shocked them that those who had made the world tick could be so reduced to such indignity, such obvious loss of face. They felt helpless sympathy for them.
Sandingham was put into a draft to dig a ditch. Pedrick, by chance, was in the same workforce.
At the site of the ditches they were issued with labourers’ shovels with ‘P.W.D.’ painted on the handles, and common garden forks, and told in broken English to dig to a depth of eleven feet between the tied-out stakes about three feet apart. Some Chinese coolies were already at work in the ditch, clearing out what soil had fallen in during the night. Tom contrived to get next to Sandingham.
‘I’ve not done this before,’ Sandingham said, looking at the handle of his shovel and thinking of the twist of fate that gave him a government Public Works Department tool.
‘We just dig,’ said Tom. ‘The coolies dig with us and we get them to shift the dirt out in those wicker baskets’ – he pointed to a stack of them – ‘… and we get a drink break of ten minutes mid-morning. Water. Half an hour at midday, while the guards and the coolies eat and then back as usual. What have you done in the past?’
‘Moved explosives, piled up lorry tyres, mixed concrete, filled kerosene cans, that sort of thing. Tight supervision. Not like this.’
Casting casually about him, Sandingham saw only three guards for a work detail of at least one hundred PoWs and as may coolies. He started to tug his vest off.
‘Don’t do that. Keep it on,’ advised Tom. ‘It stops the dust from getting in the sores. I’m told the ground’s a bit tetanus. After a bit, one of the coolies’ll get a bucket of sea water. Wash in that. The salt does you good.’
They went into the trench, already thirty yards or more long. It was not a drainage ditch but a slit trench as cover against air attack. The first twenty-five yards were shored with rough-sawn timber, but the rest was not. Sandingham set to on the sandy, gritty earth with his shovel. It was hot going, but if he took it slowly it didn’t tire him too quickly and, by mid-morning, he was in a routine.
‘You no work too hard. Take it easy. We can do more instead of you.’
He had not been spoken to all morning, not even by Tom who was cutting planks and cross-members for the shoring. He started to twist himself round in the narrow passage of the trench.
‘No. No see me. I standing behind you. Just listen. I can help you. You take this. Guards no can see. We too deep and my man watch out fo’ us.’
Stopping digging, Sandingham was handed an oblong block of cooked fish about the size of a cigarette packet.
‘Eat now!’ ordered the Chinese voice with urgency.
He crammed the fish into his mouth and chewed on it. It was hard to swallow because his throat was dry, but he forced it down. It tasted good and had been poached in ginger. His lips ignored the sand on his fingers as he pulled the few bones out of his mouth, covering them with a shovelful of gravel.
‘Thank you,’ he said.
He recommenced digging. After a few minutes, a guard’s shadow slid over the sheer side of the trench: he peered down to see nothing abnormal. He moved off and the lookout overhead tipped the Chinese the nod.
‘You know you’ senior officer?’
Sandingham replied in the affirmative.
‘I got a message for him. You take it.’
The Chinese was still behind Sandingham and his hand reached round and bent Sandingham’s arm behind his back. He pressed into the palm a minute square of paper, folded to the size of a postage stamp, and Sandingham deftly wrapped it into the creases of his loincloth where his vest tucked into the waistfold.
‘What’s your name? Who shall I say…?’ he asked obliquely over his houlder.
‘You just say Number 177. Very lucky number for Chinese. Nearly all sevens.’
‘But your name? I can’t give him a number alone.’
‘He will understand. Tell him 177. For you, my name can be “Francis”.’
The drink break arrived. Sandingham climbed out of the trench into full sunlight and the heat struck him. It was actually cooler in the bottom of the ditch. He squatted next to Tom Pedrick and took a swig from the water jug. It was warm but refreshing.
As they doused their bodies with sea water from the buckets they spoke very quietly, their whispers disguised by the chattering of the coolies. The salt stung in their cuts, the cracks in their dry skin and their open sores, but it was a healthy sensation.
‘I’ve got something for the CO,’ Sandingham said bluntly. ‘A note.’
Tom Pedrick seemed unperturbed, as if he expected such an occurrence. He didn’t ask how Sandingham had come to obtain it.
‘Put it under your balls if you get the chance,’ said Tom. ‘They won’t search there and you’ll not lose it because the material’s tight around the crotch.’
Pretending to ease his testicles, Sandingham succeeded in getting the note shifted.
They returned to dig. At midday, the guards brought over half a petrol barrel filled with a thin soup containing some cabbage leaves and with bits of fatty tissue floating in it. The usual chrysanthemum leaves hung suspended in the liquid. The tissue was tasteless but someone said they believed it was dolphin: one had been found beached the day before by the detail working on the taxiway extension. They ate under an awning slung between four poles. A warm breeze flickered the hanging edges and the guy ropes.
One prisoner kept apart from the rest of them. He was slight of build with large ears that were exaggerated by his shaven head. His long fingers held his Chinese soup spoon very delicately, as if he were at a banquet. Sandingham studied him for some minutes. The man kept his eyes lowered and seemed to ponder his soup bowl with unnecessary concentration, sipping the liquid with a determined deliberation. Pedrick saw him watching the man.
‘Who is he?’ Sandingham enquired.
‘Don’t you know? He’s –’ Pedrick answered, then he silenced himself.
Going mad, thought Sandingham. He’s one of the ones who’s going insane. Balmy. Off his rocker. Losing his marbles. He had been near to that himself in the first few months. He made to rise and go across to the man. Tom grabbed his wrist.
‘Why on earth not? Look at him: he’s cracking up. He’s barely with us.’
‘He’s not with us at all. He’s against us.’ This puzzled Sandingham. Tom carried on, ‘You know the hut by the kitchens, the one with the boarded-up window? He’s in that hut.’
This did not solve the dilemma for Sandingham.
‘Those two – the lance-corporal and his mate who were in that same hut – who were caught last month, trying to get out through the wire behind Jubilee Buildings? He’ – Tom spat in order mainly to clean his mouth of the aftertaste of the soup that was tainted by the petrol formerly in the cooking drum, but also to show his dislike – ‘ratted on them. To the Nips. Told Cardiff Joe. And that was it. Nabbed at the post. They’ve not been seen since. Second time it’s happened, I’m told, but the first I only heard about umpteenth hand. This one I know of for sure. I was skivvying in the next room, mopping the floor. Heard him spill the beans. Now he’s in Coventry. Will be for years if this bloody war goes on and on. And it will…’ His voice tailed off. That was defeatist, and Pedrick’d have none of it.
‘What’ll happen to him?’
‘When we’ve won the war,’ said Pedrick positively, ‘and we’re out of this, the fucker’ll get court martialled. I do hope.’
His vehemence took Sandingham aback, but he understood it, shared in it to some extent. He could not avoid it.
The afternoon was spent digging monotonously. Tom and his partner on the two-man saw, a Merchant Seaman stoker with a tattooed moth on his chest, found the going heavy for the teeth were blunting. Eventually, the saw twanged and the nearest guard sauntered across to see what was wrong. In mime, they showed him that the teeth were not only blunt but breaking off. He ordered them to stop and sent a Chinese basket coolie as a runner to his superior. The coolie took his time and the supply of planking was held up. The digging did not cease, however, and soon there were twenty yards unshored.
Sandingham stopped and took the handles of one of the wicker baskets of soil. In the coolie’s absence excavated earth was building up. He moved back through the trench to the nearest steps up. Here he put the basket on his hip and started to climb.
Off to his left was a rushing sound, like water running in a sluice. In a mill race in Suffolk: it made his thoughts cool to hear it. Then, funnelled on to him by the trench, there was a horrendous scream.
The sides were collapsing on to two coolies. The sandy soil had dried out in the heat of the day and now it just fell in. The two men were still screaming and then their scream was cut as if switched off. Dust eddied upward.
Everyone dropped tools and rushed forward. The guards unslung their rifles and hurried towards the scene, prepared for trouble. Several fixed their bayonets as they ran. Sandingham grabbed another man’s shovel and he and Tom, a private from the Middlesex and several Chinese, started frantically to dig. A seven-or eight-yard section had gone. The eleven-foot-deep trench was now only a two-foot-shallow depression, ten feet across.