Korea (12 page)

And as with Russia—thus went my thoughts a year or more later, on this spring evening in the tiny town of Illo—so with the Koreans. With such determination—in the fields, in such factories as I had seen, in the fishing boats, or on the tennis court baseline—how could they lose? Maybe they would not win today, not immediately, not for some years. But one day they would be up with the masters—one of the big boys, one of the kings of the world, and make no mistake about it.

‘Are you an English-speaker, sir, by any chance?’ A very pretty girl had tapped me on the shoulder, starting me from my reverie. She was smiling broadly, her finely chiselled features glowing in the warm twilight. ‘You are? Why are you here? We see very few foreign people in Illo.’ I explained that I was waiting to see a Mr Kim from the house beside Saint Gertrude’s and that I had a letter, written in
hangul
, that would explain. I pulled out and gave to her the crumpled note of introduction Mae-young had written for me at Sogwipo, whereupon the girl gave a cry of sheer delight: ‘We are friends, she and me! I was at school with her! I am the daughter of the house. You must come in. Come on in!’

The family—or the three then in Illo, members of what I later learned was the total family of five—had been out for an afternoon stroll. The parents were sitting on the floor of their living room when Ae-ri (as she introduced herself—‘A most lovely name, don’t you think?’ she giggled) brought me in, and there was some confusion as they put down teacups and bottles of O.B. beer, and struggled to their feet to greet the newcomer.

Mr Kim, the father of the house, was tall, well tanned, a fit-looking man in his early sixties who spoke some English, and after a hurried consultation with Ae-ri said he would be ‘very
happy indeed’ if I would stay to dinner and then sleep there for the night. ‘We have a Western bed, you know,’ he said proudly. He introduced me to a small, curly-haired lady with shiny red cheeks and a ready smile: ‘This is Kyu-Hwan
eum-ma
,’ he said, meaning, literally, ‘This is the mother of Kyu-Hwan.’ His wife.

Korean protocol can on occasion be cumbersome and confusing—this occasion being one such. The lady that Mr Kim was introducing to me was the person that a Westerner would probably call Mrs Kim. Her actual name, the one she would use if she was introducing herself to a shopkeeper, say, was, Ae-ri explained to me later, Mrs Choe—Choe Mi-young. But to Mr Kim she was neither Mrs Kim nor Mrs Choe. She was, instead, the mother of the family’s eldest son. And since the eldest son was called Kim Kyu-Hwan, then Mr Kim’s wife was introduced as ‘Kyu-Hwan
eum-ma
’, Kyu-Hwan’s mother.

The system, for all its apparent clumsiness, does have some advantages, even for me. The moment I heard Mr Kim’s phrase I knew first that this woman was Mrs Kim; second that Ae-ri was not the only child of the union; third, that there was a son somewhere; and fourth, that he was called Kyu-Hwan. The modest sentence of introduction thus gave me a considerable amount of information about the Kim family—rather more than a Mr Smith at a cocktail party might give me by introducing his female companion as ‘my wife, Mary’.

Mr Kim, who was dressed in baggy silk trousers and a grey silk blouse tied with ribbons and toggles made of bone, settled himself back onto the floor, crossed his legs, and pushed a royal blue silk cushion across to me. He asked me to sit, apologizing for the lack of chairs but noting rather grandly that ‘we don’t like to use chairs—they take up so much room’. He made a signal, and his wife and daughter left silently through the sliding paper-windowed door, presumably to find some more tea. Once they had gone Mr Kim, without any ceremony or shyness, proceeded to ask me my age—an important first step in the forging of any relationship, I was later to discover, between Koreans and the rest of mankind. I told him (‘You are a Monkey!’ he said, when
he worked out that I had been born in 1944. ‘Very—how shall I say?—very tricky!’), whereupon he immediately began to gush forth facts and statistics about his family.

He was sixty-four. (That is to say he was sixty-three, to the Western way of counting. In much of the Orient, Korea included, a child is reckoned to be one the moment it is born.) He had been born in Mokpo and had grown up in the bewildering atmosphere of Japanese colonialism—he had been given a Japanese name at school, he had been forced to learn to speak Japanese, he had been impressed into the Japanese militia, and he had been given a job guarding prisoners of war from Singapore. ‘You will never understand, no matter how long you stay, how bad the Japanese times were. They tried to strip everything away from us. They tried to destroy all that was Korea. But we stood up to them. We rejoiced when they were defeated. I have never spoken a word of Japanese again—and I never will.’ He shuddered with distaste as he said this, though Ae-ri, when she brought in more beer, rolled her eyes heavenwards and tutted at her father, who had clearly given this little speech many times before. ‘Why don’t you forget it? It is so long ago. We need the Japanese. We must be their friends again.’

His wife was fifty-nine, he went on. He had three children—Kyu-Hwan, who was thirty-nine, an engineer in Seoul; Sung-Hwan, who had been born after the end of the Korean War, in 1954, and was now working with the police in Taegu; and Ae-ri, who had gone to Soodo Women’s University in Seoul (to study Japanese, her father later admitted, with evident distaste; it was at the university that she had made friends with Kyoung-sook, who had studied Japanese too) and was now working in Seoul as a ticketing agent for Korean Airlines. There had, I gathered, been some trouble with her marriage, and she was now back in Illo ‘getting over it’. But it was made clear to me, despite all the degrees of intimacy of the conversation thus far, that I was to know little about it and that it would be impolite to ask for further details, since the family had already lost a considerable amount of face over the whole incident.

Mr Kim had worked for so much of his early career in Seoul—the children had all been born and brought up in the capital, where most ambitious Koreans eventually migrate—but had ended up as a foreman at a steel factory on the east coast. He had retired four years ago and had used his final bonus—a month’s pay for every one of the twenty years he had worked—to buy this modest house in Illo. He now spent his days walking, his evenings reading or talking. He was very interested in the outside world, never having been beyond the shores of Korea, nor ever likely to. His last real holiday had been a trip to Cheju-do two years before, and he talked delightedly about the beauty of the diving women, and laughed happily when I warned him that the
haenyo
were in fact rather more beautiful in retrospect than they actually were at the time.

But his most powerful memories were, as one might suspect, of the Korean War. Once our modest dinner had been cleared away—we ate alone, the women bringing us soup and rice and a small dish of meat with perhaps eight side dishes of pickles and marinated fish—he brought out a map, demanded more beer, and showed me where he had seen action.

He had been twenty-six when the North Korean Army invaded on that wet June Sunday in 1950. He was immediately impressed into service—the standing southern army at the time of the invasion was a mere 95,000 men, with eight divisions, some mortars and some artillery pieces, but no tanks. With immense assistance from the Americans an army was hurriedly formed, trained, and sent into war. Kim Jung Jin was a recruit, an infantryman of no particular distinction—a ‘grunt’, he would have been called in that later war as tragically pointless as the one in Korea, and fought so near by, and between such similar enemies.

Private Kim had been busy in his war. He had also been lucky. He had fought his way through the length and breadth of the peninsula for nearly the entire three dismal years that followed and was neither captured nor hurt, ‘not even a scratch’.

He pulled a blurred old sepia picture from his wallet, showing
him, or so he said—it could just as well have been Audie Murphy, so blurred was the picture—‘on the road near Taejon, some time in the summer of 1951’. The image was a pathetic one: it was of a young soldier, barefoot, with baggy trousers and a camouflage shirt tattered beyond repair, shuffling along a dusty road alone. He carried one boot—his only boot, so far as I could see—in his right hand, and an elderly rifle was slung across his left shoulder. He looked more like a gamekeeper on a rather decrepit Yorkshire estate, and the thought that he had wandered through Korea like this for three years, being shot at by the fanatically trained soldiers of the Korean People’s Army, or by the ‘volunteers’ of the Chinese People’s Liberation Army, seemed barely believable. ‘It was very cold in winter,’ he said, brightly. ‘This picture was taken in the summer.’

He knew his war backwards and inside out. He knew all the dates, all the men, all the battles, all the decisions, all the victories, and all the defeats. He was, in fact, a walking encyclopaedia of the Korean War, and we talked of it late into the night, over yet more beers and with many small bottles of that powerful firewater known as
soju
, the drinking protocols of which require each drinker to fill the other’s glass so that there is always something to drink and no possible way of avoiding the drunkenness that follows.

So my recollection of his conversation is a hazy one, although I see from my notebook that I managed somehow to write down a fairly complete chronology of the war on the day after the one I spent in Illo, so at some moment during the day’s hung-over walk I must have recalled it all.

He remembered (according to these notes) all the strange arcana of the times. He knew that Yugoslavia, India and Egypt had abstained from the Security Council resolution naming Douglas MacArthur as commander of the UN forces. He knew that MacArthur’s landing at Inchon was code-named Operation Chromite, and he could recite the names of other American operations, the actual or the merely planned—operations with names like Big Switch and Little Switch; Killer, Ripper and
Strangle; Piledriver and Roundup and Thunderbolt (which latter was General Matthew Ridgway’s celebrated attack on the Chinese defences of the Han River in that bitter winter of early 1951).

He knew of the pointless ebb and flow of battle, how Seoul fell to the Communists, was retaken by MacArthur, was taken again by the Reds and then once more by Ridgway’s men, and how similar tidal races had raged up and down rivers and ranges of hills and impenetrable valleys and fjords and coastal plains and paddy fields. He remembered the cold; of being entrained and marched or crammed into swaying trucks to every corner of the old kingdom; he remembered the trenches, and the C-rations and the packs of Lucky Strike cigarettes, and the occasional and much-valued comradeship with those few Americans who actually tried to talk to the soldiers of the ROK armies.

He knew of all the friends and foes, of the armies and navies and air forces of the Americans and South Koreans, of the Chinese and North Koreans, and of the battle groups made up of such improbable allies as Ethiopians and South Africans, Frenchmen and Dutchmen, Filipinos and Turks, Thais and Belgians, Australians and Columbians, Canadians and Greeks, and that little contingent of infantrymen from Luxembourg, all of whom were waging war under the UN flag.

And Mr Kim knew of the British, too, and of the Glorious Glosters, and their defence of Hill 235, just south of the Imjin river. ‘Ah yes, the Glosters,’ he breathed admiringly. ‘The only unit in your army allowed to wear its cap badge on the back as well as on the front.’ (I later looked it up. He was quite right. The Gloucesters (as they were properly known) had fought the French in the Battle of Alexandria in 1801 and were attacked both from the front and the rear. The rear rank promptly faced about and dealt with the situation—the honour of having successfully fought ‘back to back’ never being forgotten and thus memorialized on the uniform beret.)

I knew only the schoolboy tales of the Glosters’ stand on Hill 235, of the massive casualties they sustained, of their heroism, of
the Victoria Cross they won, and of the commendation from the Eighth Army’s Commanding General, James Van Fleet, proclaiming that theirs was ‘the most outstanding example of bravery in modern warfare’. But I was able to tell old Mr Kim something I had learned in Northern Ireland that he did not know. One of the generals dealing with that grubby little war in Ireland was Anthony Farrar-Hockley, who had been with the Glosters in Korea, and he told many stories of the time.

Back then he was a captain, and adjutant to the battalion CO, Lieutenant-Colonel James Carne. When the Chinese began their final assault on Hill 235 they did a most peculiar, psychologically devastating thing: they blew hundreds upon hundreds of bugles, making a vast, discordant, strangely triumphal sound that echoed all around the war-scarred hills above the Imjin River. But Captain Farrar-Hockley refused to be intimidated by this weird music, and he ordered the battalion bugles to return the salute. There was only one instrument remaining, in the care of one Drummer Eagles, who gave it to the sergeant-major to play. And play it he did, giving the Chinese every tune and call and fanfare known to a British Army bandsman, with the single omission of the call ‘Retreat’.

But finally, as the attacks went on and it became all too obvious that the Chinese would overrun the Glosters’ position, and there was no option but for the British to leave, Drummer Eagles made a final gesture. He blew his bugle apart with one of his own grenades, making sure that no British bugle would ever fall into enemy hands. I told Mr Kim this story, and he was so well oiled with
soju
and beer that he laughed quite helplessly for five minutes before suddenly appearing to sober up and suggesting that I go along the corridor to where my bed—a real Western bed, a legacy of his army days, he said—had been readied for me.

I slept dreamlessly until the middle of the morning, by which time Mr Kim had gone out on some business, and it was left to Ae-ri to make me breakfast (she found some bacon and an egg and a glass of mango juice) and show me the way out of town. I was feeling quite dreadful and hoisted my pack to my back with
no certainty that I could carry it much farther than I could throw it.
Soju
is powerful medicine, I decided. Never again.