The nationality of the camp was predominantly American and British. The cosmopolitan mix – another twenty-seven different countries were represented there – nonetheless included Iranians, Panamanians, Palestinians and White Russians, the latter financially bereft and displaced after the Communists turned the country red in 1917 and left them stateless. Some internees were half-Chinese or even half-Japanese. Like every community Weihsien wasn’t free of problem citizens either – the alcoholics, the prostitutes, the drug and opium addicts and also the downright lazy and the sort of devilishly rakish-cum-nasty personalities that ordinarily you’d cross the street to avoid. But, of course, it was impossible to avoid them in Weihsien. The consequences of overcrowding were entirely predictable. There were acute shortages, especially of food and fuel and clothes and soap. There were also interminable queues to receive them.
According to one internee, who remembered ‘queuing for everything’,16 the food line provided an almost daily example of ‘the worst in people’, a place where ‘griping and surliness were a way of life’. Those serving the meals were frequently harangued about the portions. Accusations of favouritism could rapidly turn into shrieking rows too. Hair could be pulled. Balled fists could be brandished. Clothes could be torn.
There was no privacy, which led to disputes about personal space.17 If a husband and wife had two or more children, the family would be given a pair of 9-by-12-foot rooms. Each had a square window at the front and a clerestory window at the back. Often a loop of rope ran from one wall to another so a sheet could be draped across it, like a modesty screen, to divide living and sleeping areas. In winter, plaster peeled from the walls and the window frames splintered. The internees would cover gaps and cracks with papier-mâché; sheets of newspaper were pasted together with an unstable glue made from flour. Those alone in the camp – Liddell among them – were called ‘the unattached’ and grouped together in similarly minuscule rooms or the barn-like dormitories. Suitcases and bags were stored beneath the beds – some of which were propped unsteadily on bricks – or used as seats and tables. The dorms became so congested that the foot of one bed often touched the head of another. Territorial quarrels arose because beds were supposed to be 18 inches apart.18 Chalk marks were laid on the floor to demarcate occupancy after some internees began incrementally shifting their beds into a neighbouring space. A few went as far as rubbing out the chalk and redrawing the marks, expecting the fraud to go unnoticed and unchallenged.19 There were also internees without bed frames who slept on mattresses lifted on to trunks or cardboard boxes.
The sanitation, which essentially amounted to holes in the ground, worsened after diarrhoea, sickness and even worms spread throughout the camp. As one captive said of these crude latrines, ‘It took a strong stomach to use them at all.’20
The Weihsien commandant had only recently been a vice consul in Honolulu. He had almost no English, and a memo sent from the American consul in Japan to the American State Department condemned him as ‘a man of very ordinary intelligence’ who was ‘extremely incapable in practical matters’ and ‘not inclined to be helpful’. His language was so limited that a colleague who’d once lived in London had to speak to the internees on his behalf. Since the English had always treated him well, he promised reciprocal benevolence.21 There was a proviso. ‘Remember,’ he said, pausing for effect, ‘you must co-operate. Provocation and disrespect will be treated harshly.’ The internees were given a square of cloth on to which their camp number was stencilled. Everyone wore it – and woe betide those who didn’t – because rebuilding was more important than rebelling.
The Japanese told the internees to manage their own affairs. Committees were promptly set up to administer day-to-day organization.22 These fell under nine categories. Seven of them were discipline, education, engineering, employment, health, quarters and supplies. The other two were finance and general affairs. Both of these attracted those men in the camp who had previously sat around boardroom tables and considered themselves to be ‘big wheels’. The terms ‘finance’ and ‘general affairs’ each had a whiff of lordly power about them and, unlike some of the others, didn’t seem to imply either getting your hands filthy or bending your back. The situation changed when the Japanese became aware that ‘general affairs’ was being seen as a soft number.23 The commandant decreed that latrine cleaning and maintenance would be part of it. Those who had previously taken two sharp steps forward to volunteer now went into a fast-pedalling retreat.
The rich businessmen, aghast at the prospect of unblocking toilets, were embarrassed by the nuns and missionaries, who did it with ungloved hands. The sisters turned up the long hems and the sleeves of their blue or black habits and pulled on boots to prove that cleanliness is next to godliness.24 Their starched white coifs were pushed further back with every exertion, revealing stray coils of hair. Among those known as ‘the sanitary police’ was Mary Scott, a self-confessed ‘tomboy’. Scott was thirty-four years old and 5 feet 2 inches tall. She was both stoutly round-shouldered and round-faced. Her voice was calming. Her walk was a firm bustle. Her black wavy hair was brushed well back from her forehead. Just two and a half years earlier she had abandoned a comfortable teaching position in America to become a missionary for the Church of the Nazarene. Scott admitted that the odour from the toilets was ‘so pungent’ that her nose ‘burned’. Some of the nuns held a scented handkerchief to their face to prevent them from vomiting. There were twice as many men’s latrines as women’s because the Japanese – in another sign of the army’s defective planning – had miscalculated the number of females for internment. Once these became usable again each stall was hand-flushed with old washing-up water, which was stored in bulbous earthenware kangs.
The 10 p.m. curfew for internees necessitated the use of chamber pots. These pots were emptied next morning into unfenced cesspools about 12 feet in diameter. A priest, who had a deformity of the spine, slipped into one of them and had to be rescued. Another internee, who also fell in, suffered a severe panic attack before being heaved out with a rope. A river ran beside the compound.25 The Japanese told the internees to dig a trench that would allow the effluent to be swept straight into it.
The camp, however, did begin to take some sort of rough shape.26 The internees sorted through the destruction, rescuing what could be fixed and disposing of the rest. The pathways were slowly cleared of rubbish. The rooms and dormitories were spruced up a little. Some were even given cosmetic flicks of paint from half-full pots. The wells were dredged. The internees were inventive too. Stoves were built from discarded bricks. The fuel used in them came from scraps of firewood – snapped twigs and branches of trees and broken furniture. Scavenged coal dust and odd, precious fragments of coke were mixed with clay and water to create rectangular briquettes or round lumps the size of a pool ball after drying. The flues, which carried the smoke away, were crafted from tin cans. Crude candles were made by pouring peanut oil into shoe polish bottles and cutting a length of Chinese thread as a wick.
Everyone fit enough to work was assigned a specific task. The specialist skills of the qualified tradesmen were a boon. Those who lacked them were mostly given manual labour to do. Three kitchens, each capable of serving more than five hundred, were soon operational. These required cooks and support staff to either prepare or serve the food. Enormous brick bread ovens were constructed, producing around four hundred loaves per day. Strong-armed stokers fired up furnaces in both the kitchen and the bakery and then slaved to keep them alight. A rota was agreed on for pumping water from 6 a.m. to 9 p.m. The six well pumps resembled the metal handles on railway handcarts – and required the same amount of sweaty effort to operate. The water, held in 44-gallon storage towers, always had to be boiled before drinking – though the content of one well was so contaminated that even half an hour of boiling couldn’t make it fit for consumption.
Elsewhere, the hospital hired orderlies to assist the doctors and nurses and each internee was asked to surrender medicines and
bandages to create a central pharmacy. The hospital was made operational in less than three weeks, which counted as the most remarkable transformation of all. A laundry was set up in the basement, where women with boards, tin tubs and scrubbing brushes – the bristles of which soon wore away – eked out small bars of soap in marathon sessions of washing.27
Liddell was officially the maths and science teacher. He was unofficially everything else.
His original role had supposedly confined his ‘other duties’ to arranging church worship and services, taking Bible classes and scripture readings and organizing sports on a bare patch of land in the camp’s south-west corner. He scrupulously did all these things and became a ubiquitous presence. He was like the shepherd in ‘Ninety And Nine’, the hymn he continued to teach at Sunday school. Liddell was always looking for Weihsien’s lost sheep.
His background in Siaochang meant he was used to roughing it. Liddell had often slept in the same clothes for days on end and washed in basins of cold or lukewarm water without soap. He’d camped in peasant homes on slate-hard beds. He’d eaten and drunk whatever his hosts had served, which in the poverty-blighted countryside wasn’t much. Liddell saw Weihsien as an extension of his original mission. So he took extra turns at pumping water. He cleaned the latrines. He chopped wood and rolled coal balls before taking that fuel to the elderly. He swept floors. He took away garbage. He carted sacks and food supplies and helped out in the kitchen. He played chess to stoke the competitive spirit of those who seemed resigned to giving up as prisoners. He did numerous odd-jobs – shifting furniture, hanging washing lines, completing fiddly repairs. He put up a row of shelves for one of the prostitutes.28 She said afterwards that Liddell was the only man there to have come into her room without ‘demanding favours’.
When Liddell wasn’t engaged in fetching or carrying, he gave emotional support to the internees. He was the consoling Samaritan of the camp, the epitome of a good neighbour. Into his ears problems were poured, and Liddell listened to friends and strangers alike. ‘He was the man we turned to when personal relationships got just too impossible,’ said an internee. ‘He had a gentle, humorous way of . . . bringing to one’s mind some bygone happiness or the prospect of some future interest just round the corner.’ The only way to feel half-alone in Weihsien – and ensure you weren’t being overheard – was to ramble around the inside perimeter of the wall. Liddell was always being asked whether he’d be free to go for ‘a stroll’.29 On these walks he dealt with homesickness and loneliness, depressions and resentments and fears the internees had both for themselves and for far-off loved ones. Liddell never spoke with those he cared for pastorally about his own apprehensions or the awful hurt he felt because of his family’s absence. Hearing him pine or complain would only make them gloomier still, he thought. Nor did he criticize others or make disparaging remarks about them.
Recognized as an impartial and unimpeachably honest broker, he was called in to settle spats too – some of which threatened to become explosive. In one Red Cross message, Liddell had told Florence that ‘everyone [was] a worker’, as if the load in Weihsien was being shared equally. That wasn’t entirely the case. Mary Scott said that ‘men and women alike were soon known not by their outside occupations, but by the quality of their work, their spirit of willingness and their measure of enthusiasm’. She added that the camp ‘judged people not by what they had, but for what they were’. Liddell had to mediate when squabbles began over whether or not someone was shirking his – or occasionally her – duties. Sometimes he’d mediate again in claims of petty pilfering. Food or fuel regularly went missing. So did possessions. When guilt could be proved without reasonable doubt, the thieves were named on notice boards. What was meant to disgrace and deter the light-fingered also increased tensions. Suspicions both real and imagined were stirred. Some were shunned after indiscretions committed only to stave off hunger or cold rather than to satisfy greed. This was, after all, the 1940s, a period when self-respect and particularly self-restraint were expected. Not to show them was considered to be bad form even as a prisoner of war. Cliques became tighter than ever. Those who considered themselves well-to-do avoided those regarded as the camp’s underbelly. The strictly neutral Liddell was accepted on both sides of the social divide, which he shuttled between.
He never flagged. Liddell rose before it got light, well in advance of his companions, to pray silently.30 He sat at a table with the curtains tightly shut so the Japanese wouldn’t see the low glow of his peanut oil lamp and think someone was planning to escape.
Liddell’s advice was always ‘First of all, have a prayer hour. Secondly, keep it.’31 He was rigid on the point because he believed that ‘Anyone who, neglecting that fixed hour of prayer, [will] say he can pray at all times will probably end in praying at no time.’ Liddell explained that the opening few minutes of his prayers were ‘a sincere moral search’ in which he waited for the mind to stop ‘at anything’ he had done wrong. His first prayers were then for Florence, Patricia, Heather and the baby Maureen. In his Prayers for Daily Use, Liddell carefully wrote each of their names in the margin beside the section titled ‘Absent Loved Ones’.
Liddell compared his quiet period of contemplation and study to washing ‘the dust’ from his eyes. Once that was done, he faced the day to come.
Those who saw what Liddell did believed he came close to bucking the theory that no one is indispensable. ‘I once saw him unloading supplies from the back of a cart,’32 said one internee, who was then an enquiring child. ‘I said to myself: Why is he doing it? That’s someone else’s responsibility. Later I realized he did everything. It’s said he was worth ten men. I can believe it.’
Another observer put it even better. ‘I was amazed that anyone could carry such a timetable,’ she said.
The internees tried to make Weihsien more like home. The pathways in the camp were playfully renamed. The central track was Main Street. The parallel thoroughfare became Tin Pan Alley or The Rocky Road, the name dependent on preference. Among the others were Wall Street, Downing Street, Sunset Boulevard, Old Kent Road and Peitaiho Beach. There was even a Lovers’ Lane. That painter of weirdly fantastical images Hieronymus Bosch would have been the ideal artist to put on canvas the chaotically surreal scenes witnessed on them.
The Japanese never issued new clothes to the internees. What anyone wore soon became dirty, particularly when the torrential rains came and turned the main roads into mud-heaps, or were damaged through daily wear and tear. These tattered and patched clothes were repaired time and again until further repairs became futile.33 Replacements had to be cut and stitched from any available fabric – curtains, sheets, blankets, pillowcases and, most commonly, the threadbare remnants of other garments. Nothing was ever wasted. A flower-patterned tablecloth became two pairs of underpants. A sweater, with gaping holes where the elbows ought to be, was gradually unravelled, the wool re-used to knit a new one. A pair of dining-room curtains was turned into a shirt. Shoes, the soles dropping off, were bound with long string or twine. Once that became impractical, strips of cloth were nailed on to wooden soles instead. In summer some of the men went around bare-chested and walked in bare feet too. In winter there were Chinese clogs to wear. No one cared about appearance; the aim was to make clothes last as long as possible and to dress functionally.
Either out of panic, or because no one had known precisely what to take, the internees had brought an eclectic collection of outfits from their wardrobes, which led to some curious and carnivalesque sartorial sights during the two and a half years of the camp’s existence.34 The place could have been mistaken for a lunatic asylum in which everyone had free access to a child’s dressing-up box. One woman wore a fur coat and pearls. Another put on a ball-gown, the wide ruff of the hem filthy and frayed before it was cut off and made into something else. A man dressed in his dinner jacket and evening shirt to wash dishes. His friend never seemed to be without his pink Leander boating scarf. Someone else usually wore his Ascot t
ie.
None of the clothes could be properly ironed. The internees laid them between the bedsprings and the mattress. ‘When we took the clothes out, they were well creased but flattened at least,’ said Mary Scott. Otherwise, she added, clothes were washed and simply hung out to dry ‘hoping the wind would take out some of the wrinkles’.
Eric Liddell had arrived in Weihsien in a white shirt, long white socks and a pair of khaki shorts beneath his overcoat. The curtains he’d brought with him – one pair orange, another flame-red – were eventually cut up to replace the white shirt.35 He resembled the glowing tip of a match. He wasn’t alone. Another prisoner wore shorts that had once been patterned curtains too. The outlines of the sun and the moon were apparent on each buttock. Liddell discarded his socks and wore whatever footwear would fit, including his old running shoes. He merely yanked out the spikes. Clothes were still the least of the camp’s inconveniences for him and everyone else.
The internees were able to shower only once a week in austere communal blocks offering scant privacy for their nakedness other than sheets, which were no substitute for proper curtains.36 The exceptions were the stokers, covered in dust and grime, and the bakers, sweaty in the heat: the camp allowed them to shower every day. Weihsien was also home sweet home to insects and vermin, which were ever-present and everywhere. No amount of fumigation could ever satisfactorily shift them. As well as the flies in the kitchen, and the rats scurrying around the garbage, there were fat maggots and mosquitoes, scorpions and several varieties of troublesome red-brown bugs, which regarded skin as a gourmet feast and left spots of blood behind on the sheets. The internees were meticulous in attempting to get rid of them, taking out and cleaning bed frames, mattresses and blankets as well as trunks and clothes. Walls and floors were washed. Water was boiled and poured over the bed frames. The bugs were squashed beneath fingernails. None of it worked. The bug population trooped back before the sun rose again, forever interrupting sleep as the internees strove to bat, slap or flick them away. There was no Pied Piper to combat the rats in Weihsien either.37 Elaborate traps were laid and hundreds perished, snapped to death or drowned; but, like the bugs and the flies, there were always more – scores upon scores, in fact – to replace them.
For the Glory Page 27