The Kindness of Women

‘You shot him yesterday.’ Peggy shook her head over this, her face grave but forgiving, a favourite pose. ‘Private Kimura is your friend.’

‘I shoot my friends too.’ Friends, surprisingly, made even more tempting targets than enemies. ‘Besides, Private Kimura isn’t really my friend.’

‘Not half. Mrs Dwight thinks you’re an informer. Why do you have to shoot everyone?’

Sergeant Nagata emerged from D Block, scowling over his roster board, the British block commander behind him. Peggy pushed me against the door and forced my hands into my back. Glaring suspiciously at every blade of grass, Sergeant Nagata would not appreciate serving as my practice target. I leaned against Peggy, glad to feel her strong wrists and smell the cold, reassuring scent of her body. She was always trying to wrestle with me, for reasons I was not yet ready to explore.

‘Why, Jamie? You’ve shot everyone in Lunghua by now. Is it because you want to be alone here?’

‘I haven’t shot Mrs Dwight.’ This busybodying missionary was one of the English widows who supervised the eight boys and girls in the children’s hut, all war-orphans separated from parents interned in the other camps near Shanghai and Nanking. Rather than make sure that we had our fair share of the falling food ration, Mrs Dwight was concerned for our spiritual welfare, as I heard her explain to the mystified camp commandant, Mr Hyashi. For Mrs Dwight this chiefly involved my sitting silently in the freezing hut over my Latin homework – anything rather than the restless errand-running and food-scavenging that occupied every moment of my day. To Mrs Dwight I was a ‘free soul’, a term that contained not a hint of approval. Spiritual well-being seemed to be inversely proportional to the amount of food one received, which perhaps explained why Mrs Dwight and the other missionaries considered their pre-war activities in the famine-ridden provinces of northern China such a marked success.

‘When the war’s over,’ I said darkly, ‘I’ll ask my father to shoot Mrs Dwight with a real gun. He dislikes missionaries, you know.’

‘Jamie …!’ Peggy tried to box my ears. A doctor’s daughter from Tsingtao, she was a year older than me and pretended to be easily shocked. As I knew, she was far more protective than Mrs Dwight. When I was ill it was Peggy who had looked after me, giving me some of the younger children’s food. One day I would repay her. She ruled the children’s hut in a firm but high-minded way, and I was her greatest challenge. I liked to keep up a steady flow of small outrages, but recently I had noticed Peggy’s depressing tendency to imitate Mrs Dwight, modelling herself on this starchy widow as if she needed the approval of an older woman. I preferred the strong-willed girl who stood up to the boys in her class, rescued the younger children from bullies, and had a certain thin-hipped stylishness with which I had still to come to terms.

‘If your father’s going to shoot anyone,’ Peggy remarked, ‘he should start with Dr Sinclair.’ This vile-tempered clergyman was the headmaster of the camp school. ‘He’s worse than Sergeant Nagata.’

‘Peggy …?’ I felt a rush of concern for her. ‘Did he hit you?’

‘He nearly tried. He always looks at me in that smiley way. As if I was his daughter and he needed to punish me.’

Only that afternoon one of the ten-year-olds had come back to the hut with a stinging red forehead. Our real education at the Lunghua school came from learning to read Dr Sinclair’s moods.

‘Did you tell Mrs Dwight?’

‘She wouldn’t listen. Just because they’re kind to us, they think they can do anything. She’s more frightened of him than I am.’

‘He doesn’t hit everybody.’

‘He’ll hit you one day.’

‘I won’t let him.’ This was idle talk, and my next Latin class could prove me wrong. But so far I had avoided the clergyman’s heavy hands. I had noticed that Dr Sinclair left alone the children of the more well-to-do British parents. He never hit David Hunter, however much David tried to provoke him, and only cuffed the sons of factory foremen, Eurasian mothers or officers in the Shanghai Police. What I could never understand was why the parents failed to protest when their children returned to their rooms in G Block with ears bleeding from the clergyman’s signet ring. It was almost as if the parents accepted this reminder of their lowly position in Shanghai’s British community.

Bored with it all, and deciding to show off in front of Peggy, I picked up a stone from the step and hurled it high into the air over the parade ground.

‘Jamie, you’re in trouble! Sergeant Nagata saw that …’

I froze against the door. The sergeant was standing on the gravel path twenty feet from the children’s hut. As he stared at me he filled his lungs, his face bearing the weight of some slow but vast emotion. However complicated the British at Lunghua seemed to me, there was no doubt that Sergeant Nagata found them infinitely more mysterious, a stiff-necked people whose armies in Singapore had surrendered without a fight but nonetheless acted as if they had won the war. For some reason he kept a close watch on me, as if I were a key to this conundrum.

Why he should have marked out one 13-year-old boy among the two hundred children I never discovered. Did he think I was trying to escape, or serving as a secret courier between the dormitory blocks? In fact, most of the adults in the camp shied away from me when I loomed up to them, eager to play blindfold chess or offer my views on the progress of the war and the latest Japanese aerial tactics. My nerveless energy soon tired them and, besides, I was forever looking to the future. No one knew when the war would end – perhaps in 1947 or even 1948 – and the internees coped with the endless time by erasing it from their lives. The busy programme of lectures and concert parties of the first year had been abandoned. The internees rested in their cubicles, reading their last letters from England, roused briefly by the iron wheels of the food carts. Mrs Dwight was not the only one to see the dangers of an overactive imagination.

‘Jamie, look out …’ Mischievously, Peggy pushed me through the doorway. I stumbled on to the gravel, but Sergeant Nagata had more pressing matters on his mind than a head-count of the war children. Slapping his roster-board, he led his entourage back to the guard-house. I was sorry to see him go – I enjoyed squaring up to Sergeant Nagata. There was something about the Japanese, their seriousness and stoicism, that I admired. One day I might join the Japanese Air Force, just as my other heroes, the American Flying Tigers, had flown for Chiang Kai-shek.

‘Why isn’t he coming?’ Disappointed, Peggy shivered in her patched cardigan. ‘You could have escaped – think what Mrs Dwight would say. She’d have you banished.’

‘I am banished.’ Not sure what this meant, I added: ‘There might be an escape tonight.’

‘Who said? Are you going with them?’

‘Basie and Demarest told me.’ The American merchant seamen were a fund of inaccurate information, much of it deliberately propagated. As it happened, escape could not have been further from my mind. My parents were interned at Soochow, far too dangerous a distance to walk, and the British in charge might not let me in. They were terrified of being infected with typhus or cholera by prisoners transferred from other camps.

‘I would have gone with them, but Basie’s wrong.’ I pointed to the guard-house, where Private Kimura was saluting the sergeant with unnecessary zeal. ‘They always close the gates when Sergeant Nagata thinks there’s going to be an escape.’

‘Well …’ Peggy hid her pale cheeks behind her arms and shrewdly studied the Japanese. ‘Perhaps they want us to escape.’

‘What?’ This struck me with the force of revelation. I knew from the secret camp radio that by now, November 1943, the war had begun to turn against the Japanese. After the attack on Pearl Harbor and their rapid advance across the Pacific, they had suffered huge defeats at the battles of Midway and the Coral Sea. American reconnaissance planes had appeared over Shanghai, and the first bombing raids would soon follow. Along the Whangpoo river Japanese military activity had increased, and anti-aircraft batteries were dug in around the airfield to the north of the camp. Lunghua pagoda was now a heavily armed flak tower equipped with powerful searchlights and rapid-fire cannon. The Korean and Japanese guards at Lunghua were more aggressive towards the prisoners, and even Private Kimura was irritable when I showed him my drawings of the sinking of the Repulse and the Prince of Wales, the British battleships sent to the bottom of the South China Sea by Japanese dive-bombers.

Far more worrying, the food ration had been cut. The sweet potatoes and cracked wheat – a coarse cattle feed – were warehouse scrapings, filled with dead weevils and rusty nails. Peggy and I were hungry all the time.

‘Jamie, suppose …’ Intrigued by her own logic, Peggy smiled to herself. ‘Suppose the Japanese want us to escape, so they won’t have to feed us? Then they’d have more to eat.’

She waited for me to react, and reached out to reassure me, seeing that she had gone too far. She knew that any threat to the camp unsettled me more than all the petty snubs. What I feared most was not merely that the food ration would be cut again, but that Lunghua camp, which had become my entire world, might degenerate into anarchy. Peggy and I would be the first casualties. If the Japanese lost interest in their prisoners we would be at the mercy of the bandit groups who roamed the countryside, renegade Kuomintang and deserters from the puppet armies. Gangs of single men from E Block would seize the food store behind the kitchens, and Mrs Dwight would have nothing to offer the children except her prayers.

I felt Peggy’s arm around my shoulders, and listened to her heart beating through the thin wall of her chest. Often she looked unwell, but I was determined to keep her out of the camp hospital. Lunghua hospital was not a place that made its patients better. We needed extra rations to survive the coming winter, but the food store was more carefully locked than the cells in the guard-house.

As the all-clear sounded, the internees emerged from the doorways of their blocks, staring at the camp as if seeing it for the first time. The great tenement family of Lunghua began to rouse itself. Listless women hung their faded washing and sanitary rags on the lines behind G Block. A crowd of children raced to the parade ground, led by David Hunter, who was wearing a pair of his father’s leather shoes that I so coveted. As he moved around the camp my eyes rarely left his feet. Mrs Hunter had offered me her golfing brogues, but I had been too proud to accept, an act of foolishness I regretted, since my rubber sneakers were now as ragged as Private Kimura’s canvas boots. The war had led to a coolness between David and myself. I envied him his parents, and all my attempts to attach myself to a sympathetic adult had been rebuffed. Only Basie and the Americans were friendly, but their friendliness depended on my running errands for them.

Mrs Dwight approached the children’s hut, her fussy eyes taking in everything like a busy broom. She smiled approvingly at Peggy, who was holding a crude metal bucket soldered together from a galvanized-iron roofing sheet dislodged by the monsoon storms. With the tepid water she brought back from the heating station Peggy would wash the younger children and flush the lavatory.

‘Peggy, are you off to Waterloo?’

‘Yes, Mrs Dwight.’ Peggy assumed a pained stoop, and the missionary patted her affectionately.

‘Ask Jamie to help you. He’s doing nothing.’

‘He’s busy thinking.’ Artlessly, with a knowing eye in my direction, Peggy added: ‘Mrs Dwight, Jamie’s planning to escape.’

‘Really? I thought he’d escaped long ago. I’ve got something new for him to think about. Jamie, tomorrow you’re moving to G Block. It’s time for you to leave the children’s hut.’

I emerged from one of the hunger reveries into which I often slipped. The apartment houses of the French Concession were visible along the horizon, reminding me of the old Shanghai before the war, and the Christmas parties when my father hired a troupe of Chinese actors to perform a nativity play. I remembered the games of two-handed bridge on my mother’s bed, my carefree cycle rides around the International Settlement, and the Great World Amusement Park with its jugglers and acrobats and sing-song girls. All of them seemed as remote as the films I had seen in the Grand Theatre, sitting beside Olga while she stared in her bored way through Snow White and Pinocchio.

‘Why, Mrs Dwight? I need to stay with Peggy until the war’s over.’

‘No.’ Mrs Dwight frowned at the prospect, as if there was something improper about it. ‘You’ll be happier with boys of your own age.’

‘Mrs Dwight, I’m never happy with boys of my own age. They play games all the time.’

‘That may be. You’re going to live with Mr and Mrs Vincent.’

Mrs Dwight expanded on the attractions of the Vincents’ small room, which I would share with this chilly couple and their sick son. Peggy was looking sympathetically at me, the bucket clasped to her chest, well aware of the new challenge I faced.

But for once I was thinking in the most practical terms. I knew that I would be easily dominated by the Vincents, the morose amateur jockey and his glacial wife, who would resent my presence in their small domain. I might try to bribe Mrs Vincent with the promise of a reward for being kind to me, which my father would pay after the war. Unhappily, this choice carrot failed to energise the Lunghua adults, so sunk were they in their torpor.

If I was going to bribe the Vincents I needed something more down to earth, the most important commodity in Lunghua. Ignoring Mrs Dwight, I seized my cinder-tin from beneath my bunk, shouted a goodbye to Peggy and set off at a run for the kitchens.

Spitting in the cold wind, the glowing cinders seethed across the ash-tip behind the kitchens. Naked except for their cotton shorts and wooden clogs, the stokers stepped from the steaming doorway beside the furnace, ashes flaming on their shovels. Now that the evening meal of rice congee had been prepared, Mr Sangster and Mr Bowles were raking the furnace and banking the fires down for the night. I waited on the summit of the ash-tip, enjoying the sickly fumes in the fading light, while I watched the Japanese night-fighters warming up at Lunghua airfield.

‘Look out, young Jim.’ Mr Sangster, a sometime accountant with the Shanghai Power Company, sent a cascade of cinders towards my feet. The ashes covered my sneakers and stung my toes through the rotting canvas. I scampered back, wondering how many extra rations had helped to build Mr Sangster’s burly shoulders. But Mrs Sangster had been a friend of my mother’s, and the horseplay was a means of steering the most valuable cinders towards me. Small favours were the secret currency of Lunghua.