by Martin Booth
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CONTENTS
Title Page
Copyright Notice
Acknowledgements
PART ONE: Hong Kong: Spring, 1952
PART TWO: Hong Kong: Christmas, 1941
PART THREE: Hong Kong: early Summer, 1952
PART FOUR: Sham Shui Po and Argyle Street PoW Camps, Kowloon (Hong Kong): 1942
PART FIVE: Po Lin Monastery, Lantau Island (Hong Kong): Summer, 1952
PART SIX: On board SS Lisbon Maru off the Chinese coast and Japan: 1–15 October, 1942
PART SEVEN: On board SS Takshing en route to Macau and Hong Kong: September, 1952
PART EIGHT: Japan: 1943–1945
PART NINE: Hong Kong: Autumn, 1952
PART TEN: PoW Camp near Hiroshima: 1945
PART ELEVEN: Hong Kong: Christmas, 1952
PART TWELVE: Hong Kong: Summer, 1985
By the Same Author
Copyright
ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
IN WRITING THIS novel, I am indebted to a number of people from whom I obtained much help, advice and encouragement. I am most grateful to Dr A.H.R. Coombes, MBE, and M.M. Swan, ISO, for their recollections of the fall of Hong Kong and Japan; to N.H. (‘Yagi’) Colley for his memories of the sinking of the Lisbon Maru and his liberation; to G.P. Adams for his knowledge of prison camps in Japan and for his informative book Destination Japan; to the librarian of the Embassy of Japan in London; to J. Teicher, who researched details of the despatches of General MacArthur in the Library of Congress, Washington D.C.; to Harry Guest, for helping me through the complexities of Japanese maps; and to my parents, who provided jarring memories of the Hong Kong of my childhood throughout the writing of this book.
Finally, I owe considerable thanks to Miss Yasuko Fujiwara in Hiroshima who invaluably researched the year of the bomb for me, corrected my Japanese, sought out the most obscure details on Japanese wartime life and generally guided me through the web of detail. Without her, the story would have been infinitely poorer.
Martin Booth
Somerset, 1985
PART ONE
Hong Kong: Spring, 1952
SANDINGHAM WOKE WITH a jerk, puppet-like, life surging through him as if he were in the hands of some impatient grand controller, someone who had snapped a switch that coursed a charge of electricity through him. His dream was already forgotten in the panic of coming round. His left hand was folded under his chest. It was numb, and this had been a part of the dream, although now he was unable to say how. His right hand was lying on the pillow next to his face and in the semi-darkness of the room it looked whitely ill. His entire body was damp with sweat and the cotton sheet that covered him stuck to his back and clung to his vertebrae where they showed through the skin.
Slowly, he reached for the battered alarm clock that rested on the glass top of the bedside table. Under its cracked leather case was arranged a set of hotel rules and a tariff card; between these he had lodged a tattered photograph of a young man in loose army drill shorts and a battle-dress blouse. The person in the photograph was wryly smiling, as if aware of what fate and the years held in readiness for him. Beneath his feet, across the dry grass of a lost Malayan summer, was scrawled in blue ink, ‘Bob: Penang, 1939’.
The night before, as on the nights before that, he had forgotten to wind the clock and it had run down at 2.09. Even after seven years he could not get used to turning the key before sleeping. He had forced himself to grow so much out of the habit of counting time. It was enough just to let the days slip past, unheeded and uncared for. Every so often, though, he found a deep need to time-keep, and this worried him. He knew he should not count the days and yet sometimes he did. To mark off a mental time-sheet was a sign of optimism, anticipation, a readying for a time to come; yet he knew he had nothing for which to prepare.
He shook the clock viciously and it started ticking again. As soon as he put it down, the mechanism stopped. The tips of the hands phosphoresced dully but the spot of luminous paint over the twelve had peeled off, to leave a grey spot, like a blind eye.
He turned on to his back, then sat up and rubbed his forearm to regain circulation. As he worked at the skin he noticed, as he so often did, its faint pallor and coarseness. His massage also caused tiny shards of tissue to flake off, as if his arm had dandruff. The minute jabbing pains that he felt as his hand passed over the flesh made him wince.
With his arm restored, he leaned over and tugged open the drawer of the bedside table. His fingers fumbled through the contents – an old army paybook, some dog-eared letters in airmail envelopes, nearly a dollar’s worth of change in ten-cent coins, a fountain pen with a cracked case, a comb with a thick conglomeration of grease accumulated at the base of the teeth, a used khaki handkerchief, a British passport and a cardboard pocket calendar for 1952 – until they found a half-empty packet of Lucky Strike and a box of matches with a yellow and red label decorated with two world globes illuminated by a single match and a pair of Chinese characters. He lit one of the cigarettes and lay back upon the pillow, concentrating only on blowing the smoke into the air. His fingers’ first joints were stained by nicotine and they quivered, almost imperceptibly.
Outside, the last of the night was close and warm. Although it was less than an hour to dawn the buildings still retained some of the heat of the previous day. The window of his second-floor room was open, but it faced only a bleak concrete wall which was punctuated, some yards off, by the vertical line of frosted glass panes to the stairwell of the next building. Somewhere above him he could hear the clatter of mah-jong tiles across a hardwood table top and the laughter of the players rising and falling. The game had lasted through the night and it too had played an indecipherable part in his dream.
With the cigarette smoked down as near to his fingers as he could stand, he pinched it out and, certain that the flame was extinguished, crushed the remaining quarter of an inch into a dented tobacco tin. This he placed at the rear of the bedside-table shelf, covering it with the Bible that came with the room. It was not that he was afraid that one of the hotel roomboys would steal it: he knew they wouldn’t. And it wasn’t because he was ashamed to hoard the fag-ends in order to roll remnants up later. It was just that he was used to doing this, had done it for many years. Like not winding the clock, it was something to which he was accustomed by training; perhaps even by instinct. He did not know and he could not tell.
Balancing on one elbow, he reached for the cord of the faintly blue venetian blind. He pulled firmly and the slats of the blind shuttled together loudly as he raised it. Dawn had come while he was smoking and daylight had already overpowered the glim of the neon street lamps.
The metal window-frames were warm to his touch. Gripping them he peered out of the window, craning his head sideways to catch a glimpse of the papaya tree at the end of the alleyway between the two buildings. He could just see it, the fruit hanging down pendulously from under the canopy of broad leaves. The tree reminded him of another papaya, one that had been so close to him for so long and had yet been wholly unobtainable. He had watched the fruit on that other tree grow and fill, turn from dark to light green and then to a peachy cream that developed into the soft, subtle yellow of maturity. From the present tree he had never seen any fruit drop. It was always picked by someone unseen. It was as if they came in the night and spirited the goodness away: often staring at the fruit in the mornings, he could actually taste the fir
m sweetness of the pinkish flesh in his mouth. Once he had even seen the debris of black pips just outside the wire, and had tried to reach them with his hand. They were too far off so he had gone to get a bamboo broom, but by the time he returned with it two speckle-breasted birds had pecked clean the spot in the dust. They had flown off guiltily as he approached.
It was while leaning out of the window that he made his decision. Today he would have a papaya fruit. The lowest was very nearly ripe. If he took it now and kept it on his windowsill it might just ripen. Of course, the roomboys might find it. But then he could hide it in the cupboard, under his dirty clothing, until they had finished cleaning the rooms on his corridor, and place it on the sill afterwards. They usually reached his room by half-past nine each morning.
The sunlight, reflected off the wall outside, should be sufficiently strong to ripen the fruit. After all, in nature they ripened under the shade of the leaves. If it did not ripen then he’d eat it however it was.
He dressed stealthily in a creased, off-white shirt without a collar and a pair of loose underpants. Over these he pulled a pair of dark trousers, with frayed turn-ups. They were old and slightly long for him – hardly surprising, as they had not been tailored to fit him. He put on unwashed grey socks and slipped his feet into scuffed brown brogues with rubber soles. He owned two pairs of shoes – the other pair was black with leather soles – but, at this moment, brogues seemed the more appropriate. He wouldn’t be heard walking in them and they would give him added grip.
He opened the door. The verandah corridor outside his room was deserted. It ran along to the left then, at a T-junction, joined the main corridor. Across the central courtyard he could see the pebble-glass window of the ground floor office where the night-duty porter would now be sitting, dozing. The strip light was still on over the desk.
Turning right, he came to a navy-blue painted door and slipped the catch. It clicked loudly and he glanced through it, shutting it gently but firmly behind him.
He was on a staircase that was never seen by ordinary guests of the hotel. It was made of bare concrete and its walls were whitewashed. Upon each step was piled cleaning equipment – mops, galvanised buckets, brooms, boxes of lavatory cleaner and Mansion floor polish.
By the head of the stairs, at a thin landing from which a door opened out to the flat roof of the hotel, lived the gardener. He slept there in a folding camp-bed, his belongings stored in two small apple crates and a cheap suitcase which he secured by parcelling it up with a length of chain and a brass padlock.
It was imperative not to awaken him for he was easily angered and his gaunt, tight-skinned face was quick to mirror his mercurial soul.
With the skill of long practice, Sandingham crept up the stairs to the last angle before the gardener’s bed. It was not an easy manoeuvre, for the equipment and stores that were kept there were, in places, precariously balanced. He had to be very careful not to touch anything. One object knocked over would be sure to domino into others below it. That would be disastrous. From overhead came a grunt and a volley of exhaled breaths: the gardener was soundly asleep.
As he went deeper into the well, Sandingham saw the articles change from cleaning materials to tins of soup, vegetables, fruit and meat products. These were new: they had not been there the last time he had edged his way down. The lower flights had held only bundles of newly-delivered laundry then. He was certain the food would remain there for a short time only, until the shelf space was found for it in some storeroom.
At the foot of the staircase was a metal door with a Yale lock. He opened this, being careful to put it on the latch, for he wanted to return this way.
A narrow passageway led off to the right from the door and he took it, careful not to disturb the lids of dustbins that stood alongside it, against the street wall of the hotel grounds. From over the wall he could hear footsteps moving along the pavement. They fell with slow deliberation and he visualised a Hong Kong police constable on his beat, black leather belt, revolver holster and peak cap glinting in the early light. Standing on an empty tea chest, Sandingham looked warily through strands of barbed wire strung on metal posts along the top of the wall. His fears were instantly soothed. Instead of a policeman walking the pavement an elderly man in a loose-fitting suit of black cloth was counting through a thin wad of dollar bills. He had come out of the back yard of the building next door.
Sandingham stepped off the tea chest and continued around the corner of the hotel. The ground-floor windows were guarded by wavy, wrought-iron grills. He frowned. He hated bars and these bars in particular for, at the rear of the hotel, they protected the storerooms.
The alley beneath his room window was narrower than the other passageway and he had to squeeze along, stepping gingerly over broken glass. He was not afraid of cutting himself but he knew from personal experience that glass makes a distinct, loud crunch when stepped on, especially in a confined space.
At the end of the alley he came to the top of a grass bank, twenty feet wide, ten feet high and overlooking the arc of the hotel front drive. Cautiously he put his head around the corner of the building.
The main entrance was deserted, like the rest of the hotel. He could see the marble steps leading up to the foyer clearly, the small door that revealed steps leading down to the hotel garage beneath the front lawns. He ducked under a bush and inched forward, using a hunched, squatting technique, to the foot of the papaya tree. Here he paused.
Near him he could hear muted voices coming from the open window of one of the downstairs front suites; the sound of lovers in the early morning. He heard a man’s cough, then the quiet whisper of a woman.
The tree was younger yet also higher than he had expected. Stretching his arms up he found he was still some four feet short of the bottom-most fruit. He looked around.
Another wall, five feet high, separated the hotel frontage from the garden of the next building, a block of flats. This wall was made of concrete covered with plaster that had cracked in the summer heat; like the rear wall, it had three strands of barbed wire running along it.
He held one of its metal stancheons and lifted himself on to the wall, placing a foot on each side of the wire, which he used to keep his balance as he edged precariously along to the tree. Here the fruit was hanging level with his face, but several feet away from the wall. Judging the distance carefully, he let himself fall outwards to the tree. He hugged the trunk tightly as it swayed away from the wall, then returned to its original upright position. With one hand he grabbed the ripest papaya and twisted it. Its stem bent, then snapped. He carefully dropped the fruit to the ground, where it bounced under a bush.
He lifted one leg clear of the wire and was about to lift the other, to swing himself on to the tree trunk, when the young tree juddered and again took him away from the wall. This time it did not straighten but started to bend dangerously and he thought it might break. The leg of his trousers caught on the wire and ripped down the seam from the knee to the turn-up. He swore inwardly, and pulled hard. The wire released him, but one barb dug into his ankle as he broke free.
The tree shuddered and two more papaya came loose, one hitting him on the shoulder before falling into the bushes below. He slithered down the trunk, searched for the ripe fruit on all fours. It was nowhere to be seen.
Puzzled, he looked over the bush. The papaya had slipped through the bushy undergrowth, rolled down the bank and hit the concrete drain at the side of the drive. Bouncing over this, it had struck the concrete driveway and split open. Its sections had then rolled down the slope of the drive and out into the gutter of the main road.
He heard a swishing sound. The main foyer doors had been opened. The night clerk had obviously heard the fruit falling on the drive and come out to investigate. He glanced right then left. An unripe papaya had toppled after the ripe one and was now rolling crazily, like a rugby ball, down the drive. The clerk, a fresh-faced Chinese man in his early twenties, walked briskly after the fruit and stopped th
e papaya with his foot. He looked up the bank.
No one there.
Once in safety around the corner of the building, Sandingham stopped to regain his breath. Another sound, above his head – no more than a bird might cause – made him look up.
From a window on the second floor peeped the face of a boy. He was a European, blonde haired and with blue eyes, and it was obvious that he had seen everything. Their eyes met. For twenty seconds the boy looked at the man and the man at the boy. The boy’s eyes were wide with wonder at what a grown man was doing, at the crack of dawn, before most adults were awake. The man’s eyes were squinting with fear as he tried hard to think how he could avoid the beating that would inevitably follow.
In the end he did nothing, said nothing; just went back down the alleyway, around the rear and in through the metal door, slipping the deadlock into its closed position. On his way back upstairs he found that two of the food boxes had already been opened. From them he took three tins of pineapple cubes and two of tomato juice. His scrounging trip, after all, had not been entirely in vain.
Back in his room, he lowered the venetian blind – although there was no way anyone could see in without a long ladder – rummaged in the chest of drawers, found a rusting tin opener and prised open the top of a can of pineapple. He ate the contents with his fingers and drank the sweet syrup straight from the tin, cautious not to cut his lips.
He hid the other cans in the hollow pedestal of the wash basin and flattened the empty one with his foot. Once it was out of shape, he wrapped it in newspaper and put it in the wastepaper-basket. He stood for an instant, indecisive. It was not worth the risk of the roomboys finding it, so he took it out again and placed it in a drawer, planning to dispose of it later in the day.
It was after doing this he sensed his ankle was wet, tacky with blood. Tugging off his trousers, shoes and socks, he lifted his foot into the wash basin and ran cold water over the cut. It was not as deep as he had feared it might be. The water stopped the bleeding long enough for him to take from under the mattress a strip of clean cloth hidden there, wrapped in newspaper for just such an emergency. This makeshift bandage tight, he lay back on his bed, crudely stitched the rent in his trousers and dozed.
