by Martin Booth
Three enemy soldiers were shooting at them from the tram. Two more were in the upper floor of what had been a bakery. The machine-gunner carried on intermittently, his weapon obviously jamming off and on. The mortar crew had not fired for several minutes.
Sandingham emptied half a magazine into the derelict tram. Another Japanese infantryman ran out towards it from the cover of the bakery, but one of the Canadians opened up and hit him in the groin. The infantryman crumpled up in full view of them and started to crawl to safety the way he had come.
Like an insect, thought Sandingham. It wasn’t a man, or even an enemy, but a bug, a dull green thing that had to be exterminated.
He pulled the Bren-gun barrel left.
‘Forget him. Draw a line on the LMG.’
He ignored Bob’s order. This action had no military justification. This wasn’t in the manuals of instruction, it wasn’t for the sake of King, country or the pride of the regiment. It was because it had to be done.
Perhaps it was for Mack, he reasoned. Perhaps that was why he bawled, ‘Shut it, Bob! This one’s for Mack!’ Yet he wasn’t convinced.
He tightened the muscles in his finger. The butt shook against his cheek. The crawling man looked round just as the trigger reached the point of clicking. Sandingham saw him look up. The soldier seemed to know: he tried to stand. The stream of bullets from the little trumpet-shaped cowl on the front of the barrel of the Bren gun hit him in the chest, ripping his breast cage open. The force of it carried the dead man down the street. He folded over but the momentum of the shells kept him going along the tarmac like a piece of paper caught in a wind.
A feeling of satisfaction came over Sandingham. He could not understand it: he simply knew it was there.
He turned on his side, partly to bring the Bren gun to bear on the verandah, partly to reach for another magazine. As he did so, he found the front of his tunic soaked with blood and a chronic yellow, mucousy liquid.
His first thought was that he was hit. That somehow, without knowing it, he had been shot. Yet there was no pain. It was then he realised it was not his blood and bile, but Mack’s.
He snapped in the magazine. The leaf sight had flattened itself; he lifted it back into place.
The light had nearly gone from the verandah now, and he could not differentiate the shadows of the collapsed roof from those of the men.
Still he waited.
There was a rush of staccato fire from the verandah. He aligned his sights on it, but it quickly stopped.
Deliberately, he reset the fire selector lever to single shot. Carefully aiming at where the last flash had come from, he pressed the trigger. Once. Twice. Pause. Thrice.
During a lull in the thunder of shooting, he heard a loud grunt. The floor of the verandah was on a tilt. Very gradually, the Japanese NCO and his gun slid forward and over the edge. They pitched out of sight behind a half-destroyed wall.
‘Bloody fine shooting!’ Bob yelled.
Then he was deaf.
An enormous explosion rocked the shop. Large fragments of plaster showered down on them. The barricade lifted several inches and resettled itself. The walls bulged. Dust fogged everything. Smoke wraithed about, marbling the air. Sandingham found himself choking. Choking on something wet and metallic and hot.
‘Bob!’
Fear coursed through him. He could hear nothing, not even his own voice.
‘Bob! Bob!’
It hurt him to move his jaw. He felt his teeth catch on something, he spat and skin flapped loose.
He looked to his left. Mack’s corpse lay twisted over on itself, his body haphazardly decorated with the brass cartridge cases that had been ejected from the Bren. They shone dully in the uneven half-light caused by the beams, which had caught alight, and were now burning steadily.
Sandingham looked right. One of the Canadians had propped himself against the butcher’s table. A long splinter of wood was sticking out from above his shredded ear. Blood was congealing in his hair and on his neck and collar. He was dead.
Behind was a sloping avalanche of assorted debris – glass, mortar, bricks, concrete, wood, tiles, strips of cloth, carpet tatters. From out of the avalanche jutted a forearm. The pale hand on the end of the wrist dangled loose. It had no thumb. It was Bob’s hand.
Sandingham looked at his own wrist. His eyes were numbed.
His watch glass was broken and his watch had stopped.
Four-thirty-two.
PART THREE
Hong Kong: Early Summer, 1952
TO STARBOARD WAS a solid floating wedge of lighters and cargo junks, barges, small launches and sampans. They bobbed gently against each other on the harbour swell, stirred by the passage of the Yaumati ferries past the jetty. The creaking of the wood, the slap of wavelets and the flap of rigging, sails, awnings and clothes drying on lines mingled with the calls of stevedores, the barking of dogs, the disgruntled puttering of marine engines and the self-satisfied clucking of hens. For the owners and crews of this armada the craft were not merely a means of earning a livelihood or a form of transport but an entire world – a home, a universe, a place for being born, courting, copulating and dying. Many seldom stepped on to the firmness of a dock or a beach. The children, even as toddlers barely able to walk, could gauge the roll of the deck and stay upright. All could swim. They existed completely afloat, coming ashore only for certain after death: to be buried in water is to be eternally restless.
To port, in stark contrast to the mêlée of the other side of the ship, was the concrete pier. A double row of lorries was parked down the centre, one vehicle bumper to bumper with the next. The windscreens, grimy with salt from a long sea voyage, had forms stuck to the inner surfaces, while the doors and side windows were decorated with scrawled yellow chalk marks. On either side of the lorries was a clear area upon which coolies were working with the chaotic efficiency of ants. They received wooden crates that were slid down a gangway mounted with steel rollers, lifted these bodily off a pile of hessian mats placed at the foot to stop each crate from becoming damaged and manhandled them into a neat wall beside the trucks. The crates had incomprehensible black lettering stencilled on their sides: ‘1st Div. Trans. U.: Veh. sps.’, ‘5th. Arm. U.: Univ. Car. Engs. Pts. & replts.’ and ‘8th. Br. Gen. Eq. pts. & sps.’ All that Sandingham could understand with certainty were the words ‘Top’, ‘Use Nets’ and ‘Use No Hooks’.
Overhead, derricks mounted on to the superstructure of the ship swung out over the dock and lowered one more lorry after another, each held by ropes or chains passing under the front and rear wheels. The booms and jibs whined and howled as they gently lowered their burdens on to the dock where a special gang of coolies pushed the vehicles into the line.
After an hour, two Europeans, stripped to the waist but wearing slouch-sided hats, arrived and commenced driving the lorries away. As they passed him, Sandingham saw the tyre pressures written in small white numbers over the wheel arches. He saw the white discs bolted on to the rear axle differential casings, saw the toggle-like hooks for tying down tarpaulins and noted the dun colour of each vehicle. The make was in his knowledge, too. But that didn’t matter. They were army trucks.
Remaining by the Kowloon dock gates for the rest of the afternoon, he saw more military equipment being landed and removed. Some jeeps were driven out along with two low-loader articulated lorries on which squatted massive crates, unblemished by stencilled or painted markings. Consignments of NAAFI ration boxes went by; so did cargoes under green tarpaulins, tied down tightly and each truck with a motorcyclist riding escort. No one could tell what was under the covers, but Sandingham knew: ammunition boxes.
At around five o’clock in the afternoon, the activity started to slow and eventually ceased. The dock gates, which had been reserved for these military comings and goings, became clogged once more with the familiar civilian traffic: one of the P&O steamers – the Canton, heading for the United Kingdom – was due to sail very early in the morning and the passeng
ers were mostly embarking the evening before. Taxis, rickshaws and private cars arrived carrying passengers, their baggage, friends, relatives and business associates. Cabin trunks and leather suitcases, circular hat and square uniform boxes, rattan baskets and canvas bags gathered on the quay nearest to the Star Ferry jetty. Lascar deck-crew members scuttled to and fro with the luggage, and English stewards took in bowls and baskets of cellophane-wrapped flowers and fruits and other going-away gifts with all the readiness of acolyte priests accepting offerings to a great goddess.
The Canton herself lay moored alongside. Her newly-painted white hull, unstained by rust streaks, shimmered in the afternoon glare, almost too harsh to be looked at. The Plimsoll line was sunk well into the water now that she was loading fast. The cream-coloured funnel emitted a faint whisper of grey smoke and, from the ship’s horn, a drift of steam wafted away into nothingness. At the head of the aft mast fluttered the flag of the line, quartered into garish diamonds, and from the foremast hung the Blue Peter. The portholes were all closed against pole-fishers.
It hurt Sandingham to watch the ship and her preparations for departure. Save for the mere necessity of cash for the ticket – and the rounds of drinks, and the bridge games at a penny a hundred points, and the raffles, and the tote of the ship’s daily nautical mileage, and the keeping of face – he’d be aboard her. Often he had thought of the chances of stowing away. At his age, it seemed ridiculous, the kind of thing a wander-struck youth would do to see the world and find a bit of adventure.
It was ridiculous, too. He knew it. He’d be found out as soon as he had to give his cabin number to secure a seat for dinner. He wouldn’t have a place allocated to him. At Singapore, they’d stick him ashore in the arms of the local police, then transport him back to Hong Kong in ignominy.
There were times when he considered himself a refugee from matters European, a man who had removed himself from the horrors of the shallowness and materialism and hypocrisy of the world in the West. He was a man purged of impurity, a man ‘gone native’, as the derogatory term had it. He saw himself as a pacifist Lord Jim. Conrad’s Lord Jim. Except that in his case it would be Lord Joe. ‘Tuan Joe.’
‘Good morning, Tuan Joe,’ they would say as he woke, looking out upon the virginity of the jungle and hearing the mynah birds calling and the parrots squawking; overhead would be the chattering of monkeys, and the calls of children would echo up from the banks of the river where they would be swimming in the freedom of glorious nakedness, the little girls unhaired by puberty and the boys swimming hard into the current, diving for mussels and raw opals polished by the grist of the sand. Each time they dived he would see their firm buttocks rise above the surface before disappearing in the foamy splash of their kicking legs. After a minute, they would reappear and, holding their hands high and treading water, would shout out, ‘Tuan Joe! Tuan Joe!’ The sky would shake with their laughter. And his.
He would never lift a gun. There would always be food and the love of the boys and the men, and the admiration of the girls and the women, and no one would be there to censure him. There would be waxy pink orchids hanging from the branches and the milk of green coconuts to drink. There would be no gin or rum. There would be opium, of course; that was natural.
In his heart of hearts, though, he knew that it wouldn’t – couldn’t last. Some son of a bitch would come along with a need to mine tin, plant ordered ranks of rubber trees, excavate the opals with a dredger, fell the mahogany trees, shoot the monkeys (for food, perhaps, as the Japanese had done in Hong Kong during the war) or enslave the people with a desire for trousers, nylon stockings, wristwatches.
At other times, he saw himself not as a willing and accepting refugee, an acolyte of peace and simplicity, but as a castaway, suffering the purgatory of deliberate rejection or cursory dismissal.
‘Excuse me.’
Sandingham turned to one side.
‘I say, excuse me.’
An Englishman dressed in tropical whites was struggling to lift a heavy suitcase on to a rickshaw. The rickshaw-puller was raising the shafts of his vehicle horizontal in the hope that that might tilt the case backwards, but it was too heavy.
At first, Sandingham thought the man wanted him to move along. That was not uncommon. Then he understood that, in this instance, the man was actually asking for assistance.
‘Could you help me in with this, do you think? God alone knows what my wife’s got in it – can’t think! And I can’t find a free baggage coolie anywhere.’
Saying nothing, Sandingham took a firm grip on the underneath rim and hoisted it on to the seat of the rickshaw as the owner of the case worked it from side to side. It took only a few moments. He noticed the passenger’s name on the ‘Wanted on Voyage’ label: ‘Grover – Mr & Mrs: Cabin B16.’
‘Thank you so much,’ said the man.
He did not offer a tip: Sandingham thought that, had he been Chinese, the man would have dipped into his pocket for a ten-cent coin. Because he was white, he didn’t.
The rickshaw pulled away from the kerb and the European settled himself into another in order to follow the luggage. Lifting the case had made the man stickily hot and he removed his jacket. Sandingham watched but said nothing. As the man went off, Sandingham stooped quickly and picked up the paper that he had seen slip from an inside pocket. He hoped it was a banknote, possibly in sterling. That would have been more use than a Hong Kong dollar. Although it looked too stiff, the colour of the ink and size suggested that it might be a ten-shilling note. It wasn’t. It turned out to be much, much more valuable: a visitor’s boarding pass for the Canton.
There was only one way to exploit the pass and that would require a change of clothes. Even as a European, he was not going to get past a sharp-eyed P&O gangway officer, someone experienced in sorting out hangers-on from genuine sender-offers, dressed as shabbily as he was at present. He took a number seven bus travelling up Kowloon peninsula in the direction of the hotel, quickly washed, shaved and changed into a jacket and fairly well-ironed pair of trousers, then caught another bus back to Tsim Sha Tsui. At the dock gate he flashed the flimsy card pass to the policeman on duty and was waved through. At the head of the gangway, he showed the pass to the ship’s officer.
‘Who are you seeing off, sir?’
‘Mr and Mrs Grover. B16,’ Sandingham answered, looking the man full in the face.
The officer looked down his passenger list to check, then said, ‘Thank you, sir. If you’ll turn left at the head of the stairs and follow the notice to B deck. Visitors will be required to go ashore by eleven p.m., sir.’
It was cooler in the ship than on the dock where the stones and tarred wooden planks reverberated with the stored heat of the day. The lowering sun pierced the windows of the deck lounge as Sandingham walked out of the door and up the companionway to the starboard boat deck. A hot breeze soon removed from him the pleasant effects of the ship’s blower system.
The boat deck gave him an elevated view of the panorama of Hong Kong which he knew so well from street level, but not from sixty feet up. Standing beneath one of the lifeboats, he watched the green Star Ferry craft plying across the harbour with their tall, thin funnels like stovepipe hats and their circular white lifebuoys hanging from the railings of the upper decks. There was a gentle swell on the surface of the sea that complemented the green slopes of Mid-Levels above Victoria. He found himself trying to pick out familiar buildings on Hong Kong-side – the Hong Kong and Shanghai and China Bank buildings were easy. So was Government House. The block of flats below Macdonnell Road was not so easy to place, even though he could see plainly the Peak Tram line, by which it stood, slicing up the mountainside: there had been another building erected in front of the one for which he was searching.
Descending by a different companionway, Sandingham walked slowly towards a first-class lounge and sat down at a small, highly-polished table in the middle of the room. He looked around.
As his eyes grew accustomed to the inte
rior light, he saw that the lounge was sumptuously furnished with leather chairs and round card tables, the rims of which were raised in order to prevent objects from sliding off in choppy seas. There were carved wells for glasses at each of the four players’ seats. The walls were panelled with walnut veneer sections and there were paintings screwed on to the wood. They were of a series depicting scenes from the various ports of call at which the ship stopped on her Far East run – Port Said, with gilli-gilli men producing eggs from passengers’ ears; Bombay, and a snake charmer performing at the foot of the gangway; Singapore, and the ship surrounded by sampans selling curios; Hong Kong, and, inevitably, a portrait of the ship against the grandeur of The Peak at sunset.
A steward approached him.
‘Can I get you a drink, sir?’
‘Dry martini,’ Sandingham ordered and the steward left, to return a very short time later with the cocktail on a silver tray.
‘One and seven please, sir.’
‘Can I sign for it?’
‘It is policy to ask for drinks to be paid for in currency when alongside, sir.’ He paused then added tactfully, ‘It avoids later embarrassment. However … may I have your cabin number, sir?’
Sandingham gave it as B16. The steward left and Sandingham, to be on the safe side, moved to another table in a corner by a window from which he could note the steward’s reactions when he came back in. Sandingham was experienced enough to be able to tell a man’s mood by a mere glance at his face. He had had the best occupational training in the world for that: prisoner.
He need not have worried. The steward had checked the passenger list, being too busy to telephone the cabin and confirm the facts. He now simply asked him for his name and, on hearing it, allowed him to sign. After all, if this were one of the Grovers’ spongeing friends, then they could accept paying for his drink.
