The Rice Paper Diaries (12 page)

On the western side of the peninsula, behind the old school buildings, are the school tennis courts, already overgrown. There must be something in my blood that makes my fingers tingle when I see the long grass on the courts, and the row of young lemon trees around one of its edges. The farmer in me. It’s what my father does. It’s what everyone does where I come from, once they get too old for their captain’s uniform. And it’s what I’ll do too, when I get out of this bastard place.

The grass doesn’t have the drenched smell of the grass at home, but it’s good to stand in the feeble winter sun and feel it beneath my feet. I’m at the northern limit of the camp, so close to the village I can see the police station. Between the wire and Tytam Bay there are large warehouses – or godowns, as they call them over here – set close to the water at regular intervals. This is where the Japs keep their own supplies, impossible to break in without getting shot at. They are full to the brim with tins of spam, oatmeal, sugar tablets, meat broth. You can practically read the bloody labels through the windows from here.

Seems someone must have been feeling generous today, though, as lunch is a cause for excitement: tinned tomatoes. We give the lion’s share to the children: one whole tomato each. They beam as they suck on the sour juice, crunching the seeds. My stomach is rumbling, bubbling emptily.

‘Stop!’ I say to one boy, holding a hand up.

His mother looks annoyed.

‘Spit the seeds out.’ I hold out my tin can, and the boy gobs them into it along with a mouthful of saliva. I get the other youngsters to do the same. In the end I have maybe thirty or forty unspoiled seeds. I go to Campbell and hold out the can for his inspection.

‘We need to start a vegetable garden,’ I say.

19
th
February

The Nips have to be handled carefully, says Campbell. We can’t just go making demands and expecting them to be satisfied without quibbling. We have to take things slowly.

In the meantime my precious seeds will grow mould if I don’t get them in the ground soon. I smuggle bricks and earth up to the roof of our quarters, handful by handful. I build a raised bed, fill it with soil. I make shallow indentations in the earth with my thumb at regular intervals, press a seed into each one, and cover it over. I water them twice a day. I wait. I don’t hold out much hope. The soil here is poor, rocky, more or less infertile; you can tell just from looking at the bare outcrops of eroded rocks scattered over the edges of the camp. Not much grows here, apart from a few trees. And the flowers. There are bulb orchids in bloom already, pushing out purple buds, hibiscus too, and it looks as if there will be camellias and rhododendrons on the way soon, if all those glossy
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leaved bushes fulfil their promise. If we were allowed to pick flowers someone would have had a go at making soup from them by now. It would be worth a try. Anything’s worth a try.

Lizzie Vernon is head of the canteen committee. She keeps a record of each meal we’re provided with, by portion and food group. The rice comes in sacks, uncooked. Once we’ve been through it and picked out the live weevils, cigarettes butts and other rubbish, it weighs about a quarter less than it did when it arrived on the ration truck. Yesterday there was a dead rat in there. I didn’t tell Elsa. Last week there was meat of a kind we’ve never eaten before – water buffalo, for God’s sake – all gristle and bone and not much flesh. Fish is delivered frozen, but is decayed all the same by the time we unload it.

It’s an hour and twenty
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five minutes since morning congee. Three hours and thirty
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five minutes to go until lunch. The last sixty minutes are the worst. By then my hunger will have subsided to a grinding ache that threatens to scrape out my insides. I know that much already.

From up here I can see the children doing their lessons in the open air, sitting in cross
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legged rows. An education committee has been set up, all plain
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faced, do
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gooding women of the type I could do without, but at least the children are being kept occupied. Some of them scratch their heads from time to time. Lice. We’ll have to shave their hair right back. Get hold of disinfectant from somewhere. Elsa says there’s nothing at the hospital yet, apart from a bit of quinine, but Mimi’s heard on the grapevine that the Red Cross will get a few parcels through before long.

1
st
March

Mari’s birthday. St David’s Day. The pine trees are starting to shed their needles. I make a rough composting box from bamboo canes and odd bits of board and start to heap all the greenery together to make leaf mould. It will take a while to rot down into half
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decent mulch, but it will improve the soil, if nothing else. Campbell says that talking to people about planting seeds that will take months to come to anything is just going to depress them when we are all going round camp in
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between meals chewing grass because we are so hungry. ‘Not everyone’s chewing grass,’ I say to him.
There’s a black market on the go, and people who came in here with a stash of money are able to buy cigarettes and even boiled sweets. Lord knows where they come from.
All I know is that we don’t have the cash and Mari’s milk has run out again. Elsa and Lizzie Vernon have tried crushing soya beans to make a substitute, but their experiments haven’t been too successful so far. Elsa says she just needs a bit of practice, but Mari is pale and she cries. She should be crawling around the place by now, but she seems to sense that she needs to conserve her energy, and she spends most of the day sitting still on a blanket close to wherever Elsa is working. ‘Don’t worry,’ the other women shout over to Elsa if she gets called away on an errand. ‘We’ll keep an eye on her.’ But the truth is that nobody needs to keep an eye on Mari because she’s still sitting in exactly the same place when Elsa gets back.

Mari was born a year ago today. Elsa makes a spice cake out of ground rice flour. It tastes worse than bad, but we eat it because we are hungry and it is an extra ration, allowed by the canteen committee in honour of Mari’s birthday.

20
th
April

The camp is being run by a couple of jokers – on the Jap side of things, I mean. Kobayashi was the barber at the Hong Kong Hotel before the war. He was there for donkey’s years, according to Campbell, even gave Campbell a wet shave once. The other one, Fujimoto, worked as a tailor’s assistant in Wan Chai for five years. That’s how far ahead of us they were. Makes me sick to the gullet to think about it.

Fujimoto has ditched his general’s uniform for linen suits, striped in pale colours and double
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breasted, too big for him all over. He oils his hair back from his face, which is thin and long as a weasel’s, with the same thin
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lipped grin. Kob is more difficult to get the measure of. There’s something boyish about him. He holds his sunhat across his stomach as if it were a football, and he wears short trousers and socks rolled down to the knee. They look quite ridiculous together, trotting around the camp. Mimi and I sometimes bump into them when we are doing our rounds, and we ignore each other.

But today they are making a beeline for me. They’ve taken to keeping dogs; long lean wolfhounds with heads too big for their bodies. They let them run ahead, off the lead and laugh when they see groups of children scrambling out of the way, frightened. Those two are a pair of sadistic bastards, even under their sheep’s clothing.

I am chopping logs out in the exercise yard. We get given a catty – about a pound and a half – of firewood a day, and although the weather’s getting pretty warm, we still need to keep the fires going to cook food and boil water.

‘Bridge,’ Fuji says to me. Kob refuses to speak English. Seems he decided to dump his enemies’ language as soon as he was no longer required to hand out a short back and sides with a smile, and accept paltry tips from rich white men.

I wonder what the hell they’re talking about. I’m buggered if I’m going to call him Sir, so I just stand there with the head of the axe resting at my feet, looking down. If you don’t do that you get a clip to the back of the head.

One of the dogs sniffs at the tip of the axe and whines. Fuji strokes its glossy fur.

‘We want to play bridge, and we want you and your wife and Dr Campbell to join us,’ he says.

I cough.

‘That would make a five and not a four,’ I say, wondering if I can bluff my way through this one. I never did bridge or whist in Hong Kong – I left all that to Elsa, although she complained that bridge was for fat old women and that she was only going along with it to please me. She used to make me laugh when she said that kind of thing.

Fuji tells me to bring Elsa and Campbell with me to their headquarters at 7.00 pm. I go and find Campbell, expecting him to say that this is it, our chance to make a stand, show the bastards who’s boss.

‘But they are the ones who are in charge,’ he says to me.

‘Not if we take to our arms and bloody well fight,’ I say. ‘There are three thousand of us.’

He shakes his head. He looks far too relaxed, as if he’s in a holiday camp, for God’s sake.

‘What arms? It’s over, Tom,’ he says, friendly enough.

‘So what are we here for?’ I counter. I’m determined to
have a fight with someone. If not with him, then one of the generals.

‘We’re here because they’ve got no idea what to do with us. Civilians. The worst kind of prisoner.’

‘So we just do nothing?’

Elsa comes out of the kitchens. The door doubles back on its hinges and bangs against the wall. She comes straight at me, puts a hand on my arm. I feel a mixture of desire and rage as I pull away from her.

‘Tommy.’ She sounds embarrassed.

‘Look,
Tom,’ Campbell says in that annoyingly easy tone of his. ‘All we can count on until we hear otherwise is ourselves.’

If Mimi had been with me she’d have given them a bollocking. She wouldn’t have put up with this either.

The superintendent’s house has a plain but impressively large porchway, and a verandah running right around the building on the first floor, with the roof jutting out above. As we walk up the drive, someone inside switches the lights on. For a moment, it’s like going to any party, anywhere, on a bad night when everything’s already gone wrong; trying to muster up the energy to socialise, to laugh at jokes that aren’t funny, and smile at people you don’t like.

The house has either been left untouched by the fighting, or they’ve done a better job than us at clearing up.
We are taken into a large room with a view over Tweed Bay, and a parquet floor. There is a table set out for us in the middle of the room, with five rattan chairs around it. A lamp hangs low over the table, throwing out an oblong of light. I haven’t seen an electric bulb for a while. It makes me blink.

Fuji gestures at me to sit with him and Kob.

‘General Kobayashi will observe us this evening,’ he says. ‘You can teach him by playing in a pair with me.’

‘How much do you know of the game already?’ I ask, hoping that it’s less than I do. If so, I’ll be free to make things up as I go along, and send them back to Tokyo with some cock
-
and
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bull version, and no one need know any different.

‘Some,’ he says, running a hand through his hair.

I can see that Elsa is scared stiff. She shuffles the cards face down, staring down at their red
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and
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white chevrons, and deals two hands, one for Fuji and me, the other for her and Campbell. Kob sits just behind me, looking over my shoulder.

Elsa considers her hand, points something out to Campbell silently, but he shows little interest. This isn’t his kind of thing at all. He seems quieter than usual, quite thoughtful. His big ears stick out at the sides of his face like door handles and his ginger hair is growing down over his ears. We are all starting to look uncared for, even Elsa. Her hair is straggled and dirty.

She spreads out a vertical column of cards on the table.

‘Diamonds,’ she says.

Fuji inclines his head towards me, as if this is a serious business and he trusts me to give him the information he needs. I whisper some bullshit about bids and contracts and tell him we should pass. He follows my instructions to the letter. We win. I suspect Elsa is also adapting her game to the current circumstances, to make sure we arrive at the required result.

‘Milk,’ she says, spreading out her final hand. Her fingers are trembling. ‘I need powdered milk for my little girl.’

I see Campbell looking at her, and wonder what he’ll say afterwards.

Fuji grins, showing his perfect teeth and the tip of his thick, pink tongue. He turns back towards the sideboard to get a pack of cigarettes.

‘Of course,’ he says, flipping back the top of his lighter. ‘May I offer you a drink?’ A servant comes out of the shadows in the corner of the room and serves us whisky on the rocks. His soft
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soled shoes make a slapping sound on the floor as he moves round the table. There’s a wireless on the sideboard behind him, with pillar
-
like strips at each side, the white circle of its tuner like a compass in the middle, and two black dials below. It would be so easy to lean over, flick the switch.