by Martin Booth
He set off down this path, and within a few minutes was out of sight of the monastery.
For half an hour, he continued downwards. The descent was gradual and he did not stop until he came to a section of the path where it narrowed considerably, with an upward slope to the left and a sheer drop of several hundreds of feet to the right. Here he halted, leaned against the rock face and looked westward.
The sun was patchy upon the sea. The first post-storm fishing junks were making for the open ocean around the Fan Lau peninsula, far over Shek Pik village. The sails of the vessels looked like the spread wings of bats hovering upon the dying swell.
He moved his toe against a stone the size of a football. With no effort, he flicked it over the drop. It bounced twice before tumbling into the trees far below. He pushed another stone after the first. It bounced only once.
It would be so easy. He had only to take two steps and death would rush towards him in the shape of a boulder halfway down the side of Lantau Peak, and the trees under it.
He sat with his feet over the chasm of the valley, swinging them to and fro as he had when perched upon his uncle’s garden wall above the GWR line near Wellington. He closed his eyes and the steam thump from the locomotive hauling the Exeter/London express from the black maw of the tunnel under White Ball Hill rumbled in his head. He could see the plume of steamy smoke through the branches of the huge cherry tree that stood in the meadow between the house and main line. If he tipped forward, as he had never dared, he could drop five feet into the lane; or five hundred.
Opening his eyes, he found himself leaning forward; he balanced back on to his buttocks, and got to his feet.
Walking slowly back to the monastery he knew why, all those years ago, he had not jumped into the lane. Or just now into the valley. It was a matter of courage.
* * *
‘Can I help?’ Sandingham offered.
‘Okay. You go with him.’ The monk in charge of the monastic farm pointed to a novice in his late teens. ‘He will show you what to pick.’
Three hundred yards away was a field irrigated by a stream flowing from the hillside by the past abbots’ tombs. The water glistened and rattled musically in the bright, washed morning sunlight.
The novice gave Sandingham a short knife with a worn black handle and showed him how to cut long-leafed lettuce off cleanly, near to the soil. Having passed on the instruction he moved to a nearby patch and spent half an hour plucking runner beans from their tendrils.
To work in the fields as if he were a fellow monk gave Sandingham a satisfaction he had not felt for many years. This was not hard toiling merely to keep a miserable life going, but a simple act, as basic and wholesome as breathing the mountain air. It had no ulterior motive. That was what was so rewarding about it. There was nothing else in his life that could be so regarded.
Sandingham felt the damp, warm earth on his hands. The black mountain soil grimed his fingerprint whorls and nails. The sun was luxurious on his back. He stripped off his shirt to take advantage of it. This was like that other time: picking vegetables. Only then there had been snow in the air and the freedom of the Po Lin fields had not existed. Perhaps never had.
* * *
‘You see,’ said the guestmaster, translating for the abbot, ‘how these tiny fish live in their pool? What do you call them in English?’
They were standing by a shallow depression in a rocky burn at the end of the plateau. Glass-clear water from a nearby spring was splashing through it. Minute fish darted in the currents.
‘Minnows.’
‘Minnows.’ The monk repeated the word and passed it on to the abbot who grinned at the ludicrousness of the name, and echoed it to himself. Soon he spoke again.
‘You see how they live? Halfway up a mountain, far from the big rivers or the sea, they thrive. They think not of where the water comes from, nor where it is going. As we do not think of the source of the wind or where it blows. They accept it as a right and they exist in it.’
He placed his hand on the surface and the fish, after taking to cover under pebbles, ventured out and inquisitively inspected his fingertips, nibbling at them.
‘My hand could kill them,’ he said. ‘It could close in on them and crush them. They know that, and are always ready to take flight. Yet my hand does not.’ He stood upright and the movement of his fingers scared them into hiding once more. ‘My religion demands I must not kill them. They do not know that my hand will hold back. They have to accept that it will, or will not.
‘So must you take your destiny. Fate will use you as it will. A great hand controls you. You cannot resist it.’
A bird flew up quickly from the brown grass. It rose and hovered in the air, shrilly fluting.
‘The abbot says think well on what he tells you.’
Sandingham looked into the guestmaster’s eyes. He was a shrewd man with a deep human wisdom apparent in his face, mingled with much humour and understanding. His gaze, before he politely lowered it, bored into Sandingham as if it were vital the visitor should heed well his abbot’s lesson.
They turned to walk back towards the monastery. Crickets were chirruping in the grass and, in a lone pine tree by the path, a cicada was grating its call.
‘Do you know, Mr Sandingham,’ the abbot said after a few paces, ‘that the cicada lives as a – how do you say, “not formed into adult”?’
‘A grub? Chrysalis?’
‘A chrysalis – yes, that is the word. I remember,’ the guest-master interpolated before continuing. ‘The cicada lives as a chrysalis for fifteen years, changes into an adult and dies within a day of its hatching – yes? You may think that a waste of life. But it is not. The day of the cicada is a hundred years long. It sings because it lives. You must do that.’
As they approached the tree, the insect ceased its noise.
‘It stops that we might not see it. But look.’
The abbot pointed to a spot on the flaking bark below the ragged jumble of branches. At first Sandingham saw nothing but then, suddenly, he saw the creature. It was as big as one of the joints of his thumb, and perfectly camouflaged.
‘You did not see it at first.’ They walked on, and the insect, gauging their departure, began again its metallic sound. ‘The cicada is like the truth. Always there, but not so easy to be seen.’
The late sunlight turned the heat-scorched side of Lantau Peak into a saffron cloth. The eastern sky was turning azure as the night advanced. Overhead, the air itself seemed blue.
The three men did not speak again until they reached the forecourt to the temple. The maroon colouring of the building was made richer by the light, the sun now down behind the hills.
‘I leave tomorrow, Abbot,’ Sandingham said. ‘Shall I see you before I leave?’
‘The abbot cannot see you in the morning,’ stated the guest-master without passing on the words or asking the abbot’s reply.
‘Tell the abbot I have been very happy here.’
The reply came, ‘He knows that. He says you must take the peace with you wherever you go.’
‘Tell him I shall try.’
As he said it, Sandingham knew he was lying: each step down the mountain would shed the calm of Po Lin Monastery.
The abbot entered his quarters and was gone. He did not say goodbye.
‘Can I pay you for my stay? Something towards my food?’
‘That is not necessary,’ replied the guestmaster. ‘A Buddhist monastery has to obey a rule of hospitality.’
Sandingham knew that was the case; he also knew that it was done to offer payment.
‘Please take this,’ he said, pulling from his pocket twelve one-dollar bills rolled in a rubber band.
‘Thank you. But the abbot says I take no money from you. He knows you need this. You are not like the other Europeans who come here. He tells me to say that you must not pay but instead remember him. Your memory will be your payment. And do not forget the little fishes that accept the will of Buddha, or the cicada
who is the truth, or the ant.’
From the deck of the ferry returning to Hong Kong, Sandingham looked back at the peak of the island. It was shrouded in afternoon summer mist. All during his four-hour walk along the spine of the hills he had thought over the words, the parables, the advice given so obliquely. By the time he reached the pier at Silver Mine Bay he had decided. He would try to teach, to warn others of the terror in his life and in their own.
PART SIX
On board SS Lisbon Maru off the Chinese coast and Japan: 1 – 15 October, 1942
THE LAMP-BULBS in the bulkhead mountings, fitted into sockets behind waterproof glass domes in turn protected by stout wire grills, were of a low wattage and, because the glass coverings were grimy, only a jaundiced glimmer emanated from them. This lent the hold an added appearance of being an antechamber to some pit for sinners and their benighted disciples.
As if in witness to such an image one man, lying on the sloping steel cover over a bilge pump housing, kept crying out, ‘What have we done to warrant this? What have we done? What have I done? What have I done? What have I done?’
His words took on a childish incantation as if he enjoyed the experiment of repeating them, the sounds soon rolling into one as he grew increasingly delirious.
‘Wotvidun … Wotvidun … Wotvidun…’
‘For Christ’s sake, shove it! We ain’t done nuffing. We jus’ go’ done, tha’s all.’
‘He can’t help it, man,’ came another voice from the area of the moaner’s perch, the words clipped with a distinctly upper-crust accent. ‘Just ignore him. He’ll be asleep soon.’
By morning, thought Sandingham, the man would be dead anyway and then they’d not have to listen to his rantings.
The air was fetid and noxious with the reek of male urine and liquid human faeces. Those with dysentery were unable to make it in time to the wooden latrines that had been constructed on deck, overhanging the sides of the ship like the amenities at the rear of a traditional Chinese junk. They squatted apologetically in the scuppers along the lowest level of the hold, dropping their pants or fandushis over the oily swill of sea water that lapped from side to side in the bulkhead channels. The air was hot and the stench rose to permeate every level of the ship’s living cargo. For those who could contain themselves and get on deck with the next exercise group, it was not so bad. Their excrement merely smeared down the side of the ship or fell sheer to the gliding waves.
‘There are eighteen hundred of us,’ said Tom Pedrick, carrying on the muted tones that the sick man’s ravings had broken into: all talk was kept to whispers or quietened mutterings, not because the Japanese wanted silence but because it seemed indecent to speak loudly in such squalid conditions.
‘The officer in charge,’ he went on, ‘is that prat with the talk about Japan being the land of milk and honey. Name of Hideo Wada. A lieutenant in the army. The ship’s called the Lisbon Maru – got that from a bloke in the Royal Artillery who saw it on a life raft – they’re in Number Three hold at the stern. Number One, in the bows, has the RN boys in it. God knows why I’m stuck in here with you lot. Bloody cheek, billetting a tar with scum like yourself.’ He grinned, elaborately looking Sandingham up and down as if eyeing a girl in the Savoy Grill. ‘The ship’s captain is called Kyoda Shigeru. The crew’s Nip and there are eight hundred IJA troops on board as well.’
There was a rumbling overhead and some hold planks were lifted aside. A Japanese voice shouted out an order and one of the translators near the top bawled, ‘Next shift on deck. Thirty minutes.’
Pedrick and Sandingham climbed on to the metal framework of the companionway and began to clamber up the ladder. It was difficult, pulling one’s body up with the arms as well as pushing from below with the legs. Sandingham was stiff from sitting on the hold shelving and his neck had a crick in it. For those who had electric feet, that permanent torment of pins-and-needles brought on by vitamin deficiency, the climb was agonising.
It was a warm, soft tropical night into which they rose. The sky was clear and the stars myriad. They lined up at the makeshift latrines and took their turn to balance precariously over the side of the boat. Privacy was non-existent and there was nothing upon which to wipe themselves clean. A standpipe had been erected by the side of the ship and many simply wiped their anuses with their hands which they then rubbed under the brass nozzle of the tap.
Once finished with their crude ablutions, the prisoners sat on the deck or leaned against the superstructure of the bridge. The few who had tobacco smoked it. A member of the crew, wearing baggy Oriental trousers and a vest, made his way through the hundred or so prisoners handing out an aluminium mug of water to each from a wooden bucket with a rope handle, snatching the mug back as soon as it was drained. The water was cool but brackish. Another distributed three-ounce hunks of coarse bread, which he broke off by hand from larger, sand-coloured loaves, and rigid strips of dried, salted fish. Every prisoner ate slowly to make the food last longer.
The ship was darkened for security, and showed no lights. The starlight, however, was so intense that the men lounging or walking to and fro on the deck could see quite clearly for some miles.
‘Is that land?’ Sandingham asked Pedrick as he looked over the port side, spying a narrow black smudge on the horizon.
Tom, with his trained seaman’s eyes, had already recognised that it was not cloud.
‘Mmmm,’ he said. ‘Chinese coast. We’ve been in closer and will get in closer again. I think that’s an estuary or a sound. We’re crossing the mouth of a river or something. They’re keeping to the coast for protection from the Yanks.’
‘Whereabouts do you think we are?’
‘Can’t be sure. With an educated guess, I’d say about halfway up the coast towards Shanghai. That’s probably where we’re heading. Re-fuel there, pick up an escort or something, then cut across to Japan.’
After twenty minutes or so the coast loomed nearer. The offshore breeze carried with it the inviting scents of land. They could see the outline of hills silhouetted against the starlight.
Sandingham lay on his back, his spine flat against the deck, looking up at the stars. A meteor jagged briefly across the expanse of lights, expending itself as quick as a spark from a cheap toy gun.
‘Did you see that?’
‘What?’ Tom asked, leaning over on his elbow. He had been surveying the sea, studying it with intense concentration.
‘A shooting star. Up there by that very bright one. Went across to the Milky Way and fizzled out.’
‘The bright one’s Aldebaran; magnitude one-plus,’ Tom said. ‘Funny to think you can see it from St James’s Park…’
The ship rolled gently in a slight swell and the motion set Sandingham dozing. It was the only restful sleep he was to snatch that night, and it was soon rudely curtailed by Pedrick digging him in the ribs and saying, ‘Time to go downstairs.’
The guards hassled them towards the hatch.
‘Second sitting for supper in the First-Class dining room. The fancy dress ball commences at midnight on the recreation deck forward of the bridge. If you have no costume, come as you are,’ announced a wit, formerly a senior steward on P&O.
Another retaliated, ‘I’ll go as a shagged-out PoW.’
In the hold, to those returning from the night outside, the atmosphere appeared worse than it had before. As Sandingham went lower down the ladder the stink grew increasingly foul until, upon arriving at his allotted shelf, he felt he would vomit. Only common reason stopped him. If he threw up he’d lose the food and water he’d recently been given and it would be a long while before he was to receive another issue. He lay uncomfortably on his side, facing the steel plates of the ship, and concentrated on the rivetting in an attempt to shut out his surroundings and get back into sleep.
‘Sandingham?’
A hand was shaking his arm.
‘Sir!’
He sat up, remembering just in time not to hit his head on the girder. When one’s
hair is cut short – and Sandingham’s scalp was all but shaved, to keep down the lice – such an impact is worse than when there is hair to act as a shock absorber.
‘Give a hand here, will you?’
The moaning man was dead. Three privates from the Royal Scots were lifting his corpse up the companionway towards a door halfway up the side of the hold. The door was open, which it had not been previously, and Sandingham, looking up, saw framed by a light from the passageway beyond a Japanese NCO with a dim torch. The three men had insufficient strength on their own to lift their dead comrade up the vertical height to the door.
Going ahead up the steps, Sandingham reached down and grabbed the dead man by his shirt collar. The man’s stubbly crop of hair itched against Sandingham’s arm. He heaved upward and the others lifted and levered from below. At last they got to the door. The Japanese officer indicated that Sandingham and one of the shovers-from-beneath should carry the dead man on to the deck. They gripped the body by the ankles and shoulders and struggled with him to the ship’s rail. There, without ceremony, they humped him over the side and watched as he splashed into the spume churning aft from the bow wave.
Sandingham’s helper crossed himself.
‘Say a prayer for the poor fucker when we get below, mate,’ he suggested.
Nodding, Sandingham said he would. Yet he didn’t. What was the use?
* * *
Daylight was seeping through cracks between the hatch covers when the prisoners in Number Two hold heard a pumping thump from the centre of the ship. It was as if a damp fist had slapped the bulkhead wall. The lights went out, then came on again.
The hatch covers, open to allow the emptying of night-soil buckets, most of them dripping on to those lifting them up, were slid shut and the planks dropped home. A lance-corporal in the Middlesex, who was on deck tipping the fetid contents of the buckets overboard, was hastily bundled below.
