by Martin Booth
Sandingham up-ended the leaflet. It was a single sheet of paper printed on both sides, the front in English and the verso in Japanese. Others gathered to hear him read it.
“To all Allied Prisoners-of-War,”’ he started. ‘“The Japanese forces have surrendered unconditionally and the war is over.”’
‘Well, I’ll be damned! exclaimed Pete Krasky, known as ‘Rancho’, for he hailed from San Antonio. ‘It’s finally finished.’
No one else said a word.
‘“We will get supplies to you as soon as is humanly possible,”’ Sandingham continued, ‘“and will make arrangements to get you out but, owing to the distances involved, it may be some time before we can achieve this.
‘“You will help us and yourselves if you act as follows…”’
The senior officer now stood by Sandingham’s side. In deference to him, Sandingham stopped reading and offered him the leaflet.
‘Carry on, Joe,’ the officer commanded, adding, ‘and the rest of you pay particular attention.’
‘“One: stay in your camp until you get further orders from us. Two: start preparing nominal rolls of personnel, giving fullest particulars. Three: list your most urgent necessities. Four: if you have been starved or underfed for long periods do not eat large quantities of solid food, fruit or vegetables at first. It is dangerous for you to do so. Small quantities at frequent intervals are much safer and will strengthen you far more quickly. For those who are really ill or very weak, fluids such as broth and soup, making use of the water in which rice and other foods have been boiled, are much the best. Gifts of food from the local population should be cooked. We want to get you back home quickly, safe and sound, and we do not want to risk your chances from diarrhoea, dysentery and cholera in this last stage. Five: local authorities and/or Allied officers will take charge of your affairs in a very short time. Be guided by their advice.”’
‘Not much trouble obeying that,’ ‘Harris’ Tweed stated. ‘We all stay on watery soup, eat as much as we have been and avoid fruit and veg. No problem.’
There was a general chuckle. Sandingham, raising his eyes, noticed another bunch of men over the far side of the parade-ground huddled around another reader.
‘It has a translation of the Japanese on the back,’ he went on. ‘It reads, “In accordance with the terms of the surrender of all Japanese forces signed by His Majesty the Emperor the war has now come to an end. These leaflets contain our instructions to Allied prisoners-of-war and internees whom we have told to remain quiet where they are. Japanese guards are to ensure that the prisoners get these leaflets and that they are treated with every care and attention. Guards should then withdraw to their own quarters.”’
‘Remain where I am, I will,’ CPO Rye said. ‘But quiet?’
He coughed and started singing ‘Rule Brittania’ and even the Americans joined in. The senior officer, in the meantime, with the barrack leaders and the hanchos, marched off to confront the commandant with the leaflet.
Sandingham folded his copy and put it in the pocket of Mishima’s jacket. It was then he saw Mick Harwood, tears streaming from his emotionless, unseeing eyes: Sandingham realised that he, too, was crying, but was not quite sure why.
* * *
The long table was laid with bowls, chopsticks and, by every fourth place setting, a tiny china pot of matchwood toothpicks. By every bowl was a sake cup and a flat dish. At intervals down the centre of the table were nests of condiments.
‘Attention!’
The sergeant-major by the door squawked rather than barked his words. He had suffered from diphtheria and it had affected his voice box.
They stood in their places, their folding chairs scraping on the wooden planks of the floor that had been scrubbed by some of them over and over in the past years. A few, Sandingham amongst them, felt mildly guilty stepping on to the floor with their tabis or boots on.
The commandant entered. He was wearing his formal officer’s uniform. His collars bore red patches and on his sleeves were gold stripes and five-pointed stars. Across his chest and around his waist were the regulation cross-strap and belt. By his side was his sword. His deputy accompanied him.
He went to the seat at the head of the table and stood erect behind it; then, to the consternation of the silent prisoners, he bowed low to them, undid the leather hanging strap of his sword scabbard and handed the weapon horizontally to the prisoners’ senior officer.
‘Senso wa owatta,’ he said, his shrill voice now muted but strident at the same time.
Half a dozen of their former warders then served a meal consisting of a thin fish soup, a raw fish dish, tough steak – each prisoner being served the equivalent of at least a previous month’s meat ration for the whole camp, if not more – and sake rice wine. Several toasts were made but Sandingham, as he took to his feet for them, did not hear the toasts and offered his thoughts not to ‘King and Country’ or ‘The President’ but to Bob, to Garry and to Mishima.
When the dinner was over, they returned to their barracks and fell asleep pondering on their futures.
* * *
‘Dog-shit,’ said Daphne, a brawny merchant seaman stoker. ‘Definitely Dog-shit.’
‘What about Snuffles? He was the…’
‘Ssshhh!’
They were silent.
Sandingham cleared his throat to announce his arrival from the ablutions.
‘Okay. ’s Joe.’
‘What about Mickey Mouse?’
‘I say Dog-shit.’
‘I have to agree with that.’
He lay back on his tatame and sniffed at his hand: the soap had been soft and its perfume was almost as tangible. He could not remember when he’d last used scented soap. Perhaps it had been his mother’s, he thought, or Bob’s. He had been issued with it from the supply of Red Cross parcels the commandant had been holding ‘in reserve’, as he meekly put it.
‘Dog-shit it is then.’
‘When?’
There was a pause.
‘Well, I must say there’s no time like the present.’
‘What are you talking about?’ Sandingham asked.
‘Dog-shit,’ replied Daphne from the dark. ‘We’re going to even an old score.’
‘Don’t you think there’s been enough of that?’ he answered.
‘On a national scale, maybe, but we’re thinking a bit more personally.’
‘Want to join in, Joe?’
‘No. I don’t think so.’
‘Suit yourself. But don’t think for a sec that all Nippos are nice like that mate of yours in the timber shed. He was a rare un’ – most of them are just little yellow pigs. Human runts.’
‘And we’re going to get the bacon.’
They left the barrack on tiptoes, letting themselves out into the warm night that would be the last in which Heicho Dog-shit would puff on his cigarette under the guard tower.
Holding his breath down low, Sandingham listened to the blackness, trying to pick out the sounds of death in the insect hubbub. He heard it, that rapid scuffling of feet and the thud of the length of waterpipe followed by the hurried plugs of kicking feet meeting flesh. By morning, Dog-shit’s weighted body was being nibbled by fish under the reeds in the stream half a mile to the west.
‘Nothing like a job well done,’ commented Daphne as he wriggled under his thin bed quilt. ‘Nothing like a bit of the old one-two.’
Soon he was snoring.
* * *
Over the next ten days three air drops were made to the camp. The first consisted of twenty canisters of supplies that swung to earth under cream silk parachutes. The prisoners were inundated with simple luxuries the like of which they had not seen since well before their capture. Tins of beef stew, fruit cocktail, butter and jam, sardines, fresh apples, magazines, cigarettes and even cigars fell like manna. The second drop, the following day, was made up of clothing, an assortment of civilian clothing and military articles, mostly of American origin. The last delivery was me
dical.
The prisoners were kept occupied making lists. Armies love lists and at first the prisoners duly pandered to this weakness, eagerly writing a host of lists but soon tiring of the exercise. When they grew bored they started to retreat into their private thoughts and memories. For some, the cessation of war removed their reason to fight for a hold on life and, in those last weeks, they wilted and died. In contrast, many of those who were terribly ill fought on. The arrival of saline drips, quinine, iron and vitamin pills, iodine, sulphur, procaine, Mercurochrome, gentian violet, swabs, surgical instruments and sterilised bandages were weapons in their solitary battles, and they recovered slowly but surely.
The sadness of the deaths of some of the inmates was compounded by the crash and killing of the aircrew of the plane that dropped the medical supplies. The pilot had misjudged his approach, and although he dropped his chutes on target in the paddyfields east of the camp he failed to pull out of his run in time. The aircraft hit the hill a mile inland from the perimeter fence, exploding on impact. A search-and-rescue party of prisoners, with four guards, set off for the crash site immediately, but when they arrived there was nothing they could do except offer prayers and rummage through the smouldering wreckage for dog-tags and identity bracelets.
That evening, as they left after their evening meal of mushroom soup, Irish stew and tinned cheese, the prisoners were greeted by a querulous wailing from one of the barracks.
‘Who in God’s name is that?’
‘You mean “what”. Sounds like a badger mating.’
Joking about the shindig, Sandingham and several others went to investigate.
In the barrack hut, at the end by the hibachi, was a naval rating called Giles Gilly. His nickname was ‘Wrong Hole’, derived from a dirty tale about a Bombay tart who shouted ‘Gilly, gilly’ to any cherry boy who missed his mark.
‘What’s up, WH? Got the trots?’
He was alternately hugging and punching his belly.
‘Have a good fart and shut up.’
‘But have it outside. You’ll upset the bordello pong of Joe’s soap.’
Wrong Hole made no retort to this crudery. Instead, he stopped wailing and started chattering like an ape, shivering until his teeth clicked hard enough to chip.
‘Pack it in. You’ll have the Old Man in here.’
‘Jesus Christ!’ shouted Sandingham. He had gone past Wrong Hole to the sailor’s bunk. ‘Get the MO!’
‘What?’ Disbelief and confusion hung in the question.
‘Get the fucking MO. Fast as you can.’
From under the slats of the bunk Sandingham tugged the gyroscopic flight compass from the crashed plane. The pressure glass cover over the dial was unscrewed, the brass ring shining on the floor.
Wrong Hole set off his banshee wailing again. He rubbed his eyes hard until his fists were slick with tears and blood.
The camp doctor rushed in.
‘What’s up?’
‘Wrong Hole, sir,’ Sandingham reported. ‘He’s drunk the methyl alcohol in this.’ He held up the compass.
Wrong Hole went into a spasm like an epileptic. He thrashed his limbs about and bit the leg of the table, clamping his jaws on it like a rabid dog. He died blind and mad, strapped tight like a lunatic, at dawn.
* * *
It was more a rural halt than a station, with a single shack of a building at a point where the track divided into two: there was no formal platform, just a smooth patch of dusty gravel by the rails. A fence held at bay a marauding bank of late summer weeds and the single signal gantry stuck up from the centre of the bank like an alien tree. The wires that controlled the signal arm passed in runners along the side of the track: alighting passengers had to beware of stepping upon them.
Sandingham leaned against the fence. The wood was hot and he turned his back on the other prisoners who formed the first draft to be expatriated. In the weeds, crickets sawed. A yellow butterfly jerked its wings up and down in a lazy flight as it dipped from one small blossom to the next. It did not perch long at any of them: the nectarial harvest had been robbed by the bees.
His mind was empty, but his emotions were in conflict. For three and a half years he had had but one aim in life – to be free. Not only of the camp, but of the Japanese military, the sickness and the continual presence of the dark angel, the incubus of death that waited to suck at any one of them at any time. He looked down at the well-polished boots which pinched, at the khaki trousers that rubbed at his crotch, at the white, laundered shirt that was crisp with starch and chafed his neck, and wondered if he would ever get used to wearing real clothes again.
Now he was free, liberated by an American lieutenant and his three sidekick GIs who had arrived in a jeep and distributed cigarettes, news and packets of Wrigley’s spearmint chewing gum. The night before their liberation he had slept uneasily. His dreams were crammed with images of the years: of the beatings and Mishima’s photo, of Garry’s mad run and the hibachi glowing in the barrack, of the lousy food and the lousy clothes and the lousy tatami. Over all of these hung the mushroom-shaped cloud and the row of men in the bushes. He had twitched in his sleep and bruised his ankle against the wall.
It was only as they had formed ranks to march to the station that Sandingham had realised at last that he was leaving. A great sadness had come over him which he could neither control nor explain. He had looked back at the foul latrines, the kitchen block, the parade ground; had stared lastly at his own barrack; and his mouth had seized up and gone dry, and the lump in his throat had hardened into a stone of pity and sorrow for all those who had not made it. And he thought of those graves which were, even as he marched out of the gate, being exhumed for shipment home to the UK, or the USA, or Holland or some other benighted corner of the world where relatives would weep for an hour at a fresh graveside before continuing with their peace.
The barrack: his own corner of it had been home. He had lived there for – he tried to count the months, but his misery wiped time out. He steered the tears off his cheeks with a forefinger.
The train steamed in to the halt. It had five passenger carriages behind a coal tender. They lined up at the doors and heaved themselves into the compartments, eager as schoolboys to get a window seat. Once aboard, Sandingham stood by the door and closed it. The window was open and he leaned on the metal sill, looking down the way the train had come, from Hiroshima. He could not see their camp.
A toot on the train steam whistle heralded the judder of the couplings taking up the strain; then, with the locomotive pouting smoke, they slowly set off.
Beyond the signal, where the railway was crossed by a lane, a small group of local peasants had collected. Upon their shoulders they carried mattocks or hand scythes and their cart was piled with straw. They watched the train approach and Sandingham, in turn, watched them come nearer. As the train drew alongside the crossing some of the peasants bowed. Others just stood, silent and immovable spectators watching the procession of history pass them on a single-line railway track. A dog gambolled along the shingle, snapping at the wheels.
* * *
The docks were packed and bustling. Sandingham, having been ‘processed’, joined a contingent of other British prisoners from camps all over Japan. He befriended, in the transient manner that one strikes an acquaintance with fellow travellers, a soldier with a trim, pointed beard who was known to his comrades as ‘Yagi’. It was a nickname Sandingham laughed at: yagi was Japanese for a goat.
Once aboard the ship they were shown to their berths and left to organise themselves until the vessel sailed. There was little to organise. Sandingham’s worldly possessions were contained in a newly-issued cardboard box tied round with stout twine. He had nothing of real value, even to him, except the photo of Bob and the jacket that had been Mishima’s. Other knick-knacks they all saved or hoarded were the stuff of souvenirs: gift material for sons or nephews.
He pushed the box under the shelf in the closet and lay on his top bunk. Beside hi
s head was the cabin porthole. He spun the retaining clasps and opened the heavy glass disc, clipping it back against the storm plate. He thrust his head out, to discover that he was near the stern.
Amidships, the prisoners were still coming up the gangway: those too sick to make it were being helped in through a door level with the quay. The activity in the dock buildings hummed and resonated against the galvanised metal walls.
On the dock below him, between his ship and the one lying alongside aft of her, was a corral in which was massed a throng of silent Japanese. Not one of them was under thirty-five; women predominated.
‘What are you watching?’ asked Yagi in his musical Welsh accent.
Sandingham had forgotten how beautiful a South Wales voice could be.
‘I’m sorry?’
‘What are you looking at?’
‘Nothing much. The warehouses, the docks, a crowd of Japs.’
‘Poor blighters!’
‘Why?’
‘They’re waiting there for the remains of their dead. Shipped back from all over the Pacific.’
* * *
Duty rotas were established as soon as the ship was at sea. They were light, for many of the prisoners were too weak to undertake heavy work. Sandingham was assigned to the galley to make buttered toast every breakfast. He also accepted the task of brewing up mid-morning coffee and heating the doughnuts that were issued with the mugs.
He spent his afternoons lying in his bunk reading or lounging about on the deck with a detective novel: another luxury he had forgotten. The sun tanned him and he dozed off from time to time, only to wake ten minutes later with a guilty conscience, feeling that he wasn’t doing his chores and would consequently be beaten for his idleness. Then he would see the sky and the smoke pluming from the funnel and a warm contentment would seep into him again.
One morning, the chief cook asked him to fetch more ham. The toast was made and he was about to leave.
‘Where do I get it?’
‘C’mpanyon way fo-er,’ the Texan told him. ‘Fridges ’e’en.’