Letters Across the Sea

by Genevieve Graham

  “Where’s he living, Molly? Because he doesn’t look right. When I saw him, he was sleeping on the curb. He looked awful. Filthy. And he didn’t know who I was.”

  I sagged. I’d spent all that time on VE Day writing my big, important ode to veterans, thinking I knew it all, and I couldn’t even help my brother. “He’s living where he can, I guess. He can’t stand me or anyone else. He won’t take help, and he won’t listen to reason. My heart is broken for him, Hannah. I don’t know what to do.”

  Hannah was quiet. “We knew this war would change them,” she said. “Jimmy’s so far down a hole he can’t see the light. I guess we just have to wait for him to come out, and we all know how stubborn he can be. I promise if I see him, I’ll make sure he’s at least eating, okay?”

  I thanked her, feeling a little relief now that she’d taken some of my burden on her shoulders.

  “How are you?” she asked kindly, handing me a tissue. “How’s Ian?”

  “He’s happy now that we’ve finally set a date for the wedding.”

  She sat up. “Oh, good! When?”

  “Actually, Ian picked it.” I twisted my mouth to the side. Ian and I had gone back and forth on the date. August was now just around the corner, so I’d suggested a winter wedding, thinking it would give me more time to plan, then Ian had mentioned a possible date. We need to make happy memories to replace the sad ones, he’d said. I had reluctantly agreed.

  Hannah looked at me sideways. “What date did he choose?”

  “Christmas Day.”

  twenty-two MOLLY

  The doorman at the King Edward Hotel gave a little bow as Ian and I approached, then he swung the door open to welcome us in, scattering a few dried autumn leaves. We stepped into the elevator, then headed up to the seventeenth floor, where the doors opened to the glittering Crystal Ballroom and the lazy sound of a jazz trio. My stomach tumbled with nerves. Ian put his arm around my waist and squeezed, sensing that.

  “You have nothing to worry about,” he said. “You’re the most prepared journalist in the room.”

  I had been looking forward to this reception for the past week, ever since Mr. Hindmarsh had received the invitation. Tonight we’d meet and speak with a few recently arrived prisoners of war from the Japanese prison camps. From all my research, I knew this was going to be tough. The stories being leaked were of starving, sick men dealing with horrific conditions, and from personal experience with my brothers, I knew it might not be easy to get full statements. But the interviews weren’t what had me so nervous. My apprehension stemmed from the fact that Richie had been with these men out there. They had been his friends. Even if they could tell their stories, would I be able to listen without breaking down?

  I noticed right away how different this event was from other receptions we’d attended recently. After VE Day, the returning men had been loud, boisterous, keen to open up over the free drinks in their hands. Some had flirted with me at first, and I’d let them, knowing I had to put them at ease if I was going to get them to talk. Ian was good at getting details in a man-to-man way, but I was better at getting beneath the surface, where emotions lurked.

  Tonight the mood was quiet, but I had expected that. When Ian and I had gone to celebrate VJ Day on August 15, those crowds had been smaller than back in May. Since the majority of the fighting men and POWs had been in Europe, a lot of the city was already back to work by now, having left the war behind. It almost felt to me as if the tens of thousands returning from the Far East were an afterthought. If Japan ever came up in conversation, it was usually in reference to the atomic bombs that had been dropped over Nagasaki and Hiroshima in August, not about our men left behind.

  I understood that, though. The bombs had shocked the world. The end of the war had come at a terrible price, and I was having a great deal of trouble reconciling that solution with the tens of thousands of innocent people killed. Now, as I stood in the same room as men who had been tortured for four years by the Japanese army, I wondered how they felt about it.

  At the coat check counter, Ian took my coat and let out a low whistle of appreciation. “You look incredible, Molly.”

  I’d bought myself a new emerald-green dress for the occasion, with boxy shoulders, a trim, belted waist, and a dainty white collar at my neck. Ian always looked well put together, and tonight he was wearing his navy suit with a pale blue tie. I knew we had dressed right for the event, but I felt self-conscious among these men with their baggy uniforms and sallow faces. I also noted that, while there were a few other reporters and government officials in the room, all in all, there were very few women.

  “We stick out like sore thumbs among all these uniforms, don’t we?” I murmured.

  “Mutts circling pedigree canines,” Ian said, scanning the room. “There are a lot of horrendous stories of beatings and killings coming out of these camps. This is going to be interesting.”

  I touched his arm. “Don’t say ‘interesting,’ Ian. That’s cruel.”

  “You know what I mean.”

  “I wonder if they’ll even be able to speak to us about what happened. My brothers barely can.”

  I’d been so proud of Liam lately. The light in his eyes had finally come back on a couple of weeks ago when Barbara had stopped by with Evelyn and Joan. Mum told me he’d come downstairs for tea, and the girls had run to him, wanting to play toy horses with him. At first, when they asked about the strange markings on his face and neck, he’d turned his answer into a gentle lesson about very bad people and staying away from fire. They’d nodded, wide-eyed, then they’d simply moved on to the game. Disarmed by their unaffected attentions, Liam had sat with them for hours while Mum and Barbara watched in astonishment. Mum told me that after they left, he’d started carving small toys for them, and the work was consuming him in a whole new, productive way.

  Mark and Helen were expecting their first baby in the next two months, and they were on top of the world with the news. Mark always seemed fine, but despite his cheery outlook, he had never told me the truth about what had happened to him on the beaches of Normandy. I’d asked, but he just gave me a tight smile and looked away.

  Then there was Jimmy. He hadn’t returned to Ian’s house in weeks, and neither Hannah nor I had seen him. I feared the worst, and as I had with the Red Cross and the government in ’42, I returned to calling hospitals and shelters, pleading for someone to tell me they’d seen my brother. No one had.

  The men we’d come to interview tonight had only just been liberated after almost four years of harsh imprisonment. I knew the military wanted to celebrate their return in front of the press, but I questioned the wisdom of dragging them into the public eye so soon.

  “I guess we’ll see,” Ian said. “The army probably had to choose some willing to talk, poor fellows.” He lit a cigarette. “First things first. Drinks. Gin and tonic?”

  “Please.”

  As he walked away, I studied the room, trying to determine who I should interview. Men lingered in ones or twos, cigarettes and drinks silently burning through them. I thought I knew a fair amount about POW camps, but I also knew the press hadn’t been told all of it. What exactly had these men survived? What would I learn tonight? I looked for someone standing on his own, someone with a certain energy in his eye, hoping to avoid anyone who might be too shy to answer questions. I pulled my notebook out of my purse and checked my notes one more time, making sure I had all my questions lined up.

  Ian nudged me gently then handed me my drink. I took a sip, and we scanned the room together.

  “Have you decided on anyone yet?” He raised his scotch to his lips.

  I tilted my head toward a lone, dark-haired man with a thin moustache, a tumbler of whisky in his hand. “Maybe the officer over there.”

  “He looks relatively alert, though all of them look like they could sleep for a month, don’t they?” The scotch in his glass sloshed a little as he gestured to the other side of the room. “There’s a group of younger men o
ver that way. They’ll have something to say, I imagine.” He frowned at his watch. “I’ll meet you back here in, what, twenty minutes?”

  “I might be late,” I said.

  He started toward the young soldiers. “Don’t be.”

  I took another sip then meandered toward the officer. The corner of his mouth twitched when he spotted me coming, as if he was considering whether or not to bolt, so I gave him a warm smile.

  “Good evening,” I said brightly. “I’m Molly Ryan from the Toronto Daily Star.”

  Up close, the gaunt lines of his face were even more obvious, his toughened skin loose over the bones, but I’d been wrong with my first impression of his age. He’d looked much older from a distance. Up close, I could tell he was only about ten years older than I was, maybe less.

  “Nice to meet you,” he said. His voice was quiet and slow, and I leaned in a little closer to hear him. “Sergeant Robert Cox. I’d offer to buy you a drink, but—”

  I held up my glass. “Thank you anyway. Really, I should be buying you a drink, to thank you for your service.”

  He nodded but didn’t say anything in response.

  I hesitated. “Sergeant Cox, I’m sure you’d rather be anywhere but here, but I hope you’ll speak with me a moment about your experience as a prisoner of war. So many Canadians don’t yet know what happened over there. Would you mind if I asked you a few questions?”

  “That’s why they brought me here.” His smile twitched again. “But you might not like the answers.”

  “I hope you can tell me what you remember and not worry about my reactions. I’m tougher than I look. My brothers fought. I know a little about the war.”

  “So they survived?”

  “All but one,” I said, setting my glass on a nearby table before pulling out my notebook and pen. I was here to interview the men. I didn’t want to talk about me. “You were in captivity for three years and eight months, am I correct?”

  He took a big gulp of his whisky. “Yes. I was captured on Christmas Day in ’41.”

  My mouth went dry. The same day Richie died at St. Stephen’s. I’d known his answer beforehand, but it still hit me to hear it out loud. “Where were you captured?”

  “Stanley Village.”

  My mind went back in time, recalling Hannah’s bloodshot eyes on that terrible day, when she’d told me David had died there. This was too much for me, I realized suddenly. I shouldn’t be the one here, asking questions.

  But I was. This was my job. If I gave in to the voice inside my head telling me to run, I would be a coward. I owed Richie and David more than that.

  I cleared my throat, determined to go on. “Do you remember anything about that battle?”

  He looked away. “I do.”

  He shut down so quickly it was like a door slamming. I moved on, hoping Ian would get those details from one of the younger soldiers.

  “Where were you taken?”

  “North Point Camp near Victoria, Hong Kong. It had been a refugee camp to begin with. A few months later we were moved to Sham Shui Po in Kowloon. That place was originally built as a British army barracks, and it’s where we’d stayed when we first arrived in Hong Kong in November ’41.” He smiled to himself. “Funny to think of how nice it was back then. Big, comfortable, fairly modern. When we returned to it as POWs, there was little left of it besides badly cracked walls.”

  He looked tempted to stop speaking again, so I asked him to describe the camp for me. I had found that men opened up more when they talked about physical attributes.

  “Sham Shui Po had two main barracks with fourteen huts in each. Not nearly enough room for all of us prisoners. I don’t think they’d ever imagined capturing so many men. The place was surrounded by ten-foot, electrified, barbed wire fences connected by guard towers. During the initial invasion, the place had been bombed, then the local Chinese had ransacked it and removed all the windows and wood. We ended up using metal roofing material as shutters to try and keep out the rain.”

  I scribbled away on my notepad, not wanting to miss a single detail. “What about the food?”

  He winced. “All we were fed was watery, mouldy rice. Two meals a day of it, occasionally flavoured by rat droppings and maggots. It went right through us, if you’ll pardon my saying. The whole camp was a walking boneyard. If I ever see another grain of rice in my life, it’ll be too much.”

  As he spoke, I couldn’t help but remember the POW camp Ian and I had visited in Bowmanville, with its daily fresh bread and healthy vegetables, of the lake where they swam without guards.

  “Sometimes the Chinese people hiding nearby would try to pass food through the fence to us,” he said, his eyes losing focus. “That wasn’t allowed. The Japanese made sure they never tried it twice.”

  I wanted to know everything, but the sea of pain in his eyes was too deep for me to cross.

  “And where did you sleep?” I asked.

  “We had cots of a sort, but usually we chose the cement floor instead. Between the bed bugs, the fleas, and the lice, we figured we were better off sleeping on the ground. But then we had to worry about the red ants and tarantulas, the scorpions, the termites, and the rats.” He seemed briefly lost in his memories. “Those rats tasted just like chicken, and they were big as cats.”

  I swallowed the bile that had shot up my throat, and he caught himself.

  “We didn’t have those too often, though. Rats are greasy, and all that grease was hard on a body if it hadn’t eaten anything but rice in months. Speaking of which, don’t ask me about the latrines. Trust me on that. When we got there, there weren’t any. And we didn’t have any tools to dig them.”

  I wished that what he described were shocking to me, but by that point, I’d read so many reports on the conditions of the camps, I was able to steel myself for the most part. But there was one piece of research I needed him to verify. I’d come across a list of regulations for prisoners, and the black ink on the page had detailed exactly which crimes would result in an immediate execution by the Japanese. I wasn’t sure if the regulations had been exaggerated for intimidation purposes, or if they were true.

  I flipped over a page in my notepad. “I’ve read that the Japanese were strict disciplinarians. Is that right?”

  He huffed. “That’s a charitable way to put it.”

  I looked up, allowing him to fill the silence. Before he spoke again, he took a long swallow of his scotch.

  “Personally, I wouldn’t call them disciplinarians. I’d call them sadistic monsters. We weren’t allowed to talk without permission. We couldn’t take a step without an order to do so. Even using more than two blankets was forbidden.”

  Those were a few of the crimes I’d read on the list. “And what happened if you did?”

  He frowned slightly. “You sure you want to hear about that, Miss Ryan?”

  “As you said, Sergeant Cox, that’s what we’re here for. To tell Canadians the truth of what happened over there.”

  His voice lowered. “Okay. I’ll tell you about my friend, Albert. One day he picked up a used cigarette butt—we never could get full cigarettes—and one of the Kempeitai—that’s what the guards were called—stormed over and whipped it out of his mouth. Well, my friend was pretty determined. He picked up that butt again then stared down the Jap while he lit it, like he was daring him. Albert was gutsy, but incredibly stupid.” He took a breath, stared into his drink. “He was damn near beaten to death after that, then he was staked out in the yard for a week. We weren’t allowed anywhere near him, and nobody fed him. He got gangrene in his hands and feet from the beatings. They put him in the hospital building after that—of course they wouldn’t ever give us medicine, so I don’t know why they bothered—and he died two days later.”

  My stomach rolled, thinking of Arnie. “Unspecified illness” was how his death had been listed. “What would have happened if anyone had gone to help Albert?”

  “Nobody was that stupid.” He took a big pull of his drin
k. “Once you see a man’s head chopped off, you learn to obey orders.”

  My pen stilled in my hand, and I forced myself to ask, “Did that happen often?”

  He nodded. “One time, after one of the guys tried to escape, they chopped his head off then put us into groups of ten. They told us that if one escaped, they would kill the other nine.”

  So it was true. I had read on that page that any offense was punishable by death, but Sergeant Cox’s pragmatic expression and his plain, straightforward words made it real.

  I realized I was staring. “How long were you at Sham Shui Po? Were you sent anywhere else?”

  “You’re asking about the Japanese POW camps now,” he said, seeming pleased that I knew the facts enough to ask. “I was at Sham Shui Po for about a year. Then they stuffed about five hundred of us at a time into the bowels of small boats they called hell ships. We were like sardines in there. No food or water or sanitation of any kind. We were shipped up to Japan. They needed workers, I guess, because their men were all at war. It was hard to believe at first, but those camps were a hell of a lot worse than what we’d just survived.”

  “Those were labour camps, correct?”

  He tapped my paper with his boney finger, and I noticed his brittle, cracked nails, with ridges around the nail beds from malnutrition. “Slave labour. Make sure that’s in your article, if you don’t mind. I believe most of the men had to work in the mines, but I worked at NKK, a giant shipyard near Tokyo. For years, we built and maintained Japan’s war fleet.” He smiled faintly and finished his drink. “During that time, we sabotaged everything we could get our hands on. At one point, Staff Sergeant Clarke and Private Cameron set fire to the pattern shop, where all the blueprints were stored, destroying the most vital war effort of the Japanese. I was so proud of those men. Nobody had a clue, and nobody gave them up for it, either.”

  I tried to imagine the courage that must have taken, knowing their captors wouldn’t have hesitated to kill them upon discovery.

  “Any more questions?” he asked.