by Martin Booth
Tact was an easily acquired and much-practised art with the prisoners, and this one knew it.
‘Mr Kumisada,’ he began in Japanese, addressing the owner in what he hoped were formal tones, ‘I stand to thank you on behalf of the unworthy prisoners present who have the honour to work in your timber yard. It is with deep gratitude that we accept your kind gift of cakes to celebrate your festival. We apologise for being unable to repay your hospitality and generosity save in renewing our efforts on the behalf of your company.’
He then saluted, bowed, turned about and marched back to his place with the others. Mr Kumisada nodded to them all in the way benefactors have.
That afternoon, the translator got hold of a hammer and a four-inch nail, knocked it deeply into a pine trunk and then put the timber through the circular saw. The nail stripped over fifty teeth off the blade and rendered it inoperable for a fortnight.
The second event came a few days after the new circular saw blade was delivered.
An emaciated mule pulling a cart arrived in the timber yard compound on a sweltering afternoon early in August. There was a tropical storm on the way and the heat was unbearable, the discomfort compounded by the appearance of storm flies, small midges that settled on everything and itched furiously, especially on the prisoners’ near-bald heads. It was time for the mid-afternoon rest period, a ten-minute break that allowed the prisoners and their co-workers to relieve themselves, have a quick smoke and then fill up on water to replace that lost in the urine and the day’s sweat.
The carter called to the hancho. The hancho called to the shotai-cho, the work squad leaders. They returned to their units and passed on the message.
‘Mr Kumisada sends his regards,’ reported the translator, ‘and instructs that we have a three-quarters-of-an-hour break this afternoon. He has sent refreshments in the cart.’
They stopped work and congregated at the door of the shed.
‘You know what I’d like now, boyo?’ commented a Welsh lance-corporal who had only recently been drafted to the camp. Nobody answered him so he continued his soliloquy. ‘I’d like a cold pint of fresh milk in a glass bottle.’
‘Not a hope in Christendom,’ replied Sandingham. ‘If it’s fresh water that’s not sat in the sun for hours we’ll be more than bloody lucky.’
But they were.
Pulling aside some layers of straw, the carter produced a crate of Japanese bottled beer. It was handed out, one bottle between two men. It was warm but not hot and they cracked the tops off by prising them loose on the edge of the platform of the planer.
The prisoners drank with a sense of wonderment. They’d not had real alcohol since their capture. They lay on the ground in the shade, ignored the storm flies and the gathering heat and let the beer ease its way through them like a drug. Soma could not have had a more magical effect.
When they returned to the camp that night they kept their mouths shut about their good fortune. It would have been too cruel to let on about their beer and extra lay-off to those who worked all day under the clenched-fisted, often whip-holding, hand of the hancho at the lime kiln works nearer the city.
That night, the storm struck. Inside the camp the power failed and the guards off duty were rousted out to assist in patrolling the perimeter with those on the sentry roster. The roof lifted off the kitchen and took days to repair. By morning, the hills were misted in grey, miserable clouds and the guards were in a foul mood. It was as if the gods were doling out punishment.
* * *
At Christmas, they were each given a postcard and were told they could write home if they wished.
Sandingham borrowed a pencil and wrote on his card, ‘Dear Pa, Am well and in a prison camp. Life is not too hard. Wish you were here! Love, your son Joseph.’ To write more would be to invite the censor’s red pencil and a refusal to mail the card.
As he walked through the camp, Sandingham gazed at the oblong of pasteboard in his hands. He rubbed his fingers hard on the edges, soiling them slightly with grime. If, he thought, he pressed hard enough, some minute shards of himself – flakes of skin or smears of sweat – would come off and, as his father picked the card up from the bristled doormat in the porch, they would perhaps somehow transfer themselves to his hands. His father would peer first over his half-spectacles at the stamp and then read the message. He tried to imagine him reading the card out loud over the breakfast table as he knew the old man would. After that, he would grunt as he always did and return his attention to the morning edition of the Manchester Guardian.
He posted it in the wooden box by the guardhouse, tears in his eyes. It was the only letter he had posted since before the fall of Hong Kong.
It was delivered five months later, though he did not know it at the time, the day after his father’s death.
* * *
While Pluto stood guard over them with his cartoon-character sagging jowls and soulful eyes – by which he had earned his nickname – they dug over the soil and lifted the small hard potatoes from the clods of earth shivering and blinking in the first light shower of snow. The foliage of the plants was dried and browned on the surface and they were careful to harvest that as well, for it was crisp as tinder and burned easily.
The wind had dropped and the snow flurries ceased by the time the four of them reached the end of the row and had filled the two baskets with potatoes.
‘Spuds,’ Wilkins said laconically. ‘Chip ’em and fry ’em wi’ cod. “Two cod and six penn’orth o’ chips, missus. Sorry, dear: cod’s off. Got a nice bit o’ skate, though. All right. Ta. Two skate and six penn’orth. That’ll be one an’ ten.”’ He mimicked each voice. ‘Vinegar chained to the coun’er. Salt chained to the coun’er. Rain pissin’ down outsi’. Fat hissin’ in the frier. Steam on th’ winders. Number Fourteen going by. To Peckham.’ He looked up at the snow-laden sky. ‘Four’een go to Peckham? I can’ bloody remember. Use to get it every day t’ school.’
Sandingham hoisted the bamboo pole on to his shoulder and slid the notched ends into the ropes on the baskets.
‘Sure you can manage, Joe?’
‘No. But I’ll do it. If you hear anything crack, it’s not the pole. It’s me.’
‘You make a dandy coolie, Joe.’
‘And you make a dandy spectator, Phil,’ he answered and they all staggered off, guard and guarded, to the camp gateway under their load of potatoes, oncoming winter and imprisonment.
Sandingham dropped his cargo in the kitchen and was about to collapse into a corner when the day’s cook asked him to split some wood. He picked up the axe from beside the door and went back out into the cold. It was getting dark but the camp lights were on, casting their morbid rays across the woodpile heaped at the rear of the next-door barrack.
He picked up a large log to use as a block, then balanced another upon it. He rubbed his hands on his trousers to give them a grip on the axe handle and swung the blade over his head.
Sandingham could not recall when he had last been so tired. Not even since being taken prisoner: not even in the days immediately before his capture. He did not want to chop wood. He did not want to eat. He did not want to talk, or read or dream. He wanted simply to sleep. The longer the better. Forever, if possible.
The blade struck the log, was embedded in it and came free. The wood did not break open. He lifted the axe and tried again. This time the axe merely dented the up-ended log. He took aim a third time. The axe penetrated the wood and there was a ripping sound.
He picked up another log. It rejected the blade on the first swing but peeled open easily on the second. He started on a third.
This was not a log, though. It was the skull of the soldier on the bridge of the Lisbon Maru. It was the chest of the machine-gunner on the deck outside. It was the round moon-face of Emperor Hirohito. It was the glowering visage of Winston Churchill. It was Stalin’s head. It was Roosevelt’s. Hitler’s. It was Goering’s head. It was Shat-in-Pants’ head. It was everyone he hated. It was everything he ha
ted. It was the god Mars and Vulcan and all the warring deities of the Oriental pantheon.
‘For the love of Pete, what are you doing, Joe? We’ve all had our food. Where the hell were you?’
Phil, the duty cook for their barrack, was standing by the corner of the building with his arms on his bony hips and an amazed expression.
Sandingham said nothing. He just lowered the axe and rested the blade on the ground by his foot. He let go of the handle and watched as it toppled over on to the chopped wood. He was surrounded by sheared logs: he had broken up half the month’s firewood supply. It was dark and it was snowing heavily. He was covered with snow and heaving and smoking like a horse after a frosty morning canter. Phil caught him as he fell.
* * *
The winter lasted as long as life itself, or so it seemed in that second year of captivity. The anniversary of his being taken was not something Sandingham recognised now. The months became a monotony of drudgery and working at the timber yard. He pondered, one day early in 1944, how many planks he had planed, trees he had cut or logs cracked. He tried to guess how many tons of sawdust he had swept up and bagged, how many miles of curling shavings he had peeled off, how many balls of pine sap he had rubbed into his sores, his insect bites and the rims of his nostrils.
Seated within the arc of feeble heat the hibachi offered to them, Sandingham and his hut comrades talked through a rest day that was forced upon them by a blizzard raging outside. It was so fierce that even walking to the latrines was a struggle, never mind journeying to the timber yard.
‘If this were Blighty now, we’d be sitting round the fire in the front room roasting chestnuts. What I’d give for a roast chestnut. Lick it first and dip it in the salt.’
‘For God’s sake, mun, shut your bloody mouth,’ protested a Geordie voice from the darkness outside the glow of the hibachi and the dim bulb. ‘The more you t’ak about it, the worse it is.’
‘Pipe down, Wallsend! It’s memories that keep us going.’
‘Mem-or-ees are made of this,’ sang a dis-harmonious third voice.
Silence ensued before one of the Americans said, ‘In Oklahoma right now, the snow’ll be highern the barn on the farm. You can climb up in winter and toboggan from the ridge of the barn to the drift by the creek.’ He pronounced it ‘crick’.
‘Crick in the neck?’
Laughter.
‘Only if you hit the guttering on the way down.’
More laughter.
‘I haven’t seen the snapshot yet. Anybody got it?’
There was a rummaging in a bunk and a photo was produced. It was a large black and white print, eight by ten inches, taken by a Japanese photographer on Boxing Day. Of course, it was posed.
Quite why the commandant had ordered it be taken wasn’t sure, but the general idea was that the prisoners should indicate how happy they were as the shutter snapped and the old-fashioned magnesium powder plopped on its little metal platform. Speculation had it that this was a sign that the commandant was lining his nest against accusations after the war was won by the Allies that he had mistreated his charges. This in turn gave rise to the hope that the war was indeed drawing to a close. Certainly things seemed to be on the turn in Europe.
Sandingham held the photograph under the dim light. It showed the inhabitants of his hut ranked down the central aisle between the bunks and tatami. They were all dressed in their best articles of clothing – at least, those to the forefront were – some of which had been borrowed under orders from fellow PoWs in other barracks. No one was smiling. A few looked blankly at the camera while the rest attempted not to show malice for what was so obviously a put-up job. Any hint of disagreement or obvious displeasure would be certain to warrant a beating after the shutter had revealed its secrets.
Before them, his back to the camera, was the commandant. He was saluting. The prisoners were standing to attention, but each held in his hands either a book or a bowl within which was piled what appeared to be food. It wasn’t. It was sawdust. To add realism, one of two of them had real buns beside their sawdust ‘rice’; but these were taken away after the silver chloride plate was exposed.
‘One day, I’m going to get out of this shit-hole and tell the truth about that picture.’
‘Don’t be so optimistic, Taff. You’ll have to find a senior officer to tell the tale to. How many would believe it?’
‘Someone will believe,’ Sandingham said quietly. ‘One day, the story will get out and there will be people who will believe. There will be doubters and pooh-poohers and there will be those who will listen and exaggerate the stories for their own ends. There will be others who will believe it but will play it down just as there will be others who’ll listen and believe but ignore it all. What they won’t believe is the kindness of some of the Japs. Most of them – the whole damn nation, probably – will be branded for decades as mean-minded, sadistic little yellow sods. Nips. Narrow-minded little cunts, as quick with the rifle butt to the ribs as with the cigarette butt to the cheeks of your arse and the skin of your balls. We’ll remember them for that. We’ll forget the rest.’
Nobody answered him until Foster did. He was a prisoner who before the war had been an engineer for a tin mine up-country from Kuala Lumpur. He was thin on capture, and was now so near to death from starvation that his skin was tight across every surface bone of his body. His wrists looked as brittle as matches and his face was like a skull with eyes. His chapped lips were drawn to bloodless pencil lines. He had suffered worse than most from the deficient diet as he was allergic to some of the starchy root vegetables they were fed: if he ate them, he threw them up soon afterwards, losing not only what he could not eat but also what he had been able to swallow and could normally retain.
‘Joe’s right. We shall forget the kindnesses. Once we’re liberated, we’ll overlook the good things and recall only the bad. Joe’s man in the timber yard; the sympathetic hancho at the docks; Phil’s Private Higashino from Camp Seventeen; Natch’s two lady-friends at the railway marshalling yard … We’ll forget them. We’ll remember the bastards – Coffin Charlie, Pluto…’
‘Napoleon, Wada, White Pig, Fujihara…’
Sandingham stopped listening to the catalogue. He had his own index of horrors: Willy Stewart’s crucifixion, Baz’s voice drifting out to sea, the floating peak cap … Bob’s death and the ambush at Wong Nai Chung Gap. Enough was enough.
As for liberation – that was the ultimate in pipe-dreams.
* * *
There was a sound of loud, repetitive hammering in the early light, but no one took any notice of it until the prisoners began to stir for the day’s work.
‘This you’ve gotta see. You’d not believe it…’
Sandingham and two others of his shotai were heading for the parade ground where the lorry was due to arrive at any minute.
‘What is it?’
‘New school rools nailed up by the Headmaster him-self,’ replied the US naval rating. ‘You ain’t gonna believe it.’ He did not speak too loudly in case there was an interpreter about, out of sight around a corner.
A board, four feet square, had been nailed to the wall of the barrack that overlooked the square. The paint was new and the lettering was English, but also quaintly Japanese. Sandingham stood close to read it, his eyes smarting in the cold.
1. It no allow kill commandent:
Punished – life imprison & shooted to death
2. It no allow damage commandent:
Punished – life imprison & punished with shoot
3. It no allow think kill commandent:
Punished – shooted to death & imprison
4. It no allow steal Imprieal Japanese Army:
Punished – big punish & death may be
5. It no allow rude to Japanese Imprieal Army solder
Punished – ordinary punish & keep life
6. It no allow escap
‘Apropos Number Three,’ asked Foster, ‘do you think you’re shot before or after life
in prison?’
‘Yes,’ answered Sandingham. ‘And in Number Four, who the hell would want to steal the IJA?’
The American rating looked about him. The nearest guard was seventy-five feet away, staring out through the wire.
‘I sure know. Gen’ral MacArthur sure would!’
‘I wonder,’ Sandingham pointed out in the lorry, just as it was about to leave, ‘how they’d prove Number Three.’
‘They wouldn’t. They just do it and fuck you, Jack.’
* * *
It was evening, the first week of March. The sun was set, the sky a light, flesh pink and Sandingham was sitting on the steps to the kitchen building cleaning the woks that had been used to prepare the evening food. As chemical cleaners were short to the point of invisibility, he was using a mixture of grit, wood-ash and water to remove the smears of food from the metal.
Foster appeared and sat next to him on the bottom step. He had a cigarette in his right hand, the fingers now so bony it looked as if he were clawing at the tobacco rather than holding it between two digits. He lifted it to his lips and sucked noisily on it. He had had trouble getting his lips to meet and air eked in at the corners. He had been off sick from the shotai for more than a fortnight and had spent his days with two other seriously ill men down at the beach, under the single gaze of a guard who had lost an eye fighting in China. He was a member of the gunzoku, the corps of disabled servicemen from all ranks who had been invalided into the prison camps to release fitter men for active service.
Every morning, they were marched – ‘walked’ would be more accurate, for they no longer had the strength to march in the rigid goosestep of the Japanese Army style – to the sandy beaches two miles away where they spent the day seeking out the tiny white crabs that inhabited the littoral zones. The crabs were no bigger than a half-crown coin, even when fully grown, and they were found in burrows in the sand from which they carried out sorties to establish their own territories against others of their own kind, searched for any organic material washed up and left behind on the tidemark and ran to the waters’ edge to wet their gill filaments. If one were careful, one could waylay them on their route back from the sea to their burrow, for under no circumstance would they entertain hiding in another crab’s tunnel.
