He left the window on the latch, where a warm breeze sent the scents of summer into the room, and sat down at his desk again. Finishing the tea, he ate the two biscuits and mentally composed himself for the couple of hours ahead, with his list of patients and their varying complaints.
One day at a time. It really was the only way.
Chapter Thirty
‘What on earth’s that hullabaloo?’ Hilda struggled to sit up in bed, her face turning white as the ruckus from outside the building filtered into the hospital.
‘I don’t know.’ Abby had only just come on duty and had been helping Hilda get more comfortable. The heat and humidity always seemed more unbearable in August after the rainy season had finished.
For some days now, the guards had seemed visibly upset. The POW grapevine, via good old faithful Peter, had gleefully reported that their captors had been talking amongst themselves about a very big bomb or bombs having been dropped by the Allies somewhere in Japan itself. The fact that the Japanese were seriously disturbed lent more credibility to the rumour that things were hotting up for the enemy. Many planes had been seen and heard in the vicinity and there was a different atmosphere in the camp. The guards were jumpy, very jumpy, and the POWs didn’t know how they were going to react from one day to the next. If it was true that the Japanese were close to losing the war, no one doubted that they were quite capable of lining everyone up and shooting them, or worse.
Wondering if the executions had begun, Abby went to the door of the hospital with her heart in her mouth, fearing what she would find. None of the POWs wanted to die – they had fought so hard for the last torturous years to live – but to be butchered rather than liberated would be the final twist in their uncertain existence.
As Abby stood in the doorway, one of the colonial administrators’ wives called to her. ‘The Japs are releasing Red Cross food parcels from storage. There’s tea and sugar and powdered milk and loads more. Come and see.’
Abby stared at the woman. ‘Did the guards say why?’
‘I don’t think so, but it’s got to mean the war is over, surely?’
Abby hoped so, but there had been so many cruelties, so many times that the Japanese, not content with breaking the POWs’ bodies through starvation and disease, attempted to break their spirits too with mind games.
Her heart thumping fit to burst, she went back into the hospital where all the patients who could sit up in bed were doing so. ‘It’s all right,’ she tried to reassure the anxious sea of faces. ‘Apparently the guards are distributing Red Cross parcels to us, that’s what all the noise is about.’
Almost as she finished speaking, Matron Fraser walked into the ward. For a moment the matron stood surveying the scene in front of her. Although the hospital was called that by name, in reality it had been a place where most people came so that the nurses could make their last days as comfortable as they could. With no medicine or equipment, it had been a mockery of what it should have been. She looked at her nurses, their unhealthy, pasty and malnourished skin no better than that of the patients in the beds, their clothes hanging off their gaunt frames. Her girls, as she thought of her nurses, had carried on with their duties even on the days when they were feeling so ill themselves they could barely drag themselves from bed to bed. She was proud of every one of them.
Swallowing against the lump in her throat, the matron took a deep breath. ‘The war is over and Japan has surrendered,’ she said, and to the chorus of questions that followed she held up her hand. When it was quiet, she spoke again, purposely keeping her voice level and controlled. Control was very important to the matron. ‘It appears the Allies dropped two bombs on the Japanese, the like of which has never been seen before. The second bomb tipped the balance and Emperor Hirohito called an end to the war. I understand from Major Fushida that the gist of the Emperor’s address was that he had decided to end the conflict and that the Japanese would have to endure the unendurable and submit to the Allies.’ The matron’s voice hardened. ‘Apparently the word “surrender” was never used in the Emperor’s speech and the major made it clear to me that such a word is not in the Japanese psyche. Whether it is or it isn’t, that is what they have done.’
The matron did not add here that the major had also said that there had been orders from his superiors – apparently coming from the Emperor himself – that all POWs were to be killed in the event of Japan losing the war. Major Fushida had looked her straight in the eye as he had said in his clipped and formal way, ‘This will not happen in my camp. In my camp the prisoners are treated with kindness and respect.’ She had wanted to shout at him, ‘Kindness and respect? You’ve starved many of us to death and mistreated us in a hundred different ways, and you talk about kindness and respect?’ But she hadn’t. She had merely nodded, and left his presence without the customary bow.
‘The major has assured me that medicines, bandages and mosquito nets will be brought here by one of the guards shortly. In addition we are being given soap and other supplies. I think this is a blatant attempt to gloss over the maltreatment we’ve all suffered at the hands of the Japanese, but I was not about to refuse any provisions.’ She smiled. ‘We will be going home, that’s the main thing.’
Abby stared at the matron. So many times she had dreamed of this moment and imagined how she would feel if it actually happened. But the wild joy and excitement weren’t there. In fact, she felt numb. The memory of those patients she had nursed in the camp and who had lost their struggle to survive was strong. Kurt, in particular. The transformation of an optimistic, brave and cheeky young man into a pathetic, tortured soul fighting for every breath would always remain with her, and she hated the Japanese. She did, she hated them, she told herself fiercely, and she would die hating them. And it wasn’t just the few at present in the hospital who were suffering and desperately ill either. All over the camp men, women and even a number of the little ones were in terrible shape, suffering from severe malnutrition and deeply traumatized by what they had been through. Because of the lack of protein and roughage in their diet, they all had varying degrees of colitis and other bowel trouble, and Abby knew there were those who would have to go through the indignity of colostomies in the future, Hilda for one. If Hilda made it home, that was, which was doubtful.
She glanced round the room which was strangely quiet in view of the news Matron Fraser had brought, and the same kind of numbness she was feeling was reflected in other faces. They had been through so much and now it was over, how could they pick up the pieces again? The effects of their captivity, both physical and mental, would go with them into freedom; the enemy was still winning. They would go on winning.
And then the door opened again and Delia rushed in, an armful of toilet rolls held against her chest. ‘Look!’ She grinned at them all, her face alight with laughter. ‘Look what the guards are dishing out! Victory rolls.’ And as everyone stared at her, she giggled. ‘That’s what everyone’s calling them, victory rolls. Every time we wipe our backsides it signifies the Japs have lost. How appropriate is that?’
Abby looked at her friend. Delia had suffered so much and still had problems internally because of the savage brutality with which she had been repeatedly raped. Delia was a shadow of her former self physically – they all were – and looked at least twenty years older than her actual age, but the Japanese hadn’t been able to crush her spirit.
As others in the ward began to smile and nod and then laugh, Abby felt a release of something deep inside bubble up. She had been wrong. The Japanese weren’t still winning, not when there were women like Delia around. Truth and justice, love and compassion, mercy and tenderness were qualities the enemy knew nothing about, but she had seen them enacted between her fellow POWs hundreds of times in the last years. Men and women making sure the children – and not just their own children – were fed even if it meant their gnawing hunger would drive them mad with pain for hours; individuals stepping up to take a beating in place of a friend because they kne
w the person concerned wouldn’t survive such treatment; her fellow nurses, racked with pain sometimes and bent over like old women, going about tending to their patients with a smile and a kind word and a gentle hand, and most of all humour. A humour the Japanese didn’t understand and could never understand, but which had provided strength and comfort on a thousand different occasions, like now.
Even the matron was laughing, her head thrown back and tears of amusement streaming down her weathered face, and for a moment Abby felt such a surge of love for her fellow POWs that it overwhelmed her. Hilda was in stitches, clutching her sides and chuckling helplessly, and Abby knew she had been wrong to let herself assume the worst. Perhaps Hilda would get better but whether she did or she didn’t, she’d endure her lot with the fortitude and guts of a true Englishwoman.
As Abby met Delia’s eyes that were still full of glee, she sent up a silent prayer of thanks for her friend, and for other friends too. They had done it, they’d survived the war, supporting each other and loving each other to the end. And now she would go home to Nicholas. Not today, not tomorrow, but she would be going home. The Japanese might have taken years of her life but she wouldn’t let them take a moment more by dwelling on her hate and bitterness. One day she would deal with how she felt but for now it was too raw and consuming, and so she would consign it to the future. Package away the enmity and loathing into a place at the back of her mind. It probably wasn’t a healthy thing to do; she was sure the psychiatrists would say she needed to bring her feelings out into the open and deal with them, but she couldn’t. And so she would do the next best thing and bury them.
She walked across to Delia and flung her arms round her friend. Her voice thick with emotion, she murmured, ‘We’re going home, Delia. We’re going home.’
‘I know.’ Delia hugged her back, adding, ‘Some of the guards are drunk, Abby, and apparently we only had about eight days to live as the POWs were becoming a liability as far as the Japanese were concerned. We were going to be killed in groups of thirty.’
Abby recoiled. ‘Even the children?’
‘I suppose so.’
‘So why didn’t it happen when they knew they were defeated?’
Delia shrugged. ‘Major Fushida didn’t give the order, I should think.’
Abby nodded slowly. ‘I don’t know if he would ever have given it. He likes children.’
Delia looked at her sceptically. ‘He would have given it. If the war had dragged on, he would have given it. They’re not human, Abby. That’s what we have to remember.’
‘He released the antitoxin that time, though. And that was for the sake of the children.’
Delia shook her head. ‘I know you think that and you might be right, who knows, but I think it was because he didn’t want the diphtheria to spread and infect his guards.’
‘But they had the medication to protect themselves.’
A closed look came over Delia’s face. ‘He didn’t do it for the children, Abby. They’re not capable of thinking like that. They’re demons from hell, all of them.’
The matron’s voice penetrated the silence that had briefly fallen between them, ordering her nurses to resume their normal duties and telling the patients that their food quota would be increased slowly so that their shrunken stomachs could accommodate it. Freedom or no freedom, the work of the hospital carried on.
Later in the day, the news spread like wildfire. Major Fushida had committed hara-kiri and fallen on his sword. The guards, intent only on saving their own skins, were attempting to melt away across the harbour and onto the mainland.
The war really was over.
Chapter Thirty-One
Abby stood hand in hand with Delia as the ship that had brought them home sailed into Southampton at the beginning of November. The quayside was packed and it was impossible to see individual faces in the throng, but even so Abby searched the crowds, hoping for a glimpse of Nicholas.
The two women stood on the deck of the ship which held mostly Allied troops and a few nurses like them, breathing in the cold damp air and the smell of England. It couldn’t have been more different from the tropical heat they had endured for so long and it was unbelievably welcome. They were home. Against all the odds, they were home.
They had been taken from Hong Kong on a hospital ship, a large old-fashioned vessel that was one of many such ships which had performed heroic tasks throughout the war, taking wounded men from various destinations and conveying them to base hospitals behind the lines. Originally a passenger ship in its heyday, the vessel had three tall grey funnels and vivid red crosses painted down both sides of her hull, and Abby had been amazed at the size of her. The ship had had five hundred and six beds divided into six wards on three decks, with a team of doctors, a matron and nurses to care for the sick. And to Abby’s surprise, she had been one of them. After struggling along for so long, the day after the matron had told them the war was over, Abby had gone down with a severe attack of beriberi that had threatened her life.
She had been so sick she had drifted in and out of consciousness for some time and could remember little of the departure from the camp or her arrival on the ship. It was only after some days that the medication she’d received began to pull her back from the brink, that and the amount of fluids and puréed food she was fed in tiny quantities every so often. Once she began to improve, Abby became aware of the number of former prisoners who were too weak and ill to survive the journey to India where they were to be nursed back to health before going home. There were many burials at sea, when the captain would stop the ship and prayers would be said, before the body was respectfully and slowly lowered over the side of the ship.
Hilda had been in the next bed thanks to Delia, who had asked that the two women be kept together, and she had told Abby that they had been brought to the dock by ambulance and loaded onto the ship, whereupon the seriously ill were separated from those POWs who were still fairly mobile, although suffering the effects of malnutrition, tuberculosis and other problems.
Delia came to see them regularly, and through her they learned the stories of some of the men on board and what they had endured. The more Delia told them, the more Abby realized that Major Fushida had perhaps been one of the better camp commanders, cruel and unfeeling although he had seemed most of the time. In talking to the ship’s nurses, Delia had heard tales of torture and ill-treatment in other camps in the Far East that beggared belief. Indian prisoners, who had been segregated from other POWs in special Asians-only camps by the Japanese, had been repeatedly tortured in an endeavour to force them to join the Japanese-sponsored Indian National Army, raised in Singapore.
‘Apparently they were terribly brave and endured untold pain,’ Delia had murmured to her two friends, tears in her eyes. ‘The Gurkhas resisted to a man. But the awful thing is many of them had become unhinged by the time they were rescued. It’s made me realize that what I went through isn’t the worst that can happen. At least I’m in my right mind.’ Then she had smiled wanly. ‘Whatever that is.’
Abby had taken her friend’s hand and squeezed it. Hans had tried to persuade Delia to marry him immediately and let the ship’s captain perform the ceremony, but she had decided to wait for a while. She wanted to give him and herself, too, time to adjust to being free before they took such an emotive step, but Hans couldn’t see her point of view at all. Privately Delia had confided to Abby that she needed to know Hans was marrying her for the right reasons, and not just because of their relationship in the camp. He was a very good-looking man, and had been wealthy in his own country before the war. There had been a childhood sweetheart somewhere in the background too, although they hadn’t been engaged, let alone married, when Hans had gone away. ‘If he writes, if he comes to see me when we’re both in our own homes, and if he still feels the same after some months of being apart, then I’ll marry him,’ Delia had told her. ‘But I want him to be sure. And I want to be sure too, after John. I still think of him, you know.’
‘Of course you do, and you’ll always remember him in a secret part of your heart. He was a lovely man,’ Abby had reassured her. ‘But that’s not to say you won’t be happy with Hans, or someone else if that’s what you decide.’
Delia had wrinkled her nose. ‘Who would want me looking the way I do now? I mean, we all look pretty poor, let’s face it. My skin’s ruined, my hair’s thin and patchy and I look as old as my grandmother, let alone my mother. They’re not exactly going to be queueing up in droves, are they?’
Abby thought of her friend’s words now as the ship began to dock. Admittedly, thanks to the intensive nursing the POWs had had, along with food in abundance and all manner of tonics and creams and potions for their bodies and skin and hair, she and Delia and others did look much better than they had, but what they’d been through was still apparent.
What would Nicholas think when he saw her? She knew he loved her, but would he still find her desirable?
The thought wasn’t a new one by any means. Abby knew she had changed, not just physically but in herself too. It wouldn’t be too extreme to say that she was a different woman from the one Nicholas had known before they had been parted. The things that had happened, the atrocities she had seen and the last years as a POW had taken their toll in various ways, and she didn’t think anyone who hadn’t been a prisoner of the Japanese could possibly understand. Would it drive a wedge between her and Nicholas?
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