by Jean Moran
Tansy’s voice wavered as she said, ‘A stocking. I love Christmas stockings.’
‘Not the ones in packets given to you by an admiring officer?’ Rowena sounded more amused than she actually was.
‘And chocolate. What wouldn’t I give for a bar of Fry’s Five Boys?’
They tried singing carols, Rowena going out of her way to sing the jollier ones like ‘God Rest Ye Merry, Gentlemen’ eventually getting round to ‘Silent Night’, their voices trembling when they reached ‘Sleep in heavenly peace’. So many were sleeping for ever. She only prayed that Connor wasn’t among them.
‘Wish we were at peace,’ said Alice.
Rowena mentioned their night out in Kowloon. ‘We were certainly on an adventure.’
Alice’s laugh was brittle, but it helped when Tansy asked her to tell her about it.
Rowena left her to get on with it. Her mind was outside, with Connor and the dead men scattered across the lawn.
Time dragged on, second by second, minute by minute, hour by hour. They dozed, cried and prayed, sometimes making the odd cryptic comment. Their spirits lifted on hearing gunfire or aeroplanes flying overhead, then dived at the sound of enemy cheering. The planes were Japanese.
As dusk descended Rowena, crunched up semi-foetal style against the whitewashed wall, turned her head and looked up at the window. She debated drawing up the blind to see what was going on. Did she dare?
‘The sun’s gone down.’
She stared at the blind expectantly as though some time soon it would wind up by itself. Taking a bold leap of faith, she went to the window and tentatively rolled it up.
‘What do you see?’ Alice sounded hopeful.
‘Nothing,’ said Rowena. She let the blind drop. ‘The outside shutters are closed.’
A lot of buildings in Hong Kong had shutters, no windows with glass panes. The hospital had both. It appeared the shutters had been closed and fastened from the outside.
The room had turned dark. Rowena went to the light switch. Nothing happened. ‘The mains must have gone down and the oh-so-clever Japanese haven’t found the generator.’
They all knew the generator was in the basement. Keeping Connor’s violin dry, thought Rowena, and almost smiled.
‘Do you think he’s dead?’ asked Alice, as though she’d read her mind.
‘I hope not. I’ll miss him playing the fiddle and singing. It did make me tap my feet.’
‘And our foreign friend?’
She frowned. ‘I would prefer to be with him now than here.’
Alice shivered. ‘So would I, and that’s saying something coming from me.’
‘We’ll never see the likes of him again, not unless they allow visitors at prisoner-of-war camps.’
Neither voiced the fear that they might never get to a prisoner-of-war camp.
‘I wish they would bring us food,’ said Alice, bending over her arms, which were wrapped around her stomach.
‘I don’t,’ said Tansy, averting her eyes from what she’d spewed up earlier.
‘I’ll get us some.’ Rowena did as she’d done before, rapping on the door, more furiously this time.
Muffled conversation came from outside, laughter, shouts of derision, then the tramping of army boots. The door swung open to reveal four privates standing there, glassy-eyed, a bottle of stolen whisky passing from one soldier to another.
The three women looked at them with frightened eyes. Even Rowena had lost some of her nerve, but resolved not to show any sign of fear, to appear confident, to take the opportunity to ask for food and more water.
The men stared, leering at each woman in turn, licking their lips, sipping the whisky.
‘We haven’t had anything to eat all day,’ she stated, and made movements with her hands, fingers together as though she were taking food from a rice bowl to her mouth.
An exchange of words and smiles between the men, then a coarse hand grabbed her shoulder and pulled her out of the door. Another hand pressed into her back. In her peripheral vision she saw the alarm on her colleagues’ faces. ‘Looks like I have to collect it,’ she called, over her shoulder.
All bravado vanished as the door behind her was closed, the key turned in the lock. She was alone with four drunken men. Although her instinct told her otherwise, she held on to the belief that they were taking her to fetch food – or perhaps to ask the commanding officer or his adjutant for permission to do so.
Prodding her with their fists or their rifle butts, they pushed her all the way past the wards she’d known so well, the beds now empty of the injured men that had lain in them and soaked with blood, the smell like scorched metal on the air.
When her steps slowed the butt of a rifle jabbed into the hollow of her back.
‘Out. Out. Out.’
Outside? She froze. This had to be the moment they were going to shoot her.
This is it, the end of your life, she thought, and stumbled as her legs threatened to buckle beneath her.
On they went, out of the door to a quiet courtyard at the back of the hospital. It was a shady place that used to be pleasant, but even here there was the smell of blood and the bodies of the Chinese women who had thought they would be freed. Her blood ran like iced water in her veins at the thought of her body being piled on top of theirs. So much potential. So much youth. All over.
They pushed her out of the courtyard and onto the path that wound through aromatic bushes to the chapel, a holy place set apart from the main building.
Her heart raced, drumming so loudly she could hear her pulse in her ears, like tinnitus but louder and far more frightening, fatal and final.
These men from a different country, different culture, different religion, had no need of a Christian chapel, but that was indeed the direction in which they were heading… unless it had become a mortuary.
Double doors of gleaming mahogany were pushed open. The chapel smelt of incense, candles and the wax polish recently used on the wooden pews. It was very cold and desolate but perhaps the only place not smelling of blood.
No lights were switched on, no candles lit. The light from a dying day shone through windows situated on each side of the altar. The altar cloth was missing, along with the silver candles and other church vessels that had once graced the house of prayer.
Like the hospital wards, the chapel had been decorated for the Christmas service, cotton wool snow falling in straight skeins in front of the windows, spiky bamboo shoots bound with tinsel and ribbons, glass balls and angels made from clothes pegs, gowns from scraps of bandage, dried grass woven into wings.
Rowena stood with her back to the altar facing them, her fear rising as the muttering soldiers heaved a pew against the closed doors. She knew then what they were going to do. No doubt they would eventually kill her. In her mind she was taking off on a flying carpet, an escape from reality, into a dream world.
They chattered excitedly as they laid their weapons aside, flung off their caps and formed a circle around her, grinning as they undid their trousers.
In a strange move she herself didn’t quite understand, she began to take off her white coat, the item she’d foolishly believed would act as a shield. For some reason she didn’t want it sullied with their touch or with her blood if they killed her.
‘Do you mind?’ she asked, as if having their permission really mattered, but spoken for her benefit rather than theirs.
She didn’t know what they said to each other, probably that she was keen on what they were about to do, since she’d taken off her coat.
When they saw that was all she was taking off, they came at her in a rush, tearing off the rest of her clothes, knocking her to the floor, holding her there, arms above her head, legs spread.
Above her, a trio of angels made from clothes pegs and ragged bits of material swung from tinsel.
She didn’t struggle, but lay there with her eyes fixed on the Christmas decorations, willing her mind to be somewhere else and totally separate from her body.
7
Connor rubbed at his ear and the blood crusted around it.
‘Can’t hear a bloody thing.’
‘Really?’
Connor had done nothing much to infuriate the guard who had clouted the side of his head with the butt of his rifle, except to help a man from the ground who was trying to keep up even though his arm was broken. ‘Worth it,’ he muttered to himself.
He could stand the pain of his busted eardrum. Living with the sight of the man he’d helped was more difficult. He’d been knocked down, then bayoneted, his guts overflowing from his stomach.
Now the dead man was one of many being carried to the bonfire of bodies already blazing, helped by a little petrol from a British jerry can.
Flies were swarming around the piles of dead, which included those who had been manning the machine-guns and others who had put up a fight before Harry had waved the white flag. No more than a quarter of the original military force was left.
They worked steadfastly and silently, slinging one body onto the funeral pyre before going back for another, their faces grim set and eyes filled with tears.
The worst thing about it was that they recognised those they now carried. Connor could still hear the mighty laughter of one of his Indian sergeants, the mouth-organ music of a Canadian chap.
The next body was that of Dr Black – not a fighting man but an army doctor. His second in command had also been slaughtered. Harry took his arms and Connor his legs.
‘One, two, three.’
Another body on the fire.
Hearing Harry sobbing, Connor touched his shoulder. ‘Bastards.’ He swiped at his eyes.
Three nurses, the ones who had been marched away from the rest on the first day lay dead and half naked. Neither man needed to be told that they had all been raped before they were slaughtered, the head of one almost severed from her body.
Connor’s hesitation in picking her up earned him another jab in the back with a rifle butt, but he didn’t care. ‘I’m getting there. Have a little respect.’
He cricked forward under the force of the blow, but still took his time lifting the woman from the ground. This time he held the arms but called Harry to place his hands beneath her head. Someone else carried her legs, so at least she’d go whole into the afterlife.
At long last there were no more bodies but the flattened grass and rust-coloured patches of blood where they had been. The fire sizzled with running fat and the smell of burning flesh sickened some enough to empty their stomachs, others their bowels.
‘Something for the diary,’ whispered Harry.
‘They’ll kill you if they know you’re keeping a record.’
‘They’ll probably kill me anyway. One way or another. Christ, will you look at these blisters? Whatever would my dear mama say? Or my father, come to that. “You’re an officer, son, and should be treated as such.” Tell that to the sour-faced sod over there!’
Tired, thirsty and hungry, following their grim work, Connor, Harry and their men slumped to the ground only to be goaded upright by their captors.
‘Up, up, up.’
At sight of the officer in charge, Harry stepped forward and saluted.
‘Colonel. Permission to speak.’
The colonel looked him up and down from his lesser height with what could only be interpreted as the utmost contempt. ‘Why you salute me? You are coward. Japanese do not surrender. A soldier is no longer a soldier when surrender. You bow. Like slave, servant or woman, you bow.’
Connor slowly moved closer to his friend’s side. Harry could be so bloody unbending when he wanted to be.
‘Bow,’ he whispered. ‘Stop being a fucking lord of the manor and bow.’
For a moment he thought Harry would remain defiant. A little pause, but then, to Connor’s relief, he reconsidered and bowed as low as he could from a height far greater than that of his captor.
‘We have only been given a little water and no food. My men... we are hungry and tired.’
The blow came from out of the blue and had not been ordered. Harry crumpled to the ground, eyes rolling back in his head before they closed.
At first glance Connor presumed him dead. Sick to his stomach, soaked in sweat and drowning in anger, he fell to his knees.
Harry’s eyelids flickered.
Connor glared fiercely up at the colonel. ‘Knock me down too, but if you want more work out of us, we have to be fed – or we might just as well jump into that bonfire of yours right now.’ He waited for what might be the final blow.
Although he knew how dangerous it was, his look was fierce and uncompromising.
Never far from the colonel’s side, the adjutant translated. The colonel’s jaw flexed as he weighed his options.
Connor silently congratulated himself that he’d guessed right.
Finally the colonel’s nostrils flared and his eyes were on fire. He grunted before barking orders, clipped his adjutant around the head, who, once the colonel was pacing back to his command post in the heart of the hospital, clipped a subordinate, which Connor found somewhat amusing – except he knew that in the Imperial Army, based on the old Samurai system, abuse filtered down from the top to the bottom and he was the next in line.
The slap when it came sent him reeling, but he refused to fall, staggering, then returning to a standing position, shoulders back, stomach in and head held defiantly high.
‘Just get us the bloody food,’ he muttered, blood trickling from his lip and into his mouth.
*
Harry had been out cold and had not witnessed the goings-on. It was a couple of hours before he struggled to sit up.
‘Jesus,’ he said, rubbing the side of his head. ‘I’m going to christen that a Japanese kiss. Are you deaf?’ he asked quizzically.
Connor touched his ear. ‘No. Are you?’
Harry grinned. ‘I might be, though I did hear food mentioned. I take it that was your doing.’
‘All Irishmen have the gift of the blarney.’
‘And on an empty stomach too.’
Connor grinned and rubbed at his bloodied lip. ‘I bloody well hope so. Got a slap for my trouble, though.’
It turned out that Harry was right: an hour later two guards appeared, carrying a heavy cauldron that smelt of something nourishing.
Harry took a scoop of it into his mess tin and Connor did the same. Not having the luxury of spoons, they tipped their heads back and let the mixture flow into their mouths. After that they analysed what they had just eaten.
‘There’s rice.’
‘Bit of veg.’
‘Chicken?’
‘What’s the brown stuff?’
Connor picked out a piece that hadn’t totally disintegrated. It tasted sweet.
Harry also found a piece. ‘It’s cake. They’ve chucked everything in there. Even cake. Doesn’t taste too bad, though.’
Connor grinned. ‘I’m guessing it’s not cake but Christmas pudding. Well, there’s a thing.’ He swallowed the last of it, drank some water and picked out a tree behind which he’d relieve himself. It turned out to be the one where he’d hidden Harry’s pipe and stash of opium. There wasn’t much left of the tree, the upper part having been blown off by artillery fire. There was no sign of the pipe and its contents.
When he got back Harry was sullen. ‘I’m guessing we’re looking forward to a grim future.’
‘I’m guessing that food is going to be the centre of our world. Or rather the lack of it.’
*
By lunchtime of the following day their evening meal was nothing but a cherished memory.
They’d been marched all the way to Hong Kong harbour on no food and little water. Hungry and exhausted but still defiant, they had joined the main contingent of the defending garrison where the Rising Sun now fluttered above the governor’s palace in place of the Union flag. The imperial Japanese command had taken it over, along with a few other auspicious buildings, including the Madison Hotel, where enemy aliens
– those who were still alive – were being ordered to assemble.
‘As an Irishman, I shouldn’t mind,’ Connor said to Harry, his eyes taking in the red and white flag flapping in the wind. ‘But I do.’
Harry sighed. ‘I wonder where they’ll take us. China? Or Japan? No, not Japan. Too far away.’
‘I suppose that depends on how much territory they’ve occupied.’
‘Well, let’s hope they don’t get as far as Singapore. That would be a disaster.’
‘There’s a fair few prisons in Kowloon.’
‘Yes, old boy. There certainly are. Pity the poor refugees who were there. The Japs will have caught up with them.’
Connor guessed that Harry’s thoughts about the fate of the refugees who had fled the Chinese civil war were in tune with his own. But they’d both seen enough death and were disinclined to talk about the probability of more.
‘Looks as though we’re about to get something to eat and drink.’
Connor nodded to where a contingent of Chinese was working their way around the huddles of men, ladling water from a pail. Another had what looked like balls of rice piled in panniers swinging from each shoulder. The Japanese soldiers bullied them, driving them into a huddle as a collie might a herd of sheep.
‘Seems we’re not forgotten,’ said Harry, slapping his thighs gleefully.
‘This could be the high point of our day,’ Connor added.
When a pannier of rice balls swung into reach, they both dipped in.
‘Hi, boss,’ the man whispered.
When they looked up, they saw enough of the face beneath the coolie hat to recognise Yang, their one-time barman and previous owner of their short-lived but relatively successful business enterprise.
Their own hands and others around them dug into the feast piled into Yang’s panniers.
‘They must not see us talking. Pretend you are paying me,’ Yang whispered. He held out his hand, jerking it under Connor’s nose at the same time cursing him in Chinese.
‘That’s all you’re getting, you Rangoon rogue,’ shouted Connor.
‘I not Burmese. I born in Sham Shi Po. Sham Shi Po, hear me, you British soldier? You know where that is? You should go there soon, and then you will know.’