by Rory Marron
Candles flickered, casting an orange tint on the faces of the tired, tense, young men around her. They also illuminated the specks of falling dust that was coating everything and everyone in the damp, brick-lined basement. Clouds of cigarette smoke hung in the air. She took one last drag on her own then stubbed it out.
‘Here you are, Ma’am.’
Meg turned. A soldier in his late teens was offering her an open tin of processed ham and two tack biscuits. He held the tin by its rim, claw-style, in an attempt to keep off some of the dust. Meg accepted it gratefully. She managed to remember his name. ‘Thanks, Matt,’ she said. ‘Say, where are you from?’
‘Memphis, Tennessee, Ma’am,’ he replied proudly.
‘Less of the Ma’am,’ she told him smiling. ‘Meg will do just fine.’
‘Yes, Ma’am,’ he replied automatically. Matt grinned and went back to the portable cooking stove.
Meg had been sheltering in the cellar with the platoon from the 82nd Airborne Regiment for nearly thirty-six hours, sharing K-rations and the odd ‘liberated’ beer. Operation Market Garden, the joint British-American attempt to seize the German-controlled bridges over the Meuse and Waal rivers at Arnhem, Eindhoven and Nijmegen had stalled. Both sides were exchanging regular artillery bombardments while they regrouped. Each day Meg had watched the patient residents of Nijmegen sweep their roads clean of glass and rubble, leaving neat piles on street corners.
At first the young veterans of the Normandy landings had been polite but a little sceptical of the attractive brunette suddenly in their midst. Yet they were fascinated by the idea of a woman war correspondent and almost as much by the fact that Meg had studied in France and Germany in the mid-1930s.
The paratroopers had been taken aback when they heard that ‘their’ war was not Meg’s first. Blank looks had met her tales of fighting in Spain, China and Finland. Above all, the news that there was another dictator in Spain had left them dismayed and perturbed.
‘I’ll sure be glad to leave this rat hole,’ said one soldier to no-one in particular. ‘Maybe have a look round the town.’
Meg saw he was flicking through a copy of the Blue Guide to Holland and the Rhine. She had one too. Now that the small town of Nijmegen was the front line she wasn’t sure how much of it there would be left to see.
Conversation ceased as a dull, distant boom quickly became a roar and then a shriek. Meg tensed and covered her ears. The shell came down no more than fifty yards away. More dust fell, coating her ham and biscuits. Seconds later the Allied big guns replied in kind.
Twenty minutes later the shelling stopped. During the lull, Matt wandered over and sat down self-consciously beside her. ‘Ma’am—I mean, Meg. Do you think they’ll send us to fight this guy Franco when we’ve beaten the Krauts?’
Meg hesitated. A part of her had died with the International Brigade in Spain. For a second, the old republican flame flickered in her heart. Annoyed with herself, she doused it immediately in a wave of cynicism. ‘No, Matt, I don’t think so. Spain’s minor league compared with the Nazis. It was ignored in ’36 and you can bet it will be ignored in ’46. Don’t worry, you won’t be learning any Spanish!’
Later, feeling a little guilty, Meg set her job aside and talked of other things. She knew how the men liked to hear a woman’s voice, particularly an American. It was really such a simple thing and she couldn’t begrudge it them when they were so far from home. She gave it her best shot and they sat entranced by her racy descriptions of the pre-war nightlife in Paris and Berlin. Afterwards she was pestered to write the addresses of some of her old haunts.
Eight hours later, the barrage halted and the soldiers received orders to move out. Meg left the basement an honorary member of the platoon and with a hasty promise that one day they would meet in Berlin.
Book One
Chapter One
Tjandi Internment Camp III, Semarang, Java, February 1945
As usual, gnawing hunger pangs and itching bites woke Kate van Dam long before the return of the women on the night watch who were supposed to rouse her. She lay quietly on the narrow wooden slats that had served as her bed for the last eight months and tried to close her mind to the snoring, coughing and occasional groaning from the other occupants of the crowded hut. The air was sweet with the smell of fresh blood spilled by the feasting bed bugs that infested the woodwork and thin, kapok-stuffed mattresses.
Dawn always seemed the worst time, she thought. It appeared to galvanise the bugs into taking one last bite. Still tired, she lay back and wondered if it were really so, or whether it was only because she was awake and could feel them biting. A sharp nip on her left arm reminded her that it really did not matter either way.
Automatically she brought her right arm over, sliding her hand up from her elbow to her shoulder and brushing at least two of the tiny, tenacious creatures off her. She let her fingers linger, feeling more bone than flesh and she frowned as she imagined herself in another year. In truth, she doubted whether she had got that much time. She was nineteen years old.
Still weary, she pushed herself half-up and felt a bed bug squash under her elbow. She pulled a face, knowing that the pungent, sickly sweet odour would not leave her until it was scrubbed off. Not very long ago the smell would have made her gag but now it was bearable. Perhaps that was an improvement of sorts she thought cynically.
The woven-bamboo screen to her left ballooned towards her as her mother turned over and banged Kate’s hip with her knee. Kate winced but fought the urge to push back. Her mother was ill and if she were sleeping at least she was not thinking about food.
Kate glanced upwards. Pinned to the screen was her precious red glass tulip. Its delicate green base had snapped off but now she treasured it all the more. Wistfully she ran her fingertips over the polished surface remembering happier days.
‘No, we need it!’ The shrill shout came from a few feet away. Kate recognised Annie Klomp’s recurrent bad dream. Everyone in the hut knew the scenario: Annie finds her infant son throwing away a half-empty tin of rotten sardines, then she beats him while standing in a kitchen piled high with food.
Now for the crying, thought Kate, glad now that she had to get up. Seconds later the sobbing started.
‘There, there, dear…it’s only a bad dream,’ someone said, trying the routine to calm Annie. But then the complaints started, as usual, even though they all knew Annie would not hear them.
‘For God’s sake, woman, not again!’
‘Noisy cow!’
Soon the shouts woke the toddlers who cried from hunger and sickness every morning.
Kate put her hands to her ears. In the corner of her eye she caught a sudden movement. A small, yellow-green tikjak—a gecko—darted halfway down the screen and stopped inches from her face. Its light, leathery underbelly was pulsating in a fast, regular rhythm. Tikjaks were all over the camp. They reminded Kate of life before the war when she would watch them cavorting on the ceiling of her bedroom while she lay under a mosquito net in crisp, clean sheets that had been tucked in by her mother. She had felt so comfortable and so safe then. Now it all seemed so distant and unreal that she was beginning to think it had been a dream. But that, she reminded herself sternly, was because she was living a nightmare.
Suddenly the tikjak was still. A large, shiny black beetle was heading directly for it. At the last moment the beetle saw the predator and tried to jump aside but it was too slow. In a flash it was held firmly between powerful jaws, its legs working uselessly. Remorselessly the tikjak pounded the beetle, smothering it in saliva, until finally it gulped down the crushed mass.
Kate sighed as she realised she was envious of a lizard’s full stomach. Behind the screen to her right, her neighbour, Mrs Meer, broke wind loudly and then belched. Kate let her head drop, praying yet again for the Allies to come and end her misery. Dear God, she thought, what’s taking them so long?
In September 1944 the camp had been thrilled by the reports of the Allied attack on Arnhem, thinking the libe
ration of the Netherlands would quickly follow and that afterwards Dutch soldiers would liberate Java. Every evening, nervous groups of women gathered, risking beatings and worse in solitary confinement, to listen to the BBC news on hidden radios, hoping to hear the names of hometowns. In the East, said the reports, the Japanese had been stopped in Burma; and the Americans, under MacArthur and Nimitz, were advancing. But more good news had not come and the weeks had dragged into months. They must come soon, she thought. They must!
Cheered a little by the thought of eventual freedom, Kate decided to get up and wash. She was on breakfast duty with eight others. In little over two hours, two thousand women and children would be expecting their breakfast and there would be hell to pay if their tiny portions of rice were not ready.
She gathered her ragged sleeping shirt to her, shuffled down to the edge of the boards and circled her feet trying to find the tops of her klompen—sandals made from wood and strips of car tyre inner tube—at the foot of her bed. When she could not, she touched one foot down on the floor. Her toes slid in a gooey mess. Someone had not made it to the latrines in the night. That serves you right, lazy idiot! Kate chided herself. You broke the rules that will keep you alive—your own rules!
Briefly she toyed with the idea of walking barefoot to the wash block but dismissed it because she would risk cutting her foot. No, she would have to wear her klompen to the latrines and then wash it. The danger of infection was too great. Just a few weeks earlier a young girl had trodden on a rusty nail near a latrine pit. The child’s mother had washed it as best she could but within two days the foot had swollen to the size of a coconut. Powerless to stop the infection without medicines, the mother and Lucy Santen, the only doctor among them, had watched helplessly as the dark lines of poison had spread up the leg. Eventually the Japanese had accepted their pleas for the girl to go to the nearby hospital but by then it had been too late.
On the day the girl died it had been Kate’s turn on burial detail. No formal services were allowed. Because bodies decayed quickly in the heat the Japanese insisted on immediate burial. In the end, a few of the mother’s friends had managed to say a quick prayer and sing a hymn out of earshot of the guards. Wood was too precious as cooking fuel, so a large straw basket served as a coffin. Bamboo poles pushed through the front and rear served as handles for Kate and the other bearers. The cemetery was about half-a-mile from the camp. As the basket swayed from side-to-side, a yellowish, foul-smelling liquid had dripped from it, leaving a snail-like trail. The little girl was not buried alone. Kate had made three more journeys that day.
Yawning, she reached for a drawstring bag containing her day clothes and sidled carefully between the rows of sleeping women and children towards the door. Thirty-two people were living in the former classroom. Washbowls, bottles, food bowls and other bits and pieces cluttered the ends of each sleeping space. One or two people sat up, worried in case she pocketed anything.
‘Good Morning, Mrs Kepple,’ she said to a middle-aged woman who lay watching her like a hawk, cradling a few Red Cross food tins.
‘What’s so good about it?’ The woman scoffed. Her eyes were red with lack of sleep from fear of someone stealing her treasure.
Kate moved on. No-one made any attempt to greet her. Even after eight months in the camp she and her mother were still regarded with suspicion by some. There were many who thought the van Dams had had it easy while they had suffered.
Outside the sky was a light grey but the first faint glow of red was visible above the row of lontar palm trees to the east. She was glad to be out in the fresh air. There was a slight breeze from the north, carrying the faint scent of the sea from Semarang harbour and she paused to savour it. Once the sun came up, the air would be still and heavy until the late evening.
Before the war, Tjandi had been an affluent suburb. When the Japanese decided to intern the Dutch civilians, they had simply cordoned off entire streets using large bamboo fences. Men and women had been separated. In all, the three Tjandi camps were home to nearly eight thousand women and children crammed into houses, shops, schools and other buildings. Kate’s father and brother had been sent to a men’s camp in Magelang. Every two months they were permitted to exchange postcards.
Kate and her mother had ended up in a former private school for boys. Its main building was an imposing, four-storey structure with twin central towers and wings off either side. When they arrived, all the rooms in the main block had long been claimed, so they had been quartered in one of several classroom huts in the grounds. Sudden deprivation and the shock of new surroundings and new rules had hit them hard. Their time in Tjandi had been thoroughly wretched.
Kate looked around her. Only a few of her neighbours were also up and about. Across the compound three familiar figures emerged from the latrines and started back towards the huts. Kate had known the Harwigs before the invasion. Mr Harwig had worked with her father, and his wife had been a stalwart in the local church choir, as well as secretary of the golf club. Now their two daughters, one fourteen and the other twelve, were half-carrying, half-dragging their barely conscious mother. Their father was already dead. After the Japanese had attacked Pearl Harbor and then, just days later, sunk the British warships Repulse and Prince of Wales off Malaya, there had been panic. Fears of air-raids led to a local defence corps being formed, and Mr Harwig had been among the first to volunteer. One night, driving home in the black-out after a training exercise, his car collided with a water buffalo. At his funeral, family friends had encouraged his widow and children to go to Australia, but the Indies Government, desperate to maintain morale, had forbidden Dutch residents to leave.
As the Harwigs drew near, Kate tried to keep looking at the girls but her gaze was drawn to their mother’s oedema-swollen stomach and the oozing tropical ulcers on her shins. She saw the tell-tale bloodstains and brown streaks on her nightshirt. Kate shuddered. Dysentery literally drained the life out of its victims, especially those already weakened by hunger and malaria. Lotte Harwig was one of many mothers who could not bear to see her children go hungry and had shared her own meagre food ration with them. Warnings from others that her children needed her alive were ignored. Kate had seen dysentery often enough to know the girls would be orphans in less than a week. From the look in their eyes she could tell they knew it, too.
Outside the latrine block Kate washed her foot and sandal beneath a rusting tap. A threadbare but wriggling sock was tied over the end of it to filter out the larger worms. She filled her tin washbowl, took a deep breath and went inside. Quickly she lowered her frayed shorts, trapping them behind her knees as she squatted over the open trench. Since she was eating so little it didn’t take long. Using the water from bowl, she washed between her buttocks native style, using her left hand. Then, lungs about to burst, she rushed out into the fresh air. Each day it took her longer to recover. She was getting weaker….
To banish that unwelcome thought, Kate began to anticipate the pleasure of a soak in the school bathhouse. Early morning was her favourite time because it was not crowded and she could use the mandi tubs rather than the outdoor showers that were overlooked by a guard tower. The bathhouse abutted the rear of the main school building. Once the blue-and-white patterned tiles on the walls and floor must have glistened. Now they were dull and streaked with black mould. Kate did not care. It was still one of the cleanest places in the camp. Eight large mandi tubs about six-feet long and three-feet wide were spaced around the room. Most were just half-full of discoloured scum-topped water. At intervals along two walls were rusting pipes, showerheads and controls. They had not worked for as long as Kate had been in the camp and she ignored them. Two women were leaving as she arrived but there was no-one else inside. She was delighted. It had been days since she had enjoyed even five minutes by herself.
Kate undressed quickly and as a matter of routine peered carefully along the open drain channels running around the sides of the baths. She found real treasure, a sliver of soap caught in a
crevice. Gleefully she squeezed it on to her own tiny bar of soap. She soaped herself outside the mandi and rinsed by dipping her bowl into the water. After her wash she could not resist the temptation to soak. She eased herself into one of the tubs and lay back with her eyes closed, enjoying the cooling effect, no longer bothered by the hairs, dead flies and dirt suspended in the water. Her thoughts drifted to her old home and her lovely bedroom at the top of the dark, teak staircase. She imagined herself wishing her smiling parents goodnight and then climbing the staircase to her soft, welcoming bed. Then another, much more powerful memory, replayed itself.
Christmas 1941 had been a tense time in Java. Determined to celebrate despite fears of war, Kate’s parents had held a large party at their home on Christmas Eve. Among the guests had been Mr and Mrs Muiden and their son Peter, who was a year older than Kate.
Kate had a secret crush on Peter but did not know him well. She had hardly said a word to him all evening when, to her great dismay and embarrassment, her mother had decided it was her bedtime. Her protests had been to no avail and dejectedly she had climbed the stairs. Peter was waiting for her on the landing. Without warning he had pulled her to him and kissed her on the cheek then on the lips. She had been stunned and thrilled. Time had seemed to stand still. Peter continued to kiss her, and then he began stroking her back. His hand had slipped down to the tops of her buttocks. Her heart had raced as his other hand had moved to her front, sliding up over her ribs. His lips had parted on hers and she had felt the moistness of his saliva. She had stood mesmerised, leaning against him. His hand had risen higher and his fingertips were brushing the base of her breast when the loud, deliberate cough had startled them. Peter had jumped away and scurried down the stairs. Stern-faced, her father had said nothing.
Kate often thought of Peter and the feeling his kiss had awakened in her. A sharp, squeaking clang of the changing room door brought her back to the present as three younger, chatting girls appeared. She climbed out of the tub.