by Martin Booth
As they paraded through the few streets between the ferry pier and the aerodrome the guards assumed the formation they had taken at the embarking point. They marched alongside the prisoners, rifles at the ready by their waists, bayonets fitted and their hands firmly grasping stock and barrel. The position each was obliged to take, half-facing inward to the labour column, made walking clumsy and the Japanese soldiers, for the best part short men, waddled and tripped rather than marched in a military fashion. It did not matter: no one dared laugh at the spectacle.
From a few shady shops and doorways, Chinese women and children gawped as the contingent passed. The Europeans – English, Canadians, Dutch, Portuguese – whom they had known as bank officials and businessmen, architects and dentists, police inspectors and customs officers, were now just coolies. This did not cause the onlookers any pleasure. It did not satisfy some obscure colonial rancour, settle any old scores. It shocked them that those who had made the world tick could be so reduced to such indignity, such obvious loss of face. They felt helpless sympathy for them.
Sandingham was put into a draft to dig a ditch. Pedrick, by chance, was in the same workforce.
At the site of the ditches they were issued with labourers’ shovels with ‘P.W.D.’ painted on the handles, and common garden forks, and told in broken English to dig to a depth of eleven feet between the tied-out stakes about three feet apart. Some Chinese coolies were already at work in the ditch, clearing out what soil had fallen in during the night. Tom contrived to get next to Sandingham.
‘I’ve not done this before,’ Sandingham said, looking at the handle of his shovel and thinking of the twist of fate that gave him a government Public Works Department tool.
‘We just dig,’ said Tom. ‘The coolies dig with us and we get them to shift the dirt out in those wicker baskets’ – he pointed to a stack of them – ‘… and we get a drink break of ten minutes mid-morning. Water. Half an hour at midday, while the guards and the coolies eat and then back as usual. What have you done in the past?’
‘Moved explosives, piled up lorry tyres, mixed concrete, filled kerosene cans, that sort of thing. Tight supervision. Not like this.’
Casting casually about him, Sandingham saw only three guards for a work detail of at least one hundred PoWs and as may coolies. He started to tug his vest off.
‘Don’t do that. Keep it on,’ advised Tom. ‘It stops the dust from getting in the sores. I’m told the ground’s a bit tetanus. After a bit, one of the coolies’ll get a bucket of sea water. Wash in that. The salt does you good.’
They went into the trench, already thirty yards or more long. It was not a drainage ditch but a slit trench as cover against air attack. The first twenty-five yards were shored with rough-sawn timber, but the rest was not. Sandingham set to on the sandy, gritty earth with his shovel. It was hot going, but if he took it slowly it didn’t tire him too quickly and, by mid-morning, he was in a routine.
‘You no work too hard. Take it easy. We can do more instead of you.’
He had not been spoken to all morning, not even by Tom who was cutting planks and cross-members for the shoring. He started to twist himself round in the narrow passage of the trench.
‘No. No see me. I standing behind you. Just listen. I can help you. You take this. Guards no can see. We too deep and my man watch out fo’ us.’
Stopping digging, Sandingham was handed an oblong block of cooked fish about the size of a cigarette packet.
‘Eat now!’ ordered the Chinese voice with urgency.
He crammed the fish into his mouth and chewed on it. It was hard to swallow because his throat was dry, but he forced it down. It tasted good and had been poached in ginger. His lips ignored the sand on his fingers as he pulled the few bones out of his mouth, covering them with a shovelful of gravel.
‘Thank you,’ he said.
He recommenced digging. After a few minutes, a guard’s shadow slid over the sheer side of the trench: he peered down to see nothing abnormal. He moved off and the lookout overhead tipped the Chinese the nod.
‘You know you’ senior officer?’
Sandingham replied in the affirmative.
‘I got a message for him. You take it.’
The Chinese was still behind Sandingham and his hand reached round and bent Sandingham’s arm behind his back. He pressed into the palm a minute square of paper, folded to the size of a postage stamp, and Sandingham deftly wrapped it into the creases of his loincloth where his vest tucked into the waistfold.
‘What’s your name? Who shall I say…?’ he asked obliquely over his houlder.
‘You just say Number 177. Very lucky number for Chinese. Nearly all sevens.’
‘But your name? I can’t give him a number alone.’
‘He will understand. Tell him 177. For you, my name can be “Francis”.’
The drink break arrived. Sandingham climbed out of the trench into full sunlight and the heat struck him. It was actually cooler in the bottom of the ditch. He squatted next to Tom Pedrick and took a swig from the water jug. It was warm but refreshing.
As they doused their bodies with sea water from the buckets they spoke very quietly, their whispers disguised by the chattering of the coolies. The salt stung in their cuts, the cracks in their dry skin and their open sores, but it was a healthy sensation.
‘I’ve got something for the CO,’ Sandingham said bluntly. ‘A note.’
Tom Pedrick seemed unperturbed, as if he expected such an occurrence. He didn’t ask how Sandingham had come to obtain it.
‘Put it under your balls if you get the chance,’ said Tom. ‘They won’t search there and you’ll not lose it because the material’s tight around the crotch.’
Pretending to ease his testicles, Sandingham succeeded in getting the note shifted.
They returned to dig. At midday, the guards brought over half a petrol barrel filled with a thin soup containing some cabbage leaves and with bits of fatty tissue floating in it. The usual chrysanthemum leaves hung suspended in the liquid. The tissue was tasteless but someone said they believed it was dolphin: one had been found beached the day before by the detail working on the taxiway extension. They ate under an awning slung between four poles. A warm breeze flickered the hanging edges and the guy ropes.
One prisoner kept apart from the rest of them. He was slight of build with large ears that were exaggerated by his shaven head. His long fingers held his Chinese soup spoon very delicately, as if he were at a banquet. Sandingham studied him for some minutes. The man kept his eyes lowered and seemed to ponder his soup bowl with unnecessary concentration, sipping the liquid with a determined deliberation. Pedrick saw him watching the man.
‘Who is he?’ Sandingham enquired.
‘Don’t you know? He’s –’ Pedrick answered, then he silenced himself.
Going mad, thought Sandingham. He’s one of the ones who’s going insane. Balmy. Off his rocker. Losing his marbles. He had been near to that himself in the first few months. He made to rise and go across to the man. Tom grabbed his wrist.
‘Why on earth not? Look at him: he’s cracking up. He’s barely with us.’
‘He’s not with us at all. He’s against us.’ This puzzled Sandingham. Tom carried on, ‘You know the hut by the kitchens, the one with the boarded-up window? He’s in that hut.’
This did not solve the dilemma for Sandingham.
‘Those two – the lance-corporal and his mate who were in that same hut – who were caught last month, trying to get out through the wire behind Jubilee Buildings? He’ – Tom spat in order mainly to clean his mouth of the aftertaste of the soup that was tainted by the petrol formerly in the cooking drum, but also to show his dislike – ‘ratted on them. To the Nips. Told Cardiff Joe. And that was it. Nabbed at the post. They’ve not been seen since. Second time it’s happened, I’m told, but the first I only heard about umpteenth hand. This one I know of for sure. I was skivvying in the next room, mopping the floor. Heard him spill the beans. Now he’s in Coventry. Will
be for years if this bloody war goes on and on. And it will…’ His voice tailed off. That was defeatist, and Pedrick’d have none of it.
‘What’ll happen to him?’
‘When we’ve won the war,’ said Pedrick positively, ‘and we’re out of this, the fucker’ll get court martialled. I do hope.’
His vehemence took Sandingham aback, but he understood it, shared in it to some extent. He could not avoid it.
The afternoon was spent digging monotonously. Tom and his partner on the two-man saw, a Merchant Seaman stoker with a tattooed moth on his chest, found the going heavy for the teeth were blunting. Eventually, the saw twanged and the nearest guard sauntered across to see what was wrong. In mime, they showed him that the teeth were not only blunt but breaking off. He ordered them to stop and sent a Chinese basket coolie as a runner to his superior. The coolie took his time and the supply of planking was held up. The digging did not cease, however, and soon there were twenty yards unshored.
Sandingham stopped and took the handles of one of the wicker baskets of soil. In the coolie’s absence excavated earth was building up. He moved back through the trench to the nearest steps up. Here he put the basket on his hip and started to climb.
Off to his left was a rushing sound, like water running in a sluice. In a mill race in Suffolk: it made his thoughts cool to hear it. Then, funnelled on to him by the trench, there was a horrendous scream.
The sides were collapsing on to two coolies. The sandy soil had dried out in the heat of the day and now it just fell in. The two men were still screaming and then their scream was cut as if switched off. Dust eddied upward.
Everyone dropped tools and rushed forward. The guards unslung their rifles and hurried towards the scene, prepared for trouble. Several fixed their bayonets as they ran. Sandingham grabbed another man’s shovel and he and Tom, a private from the Middlesex and several Chinese, started frantically to dig. A seven-or eight-yard section had gone. The eleven-foot-deep trench was now only a two-foot-shallow depression, ten feet across.
It was too late. Too much earth had fallen and over too great a length of the working. The guards moved in, hitting people aside with the butts of their rifles. A senior NCO came over and they talked together before the orders were changed. The trench was to be angled through forty-five degrees at the site of the cave-in.
As the prisoners lined up to board the ferry that was to take them back to the camp at Sham Shui Po, Sandingham saw Francis Number 177 glance at him. The Chinese winked once.
He wasn’t sure what to expect of the agent and Sandingham’s first view of him was perhaps a little disappointing. He didn’t look like a secret agent, a spy for the Communist guerillas, the Nationalists or the British: one of those had to be his employer. He was stripped to the waist and his chest was slightly sunken at the sternum. He was tanned but not at all muscular. He wore baggy black pantaloon-like peasant’s trousers, the waistband folded over, and rope sandals. His face was nondescript, commonplace Chinese.
They all look alike, thought Sandingham and he smiled to himself at the Europeans’ cliché of ignorance. Number 177 smiled back quickly and turned away.
The harbour was smooth with a slight swell. Sandingham stood next to Tom at the rail. The guards knew no one would jump: they’d be shot or killed by sharks. The harbour, always rich with garbage and, now that it was wartime, an abundance of corpses as well, attracted them.
‘Those poor bastards!’ Sandingham remarked. ‘God! What an awful way to die…’
‘Any worse than being shot? Or bayonetted? Or dying of scurvy or cholera? At least it was quick.’
After a pause, Sandingham said, ‘But to see it coming like that. A bullet – you never hear the bang. That’s really quick. To see the earth falling on you, though…’
‘No worse than seeing the bayonet plunge. Certainly no worse than seeing your stomach spewed up or your wound starting to smell gaseous. Be glad if your death’s as rapid.’
They said no more at that.
As the craft passed the Peninsula Hotel Sandingham studied the large ground-floor windows. If he strained his ears he could almost hear a palm court ensemble playing a tea dance over the thud of the screw and the hissing of the waves gliding by below.
* * *
If he had had a blanket around his shoulders … if he had had a mug of steaming cocoa in his hand … if there had been a roaring fire in the grate before him … if his nose had been red … and if the room had smelt of roasted chestnuts … he could possibly have been at home on a winter’s evening with a streaming cold. As it was, he had a temperature of one hundred and three degrees and stomach cramps and sat hunched over a battered tin basin with his feet in water that had been warmed by leaving it in a black bucket in full spring sunlight.
For several days Sandingham had been suffering from electric feet. It was painful and alike to permanent pins and needles, from the ankles down. The MO told him it was vitamin deficiency. A number of them were getting it. Soaking his feet in warm water relieved the pain for a while. His tongue was raw on one edge.
He had been standing for over two hours that afternoon in the ‘operating theatre’, assisting in holding down two officers while they each had a molar extracted without anaesthetic. Abscesses were becoming increasingly common, too. The operating table had seen better days taking the pink into the corner pocket off a cannon; but no one complained. It was so heavy it did not move, the baize surface was warmer than the cold slate beneath and the rims of the pockets could be used to anchor down particularly powerful and obstreperous patients.
Pushing his hands over his head in the luxury of a stretch, Sandingham looked about him. Some prisoners were playing an improvised game of bowls; a few were tending a very inadequate, dessicated vegetable plot while others were sitting or mooching or moving slowly about in groups of no more than three. Others still were gathered under the pine-tree smoking-stand. A sudden outbreak of masculine laughter rang across the compound.
‘They can always laugh,’ said de Souza. ‘The British can always find humour in even the worst of their troubles.’
He was Portuguese, and had been an import-export broker before the Hong Kong volunteer force called upon his services to fight in the early weeks of December. His English was impeccable: he had attended a missionary school in Macau in the twenties. It had been his poor luck to be present at the massacre of the patients and the raping and subsequent murder of the nurses at St Stephen’s College: he had seen the two doctors shot and bayonetted over and over on the ground. He had had a smashed hand which could still not grip well. That had been on Christmas Day.
Sandingham lifted his feet out of the water. As he did so, a prisoner came over to him with a kerosene can sliced in half and equipped with a short rope handle. He asked for some of the water and Sandingham gave him the lot, watching as he took it away to the steps of his barrack hut where he and three others stirred it with wood-ash and commenced to launder their clothes with the mixture. Soap was rare.
‘It’s a national trait, Suzie. We laugh at the terrible and take the light-hearted with deadly seriousness.’
‘It’s good, Joe. If you laugh at the awful it doesn’t seem so bad. I can’t do that. Sometimes I try – my mother was half-English, you know, and I’ve often hoped I’ve inherited some of her manners. But I haven’t got that ability to find comic the essentially tragic. Like Shakespeare: who could write such funny, sad plays but an Englishman? Romeo and Juliet – dirty jokes and a lovers’ death pact at the end.’
Carefully hoisting himself to his feet, Sandingham found that the pain had eased a bit from the soaking. With some difficulty, he managed to slip his feet into his new sandals, skilfully constructed from a webbing belt and an old car tyre. He hobbled off to the area between the two huts where there was what the prisoners called a ‘pisaphone’ – a galvanised steel funnel sunk into the earth, without screens, to serve as a urinal. The laughter followed him and came closer. Two officers whom he did not know drew
up behind him, waiting their turn at the pissoir.
‘Anyway,’ said one, ‘he’s lucky in that he’s the only person in here who’s constipated. Still … he had another parcel yesterday from her. Just like the others, it came in a derelict perambulator! Passed straight through the guards. Not much in it. But they didn’t search it too well. There was a tiny scrap of paper in it, of course. I saw it.’
Sandingham struggled to get his penis back into his fandushi: the skin of his fingers was so cracked at the joints he could not bend them enough to hook himself back into his clothing.
‘What did it say?’
‘“Darling Mickey,”’ the officer quoted, giving the words their pidgin English pronunciation, ‘– she could spell the “darling” all right! – “I got you sum vejtabul here – a litule cabag and some bens. I luv yuo. All so, I got you one more plam.”’
They both chuckled.
‘So what did he say?’
‘Nothing! What could he say? Cat-and-Dog was right there. You can’t talk to visitors. However, this morning he sees his Chinese piece going past the wire. Never mind the patrol, the bloody electrified wire, or even a good face slapping! He runs up as near as he can get to the fence and bawls out, “Hey, Gilly!” She looks his way, half-terrified to do so. “Hey!” he bellows again. “Not prams, Gilly. Not prams. Plums! Plums!”’
The laughter was the choking, chortling kind that always accompanies a good yarn. Sandingham smiled as he limped back to the step of his hut.
From inside, he could hear a French lesson in progress, a pupil repeating clumsily, ‘Je ne suis par. Tu nay par. Il nay par…’
He rubbed his hand firmly along his shin. The ringworm was as brightly scarlet as a plague mark and pestering him again.
* * *
‘It tastes fucking foul, if you don’t mind my saying so, old boy.’
‘I admit it’s not Johnnie Walker, but I don’t think it’s that bad,’ said Sandingham.
‘You do better,’ challenged Rodney Castleford, a tall, narrow young man who had been a steward in the Merchant Navy and was used to the wiles of the lower decks.