The diet induced feelings of lethargy that were close to overpowering. Many internees had already died. The rations were only just enough to live on, and the emaciated camp inmates could be killed by what should have been small setbacks – a cough, an upset stomach. The thing which kept people alive was a belief that the war would end and we would be released. When people let go of that hope they did not last long.
After I had got my strength back, or as much of it as I was going to get back on a diet of rice gruel, I did the rounds of people I’d known outside. Morale was surprisingly high, not least because when it dropped, people tended to die. All the ex-Bank people preferred being in camp to being outside. Everyone was paralysed with anxiety about what was happening to our colleagues in the hands of the Kempetai; but we also knew there was nothing to do, nothing we could do. The great nagging worry was that the Kempetai would find out more about BAAG and arrest and execute more people; but that had been the worry before, too.
I was walking back to the barracks one day for a lie-down after doing some slow-motion weeding in the vegetable patch when I saw a figure I knew I knew but couldn’t quite place. That was a familiar sensation in camp, when people were so physically changed. This woman was coming out of the door in front of me. She was wearing a clean flower-print dress which had apparently been taken in to compensate for lost weight. Something about the purposeful angle of her head and her walk was familiar. She was carrying a bucket in the crook of her arm as if it were a handbag.
‘Mrs Marler?’ I said. She turned. I hope I kept my face straight: it was Mrs Marler, mahogany brown, and so thin that her face was a crowded field not of lines but crevasses. Her mouth was set firmly downwards. She had no idea who I was. ‘Tom Stewart – from the Darjeeling. The chap who learnt Cantonese for a bet?’
‘Ah!’ Mrs Marler was smiling now, her teeth yellow and, because of receding gums, very long. ‘The nuns’ chum! Yes, of course!’
She told me she was a ‘blockhead’: camp terminology for leader of one of the inmates’ committees. I asked after her husband and her face changed again.
‘Bert’s not … he’s a bit down in the dumps. I don’t … Perhaps you might come and see us? It might cheer him up.’ And then, becoming firm again: ‘Come round after lectures tomorrow. And call me Beryl.’
The next day, after hearing Professor Cobb on the subject of Tang Dynasty poetry – especially his favourite, Wang Wei – I went to see the Marlers. They had what looked like a former boiler room in a bungalow inhabited by about two dozen people. There was space in it for a camp bed, which they folded away during the day. Beryl had somehow got hot water and so there was tea.
Marler was sitting on the floor. He was looking down as I walked in. I could see that something had gone wrong; not just physically but in his spirit. It was as if the air had been let out of him.
‘Mr Marler! How nice to see you!’
He looked up. He may have thought he was smiling. She was fussing with cups.
‘Stewart.’
‘You look well,’ I said in Cantonese, cheerfully, to show I was making a joke. At first he didn’t react. Then, very slowly, he said:
‘You kept it up, then.’
‘Oh yes – best thing I ever did. I’m in your debt, Mr Marler. I can’t tell you how useful it’s been. One of things I miss most about being in camp is not being able to keep it up – I’m worried I’ll forget before the war is over.’ That didn’t come out quite right. ‘I mean, my memory’s like a sieve, I’ll have forgotten all the Chinese I know in no time.’
‘I’m sure we’ll be out long before that happens,’ said Beryl, brightly. Her husband didn’t say anything. ‘Have you noticed in the Hong Kong Daily News how the sites of the terrible defeats the Allies are suffering keep getting closer to Japan? Terribly encouraging. It won’t be long now, it really won’t.’
As if speaking from the bottom of a well, Marler said:
‘They’ll execute all internees before they lose. None of us is leaving Stanley.’
His despair was so raw it was like a social gaffe. One felt fear when people began to talk like that: in our hearts, all internees knew that despair was contagious. Neither Beryl nor I knew where to look. She and I talked about nothing for ten minutes and then I left. A week later Marler was dead. When it happened, it could happen very quickly.
*
‘We should open a hotel somewhere else,’ said Masterson one day, a few months after Marler died. We were on duty in the kitchen, washing vegetables. This was important because of the use of night soil – human excrement – as a fertiliser. In Masterson’s top pocket I could see a rolled cigarette, a special treat waiting for when he stopped work. He had been known to swap food for tobacco, a fact which led to one of the few real arguments we ever had.
Cooper, who had been in the middle of a disquisition on some aspect of Miss Farrington’s many virtues, looked a little nonplussed. Then, recovering, he began:
‘Mary says –’
‘Kowloon, you mean? Like the time with Mr Luk? Going into competition with the Peninsula, only less snooty?’
Masterson shook his head. ‘Somewhere else altogether. Out in the country. On Lantao, or one of the islands, or even Stanley.’
‘No, not Stanley.’
‘Well, Big Wave Bay then, or Repulse Bay, or somewhere. Where people can go for a break or for weekends.’
‘No adulterers, though, Hong Kong’s not big enough.’
Masterson had often spoke of the importance of adultery to the hotel business. It was one of the things he said was tricky about Hong Kong from the professional hotelier’s point of view.
‘That’s right. Lots of other business, mind you. Weekends. Wedding receptions. Somewhere to go.’
‘Mary says that when the war’s over she wants to buy a boat and go sailing every single weekend.’
For a moment I could almost feel the movement of the boat under my feet. Sitting on deck with a beer after a swim; fishing; diving; finding unoccupied island beaches. At times the thought of freedom could be too sharp, too painful. Hope and despair were alike in the way that opposites often are, and the extreme form of one could become the other very easily. You had to keep your balance.
The need to do so was more acute because it began to seem that we were going to win the war. We could see it in the way our Taiwanese guards behaved: they would whisper items of news, rumours of Japanese defeats and Allied progress. A coolie bringing fuel for the incinerator (where blankets ruined by dysentery were burnt) told Professor Cobb about the Normandy landings. As Beryl pointed out, even the Hong Kong Daily News couldn’t conceal the trend of the war, since its chronicle of Allied defeats moved ever closer to Berlin and Tokyo. Allied planes began to appear overhead. Some of them dropped bombs; an American bomb killed fourteen people in one bungalow. Canadian internees were repatriated. The idea of our eventual release made camp life harder to bear. There were rumours that we would be exchanged for Japanese civilians whom the Australians had interned. It was life day by day; I stuck to the near horizons.
In early August 1945, we heard that the Russians had declared war on Japan. That was the first sign that the war was ending. On the evening of Thursday 16th August I went down to the kitchen to see if there was any hot water left after dinner.
‘They’re saying something’s happened in Japan,’ Beryl Marler said. She was sitting at one of the tables checking a duty rota. ‘Someone heard it from the Chinese. Something about a bomb.’
We had all become experts at attempting to sense the texture of rumours – what felt possible, what was clearly nonsense; the difference between wishful thinking and informed speculation and genuine bamboo-telegraph information. Perhaps it is only with hindsight that I can remember feeling that this time it might be real. I said:
‘I hope it was a really big one.’
The next day we were given a special allocation of cigarettes and, for the first and last time in the whole war, a roll of toilet paper.
That is when I knew it was finished. I gave my cigarettes to Masterson.
‘I do hope you’re right,’ he said. ‘I’m going to smoke all of these straightaway, so if the bloody war isn’t over I’ll never forgive you.’
The next day the Hong Kong Daily News announced that the Emperor loved his people so much he had decided to allow the war to end. We were advised to stay in camp until the situation had clarified and to refrain from excessive celebration.
Chapter Nine
The Plough,
Faversham
1 September 1945
Dear Tom,
I was so happy to get your telegram. We had been so worried and it was difficult to believe that no news was good news. Anne and I look forward to seeing you very much. She says it is funny to think she has a brother-in-law she’s never met! The boys also want to meet their ‘nuncle’.
I’m sorry to say that in with the joy of hearing you are alive is some sadness also. Grandma, whose health had not been well for some years, had a stroke in summer of last year and passed away after a short illness. She had been in good spirits all through the war, even when it was difficult, and had a good innings as she used to say herself. I hope you will let this be a comfort to you in with the sad news.
I will not write any more so I leave something over to tell you when you come here!
Your brother,
David
Saint Francis Xavier’s Mission,
Chung King
Szechuan
19 September 1945
Dear Tom,
I cannot say what a relief it was to learn you are alive and well. Deo Gratia. The hardest thing was not hearing anything other than rumours. You have been in my mind and I have often asked the community to remember you in their prayers.
As you can see from the head of this letter, I am at our mission in Szechuan. I have been here for three years. Before that I was mainly in Hunan. There have been shortages of food and the people are tired of war but we here are all well.
Father Peter Wu, whom you have not met, is going to Canton and then probably on to Hong Kong so he will either deliver this letter himself or ask a member of the mission to do it for him if he is detained. I will be in Chung King for the forseeable future, owing to the demands of our mission.
I give thanks for your survival.
Yours in the love of Christ,
Sister Maria
Masterson and I sailed back to England on the SS Abergavenny. We were lucky in that it had been a passenger ship; troop ships were less comfortable. We shared a cabin. I took the upper bunk. The cabin was the same size as mine had been on the Darjeeling. When I asked if anyone had tidings of the Darjeeling I was told that it had been sunk in action in the North Atlantic with the loss of all hands.
I spent as much of the days as I could walking around the deck in the open air. At first this was no more than a couple of circuits. Before long I could walk for an hour at a time. I began to realise that I would get better. That was not a foregone conclusion. Many internees never recovered their health.
Masterson spent the whole voyage sitting in a chair on deck, reading. The ship’s library had a selection of nineteenth-century fiction, especially Dickens and Trollope. Masterson would wrap himself in a jacket, coat, and sometimes even a blanket as we crossed the Indian Ocean, Red Sea, and made our way through the Suez Canal, so absorbed in his book that I would have to address him two or three times if I wanted him to look up.
By the time we reached the Mediterranean I was, if not back to my state of health before the war, at least much better. I could exercise until I was out of breath without causing my heart and lungs to feel hysterical with the effort. My digestion was working well, as long as I avoided fatty foods and cheese. My gums had stopped bleeding. Other ex-internees were starting to look better also, putting on weight. You could, on the metal decks of the ship, hear the difference. This in turn made it clear that Masterson was not thriving; not getting any stronger. He needed help to climb stairs, and would stand aside to let people overtake him if they came up behind him in the corridors and gangways. He was perfectly calm and stoical about this.
‘The thing about us old buffers …’ he would say. Once or twice he had a headache which made him look pale and grey beneath his tan. His face would become tight around the eyes. Then he would ask me to read from whichever book he had on the go. I tried to give the characters different voices, until he begged me to stop.
*
We arrived at Tilbury just after dawn. I had been up on deck for more than an hour, my bag already packed. It was drizzling and the sky was clouded over in a dense English way. It was as if greyness had leaked out of the sky and contaminated everything visible. I had thought that I would go straight to Faversham, but by the time I had disembarked and gone through customs with my temporary papers and single canvas bag I found that I could not. So I took a bus into London instead.
I have sometimes wondered what would have happened if that had been a bright blue autumn day, and a girl in a thin dress had sat down beside me on the bus and started a conversation. I had not been sure, on my way to England, whether I was ever going to return to Hong Kong. I felt that my experiment or adventure might have ended in Stanley. But that first morning, perhaps even that first glimpse, made me feel sure that I could not go back to England. The country seemed drab, flat, and lifeless. English voices seemed straining to be reasonable and apologetic, so unlike the frank contention of the Cantonese. There was no colour anywhere. It was not warm, and at the age of thirty-two I could feel a numb ache where my fingers had been broken. There was bomb damage everywhere. Parts of London looked as if they had been trodden flat. It did not look like the capital city of a victorious empire.
The bus dropped me at Waterloo station. My plan had been to wander around the centre of the city, see Trafalgar Square and Piccadilly again; but I was tired and shaky and my bag felt suddenly much heavier. I found a café underneath the station and sat with a disgustingly strong and over-milked cup of tea.
There was a train down to Faversham in the late afternoon. I took it, using a pass I had been issued in Hong Kong. It was some years since I had last been on a train, so the trip was a great delight. Once we got outside London, the eye had some relief in the golds and reds of the autumn foliage. I smoked so many cigarettes I felt like Masterson. At Faversham station I set out on foot for the Plough. The town was more or less intact: it had been far enough from the docks to escape the bombing. I saw one or two faces I knew but nobody recognised me.
When I got to the Plough I went round to the yard at the back to get my breath before going in. As I put my bag down and straightened up I became aware that my brother David was looking at me. Or at least, it would have been my brother David if he had been a five-year-old child standing with his hands on his hips and a suspicious expression.
‘You must be Martin,’ I said. The look of suspicion darkened. Then he said: ‘Uncle!’
‘That’s right. I’m your Uncle Tom.’
We shook hands very formally. Then he turned and ran inside, shouting, ‘He’s here!’
*
I had been dreading it, but it was fine. David, stocky and bluff and shrewd as ever, could not hide how pleased he was to see me, nor I him. His wife Annie was much prettier than I had expected, tall (at least David’s height, or an inch more) and gentle and quick-witted. He was slightly careful with her, as if he could not quite believe his luck; it was sweet and funny to see. Martin was exactly, in every detail, like David had been like a child. Tom, the youngest, was shyer and better-looking, and barely spoke.
Martin was particularly interested that I had been in a camp. He interrogated me at dinner, a roast leg of lamb which Anne must have gone to some trouble to obtain, and which I could barely eat. For Tom the novelty of my arrival had worn off, and he was struggling to stay awake. There was thickly cut bread and freshly churned butter.
‘Did you have tents?’ asked Martin.
Da
vid and Anne exchanged a glance. I gave them a look to show it was all right.
‘No, not really.’
‘Did you climb trees?’
‘No.’
‘Did you go fishing?’
‘No.’
Some people at Stanley had sometimes tried to catch fish from the beach on the infrequent occasions when internees were allowed to walk there. But the expenditure of effort involved was so great that it left the fisherman gasping with exertion and ravenously, dangerously hungry. For the same reason, although the water looked beautifully tempting, nobody ever swam. All this was too much trouble to explain.
‘Did you have sing-songs?’
‘No – well, once or twice.’
He didn’t try to conceal his disappointment.
‘He’s mad about the Cubs,’ said David.
‘We made a boat out of a barrel,’ explained Martin.
‘I hope you’ll take me out on it,’ I said. All four of them said:
‘It sank.’
‘I was frighted,’ Tom added, quietly but firmly.
*
Over the next few days I saw people I knew. Most of the boys I was at school with had been in the war, and a good few of them weren’t yet home. Some – not an enormous number, but not a tiny one either – had been killed. The worst single incident had come when a bomb had a direct hit on a rickety shelter and killed a group of dockworkers, four of whom came from Faversham. Many of the women had been working in the fields and looked amazing: they were healthy and fit and golden, not the deep leather suntan of the tropics but with skin the tint of ripe wheat. There was cider and beer and plenty to eat. (After the end of rationing, my brother never ate rabbit again.) I settled down a little. Here out in the country everything did not seem grey. In the afternoons I would go for walks out of town, taking footpaths I hadn’t been on since I was at school. The walks all seemed much shorter than I remembered, but on the other hand I was weaker, so it evened out.
Fragrant Harbour Page 17
