Three Came Home
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The Japanese gave us a young female pig. “Raise pigs,” theysaid, “and stop complaining about food.”
“Raise pigs on what?” we said.
“On garbage.”
“We eat the garbage.”
“Don’t argue. It is an order.”
How one raised pigs from one lone female was not madeclear. However, we named her Salina; the Idds doted on her,and, being a Borneo pig, she raised herself. But she didn’t getfat, and she didn’t get pregnant.
One day we had an electrical storm. Lightning struck allaround us, and Salina, obediendy raising herself on garbageunder a near-by tree, was killed. Instandy the body was racedto the kitchen, the throat was cut by a Dutch Sister, an expertin slaughtering, and the carcass was divided amongst our threegroups: the Dutch Sisters, the EngKsh Sisters, and the womenand children. One pig equals pork stew for two hundred andeighty hungry people.
I dreaded breaking the news to George that Salina wasdead; but he had to know before diimer. “Poor Salina,” I said,“she’s gone to Pig Paradise!”
“Hurrah! Pork for supper! Chilrens! Pork for supper!”said George.
The Sisters in their way were equally practical: “The Lordhas provided a feast for All Saints’ Day,” they said.
We reserved ten spaces in one barrack for sick people.These spaces were always full. If you were sick, you tookyour bed with you. The Sisters took turns nursing.
I woke up one morning in this camp hospital ward insteadof my flat. I asked how I got there; all I could remember wasshaking with chills the afternoon before in my own quarters,and thinking sadly that I had no more quinine.
Sister said I was brought into hospital the night before witha high temperature and delirious. I had said the war was overand I was going home, and I headed out through the barbedwire several times. As they were afraid a sentry would shootme, the doctor moved me into the hospital, with a Sister towatch over me,
I remained there two weeks. Penelope moved into my spacein the mothers’ barrack, and took care of George, who be-came a reformed character. Everybody said he behavedmuch better with her than with me. He didn’t mks me, butI missed him.
There was one little Belgian woman in the ward, and therest were Sisters. The Sisters wore nighttime bonnets to savetheir head coverings. At seven every morning the priestcame to give Holy Communion. The Sisters lay like deadCrusaders, hands crossed on breasts, mouths open, awaitingthe Host. The priest administered it, and a look of satisf actioncrossed their faces. A few minutes they lay in meditation, theward so quiet, a Presence there. Then up they popped, ad-justed caps and nighties, called for tea.
Mother Lucila, an English nun, was having hemorrhagesfrom stomach and intestinal ulcers, and said to be dying.There were no drugs or food, no manner of giving a bloodtransfusion. A little ice was sent in by the Japs for ice packs.
One night she started to die at midnight. The only lightin the ward was a small coconut-oil lamp, of the Sisters,which was carried from bed to bed.
At 2.30 A.M. Mother Lucila’s Sisters were awakened andcalled for last prayers. A ghost procession of white-robedwomen, led by three russet-clad Slot Sisters, the holiest ofany, passed my bed praying, chanting, and singing “Mary,
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pray for us. Save her soul. Save her soul,” and surroundedMother Lucila’s bed.
I had been trying to doze inside my mosquito net, but thisfinished me; I sat up and joined in. Mother Rose came to me,and talked for a minute, and said, “Dear little Sister! She is sohappy! We are all so happy. She is happy to go. See, shehas a smile on her hps! ”
For hours there was the sound of vomiting, gasping,groaning, singing, and chanting, while Sisters went by withblood in bowls. Until 5.30, the Sisters prayed; then MotherLucila opened her eyes very wide and looked up at the facesabove her and said, “The Dear Lord is not coming for meyet. Go home, dear Sisters, and sleep.” The Sisters wenthome, and Mother Lucila fell asleep. From then on MotherLucila got better.
Every few days Dr. Yamamoto came, stood in the doorwaywith Litde Napoleon pose, one hand m shirt front, the otherbehind him, holding — guess what? — green bananas! Bel-lowed out, “Gibson!” Then with an expression on his facewhich was a blend of naughty boy having a joke at elders’expense, benevolent despot distributing alms to the grovefingpoor, and Charlie Chaplin imitating a Nipponese soldier, hedistributed the bananas, one per patient. We lay supine, handscupped on breast as in communion, awaiting the handout.Into each pair of hands Dr. Yamamoto himself, in person, nota motion picture, jabbed a banana.
The first day Yamamoto found me here he said, “Keif-kah?How do you feel. Keif?”
“Horrible!”
“Ha-ah-ah-ah!”
Dr. Gibson came to me hastily. “Oh, she’s better, thankyou, Doctor, much better.” It was a matter of pride for us tobe “better.”
Yamamoto: “Eh? Better-kah? Keif better?”
I, determined: “No, I’m not. I feel very iU. And I won’t beany better until I have more quinine. The doctor hasn’t
enough quinine to give me the full dose; she can only give meten grains. Will you send me some quinine?”
“No quinine-kah? Hah! Hummphl Hah! Quinine verydifficult! Nobody has enough. Hah! . . . Yes, I send youquinine.” Xhen to the doctor: “I send you quinine for Keif.Understand? For Keif. You give all to Keif.”
This meant he would send full dosage of quinine for me,all to be given to me instead of being divided amongst allmalaria patients, a few grains per capita, as communitymedicine.
The quinine came. I was up in five days. I had offendedagainst community law, but I was again able to do communitywork, and to take care of George.
One month later Yamamoto again found me in the hospitalbed, hands folded, waiting the green banana.
“What? Keif again? What disease?”
“Malaria. Will you please give me more quinine?”
“I think not malaria this time, Keif. No, no, no. I thinkinfluenza. Much influenza in Kuching now. I think verygood you gargle.” Demonstration here. Then hastily, to pre-vent my asking for a gargle, “Hot water very good to gargle! ”From which I judged he was short of quinine.
“This isn’t influenza, Doctor. I know it is malaria. If youwiU send me some quinine, I will be aU right.”
“Quinine! Quinine! Quinine! You always ask quinine.Keif! I always give! Ha! Ha! All right, all right, all right. Isend!”
He proceeded on the banana tour — exit with clicking heels.Each patient relaxed from the death rigor to look anxiously ather banana and see if it would ever ripen.
Again Yamamoto did what he said: quinine arrived forKeif.
During that stay in hospital I got down to eighty pounds.
Shortly after I left the ward there was a recurrent outbreakof dysentery, the ward was full, women lay languishing upontheir beds, unable to eat anything. Dr. Gibson pleaded for
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milk and eggs; they did not come. But Yamamoto came —with green bananas!
I thought a great deal in hospital, and mostly about onething: how to get a hen.
Somebody had had a great idea. Our diet was carbohydrate.The children must have protein. If you got a hen, and fedthe hen rice, and the hen laid an egg, you had protein. Thatwas the origin of the hen racket.
I did the mental work in hospital; as soon as I got out Itraded a black velvet dinner gown to a woman who wantedit, I don’t know why, for a white cotton sheet. The Chineseoutside of camp had the hens; they wanted white cottongoods, none of which had arrived in Borneo since we hadbeen cut off by war.
I made the deal through a Japanese guard. The sheet wasworth a hundred dollars cash, and was to be traded for twolaying (emphasize laying) hens, worth fifty dollars each.The guard was to procure the hens from a Chinese farmer,the guard probably receiving a third hen for himself, or keep-ing half the sheet.
After I gave the guard the sheet, a period of suspense fol-lowed. He was shifted to another cam
p and couldn’t get intouch with me, the price of hens went up, and sheets wentdown, a smuggling scare ensued.
The guard and I trusted each other, because each of us hadsomething on the other: we were equally anxious not to getcaught. But if the guard was caught tvith identifiable goods,I might be traced; or if he was questioned too closely undertorture, I would be.
One evening at dusk he returned, and called for me. I wentto the wire. In his arms nested a hen; number-one laying hen,Hetty. We welcomed her. I had never before really noticeda hen, except in gravy on a platter. I saw that this one wasundersized, moulty, had catarrh, and rattled. But the testwas, did she lay?
George adored her, grabbed her, held her, frightened her,let her loose; Hetty squawked and ran out through the barbedwire. We followed in agony, and stood at the wire makingnoises like fresh worms, hen food, bran mash, little chicks, oranything we thought a hen would like. Hetty didn’t givea damn. Just out of reach, she squawked and scratched andclucked and rattled. Never had I hated the barbed wire more.This went on for hours; George and I and our neighborsalternately enticing and cursing. Then the guard changed,and an old pal of George’s came around. We begged him toshoo Hetty in. He shooed. Hetty came. We fell on her, andtied her firmly by the leg under my part of the barrack, kind-ness to animals or no.
The next morning I was in the kitchen getting tea. A shoutcame from George, from Shihping Cho, from all the mothers’barrack: ^‘Come quick, come quick!” I ran. There stoodHetty in the garden, looking surprised. Beside her was an egg.We looked at her in awe. That egg was worth two dollars.
It was three weeks from dinner dress to egg. Hetty laidforty-one eggs before she went broody, and thereby estab-lished the camp record. They were like ping-pong balls, withshells like cellophane — but they were eggs, and George hadprotein, one egg’s-worth per day.
Then there was a long wait before the arrival of thesecond hen. The guard was held in the guardhouse forquestioning; I swore off smuggling, and gave up hope. Butone month later the guard came back, and this time he broughtLetty, Letty was a healthier, happier, wholesomer hen thanHetty, but she knew less about eggs. Everybody said, “Whata beautiful hen!” and Letty fluffed, and scratched, andgoggled her eyes, and did her droppings daintily, but didn’t doher duty. She ate too much and laid too little. I studied her,fed her everything I could spare, did everything but push anegg in in one end and pull it out the other. She laid justoften enough to keep me hopeful.
I fed Letty and Hetty with part of my rice ration, and
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with scrapmgs of bran which I pinched from the cattle shedwhen I was working outside. I took them out worming in thegarden attached to my wrist by strings, as each hen was onlypermitted to worm its owner’s garden. In time every inch ofour grounds was dewormed, and the only worms left in campwere in people’s intestines.
The hen racket grew. At one time the Japanese officehad allowed the Sisters to accept a gift of several hens sent into them from their Asiatic Sisters ia the Kuching convent.Also several hens had been sent in as gifts from the Indonese.This nucleus of eight legitimate hens was now lost in anillegitimate population of more than one hundred smuggledfowl.
Two rival organizations formed: the Hen Owners’ Union,and the Gardeners’ Guild. The hen owners sponsored proteins,and the gardeners sponsored vitamins. The gardeners said thatthe hens scratched up their gardens, and the hen owners saidthat the gardens took up worming space. I had both hens anda garden. George was quick to throw stones at other people’shens in order to save our worms for Hetty and Letty.
My garden produced potato leaves for vitamins, and rhilisto make the leaves edible, as we had no salt. I couldn’t growpotatoes because my garden allotment was too swampy, andGeorge and I were too hungry to wait sk months for themto mature.
The hen owners were always in trouble. Threats weremade against the hens’ lives, but two things saved them. First,the hens ran faster than the ladies. Second, no one would havedared to kill a fifty-dollar hen that laid a two-doUar egg(later eggs went to twenty dollars); it would have provokedhomicide.
The hen owners met regularly to decide what we wouldsay if the office ever asked us to explain the number of hensin camp, and accused us of smuggling. At first we were goingto say that our hen was one of the eight legitimate ones be-longing to the Sisters, but when the camp total exceeded onehundred this ceased to be practical.
I decided to deny Hetty and Letty completely. Nobodycould prove they belonged to me, except by the fact that theycame when I called them. If an officer asked if that hen be-lor^ed to me, I would say. What hen.? Could I help it if ahen flew over the barbed wire and laid an egg under myflat?
The hen racket lasted with me until the next rice cut. Ialready had to give George some of my rice ration, andcouldn’t spare the rest for Hetty and Letty.
George and I couldn’t afford to kill and eat the hens; wedidn’t want a feast. We wanted the minimum amount of foodfor living, for the maximum length of time. So I traded Hettyto the Dutch Sisters for use on a feast day, in exchange for asweet potato a day for six weeks for George. They werebetter gardeners tW we, had used human excrement fromthe first to fertilize with, at a time when we still shuddered atit; now they were harvesting sweet potatoes. This potato —it was to be delivered to George at eleven every morning, inthe Dutch kitchen — meant security for George for sixweeks; that was long enough ahead to look. During the sixweeks there proved to be three feast days, and on these daysGeorge was given tvio potatoes! How he sang to himselfthose days, as he ate!
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Letty I gave to Bonita. She managed to feed Letty untilpeace came, and in addition shared the eggs with George.After armistice Letty went into a stew, and George and Ihelped to eat her. George loved Letty, but he loved her bestin the stew.
How we did long for beauty: beauty of sight, sound,odor, beauty of thought! We dreamed of hearing symphoniesagain —opera, jazz —or whatever meant beauty of sound tothe dreamer. We dreamed of beautiful flowers, places, sights,beautiful clothes; in our dreams we smelled perfumes, andfragrances, ginger bread, the sea, and the flowers. The scentof roses and violets haunted me, night after night I put my-self to sleep by remembering it. And day by day I smelledlatrines.
We had latrines made of rotting wood, now, with half adozen separate compartments with eye-high divisions be-tween, divisions which soon became waist-high as we stole theplanks for our furniture. Once established in a latrine, onelooked down into a lava flow of dung through bore-holeswhich were round, oval, or square, according to the designer’sconception of women’s behinds.
We always thought that some child would fall through ahole one day: and one day one did.
Mitey —a Javanese —was the tiniest, daintiest little girl-child in camp. She was mocha-colored — skin, eyes, and curlyhair.
One night at dinnertime when the mothers were standingin line outside the kitchen waiting for soup, word came thata child had fallen into the lats. We raced for the latrine tosee whose child, and arrived just as Mitey was being fished upby a Dutch Sister through the outside opening from whichwe emptied the latrines. Despite her protective coloration,Mitey looked desperately dungy.
As Mitey’s mother was worl^g in the kitchen, Mitey was
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instantly engnlfed by other mothers and raced to the bath-shed, the principal maternal emotion just then being one ofrelief that it wasn’t your own child. We wanted to give heran antiseptic bath, but the only antiseptic in camp was Frier’sBalsam, so we boiled her instead, and gave her a dose of salts.
The next day Mitey was fine, and the latrine was orderedemptied.
We asked the Japs for a children’s latrine then, submittinga design with a clover-leaf bore-hole, proof against fallingthrough. They admired the design, but didn’t give us thebore-hole.
Our attitude towards the waste products of living hadchanged. At first in prison camp we had shuddered over the
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latrines, held our noses, asked to have the excrement re-moved. Now we hoarded it, and rationed it, per capita, pergarden. Dysentery and doctor’s orders did not stop us.Fertilization makes vegetation; and hunger outruns hygiene.
I often thought, by contrast, of the orchid-colored, smooth-tiled Ladies’ Rooms at home, with Kleenex, Cutex, Kotex,pale soap, faint scent, and “This Room Perfumed byKush-Nu.”
Food fastidiousness had disappeared. Prisoners pushedflowers, grass, weeds, dogs, cats, rats, snakes, grasshoppers,and snails down their gullets, where desperation plus the forceof gravity carried it to their stomachs, the stomachs hurriedit on to intestines, which hurried it on to the next place. Thefollowing day, we, as gardeners, passed it back to the potatobeds. Somewhere along the yards of irritated mucous mem-brane we received the impression that we had had a meal.
If it was possible to hate one season more than another incamp, I hated Christmas. Then was the time one wanted togive — gifts, joy, happiness. Then was the time material andspiritual paupery hurt. Christmas 1944 was the worst.
The Christian religion taught us that one thousand, ninehundred and forty-four years before the Saviour of theWorld was bom. His promise was Peace on Earth, Good Willto Men. He shov/ed us the way by love. The irony of cele-brating His birth and teaching, while we were following theirantithesis, overcame me.
So then we had a rice cut, George had a toothache again,I heard Harry was ill, and Christmas was coming.
I wanted to cut it all out; I felt that I could not pretend. Isuggested that as both energy and materials were nonexistentnow, we should keep Christmas as the Sisters did, as a re-ligious festival only, and agree not to give any presents toour children. If no child had anything they could not com-pare, they would not be sad.
But the majority of mothers felt that the children would bedisappointed if they did not receive gifts, as we had madethings for them the two previous Christmas seasons in camp.And if some children had gifts, then they all must have.