At Christmas, they gathered to sing carols: ‘Once In Royal David’s City’, ‘While Shepherds Watched’, ‘O Come, All Ye Faithful.’
Miss Tarrant had put on a nativity play with the camp children. Peter, after some persuasion, played the part of Joseph; one of the little Dutch girls was Mary and the baby Jesus was of stuffed sacking. Hua was an angel with palm-leaf wings. Susan had managed presents for them: for Peter a sword made from two pieces of firewood bound together and smoothed with rough-backed leaves, for Hua a doll out of scraps of material begged from around the camp and sewn with Mrs Brook’s needle and thread.
There was nothing to celebrate on New Year’s Eve – unless it was the passing of 1942. In Susan’s hut, they played silly quiz games and charades until midnight, when they linked arms to sing ‘Auld Lang Syne’. In the depressed silence that followed, they heard more singing coming from the next-door hut.
God save our gracious King,
Long live our noble King,
God save the King!
The words carried all over the camp, and other prisoners joined in. Nobody cared that singing the national anthem was strictly forbidden by the Japs.
Send him victorious,
Happy and glorious,
Long to reign over us;
God save the King!
As a punishment, they were all made to stand in the sun for four hours after tenko next morning. But it was worth it.
Thirteen
THE ROW OF graves grew longer and longer as the women and the children went on dying. They died of diseases, fevers, infections, malnutrition, beriberi, heatstroke, heart failure, tropical ulcers … an endless variety of causes, including losing the will to live. There was no way of isolating infectious cases and no drugs to treat them with. The hospital patients lay on bali bali or on the bare floor, with only rice sacks to cover them. And it rained almost every day: hissing torrents that dripped through the holes in the roofs, turned the compound to mud, the latrine drain into an overflowing sewer. The clean rainwater would have been a godsend, but there was nothing to save it in except for a few rusty oil cans.
Stella said grimly, ‘All we need now is an outbreak of cholera to finish us off.’
A Welsh woman called Mrs Williams died in Susan’s hut during one night. She had seemed perfectly all right the evening before but by the morning she was dead, flies settling on her face and crawling into her open mouth, her corpse already beginning to smell. The guards refused to help or provide a coffin and so they carried her out on a makeshift bamboo stretcher under a rice sack. They walked in a slow procession through the gates to the end of the row of graves, where, sweating in the heat, they dug one more with the changkols. By the time they buried her, armies of ants were already swarming over her body. On the way, somebody had stolen her shoes.
Her Christian name, apparently, was Gwyneth. She had been a very quiet, retiring person and they had known very little about her except that her husband was something in the Malay civil service and had been left behind in Singapore.
Miss Tarrant took the service and Lady Battersby, hat and gloves donned as for St Andrew’s cathedral, took it upon herself to read from her ivory-bound prayer book in a very loud and clear voice.
‘I heard a voice from heaven, saying unto me, Write, From henceforth blessed are the dead which die in the Lord: even so saith the Spirit; for they rest from their labours.’
They marked the grave with a wooden cross and wrote on it in indelible pencil. Gwyneth Williams, died 12th November 1943. Nobody knew which year she had been born. After that they picked wild flowers and placed them on top of the mound before they returned to the camp. The next night they moved up an inch or two in the hut to make use of the vacant space.
The sweet potatoes and the tapioca and the vegetables so painstakingly planted and watered and fed with rotted compost could not stretch far enough to make much difference. Other vegetables were sometimes found among the usual ones thrown off the back of the lorry – bolting spinach, shrivelled carrots, hard little soya beans, green peas like buckshot, squashy cucumbers, yellow leeks. Like the sweet potatoes and the tapioca, spinach roots grew well when pushed straight into the earth. Whenever there was a ration of palm oil they fried the rice and vegetables together. The red oil looked exactly like tinned tomato soup and had an unpleasant taste but it improved their diet, and it came in useful for making lamps out of tins and wire and rags. They lived from day to day; surviving today was what mattered, not what might happen next week. Nothing mattered but staying alive.
A chicken belonging to the guards came into the compound. It had found its way through a hole in the wire behind the hut, and pecked around in the dirt. They watched it for a while, debating whether stealing and eating it would be worth the punishment. It was Lady Battersby who fetched the camp axe and chopped its head off with one blow. Within minutes, the bird had been plucked and drawn and was simmering away in the cooking pot. The baby monkey that climbed over the wire might have suffered a similar fate if it hadn’t looked too human. Lizards were difficult to catch and with so little meat on their bones hardly worth the energy spent. Rats with more flesh ignored the clumsy home-made traps and nobody had the nerve to try to catch a snake.
The native pedlars offered ducks’ eggs among their wares and another of the gold charms off Susan’s bracelet bought two of them for Hua and Peter, as well as two bananas, a papaya, a coconut and some gula. The papaya turned out to be rotten inside but the eggs and bananas were good, so was the coconut and its milk, and the gula tasted almost like sugar. She kept the papaya seeds and planted them carefully. Within a few weeks a small tree had sprung up.
Every Tuesday evening one of Lady Battersby’s talks took place. The prisoners gathered to listen while Mrs Henderson told them about life on a rubber plantation, Miss Mathews, a teacher, talked about Jane Austen. Mrs Vandenberg, a Dutchwoman, knew all about tulips and one of the nuns spoke knowledgeably on Rembrandt. The subject never mattered. What mattered was that it was about the world outside the camp. The world they had been cut off from for almost two years. It helped to keep the hope alive that they would go back one day.
* * *
It started with a headache – the worst headache Susan could ever remember. Like knives stabbing away inside her skull. After a while her legs started aching too, and then her stomach. She collapsed on the floor of the hut where Mrs Cotton found her and fetched the doctor from the camp hospital. Dr Lewis took one look at her and another look at the bright-red rash that had appeared on her chest and was spreading over her whole body.
‘We’ll get you over to the hospital at once.’
‘I’d sooner stay here. I’ll be all right in a while.’
‘I’m afraid you won’t, dear.’
She couldn’t walk and so they carried her on a bamboo stretcher. One moment she was shivering with cold, the next burning with heat, head splitting, limbs and joints aching agonizingly. She went in and out of consciousness – aware of the nurses tending her and of the doctor’s face appearing above her from time to time. She thought, quite calmly, I’m going to die. I’ll be put beside Mrs Williams at the end of the row. Lady B. will put on her hat and gloves and read a suitable prayer. I must ask Stella to look after the children. And Mrs Cotton. They’ll take care of them. I know they will. She closed her eyes and slept again.
Stella said, ‘Feeling better?’ She was standing beside her.
‘I think so.’ Miraculously, the headache had gone, and the pain in her limbs, too.
‘You were really crook. We thought you were going to give up on us. Looks like you’ve decided not to, after all.’
‘What have I had?’
‘Dengue fever. From some bloodthirsty little mosquito. Nasty thing to get.’
‘I felt dreadful.’
‘Yes, you weren’t doing too well. Sometimes it can get right out of hand. But you’re OK now. Dr Lewis says you’re to stay here for a day or two more until your temperature’s normal, t
hen we’ll kick you out to make room for the next patient.’
‘How long have I been here?’
‘Ten days.’
‘Ten days … What about Peter and Hua?’
‘No worries there. The whole hut’s been looking after them and they’ve been spoiled rotten. They wanted to see you, but we wouldn’t let them come in here. Too many things they might catch.’
When she left the hospital the children raced up to her. Hua jumped up and down, hanging on to her hand and laughing; Peter said in his quiet way, ‘We knew you’d come back.’
More rumours and none of them good ones. The Japs had landed at Darwin in northern Australia; the Queen Mary and the Queen Elizabeth had been sunk by submarines in Sydney harbour; the Americans had lost hundreds of ships and thousands of men in the Pacific. They were all too easy to believe because the Japs seemed so cocky. They screamed orders, they slapped faces, prodded with their bayonets, kicked with their boots. Hours were spent standing out in the sun, rations withheld, coolie labour with the changkols redoubled, pointless and disgusting tasks given like moving a stinking mountain of camp rubbish from one place to another.
Occasionally high-ranking Japanese officials would come in big cars to inspect the camp. They would strut around in preposterous uniforms of red and gold, big swords swinging, and the prisoners would bow low as they passed by, hiding the contempt in their eyes.
The smaller children were outgrowing the nursery rhymes and simple songs. Susan taught them ‘It’s A Long Way To Tipperary’, ‘Pack Up Your Troubles’, and because the Japs would punish them for singing ‘God Save The King’ she taught them ‘There’ll Always Be An England’ and ‘Land Of Hope And Glory’ instead. The children sang them all at the tops of their voices. Stella taught them ‘Waltzing Matilda’ and they yelled that one out, too.
Susan listened, bemused.
‘A swagman sounds like a thief, but what on earth’s a billabong, Stella?’
‘It’s a waterhole. And a swagman’s not a thief: he’s a sort of tramp who lives on the open road. They carried their bedroll and belongings in a canvas bag slung over their shoulder.’
‘And what on earth’s a billy?’
‘A can to boil water in.’
‘What about a tucker bag?’
‘That’s easy. Tucker’s food, so a tucker bag’s for carrying your grub in.’
‘And jumbuck?’
‘It’s a sheep.’
‘You do have some strange words.’
‘A lot of them are from the Aborigines. We’ve got some lovely Abo place names: Woollamaloo, Wagga Wagga, Katoomba … names like that.’
She watched the children playing hopscotch, squares marked out in the dirt with a stick. Hua was hopping up and down the squares very fast.
‘I remember you telling me once that you’d lived near Ray Harvey in Sydney, Stella.’
‘That’s right. The Harveys had a house in Mosman. I knew Ray when he was just a kid – older than me, of course, so I was a bit in awe. His sister, Verity, was closer my age. I remember he made a go-kart out of a box on pram wheels and he and some of the other local boys used to go tearing up and down the streets. Of course they never had any time for us girls. Then Mr Harvey died and they moved over the Bridge to the east shore. I didn’t run into Ray again till I started training at St Vincent’s. He was a wonderful bloke. Well, you met him, so you know what he was like.’
‘I didn’t know him well.’
‘He was the tops. The patients all loved him, specially the kids. So did us nurses.’
‘Actually, he took me out once.’
Stella stared. ‘You never told me that.’
‘There wasn’t anything to tell.’
‘My word, there would have been if I’d gone out with him.’
Mrs Cotton died early in 1944. She had survived several attacks of malaria but beriberi got her in the end. She died talking about her son, Harry, at school in England.
‘He’ll be ten next month. Getting quite grown-up. Do you know, I haven’t seen him for nearly three years, Susan.’ Tears slid down her cheeks; she wiped them away with her hand. ‘I miss him so much.’
‘Don’t worry, you’ll see him again soon.’
‘Yes … just as soon as this wretched war’s over.’
Hua couldn’t remember when her birthday was, so they always celebrated it on the same day as Peter’s, in May. Susan made a pretty necklace for her out of dried seeds and she gave Peter, who was ten, a cricket bat made from a packing case. She had hacked the wood into shape with the axe, smoothed it with the rough-backed leaves, polished it with palm oil and bound the narrower handle-end with a piece of old string found when they’d moved the rubbish dump.
He handled it reverently. ‘Gosh … Daddy always said he’d give me one when I was ten.’
‘Did he play cricket?’
‘Yes, he was jolly good. He taught me how to bat and bowl.’
‘You’ll be able to play it properly when you go back to school, after the war.’
He said, ‘I was meant to be going to Daddy’s old school in England. They play lots of cricket there – in the summer. In the winter, they play rugger. My grandfather went there too, years ago.’
‘The one you were called Cecil after? Your father’s father?’
He nodded.
‘Where does he live in England?’
‘In Hampshire. It’s a big house. He and my grandmother have lived there for ages. I’ve been to stay there.’
‘Do you like it?’
‘Oh, yes. It’s near the sea and you can go sailing. They’ve got a dinghy.’
‘And you like them – your grandparents?’
‘Yes, they’re jolly nice.’
That’s good, she thought. If John Travers turned out to be dead, then Cecil Travers and his wife would be there for their grandson in their house in Hampshire.
One of the Dutch boys had an old tennis ball and before long the boys were playing cricket matches. Not quite the same as on the smooth green Padang at the Singapore Cricket Club, or on English school playing fields or village greens, but cricket none the less.
The coolie labour parties went out early every day to clear away jungle. Armed with the heavy changkols, the women hacked and scraped away futilely at dense undergrowth. The elderly Mrs Fooks collapsed and died later in the camp hospital, others fainted from exhaustion or the heat, another was bitten by an angry snake. A poor Dutchwoman who tried to keep a papaya fruit that she had found in the grass was beaten savagely about the head by a guard.
When she returned to the camp after one of these long, weary days, Susan found Stella waiting anxiously for her by the gates.
‘It’s Peter,’ she said. ‘Trouble.’
Her heart started to race. ‘What’s happened?’
‘He was playing cricket and batting the ball hard, like they all do, and it went and hit one of the guards. They’ve made him stand out in the sun all day as a punishment. The poor kid’s been there for hours.’
Peter was all alone in the middle of the open space where they lined up for tenko, standing with his shoulders hunched, arms hanging at his sides, staring down at the ground.
Stella held her back. ‘Best not to go near him, Susie. Some of us tried to take him some water earlier but the guards say that if we do he’ll have to stay there all the longer. It’s Hatsuho’s orders.’
She shook off Stella’s hand. ‘I’m going to speak to that bastard.’
‘It won’t do any good. Miss Tarrant and Sister Beatrix have already been to see him.’
‘Now it’s my turn.’
The commandant was seated behind his desk, his interpreter at his side. Susan took off her hat and bowed.
‘Captain Hatsuho, I have come to ask if you will permit the boy Peter Travers to go free, now that he has been punished.’
She listened to the rant that followed, the Jap talk that sounded like stuttering gibberish.
The interpreter said, ‘Captain
Hatsuho say punishment not finished yet. Boy very bad. He must stay many more hours to learn respect for Japanese soldiers.’
She said, ‘It was an accident. He didn’t mean to hit the guard. He was only playing a game of cricket.’
‘Captain Hatsuho say not accident. Boy not sorry.’
‘I’m sure he is sorry. Very sorry. Peter is only a child. He’s ten years old, that’s all.’ She looked at the commandant. ‘Do you have a son, Captain Hatsuho?’
A faint flicker passed over his face. He does, she thought.
‘Doesn’t your son like to play sports sometimes? I’m sure he does.’
There was another volley of Japanese, followed by English.
‘Japanese boys do not do bad things. Japanese boys always have respect. English boy very proud. Same like all English mens. And English womens. Very bad thing.’
She waited a moment, then she said, ‘Peter’s mother was killed by Japanese bombs in Singapore. His father is probably dead too. He has suffered very much. If it were your son, would you wish him to suffer more? I beg of you to allow him to go free.’
She watched Hatsuho’s face and knew his answer before the interpreter translated it.
‘The boy must stay. Punishment not finished.’
‘Then I will stay with him.’
‘That is not permitted.’
‘Try to stop me.’
She bowed and walked out of the hut to where Peter was standing all alone in the middle of the compound. She put her coolie hat on his head, took him by the hand and stood beside him, the two of them together.
They went on standing there as the sun went down and night fell and instead of being very hot it became very cold. They stood there as the sun came up again, all the next morning and all the next afternoon. At the evening tenko Peter was allowed to go, but Susan was taken away to the punishment hut where they had locked up Lady Battersby. It was a very small tin hut, only six feet square, with no window, no furniture, only a bucket in one corner.
She lost count of the days spent sitting on the concrete floor with nothing to read, no one to talk to, nothing to look at and nothing to do. She recited all the old poems to herself, sang all the songs, played an endless alphabet game: all the countries she could think of beginning with A, all the towns, all the rivers, all the birds, all the fish, the flowers, the vegetables, the fruits, the trees … and then back to the beginning again, moving on to the letter B, then C, then D – all the way through to Z. When she had finished, she started again at the beginning.
The Other Side of Paradise Page 19