Authors: Martin Booth
It was too late. Too much earth had fallen and over too great a length of the working. The guards moved in, hitting people aside with the butts of their rifles. A senior NCO came over and they talked together before the orders were changed. The trench was to be angled through forty-five degrees at the site of the cave-in.
As the prisoners lined up to board the ferry that was to take them back to the camp at Sham Shui Po, Sandingham saw Francis Number 177 glance at him. The Chinese winked once.
He wasn’t sure what to expect of the agent and Sandingham’s first view of him was perhaps a little disappointing. He didn’t look like a secret agent, a spy for the Communist guerillas, the Nationalists or the British: one of those had to be his employer. He was stripped to the waist and his chest was slightly sunken at the sternum. He was tanned but not at all muscular. He wore baggy black pantaloon-like peasant’s trousers, the waistband folded over, and rope sandals. His face was nondescript, commonplace Chinese.
They all look alike, thought Sandingham and he smiled to himself at the Europeans’ cliché of ignorance. Number 177 smiled back quickly and turned away.
The harbour was smooth with a slight swell. Sandingham stood next to Tom at the rail. The guards knew no one would jump: they’d be shot or killed by sharks. The harbour, always rich with garbage and, now that it was wartime, an abundance of corpses as well, attracted them.
‘Those poor bastards!’ Sandingham remarked. ‘God! What an awful way to die…’
‘Any worse than being shot? Or bayonetted? Or dying of scurvy or cholera? At least it was quick.’
After a pause, Sandingham said, ‘But to see it coming like that. A bullet – you never hear the bang. That’s really quick. To see the earth falling on you, though…’
‘No worse than seeing the bayonet plunge. Certainly no worse than seeing your stomach spewed up or your wound starting to smell gaseous. Be glad if your death’s as rapid.’
They said no more at that.
As the craft passed the Peninsula Hotel Sandingham studied the large ground-floor windows. If he strained his ears he could almost hear a palm court ensemble playing a tea dance over the thud of the screw and the hissing of the waves gliding by below.
* * *
If he had had a blanket around his shoulders … if he had had a mug of steaming cocoa in his hand … if there had been a roaring fire in the grate before him … if his nose had been red … and if the room had smelt of roasted chestnuts … he could possibly have been at home on a winter’s evening with a streaming cold. As it was, he had a temperature of one hundred and three degrees and stomach cramps and sat hunched over a battered tin basin with his feet in water that had been warmed by leaving it in a black bucket in full spring sunlight.
For several days Sandingham had been suffering from electric feet. It was painful and alike to permanent pins and needles, from the ankles down. The MO told him it was vitamin deficiency. A number of them were getting it. Soaking his feet in warm water relieved the pain for a while. His tongue was raw on one edge.
He had been standing for over two hours that afternoon in the ‘operating theatre’, assisting in holding down two officers while they each had a molar extracted without anaesthetic. Abscesses were becoming increasingly common, too. The operating table had seen better days taking the pink into the corner pocket off a cannon; but no one complained. It was so heavy it did not move, the baize surface was warmer than the cold slate beneath and the rims of the pockets could be used to anchor down particularly powerful and obstreperous patients.
Pushing his hands over his head in the luxury of a stretch, Sandingham looked about him. Some prisoners were playing an improvised game of bowls; a few were tending a very inadequate, dessicated vegetable plot while others were sitting or mooching or moving slowly about in groups of no more than three. Others still were gathered under the pine-tree smoking-stand. A sudden outbreak of masculine laughter rang across the compound.
‘They can always laugh,’ said de Souza. ‘The British can always find humour in even the worst of their troubles.’
He was Portuguese, and had been an import-export broker before the Hong Kong volunteer force called upon his services to fight in the early weeks of December. His English was impeccable: he had attended a missionary school in Macau in the twenties. It had been his poor luck to be present at the massacre of the patients and the raping and subsequent murder of the nurses at St Stephen’s College: he had seen the two doctors shot and bayonetted over and over on the ground. He had had a smashed hand which could still not grip well. That had been on Christmas Day.
Sandingham lifted his feet out of the water. As he did so, a prisoner came over to him with a kerosene can sliced in half and equipped with a short rope handle. He asked for some of the water and Sandingham gave him the lot, watching as he took it away to the steps of his barrack hut where he and three others stirred it with wood-ash and commenced to launder their clothes with the mixture. Soap was rare.
‘It’s a national trait, Suzie. We laugh at the terrible and take the light-hearted with deadly seriousness.’
‘It’s good, Joe. If you laugh at the awful it doesn’t seem so bad. I can’t do that. Sometimes I try – my mother was half-English, you know, and I’ve often hoped I’ve inherited some of her manners. But I haven’t got that ability to find comic the essentially tragic. Like Shakespeare: who could write such funny, sad plays but an Englishman?
Romeo and Juliet
– dirty jokes and a lovers’ death pact at the end.’
Carefully hoisting himself to his feet, Sandingham found that the pain had eased a bit from the soaking. With some difficulty, he managed to slip his feet into his new sandals, skilfully constructed from a webbing belt and an old car tyre. He hobbled off to the area between the two huts where there was what the prisoners called a ‘pisaphone’ – a galvanised steel funnel sunk into the earth, without screens, to serve as a urinal. The laughter followed him and came closer. Two officers whom he did not know drew up behind him, waiting their turn at the
pissoir.
‘Anyway,’ said one, ‘he’s lucky in that he’s the only person in here who’s constipated. Still … he had another parcel yesterday from her. Just like the others, it came in a derelict perambulator! Passed straight through the guards. Not much in it. But they didn’t search it too well. There was a tiny scrap of paper in it, of course. I saw it.’
Sandingham struggled to get his penis back into his
fandushi:
the skin of his fingers was so cracked at the joints he could not bend them enough to hook himself back into his clothing.
‘What did it say?’
‘“Darling Mickey,”’ the officer quoted, giving the words their pidgin English pronunciation, ‘– she could spell the “darling” all right! – “I got you sum vejtabul here – a litule cabag and some bens. I luv yuo. All so, I got you one more plam.”’
They both chuckled.
‘So what did he say?’
‘Nothing! What could he say? Cat-and-Dog was right there. You can’t talk to visitors. However, this morning he sees his Chinese piece going past the wire. Never mind the patrol, the bloody electrified wire, or even a good face slapping! He runs up as near as he can get to the fence and bawls out, “Hey, Gilly!” She looks his way, half-terrified to do so. “Hey!” he bellows again. “Not prams, Gilly. Not prams. Plums! Plums!”’
The laughter was the choking, chortling kind that always accompanies a good yarn. Sandingham smiled as he limped back to the step of his hut.
From inside, he could hear a French lesson in progress, a pupil repeating clumsily, ‘Je ne suis par. Tu nay par. Il nay par…’
He rubbed his hand firmly along his shin. The ringworm was as brightly scarlet as a plague mark and pestering him again.
* * *
‘It tastes fucking foul, if you don’t mind my saying so, old boy.’
‘I admit it’s not Johnnie Walker, but I don’t think it’s that bad,’ said Sandingham.
‘You do better,’ challenged Rodney Castleford, a tall, narrow young man who had been a steward in the Merchant Navy and was used to the wiles of the lower decks.
He was naturally thin when they arrived in the camp, marching in past the small, octagonal, pagoda-like guard-box. Now his thinness was accentuated by emaciation – behind his back, the others in his hut called him ‘Tapeworm’. He had one of them, too. The papery, cream-coloured egg-segments passed out with his faeces. He could do nothing about it: they had no sulphur drugs. He called it ‘Tony’, after his headmaster at school, a man called Hill who had big ears, no sense of justice and was, in his estimation, ‘a right shit’.
‘What’s it made of?’
‘Rice, cabbage leaves and stalks, carrot tops, a few turnips and eleven ounces of sugar liberated from our Nipponese neighbours. Boiled up first on the ring.’
The ring was a home-made heating element powered by an illegal flex that was connected to the electrified fence. It worked well, if slowly, and all the huts bounding the perimeter fence had something like it. It had begun life as a form of primitive electric fire in February. Now, in April, it powered the fermentation bucket.
‘It is rough,’ admitted Sandingham after a second sip had burned his tongue.
‘Rough? You could depilate sheep with it.’ As a vet in civvy street, ‘Black’ Berry should have known.
‘Well,’ judged the medical officer, sampling a drop on the end of his finger, ‘it won’t make you blind but it might make you blind drunk. Anyone who can’t stand their share can donate it to me and the sick bay. We can use it for sterilisation. Or cleansing cuts. And I’m not joking.’
‘Better idea, doc,’ suggested the vet. ‘Keep it a few more hours to mature and use it as an anaesthetic.’
They all found that amusing.
* * *
‘You!’
Sandingham stood as upright as he could, turned as smartly as he could, saluted as smartly as he could, then bowed from the waist as low as he could.
‘When an officer in the Imperial Japanese Army comes by you, you salute immediately.’
‘Yes, sir,’ replied Sandingham to the dirt, upon which stood firmly planted a pair of highly polished leather boots.
‘Stand up!’
He did so, pressing his hand into the small of his back to press the pain away. He had pulled a muscle badly while digging the trenches at Kai Tak the day before.
‘Why is your hand not at your side? You stand to attention.’
He did so, but not fast enough. The slap across his jaw sent his head reeling to the right.
‘Next time, you salute before the officer of the Imperial Japanese Army sees you and you hold that salute until he has passed from your sight.’
Afterwards, Pedrick asked, ‘Who the hell was that?’
‘I’ve no idea and I hope I don’t have to find out.’
* * *
Sally was defecting. At the beginning, she had stayed with the Pay Corps sergeant but after a while she was to be seen offering her attentions more and more to the Japanese subaltern who was in charge of messing for the camp guards. Although their food rations were not exorbitant, they had considerably better quality food than the prisoners and there was a far greater quantity of it. Rice and fish or meat gravy, interspersed from time to time with pork or monkey scraps, was preferred by the bitch to her owner’s skimpy servings of originally weak but further diluted soup and whatever she could catch for herself by way of rats, mice and the shining, brown-backed cockroaches that inhabited every crack and cranny of the buildings. The final sign that she was going over to the enemy occurred when, returning to the barrack hut late one night, she was noticed to be wearing a brand-new leather collar with metal studs mounted on it.
The sergeant scooped her up in his once-brawny arms. The dog, with a duplicity better suited to a feline, licked his face.
‘You know, John,’ said a fellow sergeant, ‘I can’t bear that soddin’ animal. Watching it lick you reminds me of a whore. As she screws you, you wonder whose cock was up there last. The last chin that tongue slurped was probably Tokunaga’s own.’
‘Doubt it. The Imperial Japanese Commander of Saps Like Us, The High Honourable Colonel Tokunaga, Sir! would probably eat the poor little bugger. You can’t blame the dog. She’s hungry and finding ’er food best she can. Watchin’ ’er operate makes me wish I was a little bitch like that. You got to admire ’er stayin’ power.’
‘What’s more,’ added another, ‘she don’t get diphtheria, she don’t get scurvy and she don’t get cholera. She do get mange…’
‘… which is abou’ the only bloody thing we ain’t getting.’
He put Sally back down on her paws. She wriggled under one of the bunks and settled into a snug of crumpled paper she had fashioned into a PoW version of the bamboo wicker basket she had formerly occupied in the offices at Murray Barracks. Even dogs, one of the NCOs tersely commented, had to make sacrifices in a war.
For some days Sally continued to visit the guards for luxuries that would not have been refused by her rightful owners. On one occasion, in the manner dogs have, she returned with her breath smelling strongly of roasted chicken, much to the chagrin of the sergeant who had not seen a chicken since being captured, except for a solitary and scrawny cockerel that had mistakenly flown over the perimeter wire from the surrounding streets where, by April, there was none of its kin left crowing. The bird had quickly disappeared, almost before it had landed. A smearing of mouldy rice by the wire had assisted in convincing it that it should make the crossing of the no-man’s-land of electrified fencing and the guard walks. Sally had, on that occasion, been presented with the parson’s nose.
It was a sweltering day, even before the sun had reached the mid-morning angle. The prisoners who were on work draft had long since departed and would by now have been bathed in sweat at Kai Tak, the dusty soil powdering into their hair and ears, adhering to their skin like a thin pastry case. Some felt they might yet cook.
For Sandingham, it was his turn on the rota for general camp cleaning. A top-brass Japanese officer was expected to visit the camp in the evening and that meant everything had to be spruced up. The worst job was sweeping clear the dust that had settled on the concrete of the camp roads. The best job, after the sweeping was completed, was the washing down of the road. Whereas the British Army painted boulders white, the Japanese scrubbed roads: all armies do pointless things, Joe thought. Indeed, it was a job much sought after by the prisoners for it involved dowsing the hot roads with sea water and then sweeping it off into the gulleys, gutter-slots and earth. It was a chore that gave the prisoners two respites from their daily life – they could splash water about like errant schoolboys and, within the parameters of their life, ‘enjoy’ themselves; and the sea water was salty and beneficial to skin wounds.