Hiroshima Joe: A Novel

by Martin Booth

  The boy and the soldier began to exchange objects which they appeared to pore over before putting them in their pockets. Sandingham felt his eyes sting. The tears were hot and the salt hurt: he rubbed at his cheek with his hand.

  Through his tears he saw the Australian take a scrap of paper from his wallet and write on it with a general-issue army message pencil. He knew what the words, written in mauve indelible lead, would spell out – the information every soldier holds dear, regardless of his rank or his army or his nation. Name and number; unit address; home address for after the war. And the boy, for his part, with a scrawling childish hand, wrote his name and address on another square of paper which the soldier slid into his wallet for safe-keeping.

  Tousling the boy’s hair as a much older man might do, the soldier called to one of the bar waiters who came out and took his order: another lager and an ice-cold Coca-Cola in a sea-green bottle with a wax paper straw soon followed. They drank together, the boy-child and the near-man.

  Sandingham left his vantage point and made his way slowly to his room. In the slot on the door in which, had he cared to do so, he could have put his card with his name printed on it, there was a message: he read it through smarting, tired eyes.

  Mr Leung telephone you. He say you telephone to him. This evening. Half pass six oclok.

  It was just after two a.m. when Sandingham reached the hotel back gate. He was in a sweat partly because he had had to walk so far in the humid mugginess of the night and partly because the opium had been a smaller dose than that to which he was accustomed. He was also suffering from cramps well before getting home. This was a comparatively new experience: he was not used to his muscles seizing up on him after a smoke.

  In Dundas Street he had been stopped by a police foot patrol of two constables and an English-speaking sergeant. They had come upon him suddenly from the cover of a doorway and had badly surprised and consequently shaken him. The sergeant had harangued him in Cantonese for several minutes before Sandingham lifted his face and the officer saw that he was a European. He then asked if he were all right. Sandingham was taciturn. It was his only defence. If they had taken him in he would have been charged with possession, for he was carrying a quarter of an ounce.

  The roomboy on night duty in charge of the floor was asleep, slumped in a cane chair behind his desk. A luridly illustrated Chinese paperback had slipped from his hand and lay on the floor, open at a picture of two lovers lying under pine trees on a bed of needles above a beach. Sandingham stood still observing this for a moment – for all its garishness it had a familiarity to it. He could hear the wavelets of an ebb tide meshing on sand and pebbles.

  Quietly, he tore the page out, then replaced the book on the floor as he had found it. The picture he folded and kept.

  By the desk was the guests’ refrigerator, the white enamel door tempting him. Very carefully, for he knew that the catch had a loud click, Sandingham eased the door open and looked inside. The light came on and he moved so that his body shielded the roomboy’s face.

  In the top compartment was a block of ice-cream and, next to it, two trays of ice cubes. These he ignored. Below them, on the first shelf, was a row of bottles of beer, several bottles of quinine tonic and soda water and a package wrapped in greaseproof paper. Next down was a shelf with several pounds of butter in half-pound blocks, together with some slabs of cheese and a cardboard box of peaches. On the bottom shelf was a fresh lettuce, half a dozen smoked kippers that had been sent out by air mail, a pot of Cooper’s chunky marmalade and five bars of Cadbury’s Bournville chocolate.

  He took one of the bottles of beer, a bar of chocolate and a peach, a large knob of butter and a half-eaten cheese square. He twice dipped his forefinger in the marmalade and sucked the skin clean. He also peeled off one of the kippers and, gently closing the fridge door, returned to his room where he ate everything, smearing the butter on the cold kipper with his fingers.

  The ice-cold beer, which he drank last of all, lying on his bed, made his head swim. He stared hard at the central axle pin of the ceiling fan; it shifted to his right, then flicked back, only to sidle off once more. He tried to will it to stay in place, but couldn’t.

  PART FOUR

  Sham Shui Po and Argyle Street PoW Camps, Kowloon (Hong Kong): 1942

  HE WAS SQUATTING on his haunches, his hands loosely dangling from his wrists, his arms resting stiffly on his knees. The voice did not shout or call to him nor did it whisper: it simply spoke his name in a matter-of-fact, almost conversational tone from somewhere overhead. He looked aside from surveying his feet where one big toenail had turned a vague blue from being pinched in the pliers. His name was repeated. A hand then came into the line of his sight and between the finger and thumb, held as if it were a poisonous insect, was a thin, hand-rolled cigarette, the paper of which was clearly newsprint.

  He took it thankfully, put it to his lips and drew in the sweetish smoke until he felt it scorching his lungs. A steadiness came into his head and settled somewhere in the centre. He turned his eyes up to see who his benefactor was but the man was standing with the late sun blazing behind him and Sandingham had quickly to face downwards again at the sandy earth between his feet.

  He lifted his hand after he had taken a second deep drag, returning the cigarette. The voice said, ‘Keep it. I got it for flies anyway. And I don’t smoke.’

  Slowly, painfully, Sandingham stood up. The man who was beside him was about his height but even thinner. He was one of those naturally wiry men to whom the first stages of starvation seemed to make little difference. Unable to stifle it, Sandingham grinned, then chuckled.

  ‘I do look a bit – incongruous,’ admitted the man.

  He was wearing a white, tropical-issue, naval uniform shirt which was tucked into his fandushi, a sort of loincloth made of a length of grey cotton. The shoulder-tabs on the shirt were button-less and flapped like tiny wings. On his feet he wore a pair of black brogues without socks. His head was close-shaven to the skull and he wore a wristwatch on a leather strap and dark sunglasses, the lenses of which were perfectly round and gave his face a comically owl-like appearance. His skin was well tanned but wherever it folded, in the elbows or behind the knees or in the joints of the fingers, it was beginning to crack, and this made his movements delicate, like those of a girl in a finishing school, learning to balance her movements with graceful charm. He joined in the chuckling.

  ‘I saw you brought back early this afternoon,’ he said. He let a pause speak then for what he couldn’t say. ‘Did you see anything? Of – um – value?’

  They were together under a young pine tree that was one of the smoking stands. The guards forbade smoking around the camp except at certain designated places, partly to inconvenience the prisoners, partly to ensure against fire and partly so that they could keep an eye on informal groups. The soil was discoloured by ash but there was not a single dog-end to be seen: they were collected, broken up and recycled into new smokes.

  It was a minute before Sandingham replied. His head still ached badly and the foot was hurting so much that he leaned on the roughish bark of the tree to alleviate the discomfort. He was thankful Fujihara had concentrated on just his left leg.

  ‘I was taken to the Kempetai HQ. I suppose it was, anyway.’

  It was easier to go through the whole business than to pick out bits at random: besides, to talk of it helped get it out of the mind. With the memory purged, he could allow himself the luxury of thinking just of the pain.

  His fellow internee scraped his fingernail over an insect bite on the side of his neck. It was not a wise thing to do, for infection might set in, but he had not yet overcome the habit of scratching an itch.

  ‘The car was a big Ford,’ Sandingham continued. ‘We went down to the HQ and I was bundled into an office. There was a guard there – not one of ours, I think. The two who took me stayed with the car. Anyway, Fujihara came in after a bit and sat down behind the desk. He didn’t say anything. Just looked and lo
oked at me, running his eyes up and down. Then Tsutada came in.’

  A guard walked by near the perimeter fence and Sandingham used this interruption to draw once more on the cigarette. It was best not to say anything, just in case.

  ‘What did they want to know?’

  ‘About the escape.’

  Three men had got out several nights before, one of them Willy Stewart, and the Japanese had been very edgy since then. They had thought the camp to be pretty well secure after the successful escapes in January and February of Colonel Ride’s party of four and Captain Trevor and the other two. Apart from security, they thought the prisoners were now too weak or ill to try for a break-out. Every few hours they came into the large compound of the camp, grabbed someone and took him off to see if he could be made to divulge details. It was a very hit-and-miss process: out of four thousand four hundred prisoners they would be lucky to find by such random questioning even one in the know, and then he would most likely not talk. Few broke down under questioning or the accompanying beating.

  ‘What did you say?’

  ‘Nothing, naturally. I didn’t know about it until afterwards, in any case. I said so. Did I know about the raft? What raft? I said. Where did they go? Out, I said. Fujihara hit me for that one. With the flat of his sword.’

  The recollection of it caused a quick flick of agony to run through the weal across the small of his back. At the time, Sandingham had thought that his turn had come. If the blade had been edge on – and he had had no reason to suppose that it wasn’t – it would have severed his spine; certainly split a vertebra.

  ‘Were there any other escapes in the offing? I didn’t know. Then they tried the pliers on my toe. The kind you use to shift rusted bolts.’

  He spoke dispassionately of the tool, as if he were a plumber discussing a job with his apprentice.

  ‘Not an electrician’s pliers – ones with long handles for a better purchase. After that, I was returned here. Punchy had a go at me but it was a bit half-hearted. Just a slapping. Told me, “You no cheeky to Nippon.” That sort of thing.’

  ‘Did you see anything?’ repeated his companion.

  Sandingham suddenly weakened. A light-headed faintness flowed into him. His knees started to go. The bony arms of his fellow officer caught him under the armpits and lowered him on to the ground, leaning his shoulders against the tree trunk.

  ‘Not a lot. There were some Chinese roped to the trees outside the barracks in Nathan Road. Their heads were in the gutter. The burnt-out truck is still at the junction with Jordan Road. Nothing of the escapers. Not a word. I think they must have made it.’

  There was only one way to face up to it: optimistically. No breath without hope. Dream and you live, don’t and you die. Either they would get away. Or be re-caught and tortured to within an inch of their lives, then thrown in solitary confinement and die there. Deep in himself he knew that was the way it went; yet he would not admit to it.

  Chalky Stephens had gone because he had had no dreams. He was a schoolmaster before the war caught him up, a graduate in History from the University of Durham. Very grand. He had even been taken prisoner with his academic gown in his possession. He arrived in the camp with it and, at the searches, the Japanese guards had found the garment, unfolded it and been most curious. They chattered and giggled like schoolboys finding their first bra or knickers. They made him put it on and fingered it, twirling him round like a debutante. They could not understand what practical purpose it could possibly have served. It wasn’t uniform. It wasn’t camouflage. It didn’t button up down the front, was not padded against the cold and, being black, couldn’t be some piece of tropical kit. It wasn’t a gas cape or a groundsheet. In the end he had been allowed to keep it.

  For the first few weeks he’d worn it every day, strolling about the camp as if pacing the grounds of his school on the lookout for miscreant students. Gradually, as his ordinary clothes grew tattier, he looked more and more ludicrous, for the gown was kept looking neat. He placed it carefully under the bed-boards at night to retain more or less the correct creases. He tried to form a few of the younger other ranks – corporals and below, a few of the bugle boys who were not much older than his former pupils – into a class. But he couldn’t. What he wanted to teach them was not what they thought to be an important part of the prison camp basic curriculum. They didn’t, as one of them put it to him so pointedly in broad Mancunian, ‘… give a fart for the Treaty of Wedmore, the Peasants Revolt or the Triple Alliance. What we want is how to make the daily three-ounce bun taste like a Lyons Corner House éclair.’

  History is a lethal subject. It deals with facts, nothing but actualities that once were. And were no more. It is not a visionary subject but a collection of facts, one leading inexorably into another. History is a chain of events governed by the inevitability of truth. The more Chalky thought, the more he saw himself as a unit of history, unfolding day by day. He drew on his stock of precedents and saw what was to him unavoidable: that he would die, and soon, without a clear reason, in a god-forsaken, pre-war brick barrack. He would die of dysentery or pellagra, of cholera in the hot months or starvation in the cold. Despair took him over and, one morning, he lay down in his gown in the shadow of his barrack and rigor mortis had set in before they found him at the evening tenko. Within the hour he was buried and the stitching of his gown unpicked, the fabric being re-cut into fandushis or bandages.

  Sandingham pinched the cigarette out and put the remaining stub in his pocket.

  The spring was advancing now, the evenings staying light longer; soon they would be herded into the barracks for the night.

  He made to get up once more. The other bent to help him.

  ‘It’s all right. I can manage.’

  They walked slowly towards the hut. A single bird was piping in one of the pines, unanswered.

  ‘Do you play bezique?’

  ‘No,’ answered Sandingham. ‘Do you play canasta?’

  ‘Not very well, but I’ll give you a game. Do you have a second pack? We’ll need one, of course…’ His voice was tight with eager anticipation: another deck of cards would be an asset upon which to found a friendship. Then he said, ‘You’re Sandingham, aren’t you?’ It was unnecessary, for from his manner it was clear he knew. ‘My name’s Pedrick. RN.’

  Sandingham’s pack was short of the four of clubs. Whoever was to be dealt the last card had that as a ghost in his hand and stated he was playing it as he laid down nothing in thin air.

  The lights flickered briefly and were extinguished just before nine.

  * * *

  He was woken at half-past four by the sentry whom they had nicknamed ‘Cat-and-Dog’ hammering on the barrack door. He was shouting hoarsely in Japanese. First light was shimmering behind Tai Sheung Tok, promising a hot day, but the early morning air was clean and sharp with no shadows casting themselves on the dirt. He glanced out of the window to see Sally, the Pay Corps’ black-and-white fox terrior, nosing around a patch of weeds; she was oblivious of a tabby-ish cat which was hunched up on the roof ridge of the building above her, watching her every move. Smoke was rising in a vertical plume from the kitchens: it did not disseminate for at least thirty feet, so tranquil and windless was the dawn hour.

  Turning into the room once more, Sandingham saw Tom Pedrick bent studiously over a tin can covered with a scrap of grimy cloth. He had his hand in the can and was taking small dots out of it, placing them on a sheet of crumpled paper. He muttered as he did so.

  ‘How many, Tom?’ croaked an expectantly hopeful voice from the top of a three-tier bank of bunks.

  ‘Two hundred and sixteen. But there’s more to come. I’ve got three hundred and ninety-one from yesterday. Should make seven hundred…’

  Leaning on his bunk, Sandingham grinned ruefully. British officers breeding bluebottles to swap for cigarettes – one fag per hundred flies. The idea was that the prisoners killed flies and thus cut down the risk of disease. The Japanese thought the flies were w
ild, did not realise that they were being factory-bred by enterprising prisoners on mouldy rice and a dead rat.

  Cardiff Joe appeared suddenly at the barrack door but did not see the fly farm being shoved under a bunk. He was the best of the interpreters, a stocky and bow-legged figure who was helpful whenever he found his superiors looking the other way. He gained his monaker because he claimed he had a bank account in Cardiff.

  ‘Eve’ybody up! Time to go to wuk! Fi’e minits! Fi’e minits!’

  He moved on to rouse the next building. It was unusual for him to be about so early. He was normally not to be seen before seven-thirty. Tokunaga, the camp commandant, was obviously having one of his periodic tightenings-up.

  The prisoners – eight hundred of them – formed lines at the kitchen and were each issued with the day’s customary ration of a small bun and a clove of garlic. The first five hundred also got a third of a tin can of watery tea and a dollop of cold congealed rice and sweet potato. Sandingham missed this as he was last at the latrines and had to queue before balancing over the hole in the ground that served as a lavatory. As his loose turds fell into the slop containers below, which had not yet been emptied by the morning sanitary rota, he could hear the raucous buzzing of thousands of flies. His stomach was getting better: he had somehow managed to shake off the diarrhoea that had been bothering him for a fortnight. At least he was not a dysentery case. It had had him very worried.

  The lines reformed for embarkation on to the ferry. The guards stood in ranks on either side and Cardiff Joe, after receiving the count, marched them off. The ferry took them down the Kowloon peninsula, round the tip by the Star Ferry pier and the landmark of the Kowloon-Canton railway station clock tower and up the other side to Kai Tak. Here they were disembarked and marched through some streets to the site of the airport. It was being extended to take Japanese aircraft.