Now that he felt stronger, Jim realized how important it was to be obsessed by food. Shared equally among the prisoners, their daily rations were not enough to keep them alive. Many of the prisoners had died, and anyone who sacrificed himself for the others soon died too. The only way to leave the detention centre was to stay alive. As long as he ran errands for Basie, worked hard for Mrs Blackburn and bowed to Sergeant Uchida all would be well.
Nonetheless, some of Basie’s ruses unsettled Jim. On the morning Mrs Partridge died Basie learned some encouraging news about the brother-in-law in Nanking, and soon after was able to sell the old woman’s hair-brushes to Mrs Blackburn. Whenever anyone died Basie would be on hand with news and comfort, though death was an elastic term for the cabin steward, open to all manner of interpretation. Jim collected Private Blake’s rations for two days after he lay without moving on the store-room floor, the skin stretched across his ribs like rice-paper around a lantern. He knew that the private had died of the same fever that he and many of the prisoners had caught. But already Jim was looking at the elderly missionaries with an expectant eye, waiting for fever to recruit the old men. Once he and Basie had admitted their part in this supplementary ration scheme all guilt had gone.
Jim noticed how different Basie was from his father in this respect. At home, if he did anything wrong, the consequences seemed to overlay everything for days. With Basie they vanished instantly. For the first time in his life Jim felt free to do what he wanted. All sorts of wayward ideas moved through his mind, fuelled by hunger and the excitement of stealing from the old prisoners. As he rested between his errands in front of the empty cinema screen he thought of the American aircraft he had seen in the clouds above Shanghai. He could almost summon them into his vision, a silver fleet on the far side of the sky. Jim saw them most when he was hungry, and he hoped that Private Blake, who must always have been hungry, had also seen them.
15
On their Way to the Camps
On the day of the Englishwoman’s death a fresh consignment of prisoners arrived at the detention centre. Jim was hovering in the doorway of the women’s store-room, as Mrs Blackburn and the daughter of the old Dutchman tried to comfort the two sons. The mother lay on the stone floor in her drenched frock, like a drowned corpse raised from the river. The brothers kept turning towards her, as if expecting her to give them some last instruction. Jim felt sad for the boys, Paul and David, though he hardly knew them. They seemed much younger than Jim, but in fact both were more than a year older.
Jim had his eyes on the mother’s mess-tin and tennis shoes. Most of the Allied prisoners had far better shoes than the Japanese soldiers, and he had noticed that the bodies leaving the detention centre had bare feet. But as he sidled into the room there was a shrill whistle from the courtyard, and a series of barked shouts. Sergeant Uchida was working himself up to the pitch of anger that he needed to attain in order to issue the simplest instructions. Masks over their faces, the Japanese soldiers began to herd from the store-rooms everyone who could walk. A truck had stopped outside the cinema, and its prisoners stood unsteadily in the road.
All designs on the dead woman’s tennis shoes vanished from Jim’s head. At last he would be leaving for the camps in the countryside around Shanghai. Pushing past the two boys, Jim dived between the guards and raced up the steps. He lined up beside his fellow prisoners – Mr Partridge with his wife’s suitcase, as if about to take his memories of her on a long journey, Paul and David, the Dutch woman and her father, and several of the old missionaries. Basie stood behind them, his white cheeks hidden behind the collar of his seaman’s jacket, so self-effacing as to be almost invisible. He had erased himself from the small world of the detention centre, which he had manipulated for a few weeks, and would re-emerge like some marine parasite from its shell once he reached the more succulent terrain of the prison camps.
The new arrivals appeared, two Annamese women and a group of older Britishers and Belgians, the sick and elderly carried on stretchers by the Chinese orderlies. Counting their yellow eyes, Jim knew that there would soon be extra mess-tins.
His cotton mask over his face, Sergeant Uchida began to select prisoners for transport to the camps. He shook his head at Mr Partridge and kicked the suitcase in an exasperated way. He pointed to the Dutch woman and her father, Paul and David, and two elderly missionary couples.
Jim licked his fingers and wiped the soot from his cheeks. The sergeant motioned Basie towards the truck. Without a glance at Jim, the cabin steward stepped between the guards, his arms around the shoulders of the two boys.
Sergeant Uchida pressed his fingers against Jim’s grimy forehead. With his constant bowing and smiling, his eagerness to run errands, Jim had been a perpetual nuisance to the sergeant, who was clearly glad to be rid of him. Then he glanced at the party of new arrivals, who stared listlessly at the cold stove, at the scum of boiled rice around the rim of the cong.
The sergeant cupped his hand around Jim’s neck. With a shout muffled by his cotton mask he propelled him towards the stove. As Jim picked himself from his knees the sergeant kicked the coal-sacks, scattering briquettes across the stone floor.
Jim riddled the clinkers from the fire-box. The new arrivals wandered among the benches and took their seats facing the empty cinema screen, as if expecting a film show to begin. Basie and the Dutch couple, Paul and David, the old missionaries stood in the street behind the open army truck, watched at a distance by a crowd of rickshaw coolies and peasant women.
‘Basie…!’ Jim called. ‘I’ll still work for you…!’ But the steward had lost interest in him. Already he had befriended Paul and David, inducting them into his entourage. They helped Basie as he clambered on his bruised knees over the tail-gate of the truck.
‘Basie…’ Jim riddled fiercely. He glared at the cinema screen, crossed by the first shadows of the Shanghai hotels. A Japanese soldier in a face-mask counted out a stack of mess-tins. As the injured prisoners were carried past on their stretchers Jim knew that most of the inmates of the detention centre had been sent there because they were very old or were expected to die, either of dysentery and typhoid, or whatever fever he and Private Blake had caught from the foul water. He was certain that many of the prisoners would soon die, and that if he stayed at the detention centre he would die with them. Already the Annamese women had collected the mess-tins from the soldier. They were pointing to the stove and the sacks of briquettes. When they took over the cooking of the rice and sweet potatoes they would not give Jim his fair ration. He would see the American aircraft again, and he would die.
‘Basie…?’ Jim threw down the riddle. The last of the departing prisoners had taken their seats in the truck. The Japanese soldier by the tail-gate lowered the Dutch woman on to the wooden floor. Basie sat between the two English boys, making a toy from a piece of wire in his hand. The truck started up, moved forward a few feet and stopped. The Japanese driver shouted from his window. He waved a canvas map-wallet and slapped the metal door with his fist. The guards on the pavement shouted back, eager to close the gates of the detention centre and put their feet up in the orderly room. Then the engine stalled, and there was an instant clamour of angry voices, the soldiers and driver arguing over the destination of the truck.
Woosung…’ Sergeant Uchida lowered his cotton mask. His face was reddening, and drops of spittle formed on his lips, like pus forced from a wound. Already in a fury with the driver, he strode through the open gates. The driver had stepped from his cabin, unaware of the tornado about to engulf him. He dusted the map and spread it against the fender of the truck, shrugging hopelessly at the maze of nearby streets.
Jim followed Sergeant Uchida to the gates. He could see that neither the sergeant nor the Japanese driver had any idea of the whereabouts of Woosung, an agricultural district at the mouth of the Yangtze that lay beyond the northern suburbs of Shanghai. The driver gestured towards the Bund and Nantao, and climbed into his cabin. He sat passively when Sergeant Uchida
pushed through the bored guards and began to scream abuse at him.
Standing beside the guards, Jim waited for Sergeant Uchida to reach the climax of his tirade, when he would be forced to make a decision. Sure enough, the sergeant searched the crowded skyline of tenement buildings and godowns, then pointed at random to a cobbled street with a disused tramline. Unimpressed, the driver cleared his throat. Wearily he started his engine and spat a ball of phlegm into the road, where it lay at Jim’s feet.
‘Straight on…!’ Jim called up to him. ‘Woosung – it’s over there…!’ He pointed to the street with the rusty tramlines.
Sergeant Uchida cuffed Jim on the head, bruising both his ears. He cuffed him again, bringing blood from his mouth. At that moment a cloud of smoke billowed through the gates. The Annamese women had lit the stove with the rain-soaked firewood, and the smoke filled the open-air cinema, drifting across the benches as if the screen were ablaze.
Glad to be rid of Jim, Sergeant Uchida seized him in his strong hands. He swung him over the tail-gate of the truck, shouting to the Japanese guard who sat with the prisoners. The soldier dragged Jim across the laps of the Dutch woman and her father. As the truck pulled away from the detention centre, its wheels already locked in the tramlines, Jim clambered forward to the camouflaged driving cabin. He steadied himself against the pitching roof, and ignored the stream of oaths hurled at him by the driver. He raised his bloody mouth to the wind, letting the foul odours of Shanghai flush his lungs, happy to be on the way to his parents again.
16
The Water Ration
Were they lost? For an hour, as they trundled through the industrial suburbs of northern Shanghai, Jim gripped the wooden bar behind the driving cabin, his head filled with a dozen compass bearings. He grinned to himself, forgetting his illness and the desperate weeks in the open-air cinema. His knees ached from the constant swaying, and at times he had to hold on to the leather belt of the Japanese soldier beside him. But at last he was moving towards the open countryside, and the welcoming world of the prison camps.
The endless streets of Chapei ran past, an area of tenements and derelict cotton mills, police barracks and shanty towns built on the banks of black canals. They drove below the overhead conveyors of a steel works decorated with dragon-festival hoardings, dreams of fire conjured from its silent furnaces. Shuttered pawnshops stood outside the abandoned radio and cigarette factories, and platoons of Chinese puppet troops patrolled the Del Monte brewery and the Dodge truck depot. Jim had never been to Chapei. Before the war a small English boy would have been killed for his shoes within minutes. Now he was safe, guarded by the Japanese soldiers – he laughed over this so much that the Dutch woman reached out a hand to calm him.
But Jim relished the foetid air, the smell of human fertilizer from the open sewage congs that signalled the approach of the countryside. Even the driver’s hostility failed to worry him. Whenever they stopped at a military checkpoint the driver would put his head out of the cabin and wave a warning finger at Jim, as if this eleven-year-old prisoner was responsible for the absurd expedition.
Watching the sun’s angle, as he had done for hours in the detention centre, Jim made certain that they were moving north. They passed the ruins of the Chapei ceramic works, its kilns shaped like the German forts at Tsingtao. Its trademark stood beside the gates, a Chinese teapot three storeys high built entirely from green bricks. During the Sino-Japanese War of 1937 it had been holed by shell-fire, and now resembled a punctured globe of the earth. Thousands of the bricks had migrated across the surrounding fields to the villages beside the works canal, incorporated in the huts and dwellings, a vision of a magical rural China.
These strange dislocations appealed to Jim. For the first time he felt able to enjoy the war. He gazed happily at the burnt-out trams and tenement blocks, at the thousands of doors open to the clouds, a deserted city invaded by the sky. It only disappointed him that his fellow prisoners failed to share his excitement. They sat glumly on the benches, staring at their feet. One of the missionary women lay on the floor, tended by another prisoner, a sandy-haired Britisher with a bruised cheek who held her wrist with one hand and pressed her diaphragm with the other. The two English boys, still barely aware of their mother’s death, sat between Basie and the Dutch couple.
Jim waited until Basie looked up, but the cabin steward seemed hardly to recognize him. His attention had turned to the two boys, and he had moved deftly into the vacuum in their lives. From the page of a Chinese newspaper he folded a series of paper animals, chuckling when the boys gave a weak laugh. Like a depraved conjuror, he slid his hands into the pockets of their school trousers and cardigans, searching for anything of use.
Jim watched him without resentment. He and Basie had collaborated at the detention centre in order to stay alive, but Basie, rightly, had dispensed with Jim as soon as he could leave for the camps.
The truck struck a deep gully in the cobbles, slewed across the road and came to a halt by the grass bank. They had left the northern outskirts of Shanghai and were entering an area of untilled fields and rice-paddies. Beyond a line of burial mounds two hundred yards away a canal ran towards a deserted village. The Japanese driver jumped from his cabin and bent over the front wheels of the truck. He began to talk to the steaming engine, now and then including Jim in his mutterings. He was only twenty years old, but had clearly suffered a lifetime of exasperation. Jim kept his head down, but the driver stepped on to the running board, levelled a finger at him and delivered a long harangue that sounded like a declaration of war.
The driver returned to his cabin, grumbling over his map, and Basie commented: ‘Add that up any way you like and we’re still lost.’ Already his attention had moved from the boys to whatever advantage could be gained from their situation. ‘Jim, do you know where you’re taking us?’
‘Woosung. I’ve been to the country club there, Basic’
Basie played with his paper animals. ‘We’re going to the country club,’ he told the boys. ‘If Jim can find it for us.’
‘As long as we reach the river, Basie. Then it’s either east or west.’
‘That’s a big help. East or west…’
The sandy-haired Briton beside the missionary woman rose from his knees. There was a large, leaking bruise on his forehead and left cheekbone, as if he had recently been struck in the face by a rifle stock. In some pain, he settled himself on the bench. Long freckled legs emerged from his khaki shorts and ended in a pair of thonged sandals. In his late twenties, he carried no luggage or possessions, but he had the self-assured manner of the Royal Navy officers who cut such a dash at the Shanghai garden parties, thrilling the mothers of Jim’s friends. He ignored the Japanese guard, talking across him as if he were a mess-boy who would soon be dismissed to his quarters. Jim assumed that he was one of those tiresome Englishmen who refused to grasp that they had been defeated.
The man touched the bruise on his face and turned to Jim, whose ragged figure he appraised without comment. ‘The Japanese have captured so much ground they’ve run out of maps,’ he remarked amiably. ‘Jim, does that mean they’re lost?’
Jim thought about this. ‘Not really. They just haven’t captured any maps.’
‘Good – never confuse the map with the territory. You’ll get us to Woosung.’
‘Can’t we go back to the detention centre, Dr Ransome?’ one of the missionaries asked. ‘We’re very tired.’
The physician stared at the abandoned paddy fields, and at the prostrate old woman at his feet. ‘It might be for the best. This poor soul can’t take much more.’
The truck moved forward again, trundling at a halfhearted pace down the empty road. Jim returned to his post by the driving cabin, and scanned the fields for anything that might remotely resemble Woosung. The doctor’s words unsettled him. Even if they were lost, how could he want to return to the detention centre?
Jim knew that the fury of Sergeant Uchida made it unlikely that the driver would dare
to turn back. But he kept a careful watch on Dr Ransome, trying to guess whether he spoke enough Japanese to demoralize the driver. He seemed to have difficulty with his sight, especially when looking at Jim, at whom he squinted in a curious way. Jim decided that he had entered the war at a later stage than Basie and himself. He had probably come from one of the missionary settlements in the interior, and had no idea of what went on at the detention centre.
But were they lost, or on course? The direction of the shadows cast by the wayside telegraph poles had barely changed – Jim had always been interested in shadows, ever since his father had shown him how to calculate the height of even the highest building by pacing out its shadow on the ground. They were still heading north-west, and would soon reach the Shanghai-Woosung railway line. Steam hissed from the truck’s radiator. The spray cooled Jim’s face, but the driver’s fist drummed warningly against the door, and Jim knew that he was deciding when to stop and turn back for Shanghai.
Resigning himself to the wasted journey, and to their return to the detention centre, Jim studied the guard’s bolt-action rifle and its imperial chrysanthemum crest. The Dutch woman pulled at his soot-stained blazer.
‘Over there, James. Is that…?’
A burnt-out aircraft lay on the banks of a disused canal. Wild grass and nettles grew through its wings, almost invading the cockpit, but the squadron insignia were still legible.
‘It’s a Nakajima,’ he told Mrs Hug, pleased by this shared interest in plane-spotting. ‘It only has two machine-guns.’
‘Only two? But that’s very many…’
The Dutch woman seemed impressed, but Jim had turned his attention from the aircraft. On the far side of the paddy field, hidden by the nettles, was the embankment of a railway line. A squad of Japanese soldiers rested on the concrete platform of a wayside station, cooking a meal on a fire of sticks. A camouflaged staff car was parked beside the tracks. It was loaded with coils of wire which these signals engineers were re-stringing between the telegraph poles.
Empire of the Sun Page 11