Wuhan

by John Fletcher

  ‘You obviously have not checked the list of people who have read my file. Or you would not be treating me like this.’

  I continue to stare. Even with my blurry vision I can see he is hesitating, calculating whether he will lose some power over me if he gives in to my request and reads the list, but simultaneously worrying about the chance of there having been some cock-up. Some really important person, or people, might be on that list – people who could, on hearing a friend of theirs had been tortured, be in a position to wrathfully descend upon him and annihilate him forever.

  ‘You do not dare to read it,’ I say.

  Interrogations like this are all about power.

  He is still hesitating when the man without glasses snatches the file from him and runs his eye down the list. And stops. And blanches.

  ‘Shall I hit him, boss?’ enquires the unseen man behind me.

  ‘No,’ says the man, slight panic in his voice.

  A series of rapid calculations are obviously spinning through his mind.

  ‘Get out,’ he orders the man behind me.

  ‘Yes, boss,’ says the man. He marches away and down the corridor. I will never see my assailant’s face.

  By this time the man with glasses has read the list on the file and his face has turned deepest grey. The man without glasses is meanwhile still sunk in desperate calculation.

  ‘Could you pass me back my glasses?’ I ask with quiet authority.

  They scramble to return them. Suddenly start howling out apologies. Deluge me with grovels and pleas for forgiveness, each offering the other as sacrificial victim.

  Within twenty minutes, my wounds doctored, my clothing brushed and restored, I am standing – just about – on the street outside. Beside me stands Tian Boqi – just about. This time he has got more than a black eye.

  *

  Celia Johnson was about the only stable thing in her husband Peter Fleming’s life. The next evening he watched her as she patiently removed her make-up from her face in her dressing room in the St James. She did it in that slow, thorough way in which she approached life. She specialized in playing ordinary, sensible, uncomplaining people on stage. Which was what made her Elizabeth Bennet so interesting. A serious, feeling woman, sometimes aghast at her own flippancy and malice, slowly, painfully working her way towards becoming a worthy woman and wife to a man himself going through similar ordeals.

  In everyday life she was exactly the same – intelligent, reserved, kind, with infinite patience. She’d once trekked over the Himalayas with him. Not one single complaint. Fleming wondered what he would do without her. She was his rock. Of course, he couldn’t wait to get away. More from London, from England, than from her. He found London a prison. But then abroad was not much better. The wilder, the more primitive it was the better he could cling on.

  ‘Got to go, old girl,’ he told her.

  ‘You’re going straight to the airfield after your meeting?’ she asked.

  ‘Yes.’

  She didn’t rise to kiss him farewell because she didn’t want any of her make-up to smear his face or his immaculate evening dress.

  ‘You’re a good girl,’ he told her, his voice thickening slightly with emotion.

  ‘You look after yourself,’ she told him, as she knew that was what he wanted to hear.

  He left. She did not drop a tear because, however sad she felt, that would help no one. She continued patiently removing her make-up.

  Fleming was soon in the garish light of Piccadilly. A tart trolled past looking for custom. A negro leant against a shop front picking his bright white teeth with a toothpick. Fleming’s car, black and sleek, swept up to the curb. He stepped in and was whisked into the night.

  In 1938 MI6 was ruled by an unstable quadvirate of rivals – its ailing head, Admiral Sir Hugh Sinclair; his soon-to-be successor, Major General Sir Stewart Menzies (Sir Hugh having died at his desk); Colonel Valentine Vivian, known as ‘Vee-Vee’, ex-Indian Police officer with a monocle to match; and Colonel Sir Claude Dansey, who, he liked to tell people, could think in nine directions at once.

  MI6 inhabited a bizarre and dilapidated block of flats. Peter Fleming was visiting Major General Sir Stewart Menzies, whose office was perched on top of the roof. An assistant guided Fleming though a rabbit warren of passageways, corridors, nooks and alcoves. At the end of all this he was led up a flight of stairs so narrow a stout man would become irretrievably wedged. Finally, on the roof, they crossed an iron bridge and Fleming was ushered into Sir Stewart Menzies’s private office, a cramped shed measuring ten feet by ten.13

  Sir Stewart Menzies’s chief claim to fame was that during the 1924 general election he had helped forge the notorious Zinoviev letter, which ‘proved’ that the Labour Party, which was poised to win the general election, was directly under the control of the Kremlin. Published in the ever-cooperative Daily Mail, this document immediately destroyed Labour’s election chances.

  ‘Peter,’ said the major general.

  ‘Stewart,’ said Peter.

  ‘Good flight?’

  ‘Yes. And you, how are you?’

  ‘Not bad.’

  ‘Any good hunting?’

  ‘Went out with the Beaufort a couple of times in the spring, with Henry Somerset.’

  ‘How’s he keeping?’

  ‘Not too bad. Asked to be remembered to you.’

  ‘I could do with a good gallop sometime.’

  ‘Henry said there’ll always be a horse for you.’

  Slight pause.

  ‘I asked you to fly over for two reasons, Peter. Firstly, to brief you on what’s happening here. Big moves ahead on the European front. PM’s due to fly to Germany to meet the corporal and smooth out an agreement on the Sudetenland.’

  ‘Beneš will be ignored?’

  ‘Not permitted within a hundred miles of it. But deals on the Sudetenland are not the main purpose of the conference. While there, Chamberlain intends to work out a far more general arrangement, a solemn and binding agreement on the future of the whole of Europe. Hitler must keep his hands off the rest of Czechoslovakia and France, the Low Countries and Scandinavia…’

  ‘The civilized bits.’

  ‘…and he can do what he damn well wants with the East. The sooner he lays into those Bolshevik animals in Russia the happier we’ll all be.’

  ‘Agreed.’

  ‘Which means that, a New European Deal signed, we can at last be rid of the place and all its perpetual squabbles and Britain can once again rule the empire and the world. Resume our rightful position as the world’s leading trading nation.’

  ‘What about Eden and Churchill and their rabble?’

  Menzies sighed.

  ‘Don’t those imbeciles realize that another European war will destroy our Empire, Britain’s financial and military strength in the world? Because of our obsession with Europe we see increasing demands for independence in India, the Americans stealing our markets in China and Japan and South America…’

  There was a pause.

  ‘I called you in, Peter, because we want someone out there who can keep his head – so in case things go pear-shaped here in Europe, you can step in with the Chinese government and reassure them there’s no cause for alarm. Do you have contacts with the Japanese intelligence services in Wuhan?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Then you must convey the same message to them. Business as usual.’

  ‘You can rely on me.’

  ‘Of course I can, Peter.’

  Menzies admired Peter. His endless treks and expeditions through wild and remote places. His taste for the dangerous and exotic. He reminded him of Buchan’s Richard Hannay, forever playing the Great Game, guarding the outposts of Empire.

  ‘Recruited any useful agents in Wuhan? Got any insights into what our enemy’s intentions are over there?’

  ‘The Bolsheviks are there in force. They’ve got communists in the government. Chou En-lai and so on.’

  ‘Not good.’<
br />
  ‘The press corps is almost entirely Bolshie, or at best socialists.’

  ‘You’ve got names?’

  ‘Well, there’s the well-known ones like Agnes Smedley, probably a lesbian, or the Snows, or Jack Belden, an alcoholic. But they’re Americans, so there’s little we can do about them.’

  ‘I know a couple of chaps in Washington who’d be interested in their names.’

  ‘And you can tell them Evans Carlson, their so-called military attaché, talks openly and in depth every day with his Russian counterparts. And he spends as much time in the north-west plotting with the communists as he does in Wuhan.’

  ‘Useful. He’s Roosevelt’s man, isn’t he?’

  ‘Yes. In the British press there’s Vernon Bartlett…’

  ‘That creepy little parlour socialist. Have to switch the wireless off every time he comes on.’

  ‘James Bertram of the Telegraph – he’s pretty red. The Kiwi Rewi Alley, out and out communist. And there’s someone who’s just turned up, from the News Chronicle, a woman called Freda Utley. Looks a bit of a mess. According to gossip she spent quite a lot of time in Moscow. They all work little bits of socialist propaganda into their reports – the changes in Chinese society, social medicine, educational reform, the “fight” against fascism…’

  ‘Good,’ said Menzies, having noted down all their names and the papers they wrote for. ‘I’ll get in touch with their proprietors and editors. Either get them sacked outright or get someone in head office to rewrite their stories before publication. Recruited any agents?’

  ‘One likely candidate – a George Hogg – Quaker, works for UPI. Not exactly top drawer. Went to some school in Harpenden, then Wadham.’

  Menzies raised an eyebrow.

  ‘Earnest, not bright,’ continued Fleming. ‘I managed to turn him, as a pacifist, against all the lefties perpetually screaming for war. I’ve impressed on him the prime minister’s desire for peace.’

  ‘I’ll run a check on him. What’s his politics?’

  ‘Liberal. But I’ve tutored him to see lefties as the enemy. Before I left I got him to note down while I was away what other journalists were saying, conversations he’d overheard. I’ll send you a copy. I’ll have him signed up within a month.’

  ‘Splendid.’

  Then Menzies pulled a face.

  ‘Not going to cost us a lot of money, is he? Our budget’s pretty tight.’

  ‘He won’t cost us a penny. He’ll spy for us out of pure idealism.’

  ‘The best sort of spy,’ opined Major-General Sir Stewart Menzies.14

  *

  It is a fact rarely acknowledged by writers that in fact they themselves have very little to do with the actual act of writing. Of course, after the fact, it is great to claim credit for one’s wonderful creation – gorgeous prose, deeply memorable characters, thrilling plot etc. etc. – but, in truth, while in the substantive act of creation, one has virtually no control whatever over the actual process or its results. It just sort of occurs.

  Of course, one does one’s research for such things. The background. Draw up sketchy versions of the final characters. Have a rough idea of the plot and the tone and the ‘what it’s all about’. But then you enter a period of complete blankness. You wander around listlessly doing nothing in particular like some broody duck. Then miraculously, spontaneously, without any conscious actions or decisions on your part, it breaks forth, starts pouring out of you, in uncontrolled and uncontrollable gushes. Walms up from nowhere, nothingness, and pours forth onto your page. In all this you are but a mere medium, a duct of the downpour. It writes itself without any intercession or deliberation or consciousness from you. And then, suddenly one day, miraculously, it all ends. You mysteriously regain your normality and become once again just an ordinary person. And no one is more ordinary than a writer.

  But I am not here to reveal to you the embarrassing and hidden truths about writing. Let the mystery of brooding genius remain! I am exposing these soiled trade secrets because they help explain to you precisely how it was that I managed to write my embarrassingly successful entertainment Defend Wuhan!

  As I have previously explained, I had for some time been fiddling with ideas and themes and characters and tones and styles. All with absolutely no result. My mind remained a complete blank. My creative constipation was so obvious it became an embarrassment. But then suddenly…! Well, you know what happened. I was arrested. Yes, arrested. And this is where it becomes deeply embarrassing, and why I haven’t told you about this until now. Because, whatever your circumstances, however dire your situation, nothing can stop the arrival of creativity. So while I lay quivering in my cell, while enormous men were raining lusty blows on me, while afterwards I lay inert and silent upon the stone floor, then, then the words commenced. At first in dribs and drabbles. Then with sudden spurts, finally in torrents. I became like an incontinent baby. Words, words, words! Words immeasurable as stars in the midnight sky. And as a writer, a proper professional writer, I knew that unless I caught them then, in spate, in full roar, remembered them, every single one exactly and in place, then they would have gone, emptied forever into the void. So all the time I was being beaten, interrogated, humiliated, shouted at, simultaneously I found it necessary, unavoidable, that I MUST record and exactly memorialize obsessively each and every word that evacuated into my consciousness. And, believe it or not, somehow or other, I managed it. Such are the abnormalities of writers.

  Which was why when I met Tian Boqi on the pavement outside the prison I was in such a hurry to leave him. Because I had all these words bursting within me. I had to write them down. And judging by the look on his face and the gait of his body he found himself in a similar circumstance.

  So when I get home I immediately seize my pen and start writing. It flows from me. My play has to start in a prison. A single man in a prison cell. Where can I have got that idea from? And of course it has to be a Japanese prison cell, not a Chinese one! And he of course, with great courage and physical daring, has to escape. And because of his courage and all-out patriotism, under the leadership of the heroic Chiang Kai-shek, he quickly becomes a great commander of men and leads innumerable armies of China onto the fields of battle and there defeats sub-human Japanese at every turn. And now he stands here in Wuhan, sworn to defend it to the very death! (Even though, of course, everyone in the audience will know that within days Wuhan will fall to the horrors of the Japanese.) But that is the very purpose of art. To dream the impossible dream!

  We’ll need lots of marching people – so through Chiang Kai-shek’s office I contact the army. The Boy Scouts and Girl Guides are added for more marching. We get the anti-aircraft corps to contribute various searchlights (provided there isn’t an air raid that night) and a military band for martial music. I request my old friend and comrade Yu Liqun – or Guo Liqun, as she now is – if she and her theatrical troupe can provide some stirring military dancing for us. It’s what they specialize in. For emotional music I contact my old friend Shanyaodan, who does the great drum song epics in his tented theatre down on the Bund. His orchestra can provide the music, and I also ask him to play our hero. He may be a bit old but no one can deliver lines with the strength and conviction and emotion he can. He’ll transform my feeble and unconvincing hero into a second Zhang Fei holding the bridge at Changban, and everyone will understand and feel the parallel.

  But I still have one problem. I really need in my torrid extravaganza to show a bit of what the Americans call ‘leg’. A bit of pizzazz and flapdoodle. Something that is simultaneously exotic but also exceedingly modest. General Chiang Kai-shek and his wife are both stern Christians. And so am I.

  Where on earth am I going to find that in Wuhan?

  10

  This afternoon George Hogg was doing what he enjoyed doing more than anything else in Wuhan. He was in a shed. A very small, cramped shed.

  In this shed lived the orphans George had volunteered to look after – nearly fifty boy
s – where, for several extremely frantic hours, he tried to organize them into team games, stop them fighting each other, keep an eye on the violent ones and stop them from attacking the vulnerable ones, get them all singing cheery patriotic songs and trying to teach them the rudiments of reading and writing.

  Since George’s skills in writing and reading Chinese were only slightly more advanced than theirs, however, this was an uphill process.

  Overall it was bedlam, but slowly, through the screaming and punching and howling and laughter – because they did like this big, chunky and not very sharp Englishman, or at any rate feared his size and strength – very gradually George was able to discern at least some improvement, some calming of their behaviour. They were the survivors of blown-apart families, kids who’d had to resort to violence and thieving and even murder to survive. Deeply disturbed and grieving children, some of whom had had to invent entirely new imaginary worlds and personas to escape into in order to survive. But amid this cacophony George noticed individuals starting slowly to abandon their extreme isolation, to explore new ways of relating to each other, beginning to realize that on occasions cooperation and trust might be a more effective way of surviving in the midst of such violence and insanity.

  All this took place in the shed where they also lived. Sometimes they went for walks, but at least two adults were required to keep under control the strays and berserkers. George often wished that they had some sort of play area, or even better playing fields – like he’d had at St George’s School, Harpenden – where they could roam and explode their energies and angers.