by Martin Booth
‘Coffee!’ he repeated. ‘Bugger me!’
‘No thanks, my ole son,’ answered Pedrick, grinning.
Sandingham guffawed and left with the message, saying over his shoulder, ‘I’ll be back in a tick to wash the aubergines and shell the peas.’
His remarks produced a groaning laugh from all: they rarely saw even pea pods.
* * *
The aviation fuel barrels had been piled into a circle in such a way that, in the centre, there was a space just big enough for two men to stand in. As the barrels were empty and piled high, awaiting refilling from a fuel lighter that came in to the beach every day, they were not well guarded.
The stink of the kerosene was overpowering in the afternoon sun, but it was better than the stench of death that hung over the other end of Kai Tak. The Indian PoWs in Ma Tau Chung were dropping like flies to diphtheria and cholera, the latter now running rife through the civilian population as well. The Japanese were trying hard to cope with the matter, but it was getting on top of them.
‘Indian troops not very good,’ explained Francis 177 in a hushed voice. ‘They got no officers and they lose face over capture. They not wash, they lavatory in open gutters, they get much sickness. Some of them more senior try to stop this but many no care if he die or not.’
Sandingham said nothing. What could he say? He knew what it was like to be demoralised, to have the bottom kicked or slapped or punched or prised out of one’s life. It was only nationalistic pride, he supposed, and a degree of stubborn determination that kept him alive and comparatively civilised.
‘How do you keep going, Francis?’
‘I am Communist. For now.’ He smiled. ‘Not all time though, Joe. Later, when war over, I go back. I be rich man then.’
There was, just for a fleeting second, a distant look in his narrow, almondy-coloured eyes and Sandingham saw that what kept him going was the desire to be wealthy and to hold the power that went with it.
‘All Japanese dead. I get watches, rings, teeth. Japanese soldier go on patrol in New Territories. Go far into woods, up in hills behind Fei Ngo Shan, Ma On Shan, Kai Kwun Shan. Out where you’ friend Stewart captured. We ambush them. Ambush?’
Sandingham nodded. ‘Your English is improving.’
‘Get bigger vocabulary.’ Another smile. ‘When we ambush, I get things and buy sell them to me for cheap money. Then I pay the money to the Communists. They buy foods, friends. Bribe Japanese soldiers. Get information on patrols. Go out and ambush patrols. And it go on and on. Like business. Buy, sell, create demand.’
It was Sandingham’s turn to smile. He wanted to laugh, but the sound would have reverberated in the space inside the barrels and a guard might have grown suspicious. To Francis 177, war was business. He was more than an underground agent – he was a company agent, too.
‘You got anything for me?’
‘Only this,’ replied Sandingham as he took from a fold in his loincloth a fountain pen.
‘Not worth much,’ said the temporary Communist. He unscrewed the cap. ‘But nib is gold.’ He studied it closely. ‘Nine carat. I get you something for this? What you want?’
‘Chocolate. Or a block of ice.’
‘I see. Maybe can do, maybe not.’
An aircraft came into land, its piston engines throbbing in the sky overheard and its shadow flitting over the hiding place.
‘You my friend,’ said the Chinese. ‘You no cheat me and, one day, I help you big time. One day, you want somet’ing, you call on Francis Le … Number 177. Lucky number.’
There was a ‘psst’ from the shadows.
‘I go. You watch vegetables. See you, Joe.’
He was gone, disappearing with the rapidity and magic a gekko would have been proud of displaying.
The following day, right in the centre of the vegetable basket, wrapped in straw and newspaper, was a nine-inch square block of ice and a bar of chocolate, as rock solid and as cold.
* * *
In the mid-morning of 15 September, Sandingham was called to the guardhouse at a moment’s notice. He went there at the double, for any order had to be carried out at speed for fear of reprisal.
In the room was a desk behind which sat Panama Pete. Sandingham stood to attention before him. He was not spoken to until Tom Pedrick entered.
‘Right!’ Panama Pete began, looking up from an army memo pad upon which was an obvious list of names in Japanese characters. Sandingham, who knew what his name looked like in its phonetic translation, tried to see it on the sheet.
‘You two officers are to return to Sham Shui Po prisoner-of-war camp. At two o’clock, a lorry will come for you. You got that? You get your belongings together. You do not take food. You got that?’
‘Yes, sir,’ they replied in chorus.
Taking the risk, Tom asked, ‘Can we be told why we are moving and no other officers are, sir?’
The ‘sir’ stuck in his craw but it beguiled the Japanese.
‘You go to command some soldiers there. Dismiss!’
‘Well, it would seem that at least we aren’t going there for the chop,’ commenting Pedrick as they made their way briskly through the camp.
‘No.’ Sandingham was apprehensive. ‘But they must have a reason. I wonder…’
‘Don’t wonder. It’ll happen if it’s to happen. As for 177, which is what is on your mind: I’m sure they’ve not sussed him or you out.’
It did not take Sandingham long to pack his few belongings. It took him much longer, however, to say his goodbyes. Everyone accepted his farewells with a mixture of blessing, curiosity and fear, all emotions which he himself churned over in his mind.
‘Suzie’ da Souza gave him his usual piece of advice: ‘Remember, Joe. Laugh. Laugh at the awful and the terrible comes easier.’
Rob Bingham gave him six tooth-cleaning sticks: how he maintained his supply puzzled Sandingham.
From the senior officer, he received three messages to be passed to his opposite number in Sham Shui Po. Sandingham hid these in a slit in the sole of his rubber-tyre sandal.
On the dot of two, he and Tom Pedrick climbed into the lorry with their escort and were driven out of the camp.
* * *
‘What’s it all about?’ Tom said.
‘It’s like this. At least, I think this is their reasoning.’ Sandingham had been talking to those officers in Sham Shui Po who had not been moved to Argyle Street. ‘A week or so ago, a draft of prisoners was cobbled together and shipped off to Japan. It seems they want to use PoWs in factories and the like in the Nip homeland: so much for the Geneva Convention. But this is rather encouraging, as it suggests that things are getting tight for them at home. Anyway, this lot went off. That left an under-staffing ratio of officers to ORs, in their eyes. So we’ve been brought in. Suppose because we’re of the comparatively healthy few.’
‘Do you think we are heading for the Land of the Rising Sun?’ was Tom’s next sentence.
Ten days later, on 25 September, their speculation was satisfied.
* * *
‘Attention!’
The ranks came to some semblance of order.
‘This officah,’ Cardiff Joe shouted out, indicating the man at his side on the platform, ‘is Lieutenant Hideo Wada of the Imperial Japanese Army. He has a message for you all. Pay attention to his words and listen. It ve’y good news.’
They listened. The lieutenant talked of Japan, how it was an ancient land, a beautiful land of calm where ‘all is green and prisoners will be cared for by the Imperial Japanese Armed Forces who look after their prisoners very well and treat them as worthy and honourable opponents.’ He told them how he was to be in command of a draft of one thousand eight hundred prisoners who were to go to Japan in a few days upon a ship called the Lisbon Maru. By going to Japan, he assured them, they would escape the diphtheria outbreak. In Japan, it appeared, disease was all but unknown.
The following day, Sandingham and Pedrick spent some hours in a queue for inoculat
ions, the first they had had since the fall of Hong Kong. They had no idea against what they were being immunised. Evidently only healthy foreigners would be allowed to enter the homeland. After the inoculation, every prisoner was forced to bend over while a glass tube was inserted up his anus and a Japanese doctor studied his rectum. It was quick but thorough, impersonal and painful. Some prisoners were weeded out, but the majority passed. As Pedrick said, the Japanese standard of health must be considerably lower than that of the British; few of the men were really well enough to make the trip by sea. Some even had diphtheria and not one was anywhere near fair health.
From the radio in Argyle Street, Sandingham knew that American naval activity against the Japanese in the South China Sea and western Pacific area was on the increase, and this worried him. He voiced this concern to the senior officers who debated the issue and managed as a result to get a message out of the camp through partisans, with instructions to tell the British consul in the neighbouring neutral Portuguese colony of Macau that a Japanese ship was about to leave loaded with a human cargo of prisoners-of-war. He, in turn, could pass this on by radio to the American naval authorities.
Perhaps the agent was delayed: perhaps he was stopped and searched and had to clear himself. Maybe the ferry was held up with a breakdown and did not sail. Whatever the reason, the message was never to arrive.
PART FIVE
Po Lin Monastery, Lantau Island (Hong Kong): Summer, 1952
HE LOOKED UPWARDS. The looming mountain peaks, suddenly appearing then vanishing into the clouds, reminded him of those others he had known in similar weather, the skies thick and gun-grey and the wind gradually rising by the hour. A tropical storm was on the way and the air carried its threatening message in a close and humid anger. The ferry crossing from Castle Peak had been choppy and he was still unsteady on his feet, even after walking half a mile along the promontory from the jetty and across the stout wooden bridge to the village, through the little streets and over the paddyfields behind.
He had halted once to buy some sticks of sugar cane. Biting strips off and sucking the sweetness into his throat before spitting the woody fibre on to the path ahead would give him the strength he required to climb the fifteen hundred feet ahead of him. The shopkeeper had been surprised, though he had managed to hide most of his amazement, to see a European in his small store. Although they occasionally passed through the village en route for the mountain, they seldom if ever stopped to make a purchase, and they certainly never came in the summer. It was too hot for them to face the mountain paths in the middle months of the year: they generally arrived in February or March.
The shop was made of charcoal-grey bricks, as if it were solidified from the dull sky overhead. Across the front and under the canvas awning that was flapping and tensing in the wind hung several strands of fish and squid, drying in the air. He had asked after the price, but they were too expensive for him. That, too, had surprised the shopkeeper – that he should have been asked, then have the European refuse after counting through his loose change. Strange behaviour for a gweilo.
A cube-shaped rattan basket blew over the stone-slabbed platform below the awning as Sandingham left. A girl not yet in her teens, with an infant sister strapped in place on her back by a brightly-coloured cloth that criss-crossed her childish breasts like a gawdy parachute harness, came out and prevented the basket from bowling away towards the river.
The paddyfields he took to after leaving the village were dark emerald with tall, near-ripe rice although the colour was muted by the dull weather. The heads of grain hung over and swished together in the wind like a million distant cicadas.
On the path stood an old man who was watching the crop with a worried frown. It was not ready for gathering and he knew that if the eye of the storm hit the island with accuracy, as was forecast, then by morning most of the grain would be levelled to the dense, muddy water in which it was rooted. A peasant woman wearing baggy black trousers, the legs rolled up to her knees to display her muscled calves, was taking no chances. She was approaching along the path, a bamboo pole over her left shoulder with an overloaded basket of cabbages and assorted greens hanging from each end. The old man stepped on to a paddy wall to give her passage and they muttered incoherently together as they reached each other. To let her by, Sandingham stood aside upon a stone balanced over an irrigation channel.
The rain began. At first it was a meagre drizzle but this cleared, to be followed shortly afterwards by large drops that were warm and heavy and hit the top of his cropped head with a firmness that was so definite he could count the impacts until they grew too numerous. It was then he knew he would have to find shelter.
Ahead were a few houses, but they lacked awnings. The windowless front walls were punctuated only by single doors, beside each of which, pasted to the stone doorposts, hung red paper scrolls bearing prayers in black characters, faded by the sun. The eves were typically shallow, and water cascaded from them – for there was no guttering – pitting the soil beneath.
Just before the houses was a ruined fort. Sandingham made for that.
He pushed the overhang of branches aside and sat down in the doorway of a collapsed room. While the rain fell he chewed upon the cane and listened to the water’s clamour on the leaves. When it ceased, he stood and went up the crumbling steps to the battlement. Several rusting cannons poked their snouts over the low balustrade and into the top foliage of the trees. He sat upon one of them. From there, he had a good view over the fields towards Ma Wan Chung, a panorama that had been studied previously by Chinese soldiers serving in the Opium Wars of the early nineteenth century and, before that, Portuguese soldiers trying to prevent the scourge of pirate junks from raiding the fertile valley.
He spoke out loud to no one. The wind whipped the words away. He tried to remember who had said it to him, and when.
‘History is now. War is all the time. There is always a fight going on somewhere. It’s all a part of human activity. Common as buying and selling.’
Beyond the fort the path skirted a wooded slope before crossing another expanse of flat fields prior to rising up the first foothill. He adjusted the army pack on his back, altering the brass buckles so that they did not bite into his shoulders or chafe his collar-bone. The knapsack was not a left-over from the war years, a relic treasured for its associations with memory. He wished it were: he could have done with it then. In fact it had been stolen from a soldier in transit through the hotel.
The ascent was gradual as far as the temple but, shortly after that, it increased sharply. The path narrowed as it wound through a belt of pine trees, then ran up a valley beside a gushing, splattering brook. The rain-swollen torrent, plunging down from the upper slopes of the mountain, was undermining the roots of the saplings by the path and, from place to place, was gouging out the pathway itself.
After an hour’s climb, he reached the first gate to the Buddhist nunnery. Here he paused and sat upon a rock, looking back over the route he had just taken. The drizzle had set in below him, and he could only see as far as the start of the valley.
With the wind tossing the trees, he set off once more, the path following the contours of the bleak sides of Lantau Peak. Short grass clung to the steep slope and he had to brace himself against the wind which tugged at him with no motive beyond a primitive desire to point out his human weakness to him.
As soon as he had reached the gap below the summit he paused once more. He sat down under a ceremonial archway, mist swirling around him and drops of dew collecting on his clothing. He was hot from the climb but not uncomfortably so.
Through the gap was a plateau and the mist lifted sufficiently for him to see the neatly planned fields of the monastery. Ten minutes later he was within the precinct and standing by a door. He banged with the palm of his hand upon the wooden panelling.
The wind was flinging grit up from the forecourt to the temple. It rattled upon his shoes. By and by, the door was opened by a shaven-headed monk in a dark h
abit.
‘Tso shan,’ Sandingham said, although he knew by now it was mid-afternoon. ‘Seung tso fong. Saam yat.’
The monk beckoned for him to enter, and closed the door against the weather.
‘Okay’, he replied. ‘Three night okay. Welcome to Po Lin Buddhis’ Monastery. Follow me. I show you to our gues’ dormitory.’
The monk’s English pronunciation was better than most Chinese could manage, and Sandingham felt he had lost face in speaking in pidgin Cantonese to him. He also knew that he need not worry. Face did not concern the inmates of Po Lin.
The two men passed through a bare room containing only a table and several chairs, pausing for Sandingham to write his name and address – he non-commitally wrote ‘Waterloo Road, Kowloon’ – in a visitors’ book. It had all the formality of a hotel. The monk watched over his shoulder as he wrote.
They left through a rear door and went down a narrow alleyway towards a two-storey, stone building. The monk pushed at the door with his hand. It stuck, then swung open suddenly, helped by the wind funnelling along the passage. Sandingham was ushered inside.
It was dark in the building but he could see a long table with forms to either side running down the centre of the room that constituted the entire ground floor. At the far end, by the only window, there was an open wooden staircase with no railing.
‘M koi – thank you.’
The monk told him what time the evening meal was and then asked, ‘You wan’ to eat here or wi’ monks?’
It would be easier for him to eat with the community. He was certain that he was the only guest, and to dine alone would seem churlish. He replied that he would eat with the monks.
‘T’ank you,’ said the monk and turned away, only to stop on the way to the door. ‘You been to Po Lin before?’
‘Yes. Last year.’
‘Tha’ righ’. I remember you.’ He paused. ‘You wan’ see abbot again?’
‘Yes,’ replied Sandingham, not a little surprised that the man should recall him.
‘Okay. Can do.’