by Damien Lewis
“And the pigeon said . . . I’ll carry their sad messages. I am their family and they are mine.” —Alice Renshaw
But there was no story to rival Judy’s, Meg added. She was truly a dog in a million. Meg, like Lizzie, advised me that the one person I really did need to meet was Rouse Voisey. In due course I drove up to rural Norfolk to meet the man himself. My GPS took me to a pretty bungalow that looks out over wild woods and rolling fields lying to one side of the neat row of houses in which he has his home.
Rouse had clearly been awaiting my arrival. He greeted me on the garden steps—an incredibly sprightly and sharp-looking ninety-two-year-old. We shook hands. He scrutinized me with a quick, piercing look, as if trying to appraise the caliber of the “young man” who had driven such a long way to speak to him about events that lay some seven decades in the past.
He glanced at the scenery, which was lit by a bleak winter’s midday sun. “You know, on some days the birdsong is so loud that I can’t hear myself greet my neighbors across the fence.” He smiled. “I love it here. You’re very welcome.” He gestured to his half-open door. “Please, come in, come in.”
Rouse was a remarkable man, to put it mildly. Not only was he a survivor of Sumatra’s railway hell, he’d lived through what by his own admission was a “worse” slave-labor project under the Japanese. He was among a group of Allied POWs who were forced to clear the coral island of Haruku of its jungle in order to hack out a landing strip from the bare rock—in preparation for Imperial Japan’s planned invasion of Australia, something that of course never happened. Haruku is an island in the Moluccas—the so-called Spice Islands—but under the blistering sun and in the scorching heat and dust, building that runway had all but killed Rouse and so many of his fellows had died.
If that wasn’t enough, he had then been loaded aboard one of Imperial Japan’s so-called hell ships—rusting death traps used to transport POWs like slaves of old from one forced labor project to another—for a journey that he feared would be his last. So ill was he that he could remember little of the voyage prior to the sinking of the ship, the Junyo Maru, by a British submarine. It was, at the time, the worst maritime disaster in history in terms of confirmed loss of life: some 5,600 Allied prisoners of war plus local slave laborers perished at sea.
Somehow Rouse survived the shipwreck. In doing so he made it to Sumatra to join the many hundreds of POWs slaving in that living hell. It was then that he first heard about Judy, the de facto mascot of the trans-Sumatran railway. As with all those who’d spoken before him, Rouse was unable to mention Judy’s name or recall her memory without a warm smile. He glanced at a photo of his own dog—now deceased—hanging on the living room wall.
“That was my dog, Shona. She was a tricolor English setter. She was the most loving, wonderful companion you could ever wish for. I used to take her to the office where I worked—she’d sleep under my desk. She had the most lovely nature. I put the leg of my chair on her ear once by accident. She didn’t snarl or bark at me. She just rolled her eyes and whined, as if to say, Hey, that really hurts, you know. I never got another dog after Shona. I couldn’t—not after her. And Judy—she was exactly that kind of a dog. There wasn’t another like her.”
Rouse went on to share with me stories from his time in the prison camps, with his fellows and their camp dog—ones that perhaps he’d never discussed with anyone before, not even his recently deceased wife. He ended our chat with this:
“I was amazed that a dog could survive it all. That Judy outlived the hell of that place—it was incredible. The Korean camp guards in particular—they used to eat dogs. And they had the power of life or death over us all. It makes you wonder how anyone got away with it—keeping a dog like Judy. It’s all part of the wonder of her story.”
I left Rouse’s little bungalow with a box heaped full of yellowing newspaper articles, dog-eared books, photos, and reports from the POW camp survivors—much of the “library” that Rouse had built up over the years.
“Yes, yes—take it all,” he reassured me as I asked again if he really was happy with me borrowing his library for a while. “I’ve got little use for it at my age. And if you need to come talk to me again, please do. I’m here on my own with nothing much to do other than watch the box—and there’s never anything on but repeats these days!”
I loaded the precious container onto the backseat of my car, but as I went to say a last good-bye, Rouse held out a hand to restrain me. “You know, there’s one question you never asked that people always tend to: After what happened, do you hate the Japanese? I rather like it that you felt you didn’t need to ask that of me.”
Rouse shook his head, his eyes lost in memories of the past. “No, no—I don’t hate the Japanese. How can you hate an entire people? I hate the guards who did those unspeakable things to us. But I could never hate an entire people. I think the hate would eat you up. It would consume you.” He laughed. “So that’s probably how I’ve lived to such a ripe old age!”
After visiting Rouse I spent time with other survivors of the POW camps and their relatives and families, learning more about the story that was beginning to captivate me. Fergus Anckorn, the irrepressibly youthful ninety-five-year-old who survived the POW camps through his use of magic—he was once the youngest and is now the oldest member of the legendary magic circle—told me about his own incredible relationships with pets in the POW camps, including a dog, monkeys, and even a chameleon! The chameleon would lie on his chest at night while he was sleeping and flick out its tongue to catch mosquitoes. It was his de facto mosquito net!
“Those pets—they kept us sane, you know. They were a little tiny slice of the familiar, of what we knew—of home. And somehow, you knew you had to stay alive and return at the end of a day’s hard labor to look after your dog or monkey or whatever was waiting faithfully for you! You had to stay alive for them.”
Fergus told me about the value of those pets in sustaining the prisoners’ morale—or, more accurately, their will to live. In many cases, individuals opted to share some of their meager ration with their pet animal rather than allowing another living being to starve to death. Fergus loved dogs. He had a relationship with them that went very deep and was incredibly enduring. He was a cat lover too.
“Once I spotted a tiny bird like a sparrow on a bush,” he told me, a rare sadness creeping into his mischievous, fun-filled eyes. “I stalked up to that bird on hands and knees. On the other side of the bush was an emaciated cat. It was a race between the two of us. I saw the cat spring, the bird took off to escape, and—pow!—I caught the tiny bundle of feathers in midair. I cooked that little bird and ate it that very evening. But when I looked at the pile of bones afterward, I felt so guilty that I’d left the cat to starve. I never could forget it or forgive myself.”
Like Rouse, Fergus believed that those POWs who hated the Japanese were eventually consumed by their hatred. Those who forgave lived longer and happier lives. And Fergus was one of many who’d go on to explain to me the vital role that pets played as the unsung heroes of the prison camps. It was a story that few had told and one that Judy epitomized more than any other animal that had made it through the hell of the prison camp years.
This, then, is Judy’s tale. It opens in Shanghai several years before the start of the war, when British gunboats still cruised the mighty Yangtze River, guarding British interest far into the heart of China. It commences with a tiny bundle of curiosity that ran away from home and ended up serving as the mascot of the doughty Royal Navy gunboat the Gnat. It follows Judy and her fellows’ extraordinary adventures over the years—from the Yangtze River to the Sumatran hell railway and everything in between.
People often say that truth is stranger than fiction. Undoubtedly, Judy of Sussex’s story is one that anyone would find distinctly challenging to make up.
It is certainly one that I feel privileged to have been able to tell.
Damien Lewis,
Cork, Ireland, December 2013
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br /> Chapter One
The tiny puppy wiggled her nose a little farther under the wire.
Blessed with a gundog’s excellent peripheral vision, she was keeping one eye on those to her rear—her fellow siblings, plus the kennel staff, who would little appreciate yet another escape attempt. Ahead of her, just a breath away, lay the outside world—the teeming hustle and bustle of life that lay all around but that she and her fellow pups were seemingly forever forbidden from experiencing.
It was all just so tantalizingly close.
The English-run Shanghai Dog Kennels had bred the beautiful liver-and-white English pointer puppies to serve as gundogs for various English gentlemen then resident in Shanghai. But this one pup, it seemed, had other ideas. The kennels were like an island of calm amid the sea of chaos that was 1936 Shanghai—chaos to which the puppy poised halfway under the wire felt irresistibly drawn.
Before her very nose rickshaws—ancient-looking wooden carts pulled by human bearers—tore back and forth as they weaved through the dusty streets, carrying the better-off Shanghai residents trussed up in formal-looking top hats and dress coats. Those rickety carriages fought for space with streetcars and buses, chugging their ponderous way past roadside stalls selling freshly fried and spiced delicacies. And everywhere bright red cloth banners hung from the shopfronts, advertising their wares in exotic-looking Mandarin and Wu calligraphy.
Why it was only she of her siblings who felt this insatiable urge to see, to smell, and to taste the wider world—to escape—she didn’t know. But ever since birth, curiosity had seemed to get the better of this still nameless puppy. And now here she was, glistening nose thrust under the wire and twitching at the bewitching smells that assaulted it, round and chubby backside still within the safe confines of the kennel, but with only a few more wriggles and a final squeeze required to break free.
Doubtless, one voice inside the pup’s head was telling her: Don’t do it! But another, equally strident voice was urging—Go for it, girl! In that moment of indecision as she peered beneath the wire the little puppy heard a yell of alarm from behind. She’d been spotted! It was the cry of Lee Ming, the local Chinese girl whose mother lived and worked at the kennels, raising the alarm. Lee Ming was quick and nimble and would be on her like a flash unless she got a move on.
Tiny forepaws thrashed and scrabbled at the dirt as she fought to squeeze her way under the wire. The wrinkly folds of puppy fat rolled and gave beneath her as she got her belly down even lower and wriggled like a fat fish stuck on an angler’s hook. The bare stub of a tail, sticking out behind her like a long and rigid finger, twitched to and fro as she strove with all her might to break free.
Behind her Lee Ming came to a sudden halt and reached to grab the disobedient puppy, but as she did so the tiny ball of irrepressible energy gave one last Herculean effort and she was through. An instant and a scamper later and—poof!—the diminutive four-legged figure was gone, paws flying as she was swallowed up into the noise and dust and utter disorder of downtown Shanghai.
For a horrible moment Lee Ming stared after the puppy that had disappeared, in complete dismay. There were so many dangers stalking those city streets that she didn’t have the heart to imagine the half of them. If there was one thing the little puppy wasn’t, it was streetwise. In her headlong confusion she might be run over by a rickshaw. In her fright she might tumble into one of the city’s myriad open sewers. But worst of all, a roly-poly puppy like her would offer a tantalizing meal to those partial to dog meat—which included a large majority of the city’s native population.
In 1936 Shanghai the flesh of man’s best friend was much sought after, being seen as something of a “sweet”-tasting delicacy. A young and tender dog that no one seemed to own or to care for would be fair game. Lee Ming turned back toward the large colonial-style house that lay in the center of the kennel compound. She headed for reception to report the bad news and to help raise whatever search party they would send after the wayward pup. But her heart was heavy, and a dark foreboding lay upon her.
She feared very much that this was the last they’d ever see of the puppy that had run away.
The Shanghai that the puppy had made a break for was no place for any defenseless being, let alone an English pointer barely a few weeks old. Then a city of some 3 million inhabitants, Shanghai—a port city lying in the very center of China’s coastline—was a bustling metropolis red in tooth and claw. Because of its position at the mouth of the mighty Yangtze River—Asia’s longest and a vital conduit for trade and commerce into China’s vast interior—the great powers of Britain, America, and France had long-established trading settlements in the city.
For decades, Shanghai had been known as the Paris of the East, but in recent years it had become a city beset by troubles. Weak leadership and infighting in the Chinese government had allowed vicious gangs of bandits to thrive. Warlords had taken control of large tracts of the nation’s interior. Increasingly, Britain, America, and France had been forced to send gunboats far into the interior on the Yangtze in an effort to dissuade those lawless elements from disrupting their lucrative trade in silk, cotton, tea, and other valuable commodities.
Recently, trouble had piled upon trouble, in particular with the resurgence of China’s age-old enemy—Japan. In an escalating series of bloody skirmishes the Japanese Navy had bombarded Shanghai. As they had with the British and the other “great powers,” the Chinese were forced to sign a treaty with Imperial Japan, allowing the Japanese to establish a permanent presence in the “treaty port” of Shanghai. Imperial Japan made little secret of its desire to conquer and subjugate the entire Chinese nation, and Shanghai was the gateway to China’s then capital city, Nanking.
This then was Shanghai, the city that the escapee from the kennels had absconded to—one menaced by gangland banditry, whose streets were increasingly plagued by soldiers from Imperial Japan, who showed ill-disguised contempt for the local inhabitants. So it was something of a miracle that several weeks after her dramatic breakout, the puppy who had run away was still very much alive and breathing.
The silky chubbiness was long gone, of course. Instead, adolescent ribs poked through a liver-and-white coat that had lost much of its shine and luster. Her nose was dry and cracked, a sure sign that she was in a dreadful condition. Only her eyes seemed to demonstrate their signature brightness, betraying a strength of character that had distinguished her from birth and perhaps led to her present, unenviable predicament. They shone with a burning curiosity and a zest for life despite all that she had suffered since her ill-fated escape. But there was something else now in her gaze—uncertainty and vulnerability, a sense that the young dog had realized to her cost that not every human was her natural friend and ally.
How stupid she had been, she now recognized, to run away. She had traded the comfort and luxury of the kennels for a battered old cardboard box lying in a smelly, flyblown Shanghai alleyway. She’d traded the companionship and playfulness of her brother and sister puppies for the loneliness of life on the streets. And in place of the English kennel owner’s natural love for and protection over her dogs, she’d faced cruelty and abuse at every turn in this overcrowded human zoo of a city.
All apart from one individual—Soo. For whatever reason, Soo the Chinese trader was an unreconstructed lover of dogs. Her shabby box-cum-home lay to the rear of his store, and ever since the puppy had found her way to it Soo had taken it upon himself to deliver tidbits of food to her of an evening when his long day’s work was done. It was hardly the kind of diet she’d grown accustomed to at the kennels, but at least it had served to keep her alive.
Like many Chinese, it wasn’t in Soo’s nature or family tradition to keep a dog at home as a pet. In the China of 1936 dogs had to earn their keep as working animals, or they were invariably for the pot. In fact, the eating of dog meat in China had a history stretching back thousands of years, the meat being thought to possess mystical medicinal properties. There were even some breed
s of dog that were kept specifically for human consumption, especially in times of seasonal hunger.
Fortunately, Soo wasn’t one of those who were partial to having dog on the menu, and the lost puppy from the Shanghai Dog Kennels was lucky indeed to have fallen by chance under his protection.
But tonight, all of that was about to change.
With a sixth sense that was to become her absolute trademark, the lonely pup detected the danger before it was audible or visible to any human ear or eye, Soo’s included. A Japanese gunboat had docked in the port of Shanghai, and the sailors of His Japanese Imperial Majesty’s ship were making their noisy way along the very road upon which Soo’s shop was situated, no doubt in search of alcohol and some locals on whom to vent their aggression. It was late evening, but the hardworking Soo was still there, his being one of the few stores on the street remaining open.
That alone offered enough of an excuse for the gunboat crew to pounce.
As the Japanese sailors started verbally abusing Soo and helping themselves to his wares, he of course protested. Voices were raised in anger, but the Japanese sailors didn’t stop there. Within minutes Soo’s shop had been plundered, its rickety wooden shelves torn down and smashed to pieces. As for Soo, he was set upon by the Japanese sailors, who were working themselves into a towering rage.
Hearing her one protector in the world being so cruelly assaulted, the adolescent pup had stolen out of her alleyway and snuck around the corner to see if there was anything she could do to save him. Inching forward on her belly, she alternately whimpered in fright and tried to muster her most threatening growl as the strange figures in their baggy pants over knee-high black boots kicked and punched her protector.
Then one of the aggressors spotted the cowering dog. He stepped away from Soo and took a few paces toward her. Moments later one of those perfectly polished boots was swinging toward the adolescent puppy’s midriff. The powerful blow lifted her from the cobbles and flung her across the street into a pile of trash on the far side. There she lay, whimpering and in agony and hoping beyond hope that these cruel men in their strange uniforms wouldn’t come for her again.