Miss Jill

by Emily Hahn

  There were some women she could have asked if she had dared. They were seen in the streets, trying to find hawkers or shops that would sell them rice and vegetables, for the ordinary market had been deserted since the Japanese moved into Happy Valley. Some of them were probably Portuguese, some Eurasian; a few must have been Russian or French. They became less afraid of the Japanese soldiers as the days went by, or they were hungry and fatalistic; at any rate, they appeared on the streets with their baskets or sacks, walking quickly and looking pinched and frightened. Out on her own hunts for food, Jill saw them and wished she could ask them the news, but after her first attempt she never tried again. The woman she accosted simply drew back silently and looked at her, hatred ablaze in her black eyes. Everyone in the district must have known, then, that Jill was living with a Japanese. She felt as if she had been spat upon.

  It was a Chinese coolie who described to her the conditions down in the town and warned her of the sudden appearance of strange placards that famous morning. Everybody who held British nationality, he said, was commanded to appear in the middle of the city, on Murray Parade Ground, that day. Though he himself was British, he declared, smiling, the Japanese could not possibly prove it. Everyone born in Hong Kong was British, and Murray Parade Ground could not accommodate such numbers of people. Added to which, he said with great scorn for his conquerors’ stupidity, the Dutch and Americans, too, were expected to report there, side by side with their ill-fated allies: practically all the white people in the Colony.

  “Tadasan,” said Jill when the major came into her room, “what is this about the British? Shall I go, too, this morning?”

  “No, you need not go,” said Tada. “I didn’t hear about it until recently, or I would have made arrangements to exclude you. As it is, you had better stay home today; some of our police may be overzealous and you will find yourself interned.”

  “Interned? Is that what they’re doing?”

  Tada bowed his head affirmatively.

  “But they can’t!” cried Jill. “A whole city full of people! It–it’s never been done, never!”

  “Oh yes. The Germans––”

  “Camps for some of them, maybe, but not a whole city!”

  “It won’t be the whole city. Only the Europeans, a small part of the Colony. You talk,” said Tada with a little spice of anger, “like an Englishwoman. Be careful not to let anyone else hear you.”

  “Good lord,” said Jill thoughtfully. “It’s going to be terrible. What are you doing with them? Send them to Japan in ships? But there are so many!”

  Tada laughed. “No, no, we will put them into selected places; I haven’t heard all the arrangements. Don’t worry about your people, Jill; they will be better off under our protection. It is too much of a risk, leaving them free at the mercy of the public. After the poor exhibition they have given during the war, the Chinese might tear them to pieces.”

  She thought of the friendly peasants, still glad to see her and to talk in low tones, complaining of the Japanese and offering her condolences and hope. She said only, “Then what about me?”

  “I’ll fix some papers for you. You speak our language well and you co-operate with the Imperial Army; we can use you as interpreter or something like that. You have no need to worry. The Japanese are always just, and if you are a good girl you will be safe and happy. But don’t go out today or tomorrow until I have arranged your permit.”

  They used to ask Jill, months after the great day of the internment, why she had been so heedless as to come out without her toothbrush. “Do you mean to say you could have brought anything you liked?” they would demand incredulously. “You knew what was happening and still you didn’t bring anything? Well, of all the—”

  It never seemed just the moment to explain herself truthfully, and after a time Jill forgot, among other things, what her true intentions had been that day. She may not even have had any intentions beyond a vague restless plan to see the thing for herself. Tada had failed to impress her with his warning; after all, she didn’t know Tada very well; she needn’t put supreme faith in what he told her.

  Besides, she would go crazy if she stayed cooped up with the Japs any longer. She was beginning to dream in Japanese. She was beginning to wonder in the mornings if she had really awakened.

  As soon as Tada drove off in a staff car (which looked exactly like a delivery van of the biggest English shop, hastily painted over) Jill put on walking shoes and started out for Murray Parade Ground. It was her intention to find a nice safe taxi, but in a few blocks she realized how ridiculous that hope had been. There were no more taxis, of course; there were no more busses or trams. The world by daylight still spoke Japanese.

  Near Murray Parade Ground she saw all progress stopped. A crowd of idling Chinese, held at a distance from the field by sentries with bayonets, outraged their own sense of prudence in order to see the proceedings. Jill stood on tiptoe, but in vain; the crowd was too dense.

  “What is it?” she asked a woman near her, a woman whose brown hair and light eyes were strange with her Chinese gown.

  “They’re putting the English into prison,” said the woman. “All of them. It’s terrible.”

  “Surely not prison?”

  “It is all the same. They are marching them two by two, like prisoners, down to the hotels along the water front, all the old Chinese hotels which they have taken over. The soldiers are joking about it, trying to make us laugh. They say the English are monkeys in the zoo and this is Pan-Asia.”

  All around them the other spectators began to talk, eager to show how much they knew.

  “They will keep them there until they starve to death.”

  “Nonsense; at night everyone will be executed.”

  “Yes, they killed hundreds of English out on Stanley Peninsula already. It is a pool of blood.”

  “No,” said one man who was dressed in a foreign suit, “my cousin is working with the Japs and he knows. They are to be put into camps until the end of the war, a civilian camp, like the one where all the English soldiers are. At North Point.”

  “No, on the Peak,” said another.

  “Many of the people over there are Chinese,” said the woman with brown hair. “They thought they had to go because they are British. Fools. I am sure the Japanese don’t want to intern the Chinese. How could they do it? So many of us!”

  Jill looked at her light eyes. “What about the mixed-bloods?” she asked.

  “You can decide for yourself,” said the well-dressed man. He looked at Jill’s hair and eyes just as she had looked at the woman in the Chinese gown. “You don’t have to go,” he said. “I know lots of Eurasians like you who look just as foreign, and they’re not going to give themselves up.”

  “Of course not,” said a dozen hearty voices. “Just wear Chinese dress after this. You don’t have to go.” But here and there someone said, “I would go if I could; at least one gets rice every day in prison.”

  The crowd shifted and Jill moved closer and closer to the fatal inner edge of it, unable, somehow, to tear herself away. The sun was dim; it was beginning to show its winter face to Hong Kong, and Jill shivered in the damp gray air, in the damp wind. Everywhere the streets were littered with bits of torn paper, and all the houses looked down-in-the-mouth, with their windows broken or boarded up. She wondered why the crowd’s voices did not seem loud enough to fill the city, and then she knew why: there was no hum of motors, no tram’s purr, no threatening roar of plane engines. Without these in the background, human voices were not enough.

  Now she could see the English coming out under escort. She knew some of the faces by sight; the women were thinner than she recalled, and they looked disheveled, and she had never before seen them like this, carrying bundles and blanket rolls, calling to their children, marching together and pretending that they, or the onlookers, were invisible. Jill saw them as one sees old friends after an absence of years. She saw old men who had been proud and unconsciously insolent, and t
heir women who now looked old enough to be their wives, as they had never done before. With all her eyes she stared at them, and suddenly under that dim January sky a shell broke and shattered invisibly and Jill felt a great solid lump of pain in her breast.

  There was homesickness in the pain, and hunger and thirst, and warmth, and recollection of long-forgotten grief and joy in the nursery, and loneliness, which was the only part of the pain that she could recognize. It was as if Jill had never experienced any feelings before, as though for years she had kept them all at bay. They managed to get at her only now.

  She could not stop there in the crowd, wondering and waiting and searching for a reason. The pain pulled her forward to take her place with the other Jills of the world. That was how she saw them at that crashing moment, when the Hong Kong sky cracked open and let her in, into the great tragic thing that was happening to the British. Around her the Chinese spectators melted into ghosts. She alone on her side of the fence had any solidity. She fought and pushed and struggled to get past the fence, into the circle of prisoners, among real people, where she belonged.

  Once past the barrier, it was easy. Away off in the distance the Chinese faces merged into a moving picture without sound or color. She was safe now with the other Jills, hearing English voices, looking at people who were real and distinct and individual. They were actually glad to have her among them. She knew that and somehow was not surprised. They did not know her name or where she came from, but no one cared.

  “Have you walked far?” asked one woman.

  “Are you alone?” asked a man. “Have you heard what’s to become of us?” But he did not wait for an answer: he had no real hope that anyone could answer him. Nobody could.

  Jill heard scraps of talk all around her. Whether or not they knew each other, people were ready to talk. People even wanted to talk to her. She was one among many. No one cared that she was Jill from Annette’s.

  At last, with about twenty other Britons, she was corralled by Japanese soldiers, and she was lined up with her group and led out of Murray Parade Ground, off down the street, marching along as if she–or the gaping Chinese who watched–were invisible: Jill from Annette’s, the only happy prisoner of war in all of Hong Kong.

  XVIII

  “I had an enormous lace tablecloth,” said Monica. “I used to save it for special occasions, but if I ever have another one we’ll use it every day until it’s in pieces.”

  “More likely you’ll just pitch it out,” said Jill. “You can’t wear lace or eat it.”

  “If I had a lace tablecloth I’d unravel it,” said Lady Whitford. “Think of the sewing cotton one would have!”

  They laughed together. Sir George, a keen bridge player, rapped on the center box: “Ladies!”

  Monica stood up, “to get the wrinkles out of my anatomy,” she said, and sat down again, refreshed, on her soapbox chair. They all studied their new hands in silence.

  Out of doors it was raining and the grounds of the camp were soaked and bare-looking. Already, a scant year since the internment, bushes and trees were disappearing by night, softly chopped or torn away in the dark when the guards could not see the law being disobeyed. Fuel was scarce, and the winter this season seemed much colder than usual in Hong Kong. But that, of course, was because they weren’t eating so much, Jill reminded herself. As for clothes, they didn’t make any difference except in the way of modesty. None of the three women there was wearing a precisely conventional costume. Jill and Monica were garbed in shorts and sun tops, Lady Whitford in a pull-over and cotton skirt. Everyone was tanned and seared by the sun.

  Because of the weather they had decided to stay in the room and had arranged their boxes and makeshift chairs accordingly. Nobody stayed indoors at Stanley if it was at all possible to get out. The rooms were too crowded and dismal. The Whitfords’ domain was a tiny cubicle barely large enough for one, which was why they had been allowed to occupy it alone together; even so, there had been grumbling among the malcontents and whispered accusations of undue influence. A camp cot, now folded and leaning against the wall, was Lady Whitford’s bed; her husband had a straw pallet on the floor. This was now rolled into an untidy cylinder with the family blankets and stuffed under the cot’s framework.

  There was no ordinary furniture, though they were lucky enough to have a shelf, which was crowded with open tins- blue coffee tins, red milk containers, and one precious granite mug. More cups and tins stood on the floor. In some of these, carefully guarded, were bits of food, not all of it fresh or odorless. Lady Whitford was not a bad housekeeper or a sloppy one; on the contrary, she was one of the neatest women in the camp. It was just that all of these things, the tins and the rotting food and the bits and pieces of crockery, were of priceless value in Stanley. Food was everything.

  “George, what are you looking at?” Lady Whitford never sounded irritable under the most trying circumstances, but sometimes her voice became sharp with nervousness. “I can’t concentrate, and when Jill isn’t my partner concentration is necessary. Do stop craning your neck.”

  “Sorry, my dear, but I’m curious to see if anyone’s going up the hill this evening. I’m told there’s a bridge game with the Foreign Affairs Office.”

  “Oh?” Monica’s high sweet voice was malicious. “The Baxters are moving in society tonight.”

  “I fear so.” Sir George sat back on his milking stool and sighed. He had been a jolly fat man before the war; Jill remembered seeing him at lunch in the hotel, or pictured in the Sunday papers. After internment he had suddenly collapsed in girth, like so many hard-drinking men in the Colony, and now his skin had a puckered, loose look. “It’s a sad comment on our natures, the way we grudge the Baxters their evenings on the hill,” he said. “After all, it isn’t their fault that they speak Japanese.”

  Lady Whitford pursed her lips. “No, but they’re pushing. Very pushing,” she said. “They spend all their time up there. You’re not going already, Jill?”

  “I’m sorry, but I must, Lady Whitford. It’s my turn to collect for the room. It’s pouring, but I’ve nothing on that will hurt.”

  “Very well then; good night, my dear.”

  Lady Whitford always had a special, affectionate manner for Jill, and the thought of it kept her smiling all the way back to her own quarters. She stepped lightly along the well-worn path, sharing the smile with everyone she met on the way. Living in Stanley was something like living on a deep-sea liner. One saw the same people day in, day out, hour in, hour out. They were packed in so close that they were like inhabitants of one household, so close that words of greeting became meaningless and were almost never used. It had been a year now, and they thought they were getting used to the scarce food and the crowding, and except for dream memories like Monica’s lace tablecloth they did not really dwell on the past. But tempers were short, especially just before the first of their two daily handouts of food. Almost everyone was snappish before the food.

  Jill stopped in at her own quarters long enough to snatch up a variegated collection of tins and mugs, all ranged and ready for her. Three of her roommates, taking refuge like the Whitfords under the roof, waved to her casually from their positions, squatting on their allotments of floor space. Life indoors was lived for the most part on the floor at Stanley; there weren’t many higher eminences anywhere to use for seats. Clattering down the stairs in her wooden clogs, Jill hurried to the courtyard of the block of houses and found there a queue of her neighbors waiting for their food, each one with a basin or two in his hands.

  “Hello, I’m late, am I?” she said, taking her place last in line. She knew the woman who stood ahead of her, just as she knew everyone else in the yard. As she spoke a small child came up and stood behind her. “No, Tommy’s last,” she said. This was a mistake; the child was too young to take a joke.

  “I’m not last!” he wailed. “Marjorie’s coming too. I’m not last! Mummy,” he called back to the house, “Auntie Jill says I’m last in the queue!”
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  A woman called from indoors, telling him roughly to shut up. This brought forth a medley of comforting ejaculations from Jill and the other people nearby. “He’s so small to be helping Mummy!” they said. It all took time, but at the end of the incident nothing had happened up at the front of the crocodile.

  “Ten minutes late,” said a man with a sagging paunch and a red beard. “Some row in the kitchen, I expect, as usual.”

  But a moment later the line said in chorus, “Ahhhh!” It was a purely animal sound of satisfaction and relief, greeting two young men who came out of the kitchen, carrying a smoking pot between them. They put it down in the center of the yard, and the woman at the head of the line pushed out her mug, and one of the young men dipped a tin cup into the pot and poured out her portion, a thin stew of rice and vegetables. She moved away and the next in line was duly served. Slowly, with a patient step that showed how often she had done it before, Jill moved up.

  To a Stanley inmate’s eyes, wide social differences could be traced in that queue. There were businessmen, stenographers, police, modistes, fortunetellers, publishers, and Jill. Nevertheless, they all looked much alike: bedraggled, tanned by the sun, and ferociously eager in their expressions as they peered into the stewpot. Some of them had not become thin; on the contrary, the rice diet had made them fatter than was normal. Most of them, however, were trained down considerably. The sun had covered them all with a gracious mask of health, but even so they bore the unmistakable stamp of the prisoner of war, a facial expression that made them all brothers and sisters–a strained, anxious look, a look which had become a fixed habit.

  They behaved well, on the whole. They kept to their places in the line, with no pushing and no cheating, and they were amazingly courteous to each other, considering those differences in social rank which had once existed. Among the dwellers in one “block” there were frictions, inevitably, and sometimes quarrels which threatened to tear the place to pieces. But any threat from outside and they banded together. Nobody had taught them to do it; the reaction was instinctive.