Family Romance

by John Lanchester

  17 July 1942

  BOTH HAPPY AND WELL WRITE GRANNY BULLS AUNTIE FLORRIE ERIC FITT*

  DO NOT NEGLECT YOUR EYES GOOD LUCK IN EXAMINATIONS NO NEED TO WORRY

  It wasn’t true: they were neither happy nor well. Bill, who wasn’t stupid, would have known that. But at least his parents were alive. Over the next three years he was to receive four telegrams and four letters from them. The telegrams were sent via the Red Cross, and the letters are all on flimsy official paper, with ‘Stanley Civilian Internment Camp’ typed across the top – not at all like Jack’s proud pre-war letterhead. Censorship meant that these communications couldn’t say much; they consist mostly of requests that Bill do various things, such as write to them, tell friends and relatives that they have written, and look after his health. All through the war years, Bill only once received uncensored news from Stanley. It came late in 1943, when Canadian civilian internees were sent home as part of a deal with the Japanese government. Two of them wrote to Bill from the boat taking them home.

  MS ‘Gripsholm’

  At sea

  23.10.43

  Master Lanchester:

  Well here’s word of your Father & Mother whom I last saw at Stanley September 23rd 1943 and they were then both well but hungry. I hope you are appreciating your three per day, or do you get more in Australia.

  Both Father and Mother are doing splendid work in Camp and you can justly be very proud of them.

  Father was particularly anxious to know how you got on in your Matriculation – you had better do well and I am sure you will as he is expecting to hear good news.

  Write as often as you can as all the letters sent do not arrive.

  All the best to you and with the hope you will soon be a united family.

  Sincerely yours

  C. M. Hall

  It’s hard not to miss the bitterness and repressed anger in that letter (‘or do you get more in Australia’ – the lack of question mark makes that remark resemble clenched teeth). Food was, as we shall see, just about the only thing the internees ever thought about, and a month after leaving Stanley Mr Hall is still clearly suffering. He may have been one of the very many internees who never fully recovered from the experience. But ‘you had better do well’, to a seventeen-year-old boy who hadn’t seen his mother and father for three years and already had enough to worry about, does seem a little minatory. The other letter was gentler and warmer.

  Motorship Gripsholm

  30 October 1943

  To Mr George William Lanchester

  Church of England Grammar School

  Melbourne

  Dear Mr Lanchester,

  I send you some news from your beloved parents Dr and Mrs Lanchester in Stanley Internment Camp. They were quite well when we, Repatriated People to America and Canada, left the camp on the 23rd of September 1943. Father is sometimes a professional dentist, sometimes a lye-maker for the whole camp. He renders in the way great services for soap is often lacking. Mother is helping in getting ashes from here and there. She told me to let you know that she is also Wong no. 2. [The Wongs were a family who had worked for Jack and Lannie before the war. Decoded, this meant that she was doing a great deal of clothes-washing.] They are living in a small room in a Chinese quarter. They are longing for freedom as well as for better and more abundant food as well as all the people still in the camp. Everyone hopes to be repatriated in November according to what the Japs told them. We were believing it too, but it may not be so soon.

  They received a letter from you some time ago. You were speaking about your promotion. They would like very much to know what you study now, is it matriculation? They sent you $500 HK at Christmas 1940, through the purser of your school if I remember. Did you receive them? Please write them a long letter, telling them as much as possible. They are wondering about you, you don’t know how much.

  Maintenant, comme Madame votre mère m’a dit que vous aimez beaucoup le français, je vous dis, dans cette langue, combien j’ai apprécié vos bons parents et combien je les ai trouvés courageux dans ce malheur qui atteint le monde. Aimez-les bien et soyez toujours leur foi et leur consolation par votre bonne conduite et une application soutenue dans vos études.

  Une correspondante inconnue de vous mais que Madame votre mère connaît bien sous mon nom anglais,†

  Sister St. Stephen

  Miss. de L’ Immaculate Conception, en route pour

  Montréal, Canada, via New York

  So Bill knew that his parents were alive and hungry and keeping busy, and that they were greatly respected for their conduct under internment, but that was about it.

  A few months later, starting on 1 January 1944, he began to keep a diary. By now he was working like a demon to get into Trinity College at Melbourne University – though he wasn’t yet sure what he wanted to study. He had done less well than he had hoped at the time of his matriculation, when his secret plan had been to get honours in every possible subject. Now, he was working up to eight hours a day, concentrating on British history. He regularly made lists of his own faults, chief of which was ‘daydreaming’, and he was preoccupied with what to do with himself. He thought about joining the army, though it weighed heavily on him that this voluntary assumption of risk would not be fair to his parents. He couldn’t decide whether he should follow the ‘academic’ or the ‘diplomatic’ path; he had girl friends, but as yet no girlfriend. Some people in his circumstances, isolated and under stress, would have developed a new or differen self – harder on the outside, tougher on the inside, more opportunistic, harder to hurt. But Bill didn’t change. His clever, sweet, gentle, anxious, slightly lost dreaminess was the same as always.

  26 February 1944

  Went to pictures. The Trojan Limits with the Crazy Gang and In Which We Serve, which is a great film, perhaps the greatest I have ever seen. Thinking all evening after pictures, though not as a result of them, of joining the Indian Army instead of going to University. I would infinitely prefer to do so, but it wouldn’t be fair to either Dook or Mum & Dad. Hell and damnation. And there isn’t anyone I can really talk it over with.

  If there had been anyone for Bill to talk it over with, they would probably have laughed and told him not to be so silly. Mind you, Noël Coward would have been pleased. His performance in In Which We Serve was so implausibly butch that after the première, when he walked into a room full of friends, there was a moment of embarrassed silence. The Master broke the tension. ‘Don’t worry, dear,’ he told the assembled company. ‘Mother knows.’

  A failure to detect the camp aspect of In Which We Serve was very much in character for Bill. My father was close to being the ideal audience for almost any play, film or novel, because he identified so closely with the principal characters that he shared their emotions more or less without qualification. I say ‘close to’ the ideal audience, instead of actually being the ideal audience, because this strong identification meant that works of fiction would often be too painful for him to read or watch. Anything in which bad people were rewarded over good was for him too troubling, too unsettling; anything which touched on themes of loneliness or abandonment or not fitting in. He could not, for instance, bear to watch The Go-Between, because ‘it reminded me too much of how I felt when I was in Australia’. My mother blamed this tendency on a deficient education. She would say, ‘He identifies’, shake her head, and add, with a sigh, ‘Melbourne’.

  That diagnosis, I believe, was wrong. Bill’s way of reading was nothing to do with his education: it came from his fearing the strength of his own feelings. This was something he might have already learned, but it was the experiences of the war years that made it into a fundamental cast of mind. When a letter from Lannie comes in March 1944, he tells his diary, ‘Letter from Mum!’ – but he doesn’t say what news the letter brings, or how it makes him feel; he never says anything about his absent parents. He has learnt that when anything painful, anything touching on pain, happens, he must turn back at the sign that says, ‘Don�
��t Go There’. Indeed, there is an almost physical sense of a block between him and painful subjects.

  When in doubt, come top in an exam. Bill won a scholarship to Melbourne University to read law and switched to history when he arrived in late 1944. Dook, who had been advising him throughout, helped to pay his living expenses. He immersed himself in work, made some swotty friendships, looked around for girls to go out with, and discovered with relief that sport was not going to be as all-important a part of university life as he had feared. And all the time he worried about what to do next. From the end of the first year he was eligible for war work, but was also in a position to get a deferment if he so chose. For Bill, the issue of what to do was mainly a concern over working out what was right. The algebra was complicated, because the obviously right thing – joining up to do his part in the war – was counterbalanced by the opinion many people gave him, that voluntarily risking his life was not fair to his parents. What would happen if they served their years of imprisonment, dreaming of freedom and being reunited, kept alive by the thought of Bill in safety in Australia, only to come out and find that he had gone and got himself killed in the fighting? It’s only with the benefit of hindsight that we know the atomic bomb was coming to put a brisk end to the war in the Far East. At the time, the likeliest scenario was that the Allies would have to fight all the way up into and through the Japanese archipelago, in actions that would take years and cost of millions of lives. So the risks were not hypothetical; but when Bill was assessed for his fitness, he was graded B2, i.e. not fit for a direct combat position, on the grounds that he had ‘flat feet’. (This may have been a doctor’s gentle way of alluding to disabilities left over from childhood TB.) At first this news gave him ‘the blues’, as his journal refers to them, but then we find him reporting that he has ‘been feeling less depressed than usual’. It may be that the B2 rating gave him a way of volunteering to do his bit while not risking his life directly. In February 1945, Bill – having got a top second in his history exams at the end of his first year at Melbourne University – joined up. He did his basic training, and was then sent to a camp for three months to learn Japanese, in order to serve as an interpreter. In practice, in the event of Bill’s having been sent anywhere near the fighting, this would have meant sitting in on interrogations. That was what most of the training focused on. But then came the dropping of the atomic bomb, and the announcement by Emperor Hirohito that ‘the war has developed not necessarily to Japan’s advantage’. Newspapers brought news of the liberation of Hong Kong. And then in the middle of October he heard from the Red Cross that Jack and Lannie were at a refugee camp in New South Wales. He was told that they would be reunited in Victoria, and he was given three weeks’ leave.

  Bill as a private in the Australian army

  * Respectively Lannie’s mother, family friends, Bill’s aunt and another family friend, all of them in England. The idea was that Bill would pass on the news that Jack and Lannie were alive.

  † Now, as Madame your mother told me that you like French very much, I tell you in that language how I appreciated your good parents and how brave I found them in the misfortune that is afflicting the world. Love them well and be always their faith and their consolation by your good conduct and a systematic application in your studies.

  A correspondent unknown to you but whom Madame your mother knows well under my English name …

  3

  ‘Chaos’: that was the word Lannie used when she spoke about the fall of Hong Kong. It was an immersion in the experience of total disorder, total uncertainty.

  In the run-up to the war, after Bill had left for Manila and then Melbourne, Lannie retrained as a nurse. Life was dominated by the impending war. The Japanese had conquered much of China and it was only a question of time before they would launch a war on British or American interests. Preparations were made to defend Hong Kong along a line of fortifications in the New Territories, whose official name – not all that confidence-inspiring – was the Gin Drinkers’ Line. It might have worked, too, if there had been enough troops to defend it, but that would have meant arming the Chinese population. British forces numbered about 12,000, but a recent estimate reckons that the British could without difficulty have added another 75,000 Chinese troops to their own total. The government in London chose not to do that, believing that the Chinese could not be trusted. For London, the main point was to hold on to the colony at the end of the war. If 75,000 armed and battle-hardened soldiers decided that from now on Hong Kong was going to be part of China, who would be able to stop them?

  When the attack came, on 8 December 1941, the Japanese bombed Kai Tak airport, taking out the colony’s air defences, and then invaded over the border. The fighting was intense but brief. Within a few days, the defence had fallen back to Kowloon and begun a general evacuation to Hong Kong Island. Lannie, who had been based in Kowloon, was treating a stream of casualties. The British turned down an invitation to surrender on 16 December. (The Governor, Sir Mark Young, had only arrived in the colony a week before the attack. He spent his internment at Stanley and then in a prison camp in Manchuria. Even less lucky were the thousands of just-trained Canadians who arrived and were pitched straight into the fighting.) There began to be stories about Japanese atrocities. My grandmother saw some of the victims, including nurses who had been raped; there were stories, which proved true, about hospital patients being bayoneted in their beds. (Some inexperienced Allied soldiers had used the hospital as a firing position. The Japanese then attacked the hospital as a military target.) The Japanese invaded the island, divided the defence into two, circled it into pockets on the Peak and out near Stanley, and shelled the defenders into submission. The fortifications where this fighting took place were a feature of my childhood – playing with friends and out walking, I would regularly come across bunkers and dugouts left over from the war. We would play Cowboys and Indians, Vikings and Romans, Brits versus Germans – though never Brits versus Japanese – without it ever occurring to us that real fighting and real dying had taken place there. Our most frequent and favourite family walk, around Black’s Link with a view out over Aberdeen, circling back round over Happy Valley and the harbour, went near the sites of some of the fiercest fighting.

  Jack and Lannie were separated during the battle. Jack went to the Queen Mary Hospital on the island, where the wounded were to be treated; Lannie was put in charge of refugee accommodation in temporary quarters at the Central British School in Kowloon. On Thursday 11 December the matron at the school took Lannie aside and ‘told me that the Japanese would probably enter Kowloon that evening but did not want to spread the news around in case of upsetting the younger assistant nursing sisters’. (Lannie kept a fragmentary record of those days, written in only just legible pencil in a tiny pocket diary for 1942 – she must have bought it in late 1941, just before the fighting began.) Later that day the nurses and staff were called together and told that ‘the Japanese were expected to be in Kowloon that evening – we were advised not to leave the building and it was the Governor’s wish that we should stay at our posts. “All the military and police are being withdrawn to the Island and we are abandoning you.”’ Lannie called the hospital and, just before the phone lines were cut, managed to get through to tell Jack the news. ‘He was horrified – he said nobody had mentioned such a possibility & said, “Oh do try & come over here.” I replied that I felt I could not desert my post & that I felt I must stick to the others & take whatever they had to take – since I’d thrown in my lot with them. I added also that even if I’d wanted to come I doubted if I should be able to get there – as looters were already busy in the streets. We’d previously agreed too that it would be better for one of us to be on the mainland & the other on the Island so that at least if the worst happened one of us might be saved.’

  The Japanese arrived the next day. Over the following days the nurses were moved from place to place while the fighting went on; the bombing and shelling of Hong Kong Island was
particularly hard to watch. There was no law, and no order. Looters were everywhere. Some of them tried to pillage the school. This event is recorded in Lannie’s diary as follows: ‘Looters – chased them away’. I like this for the way it makes my five-foot-three-inch-tall grandmother, who weighed one hundred pounds sopping wet, sound like a female version of Clint Eastwood. And then the fighting was over, and the Governor surrendered. This is her diary for the last days of the fall.

  Wed. Washed clothes & had drink. Xmas Eve so different from last year. Hope all our loved ones are well. Beautiful weather warm & sunny something to be thankful for. Heard QM hospital had been bombed hope Jack is safe & well.

  Thurs Xmas day. Miss Lurgan decorated hall with poinsettia – going to have service at 11. Had carols & service & Xmas pudding & chocolate. Quite a good meal & I made coffee 24 spoonfuls for about 70 people. Voted very good & so it was. Drinks in evening. HK given ultimatum until midnight.

  Frid 26th HK surrendered. [In fact the surrender was the day before.]

  28th my birthday – 46.

  Tues 30th Our men came past to concentration camps – pitiful sight but they showed good spirits.

  On 23 January 1942, Lannie and the other women were moved to Stanley Internment Camp, where they were to spend the rest of the war. Jack was already there waiting for her. The relief at being reunited brought a terrible sting with it, since Jack had a piece of bad news for Lannie. Leslie Holmes, her lover, had been killed in the fighting for the Peak on 21 December. It must have been an appallingly hard moment for Jack, breaking this news, which can only have brought him tormentingly mixed feelings. As for Lannie, her diary simply says: ‘Heard about Douglas Leslie Griffiths.’ That’s all she says about Leslie Holmes – the fact that she uses his first name is the only hint, if one can call it that, of her strength of feeling. All through the story of my family, the things that were felt most strongly are precisely the things that were never said.