We spent the next two weeks there in Fanling. After the burials, I did not go out again. Although the overwhelming bulk of the Japanese soldiers were involved with the occupation of Kowloon and the battle for Hong Kong Island, a smattering of troops was stationed near the village. They were dividing their energies between shooting looters and doing looting of their own. Even more dangerously, there were Chinese fifth columnists who would report my presence to the Japanese. Their presence was part of what had made the Japanese attack so effective. Now that the Japanese were so obviously winning, the fifth columnists were more and more confident. The risk was that if they found me they would kill me out of hand.
Maria went out for supplies every day. Sometimes she went as far as one of the fishing villages. I waited for her return in the most acute anxiety I have ever known, imagining her being found by a patrol of soldiers and questioned, or beaten, or raped, or shot, or betrayed by a villager, or followed back to our hiding place. One of my fears was that she would be recognised and asked for some favour which she felt she could not refuse and which would lead to her exposure. I could imagine that very easily. But none of these things happened. She always came back, always with some food. We cooked it over a tiny wood-burning stove we found in one of the school outbuildings. I would feel, when I heard her approach, light-footed and quick-moving in her black trousered mufti, a moment of pure happiness. It was like a gust of wind blowing from some very far-off place. Then I would remember where we were.
Maria wanted me to come with her into China.
‘You cannot go into captivity of your own free will,’ she said. ‘It is immoral. It would be like suicide. You would be throwing away an opportunity given to you by the Lord. You would be defying your own chances of life and freedom.’
‘I don’t have a choice. I promised.’
‘The circumstances are different now.’
‘If I don’t go back, then my coming here to find you was a form of running away. Don’t you see that? If I go back it makes it into that.’
That made her angry. ‘This is metaphysics. It is’ – she made an upwards and outwards gesture with both hands – ‘froth. Freedom is real. China is real. You are exchanging a known good for an unknown evil. That is mad.’
‘I made a promise. You must surely understand that – I gave my word. It’s the only time I’ve ever done anything like this. I was asked if I would do it and I said yes. I’m not doing this for myself, I’m doing it because I was asked to do it for something bigger than me.’
‘Death is bigger than you, and it is that you are choosing.’
I have to admit I felt sick when I heard that. If I had not been so tempted to do what Maria said I wouldn’t have been so disturbed by her attempts to persuade me. I also had a fear, or a secret, that I could scarcely admit to myself: the unknown future in China, on the run in a country I did not know, permanently identifiable to anybody at a glance as a European and therefore always at risk, seemed as frightening as returning to Hong Kong. At least in captivity I would know where I was. I am ashamed to admit that I did what might seem the braver thing partly out of cowardice. Maria and I had this argument at least once a day.
Every time she returned, Maria brought back reports of the fighting. Chinese rumours proved to be much more accurate than their British equivalents. The bamboo telegraph traced the progress of the battle: Kowloon had been evacuated of military personnel. The Japanese had set up their HQ in the Peninsula Hotel. The Japanese were shelling the island. The Japanese had invaded the island across the Lei Mun Channel. The Japanese had fought their way up into the Wong Nei Chong Gap and divided the island in two. And then, on the day it happened, Christmas Day, Maria came back empty-handed and told me that the British had surrendered.
‘You have to choose today. All the British will be put in camps. Anyone they catch outside will be shot. Come to China with me or give yourself up.’
‘I’m sorry, Maria,’ I said. The next day I gave her my grandmother’s gold necklace and made her promise that if she needed to, she would sell it and use the proceeds to escape from China. Then I made a white flag out of a towel and went out to find a Japanese officer. The soldiers subjected me to certain indignities.
Chapter Seven
In addition to his property at 124 Nathan Road, the one Masterson had looked over and decided not to buy, Mr Luk owned a brothel in Wanchai. It was a tenement building which had been a European brothel, switched to being a Chinese brothel when European brothels were made illegal, and then stayed in business when Chinese brothels were banned. The only concession to the appearance of legality was a seamstress’s business installed in the ground-floor shopfront. Prospective customers had to go into the seamstress’s and ask for a Mrs Wong.
After the surrender of Hong Kong, this is where the Japanese put the bankers. If the Japanese occupation forces had gone in for jokes, this might have been one. Most civilians were rounded up and sent to Stanley internment camp; soldiers were sent to the military prison in Sham Shui Po. A few people escaped; a few, such as us bankers and some hospital staff, were made to stay at work. Wilson was right, they needed bankers to run the colony.
The Japanese had taken three days to overrun the Gin-drinkers’ line and fight their way through to Kowloon. At this point they sent a barge with a white flag over to the island to offer terms for unconditional surrender. The offer was refused. They then invaded the island. There was a feeling of inevitability about every stage of the battle. The Japanese advanced to Wong Nei Chong Gap, where the bitterest fighting took place, and split the island’s defences. The Governor, who had arrived in the colony only on 7 December, and General Maltby offered their unconditional surrender on Christmas Day. All the deaths in defence of the island, between the first invitation to surrender and the eventual capitulation, were in vain. They included Falk the Gunner, who died in the fighting for Wong Nei Chong Gap. Potter, the second of the Hong Kong Bank men from the Darjeeling, was a Volunteer; he was killed by an artillery shell in the battle for Stanley. There were a number of atrocities, including the rape of nurses, the bayonetings of doctors, and the killing of wounded soldiers at St Stephen’s hospital on the island. Some people thought an early surrender would have meant that the Japanese would have been in less of a frenzy than they turned out to be. Years later I read of a Dr Li Shu-Fan, who reckoned that he personally treated ten thousand victims of rape.
About ten thousand soldiers died in the fighting. There is no accurate figure for the number of Chinese dead.
*
I had expected the business of passing myself off as a banker would be much harder than it actually was. But the Japanese seemed, apart from a quick glance at the payroll for confirmation, more or less to take my word for it. It was as if winning the battle for Hong Kong was so exclusively the focus of their thinking that they had given no thought to what would happen afterwards. They had a name for it – the Greater East Asia Co-Prosperity Sphere – but no real plan.
As an ironic result, I was extraordinarily busy in my impostor’s role as a banker. Because all the other people spared from captivity were genuinely senior Bank staff I was the only person who could be easily spared for the most mundane tasks. In practice that meant supervising the destruction of the existing currency, double-checking the quantification of the Bank’s liquid assets, and supervising the counting of the new money being issued by the Japanese. This was Greater East Asia Co-Prosperity Sphere currency bearing the name of a bank in Yokohama. It was not intellectually demanding work but it required constant attention and vigilance.
There was no real need to count the destroyed currency, it was merely the Bank’s habitual and, I found, rather engaging belt-and-braces caution. A roomful of Chinese clerks and I, in the airless basement of the Bank building, counted notes and weighed coins all day for weeks. Every day for us bankers was the same: getting up just after dawn – we woke ourselves, rather than let the guards turn us out of bed – a bowl of congee, and then a march in a s
hambolic attempt at formation along the mile from Wanchai to the Bank’s head offices in Queen’s Road. Evidence of the bombardment was everywhere. The city had a half-deserted, half-ruined feeling. The trams weren’t running; hardly anyone was going to work; some shops had been looted. Japanese soldiers were everywhere but they brought no sense of ordered subjugation; the atmosphere of the colony was violent and chaotic. Occasionally a passer-by would jeer, more, one felt to ingratiate himself with our guards than out of real hostility. Most people passed by without looking at us. I was grateful for that. My whole day would then be spent in the Bank’s basement, where I would at some point be given a ladle of rice and sometimes meat with the clerks. Because most of the clerks would get other, albeit meagre, food at home, they often topped up my portion with their own when the guards weren’t looking. At about seven, one of the Taiwanese guards, or, more rarely, one of the Japanese soldiers, would come downstairs and tell us to pack up. We would march to Wanchai in the dark. The days were a mix of fear and uncertainty and routine.
This went on for several months. Then one day the guards stepped back from a cauldron in which a bowl of wet rice soup – a sloppy, loose congee, entirely without any meat or vegetables, the seventh or eighth such meal I had eaten in a row – had been brought down to the basement. It was carried by two coolies, sweating from the heat of the bowl and the exertion. The guards moved ten or fifteen feet away and began smoking looted American cigarettes. As I went up to take my portion one of the coolies looked up at me. He was angry, or so it seemed; people who are frightened often look angry. He had a flat northern-Chinese face and when he spoke he had the twang of a an accent.
‘Night-time go to roof in Wanchai house,’ he said in a tight hiss. The pitch and accent made the words hard to hear and I took a few seconds to work out what he had said. I fought a mad impulse to loudly ask him to repeat his message. I realised I was standing still at the front of the queue, got a grip of myself, and moved away to eat my slop.
*
Is this it? I wondered for the rest of the day. I had no idea what Wilson’s plan might consist of, though I suspected there would be an approach of some kind. I was frightened, but at the same time this was why I had stayed in the colony. Coming halfway around the world to lose a war when we were doing a perfectly good job of losing one back at home was enough of a joke as it was. To spend the whole of the war counting banknotes would have felt like too big a joke even for my mood in 1942.
News about what had happened around the fall was sketchy and enlivened by rumour, but there were stories that some people had escaped into China. So this might well be the first moment of contact with the outside. But it could just as easily be a trap – say, an attempt at pleasing the Japanese by uncovering or inventing a British plot.
‘So what do you think?’ I asked Cooper. I had taken him into my confidence. I was under no illusions about what would happen to me if I was captured – I would be tortured. I was also under no illusions about what I would do if that happened – I would give them names. I thought that I might as well get the benefit of Cooper’s advice, since if tortured I would betray him to the Japanese anyway. I don’t know if he knew what my logic was because we never discussed it.
‘I don’t think you have a choice,’ he said. We were sitting on our beds in the ex-brothel; the Japanese, for reasons of their own, had us sleeping four to a room. His calm, such a surprise to find in a man with such muddle in so much of his personal life, was always helpful – it was a force on which he always seemed able to draw, except when he needed it for himself. Miss Farrington, the girl he had been wasting his time dreaming about, was in Stanley internment camp with her father. Cooper would occasionally wonder out loud about how she was, pretending that his real concern was about her falling in love with some, as he put it, ‘opportunistic toad’ while in the camp. I tried to ease his mind on that score.
‘Yes, all right,’ I said. It was true. It would make no sense to have accepted the risk in theory and then reject it at the first opportunity in practice.
There were two ways up to the roof. Just outside our window a fire escape was not so much attached to the building as hanging off it. It was a rickety structure which looked as if it would only just bear a man’s weight. (Mr Luk had not seemed the type to worry unduly about fire precautions, but as Cooper explained, ‘it’s not there for the girls, it’s there for the customers’ peace of mind’.) The adjacent tenement was only a few feet away across a narrow, warren-like Wanchai alleyway; a very brave, very athletic man might even have risked the jump. There was a smell of rotting things from the alley below. If I went up the fire escape I would have a good chance of not being seen by the guards, though if I were seen, I would have no easily believable story of why my actions were innocent. The other way to the roof was straight up the main stairwell, which circled around an open space, at the bottom of which at least two guards sat, smoking and gossiping. They generally let us move freely among our three floors; the two floors above were empty, and then a half-flight of stairs led to a door, which in turn led straight out onto the roof. The main staircase was in sight of the guards, but for that very reason seemed less furtive. If spotted, I could act ignorant, or as if I were just going for some air.
After looking hard at Cooper and taking a deep breath, I opened the door and walked as slowly and quietly and unhesitatingly as I could up the stairwell. The Japanese, as usual, were talking loudly at their seated posts. It wasn’t apparent whether they’d be able to hear me, though they could see me through the banisters if they looked up. They didn’t. I got to the top and, praying hard, tried the doorknob. It opened easily and noiselessly. Much later – years later, as I thought back – I realised it must have been oiled. To the right of the shed-like door structure a wooden ladder had been laid to the next-door tenement, and standing at the other end of it, presumably ready to kick it away and run if the first person out of the door was Japanese, was the last man I expected to see: Ho-Yan’s brother, Wo Man-Lee.
When he saw me, he flicked the cigarette he’d been smoking out and down into the alley between the tenements. He stepped forward onto the ladder, very gingerly, and then picked his way across, looking forwards but not down. I got the impression there was a question of physical dignity. At the end of the ladder he hopped down and straightened his sleeves. He was dressed in a dark suit and a white shirt with its collar out over his lapels.
‘Wo,’ I said.
‘Mr Stewart.’
‘I did not expect you.’
I thought this was a statement of some interest, but he treated it as mere small talk.
‘I bring messages from Mr Wilson. He says, give me Japanese money to pass to him. He says, tell the others to stand by for more requests. He says you must think about how to get parts for a radio. He says, next time he will send written instructions. It’s not safe this time. You have a message for him?’
I couldn’t think of a thing. I shook my head. ‘Uh … it’s good to hear from him.’
Wo nodded, turned, and tiptoed back across the ladder. Then he pulled it after him and bent to hide it under the parapet. He nodded at me again, more amiably, and went down through a trapdoor. I took a few lungfuls of tainted Wanchai air and went back down the staircase. I could only have been gone from my room for two minutes but felt a decade older. When I sat down on the bed, I saw that I was shaking.
*
It turned out that the other Hong Kong Bank people were ahead of me. They had already been thinking about the question of a radio. Receivers were, obviously, easier to find than transmitters, and two of them were already hidden in people’s desks at Queen’s Road Central; there were transmitters there too, in the locked part of the building near what had been the chief accountant’s office. That was how it began.
The first practical thing I did was hand a bundle of Yokohama banknotes to a clerk who said, or rather hissed, ‘Wo sent me.’ A few days later Mitchell, one of the Bank’s most senior staff, came into my r
oom at the old brothel.
‘We’ve sorted out the radio,’ he said.
That was the first thing we smuggled into Stanley internment camp, via Wo and his associates. The radio transmitter went through in several dozen parts. The great worry was that the Japanese would find one of the parts as we carried it, or the cannibalised radio itself, which was hidden in a false compartment behind a janitor’s cupboard.
I also passed on messages, sometimes written, more usually not, from Wilson and others in the camp, and passed messages back. The main subject was how things were to be smuggled into the camp. The organisation we were working for was the BAAG, British Army Aid Group, which was scattered throughout southern China in areas not effectively controlled by the Japanese. The BAAG looked after escapees and passed news in both directions. I had no overview of what was happening, and by now I knew that I didn’t want one.
Some months later, in early 1943, we were moved from Wanchai to quarters closer to head office. We worked longer hours but the surveillance was less strict. The Japanese had convinced themselves that there was nowhere we could go. We were now guarded by Taiwanese soldiers; they were not as strict or as quick to violence. We could move around more freely inside the Bank building; smuggling became easier. Our new quarters were more comfortable.
‘No normal banker would put up with these hours,’ said Cooper. ‘As soon as the war is over I’m putting in the most phenomenal claim for overtime.’
One day I sat down on my bed and felt something lumpy beside me. I pulled back the blanket, a torn green British army-issue item, and saw two oranges, one of which had been peeled and fanned out into the shape of a flower. This was one of Ah Wang’s tricks. I had no idea how he did it, but from then on, once every ten days or so, I found small gifts of food under or in the bed – packets of pak choi and other Chinese greens, cooked fish wrapped in a lotus leaf, slow-cooked pork. The food was always cold and there was never very much of it, especially after I’d shared it with my roommates, but it felt as if it was keeping me alive. I was both moved and frightened to think of Ah Wang, no one’s idea of a born hero, running these risks on our behalf.
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