Hiroshima Joe: A Novel

by Martin Booth

  The wind buckled the tarpaulin and whipped across the floor, the iciness hitting their ankles. Everyone, Japanese and European alike, moved in closer to the fire, sitting on planks balanced on logs. Alex stood up to help with the next load of shavings and Sandingham found himself sitting between a couple of locals. The two races seldom spoke to each other except from necessity prompted by their common labours. Even then, they spoke in monosyllabic Japanese. The prisoners were fearful of reprisals if they spoke to the locals and assumed that the locals were afraid of being seen to consort with the enemies of their Emperor.

  Glancing from side to side, Sandingham smiled at the two civilians like a man joining strangers on a bench before the departures board at Paddington station. All they lacked, he reflected, was a loudspeaker announcing the time and platform number of the next train to Bristol.

  On his left was a man whom Sandingham guessed to be in his late thirties, perhaps slightly older. He was unhealthily lean and his face was so drawn that his already narrowed eyes seemed thinner still, mere slits behind which pin-pricks of light glimmered. His hands were calloused and one of them shook. In fact his whole body shivered intermittently, his teeth clicking inside his opened mouth which amplified the chatter.

  On Sandingham’s right was a much younger man. He was about eighteen. He did not shiver but sat stolidly facing the stove. Every so often, he lifted his hands up to its hot sides and rubbed them together with a washing action. His face was as drawn as the man’s and his ears were white with the cold.

  Casting his gaze around the entire assembly, Sandingham noticed that every person present had a common denominator: his headgear. Everyone, from the guards to the boy at his side, was wearing a boshi, a little peaked cap.

  ‘What is a marsh-mullow?’

  Sandingham turned to the man on his left.

  ‘I’m sorry.’

  He was so surprised that the Japanese had spoken to him that he was unable to find an answer straight away.

  ‘What is a marsh-mullow?’ the man repeated, ‘You said just now you would like a “marsh-mullow” on a stick.’

  ‘It’s a sort of sweet,’ Sandingham explained. ‘You cook them over a fire. Make them warm and eat them.’

  He could almost taste one, feel the soft, liquid sugar slide over his teeth, sticking to the roof of his mouth as the crisp hot shell rubbed and stung his tongue. It was a sensation as sensual as any he could imagine at that moment.

  ‘‘ank you,’ said the Japanese, and he returned to shivering.

  From outside came the sounds of a lorry pulling up. The driver’s door was slammed shut and voices were heard dimly calling across the yard, the words deadened by the snow.

  It had not occurred to Sandingham that any of his fellow labourers could speak English. Now it dawned on him that everything they had said about the Japanese, none of it very complimentary, had most likely been fully understood by at least one of them. And possibly passed on. But then, if it had been reported, where were the beatings, the reductions in food, the removal of fuel allowances, the restrictions on what tiny liberties they occasionally received? Obviously, it hadn’t. Their lives had carried on with each face-slapping having an obvious, if unjust, reason. Food was as scanty as ever.

  ‘What is your name?’ he ventured.

  It came so naturally. The man had spoken to him. This was next in the common course of communication between one human and another.

  ‘Mishima. My name is Mishima. Mr Mishima. Mishima–san, we say. And you?’

  ‘Sandingham. Joseph Sandingham.’

  ‘Where do you live? I mean in England, not in Japan.’ He half-smiled. ‘We all know where you live in Japan.’

  ‘Near London. My family live near London. I have no home of my own at present.’

  He hadn’t, and the fact hadn’t occurred to him before. He was homeless. Unless he counted the tatame in the barrack at the top of the bank, up the steps, past the latrines and ablutions. Second tatame down from the hibachi on the left of the room as you entered it.

  ‘I live two miles away. In a suburb,’ Mishima offered. ‘This is my son. His name is Katsuo.’

  The youth next to Sandingham said, ‘Hajimemashite.’

  Sandingham was about to reply incorrectly, ‘Genki desu. Okage sama de,’ but the father interrupted.

  ‘In English. In English.’

  ‘How you do?’ Katsuo enquired sheepishly.

  Mishima shrugged the shrug of every father the world over who has his patience tried by a teenage son.

  ‘How do you come to speak such good English?’ Sandingham asked him.

  ‘I am a high school master. I teach English. Or I was before the war. Now my school is closed and we must all work…’

  ‘Wuk! Wuk!’

  The tarpaulin was dragged aside. It had stopped snowing and the crowbars had arrived. Sandingham was detailed to prise planks apart. Alex Ryder started up the circular saw. Soon, the blades were screeching and howling through the wood.

  * * *

  From time to time, the hancho allowed the prisoners to take away from the timber yard sacks of sawdust and shavings which were utilised in the camp in the making of the fuel balls. Mixed with coal dust, the wood made for easier lighting and longer burning. It also emitted greater heat than the other variety of clay and coal mix. What was more, it gave the barrack rooms a scent of pine sap as it burnt and the prisoners were not slow to discover that if one inhaled the perfume of wood shavings boiled in water it cleared catarrh and eased coughs. The smoke that leaked into the room also seemed to cut down on the bedbugs, although Sandingham believed that this was a myth put about by those who sought continually to boost morale.

  When the cold weather began to abate and give way to a lukewarm early spring, the senior officer in the camp was successful in persuading the commandant to allow for the continued burning of wood dust: it was, he said, in the interests of the Japanese, as well as the unworthy prisoners, to allow for the continuation on the grounds that the prisoners were healthier for it and it would make cooking cheaper and easier. Additionally, the smoke would keep at bay the mosquitoes that were beginning to invade the camp from the surrounding fields. A single bite from one of these voracious insects was quick to suppurate and they most likely carried malaria as well, although most of the prisoners already had that from previous camps in south-east Asia. He was careful not to say that such an action would make the prisoners happier. That would be a sure way to have the sawdust stopped. In truth, being allowed to keep the supply running did boost morale considerably: such a small concession meant so much to men in the dire circumstance of imprisonment.

  Mr Mishima and his son were absent from the timber yard for some weeks but, early in April, they reappeared.

  Standing by the banshee-whining of the planing machine on their first day back, Mishima made sure he was hidden from the foreman by the protective cowling over the top of the band-saw housing. Pulling off a heavy work-glove, he nodded minutely to Sandingham and, receiving the all-clear, approached him in order to speak to him.

  ‘My mother has been very ill,’ Mishima explained. ‘I had to go to Tokyo to be with her.’

  ‘I hope she is all right now?’

  The planing machine completed drawing its latest plank through and the whine dropped suddenly to a hum as the wood cleared the spinning blades. Sandingham, with an expertise born of practice, let his voice drop the instant the whine ceased.

  ‘She is dead.’

  It was so bluntly put the announcement took Sandingham off guard. In England, the bereaved would have been so much more gradual in his statement.

  ‘I am sorry. How…?’

  ‘Tuberculosis. There is no medicine in Japan now.’

  A guard came into view around the stack of planks, his rifle slung over his shoulder but ready to be slipped down into his hands. Their conversation was curtailed.

  Later in the afternoon, Mishima spoke again to Sandingham, but this time his words were muted, for
they were standing in the centre of the yard, close to the lorry.

  As he handed Sandingham a sack of shavings to be loaded into the vehicle, he said, ‘Note this sack.’ His hand surreptitiously patted a character painted on the sacking in red. ‘This letter is kome. Rice. Be sure you take this sack back to your camp.’

  He turned away as the guard came towards them, shouting for Sandingham to hoist the sack up.

  All through the remainder of the day Sandingham was curious to know why he should have that specific sack. Obviously, there was something in it. But what? Mishima could hardly risk giving him anything. His punishment for such a thing, if he were caught, was likely to be even more severe than one levelled at the prisoners themselves. He would not only be seen to be degrading and debasing himself by associating with beaten enemies, but also treacherous. He would be tortured, then killed, and his family would live in perpetual shame.

  Once in the comparative safety of the barrack hut, Sandingham untied the neck of the sack and rummaged inside. The contents appeared to consist entirely of shavings from the plank planer which had been Mishima’s responsibility that day. Only hidden right in the centre of the shavings, was a small parcel. Sandingham removed it and lay on his bunk, facing the wall as he removed the plain paper wrapping. It was as well to take such precautions, just in case there was a stool-pigeon in the camp. He did not think there was one, but there had been in Sham Shui Po and the risk was ever-present.

  The package contained a bottle with a cork rammed in the top. Around it was a piece of paper. Smoothing this out, Sandingham read it to himself:

  Today is 8 April, Buddha’s Birthday. In the bottle is a traditional tea for this day. It is made with liquorice. Drink it and think of the Buddha, a man of peace. The tea kills stomach worms. Rub it on your bed pillars: it will stop insects climbing. Last week, Tokyo was bombed by Amerikans. Please destroy this paper.

  The handwriting was sloping and cursive, typical of the script taught with regularity in all Japanese schools. He smiled slightly to himself at the mis-spelling of just one vital word.

  He drank as much of the liquid as he could in one swallow. It tasted utterly foul. He rubbed what was left on the legs of the table. That way, he hoped, it would serve to keep ants from the food that was sometimes left there. In the latrines, as he gratingly coughed as loudly as he could, he smashed the bottle on to the concrete floor and dropped the pieces down into the half-full troughs. No one would find them there. The shredded wrapping paper followed it and he urinated on that to make sure it was well embedded in the filth.

  There was still time before the evening meal was ready. Sandingham walked through the camp towards the kitchen, the note rolled as tightly as possible, and pushed into the folds of his fandushi. The senior officer, a major in the Royal Artillery, was standing by a large cauldron, stirring the glue-some ingredients with a pole.

  ‘When I was a lad, Joe, I had a nanny. My parents had a number of staff. Our washer-woman – “laundress”, to give her her correct domestic title – whenever I returned from school for the holidays or an exeat, used to get my games kit from the nanny and stir it in the copper boiler in our laundryroom in much the same way as I now prepare a repast for my men. Pity,’ he remarked solemnly, half in thought, ‘we can’t get a weekend exeat.’

  ‘Can I have a private and urgent word, sir?’

  ‘Wilkins, see if you can keep this from congealing while I have a word with Captain Sandingham here.’

  The kitchen orderly, who was let off work duty as he had only two fingers on his right hand, took over the agitation of the soup. Sandingham and the major went into a corner.

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘I got this today, sir. From a friendly Nip at my work place.’

  It made him uneasy to call Mishima a Nip.

  The major read the note quickly.

  ‘Where’s the liquid?’

  ‘I drank a bit, sir – tasted like Jeyes Fluid smells – and rubbed the rest on our table. I didn’t like to be seen with the bottle.’

  ‘Where is it now?’

  He told him as they returned to the soup.

  The major loosely crushed the note up and slipped it on to the glowing fire under the cauldron. Sandingham watched it char, then briefly flare.

  ‘I’ll spread the word in the usual manner,’ the major informed him. ‘Grand news. Tokyo bombed. Japan is within the range of USAF aircraft. Maybe even carrier-borne…’

  Wilkins relinquished the stirring pole. The soup had turned more glutinous than before but could not be thinned. There was no water to spare.

  Later, as they sat around their hut table slurping the soup with china spoons, one of the Americans commented, ‘What the hell is that goddam vile stink? It ain’ the soup here. It seems to be coming out of the very woodwork. I didn’ notice it before. Some kind of Jap secret weapon.’

  Sandingham kept mum.

  By morning, the word was about in the camp. Tokyo had been bombed.

  * * *

  Due to the collapse of one of the supporting poles for the awning over the lorry, assisted by rusting and the artful manipulative bending of the private who contrived to sit by it every day, the tarpaulin cover was dispensed with in the early spring. Although it meant a cold ride to the timber yard in the early morning, it did mean that the countryside was now open to their view. The sight of the local Japanese peasants going about their domestic and agricultural chores gave the prisoners’ lives some new if passing interest.

  Any thoughts of escape over the sides of the truck were ludicrous and inevitably doomed to failure. The islands of Japan were a secure prison in themselves. Rumours circulated from time to time that some prisoners had escaped from a camp in Kyushu and were living rough in the mountains, from which they conducted lightning commando raids upon Japanese military establishments, but these were inventions of fancy.

  At first, Sandingham had believed in them: they were vaguely plausible. But soon the stories took on the hints of fiction more commonly found in The Boys’ Own and he disbelieved them totally after he heard whispers to the effect that this band, now grown to forty strong, had succeeded in destroying an armaments convoy heading to the naval base at Kobe. They had mined two bridges, so the story went, trapped the trucks between the explosions and mown the occupants down with heavy machine-gun fire. That Kobe was in Honshu and the prisoners were reputed to live in the hills of an island south of Nagasaki, three hundred and fifty miles away across Japan’s most southerly island, the well-patrolled straits at Shimonoseki and the Inland Sea, only proved the lie. The more ignorant of the prisoners, though – those of the other ranks, who had no inkling of the geography of their temporary host nation – believed in the fantasy and Sandingham was inclined not to disabuse them.

  Sandingham rested his head on his folded arms and peered over the woodwork of the lorry. The two guards that morning were crouched in the lee of the cab, sitting close together to avoid the cut of the wind. The snow had been thawed for a fortnight but there was still a frost at night at least once a week and the wind coming down from the hills was raw and sharp. His eyes filled with tears from the cold and his nose ran but he wiped neither. There seemed no point. He would wait until they reached the timber yard then blow his nose in the oriental fashion, pinching his nostrils between his thumb and index finger and squirting it clean on to the hard ground. In the meantime, he sniffed.

  There was a military commander inspecting infantry units in the area at the time and his staff car, with its accompanying bevy of vehicles, appeared ahead of their truck on the narrow road. Their driver pulled in to the approach lane to a small farm to let the saloon cars by. Once they had passed, he put the truck into gear and pressed the accelerator. The engine roared and the gears squealed; then there was a grunt from the engine, as if it were fed up, and all sounds of activity within it ceased. The driver attempted to restart it but with no result other than a gravelly grinding of the starter motor.

  The guards sprang into ac
tion, jumped over the tailboard and positioned themselves so that they had a clear view of the rear and sides of the truck. The prisoners were ordered to stay put. Two guards were not sufficient to march them all the remaining three miles to the timber yards or back to the camp. The driver and the warders discussed the matter in muted tones and the former then set off to find a telephone. With a degree of shouting, gesticulation, gabbled English and one face-slapping, the prisoners were made to sit on the floor of the lorry facing outwards. They shuffled themselves into position, trying to get closer to each other for warmth as they moved. Finally satisfied with the seating arrangements, the guards stood easy but kept their rifles at the ready in both hands, bayonets fixed.

  As if to bless the little gathering of men in dire need, the clouds broke open and the first of the warm spring sunshine that they were to know in the few brief weeks between winter and the heat of summer bathed them. The light was weak but soft and penetrating, and as it shone the men grew chatty and whispered amongst themselves. Their guards ordered them to speak, not whisper: a whispering man can be plotting subterfuge while logic demands that a talker cannot. It made little difference, for neither of the guards could understand textbook English, let alone the idiomatic prisoner-slang that was used to confound or confuse the captors.

  Not bothering to join in the conversation, Sandingham let his mind wander across the view before him. Immediately below the bank of the road was a paddyfield, the earth in it hard and dry and as yet unplanted. A tree was growing on the path between this field and the next, and from it he could hear the song of a bird he did not recognise. It was a shrill pip-pi-pip call, and was repeated three times, then four times, then twice before going back to thrice again. Between each call was a brief pause and, every time the thrice call was reached, there was a longer break.