Authors: Martin Booth
It was only as they had formed ranks to march to the station that Sandingham had realised at last that he was leaving. A great sadness had come over him which he could neither control nor explain. He had looked back at the foul latrines, the kitchen block, the parade ground; had stared lastly at his own barrack; and his mouth had seized up and gone dry, and the lump in his throat had hardened into a stone of pity and sorrow for all those who had not made it. And he thought of those graves which were, even as he marched out of the gate, being exhumed for shipment home to the UK, or the USA, or Holland or some other benighted corner of the world where relatives would weep for an hour at a fresh graveside before continuing with their peace.
The barrack: his own corner of it had been home. He had lived there for – he tried to count the months, but his misery wiped time out. He steered the tears off his cheeks with a forefinger.
The train steamed in to the halt. It had five passenger carriages behind a coal tender. They lined up at the doors and heaved themselves into the compartments, eager as schoolboys to get a window seat. Once aboard, Sandingham stood by the door and closed it. The window was open and he leaned on the metal sill, looking down the way the train had come, from Hiroshima. He could not see their camp.
A toot on the train steam whistle heralded the judder of the couplings taking up the strain; then, with the locomotive pouting smoke, they slowly set off.
Beyond the signal, where the railway was crossed by a lane, a small group of local peasants had collected. Upon their shoulders they carried mattocks or hand scythes and their cart was piled with straw. They watched the train approach and Sandingham, in turn, watched them come nearer. As the train drew alongside the crossing some of the peasants bowed. Others just stood, silent and immovable spectators watching the procession of history pass them on a single-line railway track. A dog gambolled along the shingle, snapping at the wheels.
* * *
The docks were packed and bustling. Sandingham, having been ‘processed’, joined a contingent of other British prisoners from camps all over Japan. He befriended, in the transient manner that one strikes an acquaintance with fellow travellers, a soldier with a trim, pointed beard who was known to his comrades as ‘Yagi’. It was a nickname Sandingham laughed at:
yagi
was Japanese for a goat.
Once aboard the ship they were shown to their berths and left to organise themselves until the vessel sailed. There was little to organise. Sandingham’s worldly possessions were contained in a newly-issued cardboard box tied round with stout twine. He had nothing of real value, even to him, except the photo of Bob and the jacket that had been Mishima’s. Other knick-knacks they all saved or hoarded were the stuff of souvenirs: gift material for sons or nephews.
He pushed the box under the shelf in the closet and lay on his top bunk. Beside his head was the cabin porthole. He spun the retaining clasps and opened the heavy glass disc, clipping it back against the storm plate. He thrust his head out, to discover that he was near the stern.
Amidships, the prisoners were still coming up the gangway: those too sick to make it were being helped in through a door level with the quay. The activity in the dock buildings hummed and resonated against the galvanised metal walls.
On the dock below him, between his ship and the one lying alongside aft of her, was a corral in which was massed a throng of silent Japanese. Not one of them was under thirty-five; women predominated.
‘What are you watching?’ asked Yagi in his musical Welsh accent.
Sandingham had forgotten how beautiful a South Wales voice could be.
‘I’m sorry?’
‘What are you looking at?’
‘Nothing much. The warehouses, the docks, a crowd of Japs.’
‘Poor blighters!’
‘Why?’
‘They’re waiting there for the remains of their dead. Shipped back from all over the Pacific.’
* * *
Duty rotas were established as soon as the ship was at sea. They were light, for many of the prisoners were too weak to undertake heavy work. Sandingham was assigned to the galley to make buttered toast every breakfast. He also accepted the task of brewing up mid-morning coffee and heating the doughnuts that were issued with the mugs.
He spent his afternoons lying in his bunk reading or lounging about on the deck with a detective novel: another luxury he had forgotten. The sun tanned him and he dozed off from time to time, only to wake ten minutes later with a guilty conscience, feeling that he wasn’t doing his chores and would consequently be beaten for his idleness. Then he would see the sky and the smoke pluming from the funnel and a warm contentment would seep into him again.
One morning, the chief cook asked him to fetch more ham. The toast was made and he was about to leave.
‘Where do I get it?’
‘C’mpanyon way fo-er,’ the Texan told him. ‘Fridges ’e’en.’
Sandingham found companionway four and descended the steep incline of the steps. At the bottom, in the bowels of the ship, he found himself in a corridor into the walls of which were set heavy steel-plate doors. The nearest was labelled ‘TWO/2’, the next ‘THREE/3’ – both numbers and letters made it simple for the military uneducated. He walked down the dimly-lit passage until he reached ‘SEVEN/7’ and wrenched the retaining levers down. The bulk of the door swung open. He twisted the switch and low wattage bulbs came on in the refrigeration compartment.
He lifted his leg over the door sill and looked about him for the sides of ham.
The metal shelves, six high, reaching as far as he could see ahead and to left and right, were loaded with corpses sewn into canvas sacks, each one stencilled in black – the one by his elbow was marked ‘PEARLMAN: KEVIN/342688’.
* * *
They steamed past Corregidor Island, into the Bay of Manila, the sun set astern of the ship with a vast godly blaze of yellow, orange and red. The sea was a smooth, dark green and the tropical undergrowth on the island was already so lush as to cover over the scars of the intense fighting that had taken place there. The bay itself was strewn with sunk or scuttled ships and minefields, indicated by brightly painted buoys, were scattered either side of the shipping lane.
On the quayside, US Red Cross girls were dispensing Coca-Cola and coffee, doughnuts, packets of peanuts and chewing gum, cigarettes and copies of
Life
magazine.
Peering down on them from the deck, Sandingham realised that they were the first European women he’d seen since the week before Christmas, 1941.
P
ART
E
LEVEN
Hong Kong: Christmas, 1952
T
HE HOTEL LOUNGE
was bedecked with paper-chains, tissue Chinese lanterns, silver and gold tinsel and fairy lights. After the guests had retired for the night the first-floor roomboys had taken the decorations out of storage and hung them. When they had completed the lounge they moved down to the main lobby. The square wooden pillar by the reception desk was spiralled with red, white and blue crêpe, the bar was surrounded by blinking lights, each bulb the shape of a distinctly oriental Santa Claus, the ceiling was criss-crossed with more paper-chains and, on the main glass doors, there was a matching pair of wax-paper and plastic holly wreaths. The younger children, coming down for breakfast the following morning, were entranced by the translation of the business-like lobby into a pseudo-grotto of magical proportions.
Up in his parents’ room, David studied his diary. It was nearly full. His grandmother had sent it to him from England the Christmas before and he knew that she would send him another this year. She had said she would in the letter that had accompanied her birthday card to him in September.
Thumbing through the entries, he relived bits of his and the world’s year. After a few pages, he read sections out loud, pretending he was the BBC World Service announcer recapitulating upon 1952:
‘February: King George VI of England dies; the nation and the Empire mourn. 22 June: I have a cholera jab; very painful. 7 September: my birthday; I have a party and Andrew gives me a BRM Dinky, godfather gives me a fountain pen with a solid gold nib…’
He stopped reading. His finger was in the page on which he had written of his encounter with barmy Hiroshima Joe in his room. The meeting had scared him, though at the time he was not so scared as puzzled and apprehensive. It had taught him that adults were certainly not all to be trusted to behave rationally, and Hiroshima Joe in particular seemed to have a code apart from his parents, from Jonty and Margaret, Biddy and Major Binniss, Sally and Mike Prentice and others of his parents’ friends.
Adults, he concluded, were utterly unpredictable and not to be relied upon. The one exception was in areas in which experience or tradition governed them – such as at Christmas: then they were safely predictable. In the run-up to Christmas Eve they would secrete parcels in cupboards (heavily taping or tying them against tampering); they would become jovial – sometimes falsely so – and free with praise; or alternatively they would become threateningly strict at odd moments when they knew they held the whip-hands of present-withdrawal or Father-Christmas-absence.
On Christmas Eve itself they were particularly jolly. The anticipation of giving, which David himself appreciated as a momentary warm and pleasing glow, affected them as much as receiving did the children. They invariably spent the morning shopping or going to work where little work was done. At lunchtime they went to office parties and in the evening they drank with friends, went out to other friends’, had friends visit them or a mixture of all these. Their children either accompanied them, which was uncommon, or stayed at home in the charge of the amah, which was commonplace. During the night, as David now knew, one of them stole into their children’s bedrooms and filled their stockings; later they would giggle as they arrayed presents under the tree. The following morning Father, a majesterial head-waiter-cum-master of ceremonies, handed out the spoils to Mother, children and, in David’s case, the roomboys who serviced their hotel rooms.
This year, he mused, Christmas would be different for him, at least. His father was not going to be there. He was in Korea, and would not be back from his tour of duty until the second week in January.
David’s mother told him that his father would telephone on Christmas Day, but she was not sure when, for the lines were always busy at Christmas with people ringing their loved ones. He pointed out that they
were
loved ones, which his mother indeed assured him was so, but he also understood that there were lots of men in the war who wanted to talk to their wives and children, too. And parents.
Recalling this conversation as he looked at his diary reminded him of his letter. He pulled it out of the flap at the back of the book, next to an old map of the London Underground and Southern Region commuter lines. Somewhere, surrounded by pastures of grazing kangaroos and wallabies and dingoes, Mr and Mrs Kerrins would not be getting a phone call. This no longer gave him the sad ache that it had, but it did still hurt him a little to think that the call would not be connected.
The door opened and his mother came in, carrying in her arms two large brown-paper bags.
‘What’s in them?’ He looked from one of them to the other.
‘Specialities,’ she said mysteriously.
He knew better than to ask, for at Christmas ‘specialities’ could cover a multitude of items, many coded ‘Top Secret’ until the day itself.
‘Don’t you want to know what they are?’ she asked. This went further to prove David’s theory of adult unpredictability. ‘It’s not like you to be uncurious.’
He had done suffixes and prefixes at school in the last week of term. With Christmas drawing nigh, however, he considered it would be unwise to correct his mother’s grammatical error which, he reasoned, was in any case probably made to check his knowledge. Whenever David caught his father out over such mistakes he would first scowl, just for a split second, then cheer up, saying, ‘Just testing you, David. Well done!’
‘What is there, then?’ he replied, causing his mother to smile indulgently.
She lifted the articles free of the bags one at a time and laid them on the coffee table.
‘Walnuts,’ she began, ‘hazelnuts and almonds; crystallised fruit; dried figs; dates; a bottle of gin, a bottle of whiskey, a bottle of rum’ – she winked at him – ‘a bottle of vodka; some maraschino cherries – green and red – not,’ she emphasised, ‘to be eaten by others beforehand – and stuffed olives; crisps and prawn crackers, cashew nuts and peanuts…’ She opened the second bag. ‘And decorations. We’re going to decorate this room.’
‘We haven’t a tree,’ David pointed out with the unmoving logic of his age.
There was a knock on the door. With perfect timing the duty roomboy entered carrying an artificial tree. It was not very large, and when he stood it on the suitcase shelf by the bathroom door it did not reach to the ceiling. But it was a tree, and it delighted David.
‘On Christmas Eve we’re going to have a party. And on Christmas Day we’re going over to Commander Fisher’s for lunch. You’ll like that, won’t you?’
‘Yes,’ David answered truthfully. The Fisher boys were friends of his and they lived on Hong Kong Island with a wooded hillside right behind their bungalow. They had found a dead cobra there in the summer. ‘But what about Daddy’s phone call? He won’t know where we are.’
‘That won’t matter,’ his mother said. ‘We’re going to ring him on the way. We’re going to stop off at the Cable and Wireless office in Central District and call him ourselves. I’ve got the call booked for Christmas morning. We’ve got three whole minutes.’
She busied herself putting away the Christmas fare and, together, they spent the rest of the afternoon decorating the room.
* * *
Sandingham had been staying more and more in his room, raiding the cardboard cartons of canned food on the back stairs and going down to the hotel dining room for a meal every other day, so as not to arouse suspicion. Much of the stolen food was wasted and he flushed it down the toilet: he was seldom hungry, and losing weight. A week before Christmas he had risked venturing out after dark to obtain as much opium as he could; he managed to purchase enough to keep him going for a few days, but no more. The word was out that he was a marked man.