For all its distortions – ‘we presumed even its sports results weren’t true’,11 said a prisoner – the Peking Chronicle was useful, providing you were intelligent enough to read between the lines and dismiss the lies. According to the Chronicle, the Japanese and the Germans were forever trouncing the Allies. In saying so, the paper dropped place-names.12 ‘The mention over a period of months in this newspaper of the Gilbert and Marshall Islands, Manila, Iwo Jima and Okinawa was an unintended admission that the Americans had the Japanese on the run,’ observed an internee, who reached this conclusion: ‘To be fighting there the Americans must have advanced there.’
The Japanese guards were inadvertently suppliers of snatches of information from the distant war too. Remarkably slow-witted, the guards discovered that a Russian internee was a wizard when it came to mending radios.13 He was even allowed to fix them unsupervised, which allowed him to listen to broadcasts. He’d either delay the return of the radio, claiming the job was a tricky one, or he’d complete a token repair on the set, knowing the guard would have to bring it back to him in a month or so. In this way the internees learned of the Allies’ invasion of Sicily in July and August 1943. As a way of communicating it to the camp, some of them sang countless renditions of ‘Santa Lucia’, which was then changed to ‘Goodbye Sicilia’.14 The guards never spotted the unsubtle code.
None of the broadcasts suggested the war would be over soon. So the acceptance that freedom – if it came at all – was years rather than months away took an awful hold. The prospect was frightening for some, disturbing to all others. ‘Our forced inactivity and complete ignorance of what the future held in store weighed heavily on all,’15 said Scanlan.
Towards the end of that first, hot summer the internees were at a low ebb, morosely disheartened by the squalor, the lack of food and the monotony of the diet and also pessimistic about how long Weihsien would be their gaol.
So the camp decided to stage late-afternoon athletics races to raise morale.16 Often these were held on red letter dates, such as American Independence Day, Labour Day or British Empire Day. For a few hours Weihsien’s ‘Sports Day’ was a way of forgetting the world both inside and outside its wall. The internees who weren’t working tumbled out of their rooms and their dormitories to see it. The question of whether Liddell still ran wasn’t so empty-headed after all now. And the running shoes he’d brought – even minus their spikes – proved useful.
There was no space to create a track in the cramped camp.17 A convoluted route was agreed upon instead. The start line was close to the Church Assembly Hall. The so-called ‘front straight’ was the turn along Main Street. The competitors then went into Market Square and returned down Tin Pan Alley, which was the ‘back straight’. The finish line was a corner of a recreational field, already used for baseball and softball, which was treeless. One circuit totalled approximately 220 yards. Liddell’s race, which was the main event, comprised four of these.
He had once given Patricia a pep talk about competition.18 The two of them had run together in a father and daughter’s race in Tientsin. Patricia was supposed to pass on a white handkerchief, a substitute for a baton. She completed the course, but continued to hold on to the handkerchief. Liddell couldn’t begin running until he had ever so tenderly coaxed it away from her. Those seconds, lost in persuasion, made it impossible for him to come first. Afterwards he told Patricia that winning never mattered. The important thing, he stressed, was always to ‘do your best’. Liddell, though absolutely sincere in what he’d said to her, seldom acknowledged his toughly competitive instincts, which were inborn. He didn’t like to lose.
Weihsien camp’s makeshift baseball and softball field, which also marked the finish line of racing during frequent ‘Sports Days’.
An Olympic champion doesn’t only possess more talent than anyone else. He also has something extra in regard to desire and motivation, which pushes him past the rest. Liddell demonstrated it even in Weihsien. He was spindly.19 His facial flesh had sunk around his cheekbones. His shoulders had dropped slightly because of the physical loads his frame carried from dawn to darkness. He didn’t resemble a runner any more, let alone one whose name and photograph had appeared on the pages of five thousand newspapers – from New York to Nairobi, from Montevideo to Moscow – as a world and Olympic record holder. Those photographs had shown him in his Great Britain vest. Now Liddell wore his loose short-sleeved shirt and his khaki shorts, shabby because of wear and grime.20
Aubrey Grandon, nicknamed ‘Muscles’ because of his physique and his love of exercising.
Some of his rivals either hadn’t been born or were toddlers in 1924. Chief among them was twenty-four-year-old Aubrey Grandon, powerfully built enough to be nicknamed ‘Muscles’.21 ‘He was always showing them off to us girls,’ said one internee. ‘You’d see him doing his exercises and playing sport whenever he could. That was his way of coping in the camp.’ He was a stoker, which accentuated his impressive physique – wide shoulders, strong arms and well-defined abs and pecs.
Half-Chinese, Grandon became a bit of a heart-throb, the sort of handsome gent who would stop a lady in mid-conversation when he entered a room. He had considerable charm, winning over even the elderly ladies with a rendition of the Irish ballad ‘Molly Malone’.22 He had a prominent jaw and his nose, equally prominent, looked sharp enough to guillotine cheese. An accountant, Grandon grew up in a family wealthy enough to have servants. ‘You didn’t pour your own coffee – even if the pot was in the same room,’23 he said. After Weihsien, his father’s fortune long gone, Grandon let his hair grow into a dark mane.24 This was so unfashionable and socially frowned upon that his friends refused to sit beside him on the London tube. The British sculptor Jacob Epstein noticed Grandon nevertheless and subsequently used him as the model for his work Manhood, which was exhibited at the Festival of Britain in 1951. Epstein’s contemporary, Henry Moore, also chose him to be Adam in his study Adam and Eve.
Sportingly, Liddell gave his opponents a slight head start, agreeing not to begin until those quickest off the line began to swing into Main Street.25 He had a dozen paces to make up on them after the starter climbed on to an upturned wooden crate and held a white handkerchief aloft, letting his arm fall after shouting ‘Ready, set, go!’
Liddell’s reputation preceded him. Everyone in Weihsien, aware of his background, expected him to win without much of a sweat. Only those with knowledge of athletics understood the challenge of pitting his middle-aged body against someone as fit and as fast as Grandon. The trauma of the previous six months, plus the lack of nutrition, had weakened Liddell. He knew nonetheless what his audience had come to see. He also knew his failure to deliver it would disappoint them acutely. Liddell went into competition mode, dragging a performance out of himself.
The narrowness of the pathways made overtaking difficult for him until the wider part of the course was reached.26 Main Street was particularly tricky because tall acacia trees grew on either side of it. Their branches, full of foliage, interlocked like fingers and draped a canopy over the ground. The dust and dirt whipped up from the dry surface also meant that blown-back grit clouded the eyes.
Tin Pan Alley in the Weihsien camp. The photograph was taken in the early 1900s.
Liddell lacked the whip speed of his younger self. What he didn’t lack was technique and timing. There were runners who could undoubtedly have bettered him in a short sprint. This, however, was more a trial of endurance. He knew when to lengthen his stride and make the decisive move.
Grandon went off like a firecracker. Liddell gradually made his way through the pack, taking the outside route whenever possible. The crowd urged him on with shouts and yelps. The guards in the watchtowers overlooking the field began to applaud, as though the result meant something to them. On the final lap Liddell went ahead in the gaping open space after the bell tower. He didn’t need to glance over his shoulder again. The matter was settled. No one could catch him now; not even Grandon. The winner threw
his head back as though it were 1924 again.
In that hot gale of speed Liddell took the race comfortably, endorsing the opinion Otto Peltzer expressed about him at the end of the 1920s. He could have stepped up from the 400 metres to the 800 metres and competed in the 1932 Los Angeles Olympics. Liddell also won in a way that didn’t suggest he was a slick, cocky professional who had grandiosely conquered a bunch of game amateurs. He shook each man’s hand afterwards, offering congratulations before receiving them. It seemed as though everyone in the camp wanted to slap him on the back.
The effect of the performance was calculable in the mood. In those few minutes of action Liddell had shown himself to be a battler, unnaturally strong in heart as well as muscle. The internees became even prouder than before about having him among them.
The height of the wall around the Weihsien camp and the bank beneath it were a deterrent to would-be escapees.
The brief drama of that race would nonetheless be forgotten in the aftermath of another, which proved monumental.
Not every missionary and Churchman won the wholehearted approval of Weihsien.27 Some, unlike Eric Liddell, lacked the instinct to appreciate the anguish of others and consequently failed to make proper allowances for it. The standards of the High Church could never be imposed on the secular – especially in such a harsh environment. That still didn’t deter the most overzealous missionaries and priests from trying to introduce them. The same missionaries and priests could be sternly unforgiving afterwards when these attempts predictably hit stony ground. A few of them, strictly anti-smoking, anti-alcohol and anti-gambling, thought all cigarettes should be burned, the camp ought to become teetotal and the card games within it prohibited.
Internees with vices did go to extreme lengths to satisfy their addictions. The compulsive smokers would puff away at roll-ups of dry tea when tobacco was unavailable.28 The compulsive gamblers would head for twenty-four-hour poker marathons as soon as their Comfort Money arrived. The compulsive drinkers were the worst, pressing sweet potatoes to make a pungent wine whenever the bottles of the Chinese brew pai ka’erh or by-gar, a whisky, couldn’t be obtained through subterfuge. The drunks, dependent well before Weihsien, went after the hospital’s quota of medicinal alcohol, distilled drink from wood shavings and cleared the shelves of ‘hay rum’ hair tonic in the White Elephant Shop. One man was desperate enough to swallow his wife’s perfume; no one minded the missionaries and priests condemning him.29
The mistake of the fundamentalists was to scorn the moderate tippler, the five-a-day smoker and the occasional bet too. There could be a hard stare of disapproval even when an internee was overheard swearing. Langdon Gilkey remembered that a missionary in his dormitory believed ‘any deviation from his own doctrinal beliefs, or any hint of personal vice, spelled for him certain damnation . . . He would cheerfully assure us that anyone who smoked, cussed or told off-colour jokes was certain to go to Hell,’ he said.30
The internees, thinking the odd loose curse to be a triviality in comparison with the camp’s other failings, would dismiss it as a pointless complaint from a pernickety and interfering busybody. Respect on both sides was eroded on such irrelevances and others, including another preacher Gilkey recalled insisting on extra space ‘in which I can have quiet to think out sermons’.31 The internees considered those like him to be over-righteous and unctuously moralistic. Early on Gilkey was called to calm a dormitory of twenty-one single women.32 There had been a fight between an American missionary and a British secretary. The other secretaries complained about the missionaries ‘praying aloud at night’ and singing hymns at 6 a.m. The missionaries complained about the secretaries ‘chattering endlessly’ about ‘all the lurid escapades in their pasts’.
The most divisive differences were nonetheless attitudes towards the black market.33 The Japanese had forced the internees to agree to one condition: not to make contact with the Chinese. There were missionaries and priests who thought opening up a channel to them was like breaking a solemn promise, which counted as a disreputable act. The fact that the Japanese weren’t feeding them well enough was not an acceptable excuse. The further fact that the black market’s ring leader was the ingenious and resourceful Father Patrick Scanlan made no difference to them either.
Aware of how the internees ‘were in circumstances in which it [was] easy to lose courage’, Scanlan decided to fortify them.34 Already men and women alike, but particularly the elderly, were losing weight at an alarming rate. Among them was eighty-two-year-old Herbert Hudson Taylor, the only surviving son of J. Hudson Taylor, co-creator of the China Inland Mission in the 1880s.35 H. H. Taylor had a beard like Tolstoy’s and would eventually weigh less than 80lb. He was said to have ‘one foot on earth and the other in heaven’. His granddaughter, Mary, remembered others asking him ‘let us take in your clothes’. He’d simply reply, ‘God is going to bring me out of Weihsien and I’m going to fit into these clothes again.’ Scanlan was compelled to act on behalf of people such as him. ‘We were not badly treated,’36 he said. ‘The rules of the camp were reasonable enough and, if we kept to these, we were given no trouble.’ The problem of food was nonetheless insurmountable for Scanlan unless he broke those rules. ‘Had the meals been better, or even if we had been allowed to buy from the Chinese, there would have been no friction, or at least very little, between us and the Japanese,’ he explained.
The priest had geography on his side.37 He roomed on the south-east side of the wall. Just beyond was a scattering of peasant homes. ‘There was no place in the camp better suited for buying,’ he said. The Japanese, paranoid about the internees signalling to the Chinese, banned the hanging of laundry that could be seen from beyond the wall in case the order or the colour of the clothes constituted a coded message. Scanlan was still secretly able to make initial contact and persuade the Chinese to trade. He was also fortunate that an iron-barred drain was located near his building.38 The drain became an exchange point. Usually after lights out, Scanlan would lift it open and crawl inside. The Chinese placed food, especially eggs, between the bars at the other end. A few bricks were also chipped out near the base of the wall to create a ‘serving hatch’ for him. At midnight, as soon as the goods had been checked and counted, he’d return with payment. There was a silent system to alert Scanlan of danger when exchanges were made over the wall and also under it. Under the pretext of facing the wall to pray, priests took up vantage points within sight of one another and then passed signals in a relay, using either a handkerchief or a prearranged gesture, such as bending over.39 Next morning Scanlan and the other monks would carry contraband in the large pockets of their black scapulars, delivering it to those who had placed advance orders. ‘At first I made it a rule to buy for sick people and children,’40 said Scanlan, expanding those parameters only when ‘people really in need begged me to get things’. He called the struggle to obtain them and the Japanese efforts to stop him a ‘contest between us and them’.
Liddell fully supported Scanlan. He thought the ruses to obtain food were not only legitimate, but also without moral dilemma. The Japanese expected the internees to work. That work couldn’t be done without strength and muscle, which was wearing away without sustenance. Relying only on the Japanese to provide it was neither sensible nor sustainable. Liddell willingly distributed what Scanlan brought – and took orders for more – for the camp’s benefit.
Eggs were particularly important because the shells were ground to powder with the back of a spoon to provide pure, dry and much-needed calcium, which was sickening to swallow.41 ‘It tasted like crunchy chalk dust,’42 said an internee. Tomatoes, apples, corncobs, jam and watermelons were among other foods regularly smuggled in.43 So were chickens and geese – both alive and dead. One live goose was hurled over the wall and went squawking down the streets in fright after landing.44 The recipient had to chase after it, finally covering the bird with a pair of pyjamas before smartly wringing its neck with a twist of his hands. In comparison with the sickly scraping
s of normal Weihsien dining, Scanlan introduced gold-leaf living.
At first the guards neither noticed the food nor smelled the aroma of it cooking. But some of the Chinese grew irresponsibly bold, scaling the wall to barter inside the camp rather than outside it, and the Japanese soon identified Scanlan as the mastermind behind these negotiations.45 He was closely observed. On one occasion Scanlan, hiding five dozen eggs, was about to be apprehended by a sentry who had noticed the bulge in his clothes.46 Scanlan thought quickly. He began to squat on the floor and made anguished noises, telling the guard he had diarrhoea. The guard believed him and walked away.
He was a scrupulous black marketeer. Accounts were kept in a black notebook, which he called The Book of Life. Every purchase, no matter how small, was logged and dated. This was almost his undoing. He was once apprehended with both his list and a packet containing five hundred Chinese dollars. He was led away by the wrists to be searched and interrogated. Again he feigned sickness, falling to the ground with a low groan. As the guard reached down to drag him upright, Scanlan displayed the dexterity of a magician to remove the money and throw it behind him.
Eventually Scanlan was forced to shut down the operation temporarily to avoid further suspicion.47 When it resumed, however, the Japanese caught him on a moonless evening near the wall, where he’d been whispering to a dealer. Scanlan had taken his breviary with him as a prop.48 He now pretended to read it, turning the pages as a torch beam illuminated his face. Scanlan told the guards he was ‘reading my prayers’, which was hardly plausible in such enveloping darkness. The guards ordered him to read aloud to them, a test of whether he could see the words. ‘The light was fading fast, and I really could not read the small print,’ he admitted. Scanlan nonetheless knew the psalms by heart and merely recited them from memory, convincing them he was eccentric but also innocent.
For the Glory Page 29