The Rice Paper Diaries

by Francesca Rhydderch

  Seems someone must have been feeling generous today, though, as lunch is a cause for excitement: tinned tomatoes. We give the lion’s share to the children: one whole tomato each. They beam as they suck on the sour juice, crunching the seeds. My stomach is rumbling, bubbling emptily.

  ‘Stop!’ I say to one boy, holding a hand up.

  His mother looks annoyed.

  ‘Spit the seeds out.’ I hold out my tin can, and the boy gobs them into it along with a mouthful of saliva. I get the other youngsters to do the same. In the end I have maybe thirty or forty unspoiled seeds. I go to Campbell and hold out the can for his inspection.

  ‘We need to start a vegetable garden,’ I say.

  19th February

  The Nips have to be handled carefully, says Campbell. We can’t just go making demands and expecting them to be satisfied without quibbling. We have to take things slowly.

  In the meantime my precious seeds will grow mould if I don’t get them in the ground soon. I smuggle bricks and earth up to the roof of our quarters, handful by handful. I build a raised bed, fill it with soil. I make shallow indentations in the earth with my thumb at regular intervals, press a seed into each one, and cover it over. I water them twice a day. I wait. I don’t hold out much hope. The soil here is poor, rocky, more or less infertile; you can tell just from looking at the bare outcrops of eroded rocks scattered over the edges of the camp. Not much grows here, apart from a few trees. And the flowers. There are bulb orchids in bloom already, pushing out purple buds, hibiscus too, and it looks as if there will be camellias and rhododendrons on the way soon, if all those glossy-leaved bushes fulfil their promise. If we were allowed to pick flowers someone would have had a go at making soup from them by now. It would be worth a try. Anything’s worth a try.

  Lizzie Vernon is head of the canteen committee. She keeps a record of each meal we’re provided with, by portion and food group. The rice comes in sacks, uncooked. Once we’ve been through it and picked out the live weevils, cigarettes butts and other rubbish, it weighs about a quarter less than it did when it arrived on the ration truck. Yesterday there was a dead rat in there. I didn’t tell Elsa. Last week there was meat of a kind we’ve never eaten before – water buffalo, for God’s sake – all gristle and bone and not much flesh. Fish is delivered frozen, but is decayed all the same by the time we unload it.

  It’s an hour and twenty-five minutes since morning congee. Three hours and thirty-five minutes to go until lunch. The last sixty minutes are the worst. By then my hunger will have subsided to a grinding ache that threatens to scrape out my insides. I know that much already.

  From up here I can see the children doing their lessons in the open air, sitting in cross-legged rows. An education committee has been set up, all plain-faced, do-gooding women of the type I could do without, but at least the children are being kept occupied. Some of them scratch their heads from time to time. Lice. We’ll have to shave their hair right back. Get hold of disinfectant from somewhere. Elsa says there’s nothing at the hospital yet, apart from a bit of quinine, but Mimi’s heard on the grapevine that the Red Cross will get a few parcels through before long.

  1st March

  Mari’s birthday. St David’s Day. The pine trees are starting to shed their needles. I make a rough composting box from bamboo canes and odd bits of board and start to heap all the greenery together to make leaf mould. It will take a while to rot down into half-decent mulch, but it will improve the soil, if nothing else. Campbell says that talking to people about planting seeds that will take months to come to anything is just going to depress them when we are all going round camp in-between meals chewing grass because we are so hungry. ‘Not everyone’s chewing grass,’ I say to him. There’s a black market on the go, and people who came in here with a stash of money are able to buy cigarettes and even boiled sweets. Lord knows where they come from. All I know is that we don’t have the cash and Mari’s milk has run out again. Elsa and Lizzie Vernon have tried crushing soya beans to make a substitute, but their experiments haven’t been too successful so far. Elsa says she just needs a bit of practice, but Mari is pale and she cries. She should be crawling around the place by now, but she seems to sense that she needs to conserve her energy, and she spends most of the day sitting still on a blanket close to wherever Elsa is working. ‘Don’t worry,’ the other women shout over to Elsa if she gets called away on an errand. ‘We’ll keep an eye on her.’ But the truth is that nobody needs to keep an eye on Mari because she’s still sitting in exactly the same place when Elsa gets back.

  Mari was born a year ago today. Elsa makes a spice cake out of ground rice flour. It tastes worse than bad, but we eat it because we are hungry and it is an extra ration, allowed by the canteen committee in honour of Mari’s birthday.

  20th April

  The camp is being run by a couple of jokers – on the Jap side of things, I mean. Kobayashi was the barber at the Hong Kong Hotel before the war. He was there for donkey’s years, according to Campbell, even gave Campbell a wet shave once. The other one, Fujimoto, worked as a tailor’s assistant in Wan Chai for five years. That’s how far ahead of us they were. Makes me sick to the gullet to think about it.

  Fujimoto has ditched his general’s uniform for linen suits, striped in pale colours and double-breasted, too big for him all over. He oils his hair back from his face, which is thin and long as a weasel’s, with the same thin-lipped grin. Kob is more difficult to get the measure of. There’s something boyish about him. He holds his sunhat across his stomach as if it were a football, and he wears short trousers and socks rolled down to the knee. They look quite ridiculous together, trotting around the camp. Mimi and I sometimes bump into them when we are doing our rounds, and we ignore each other.

  But today they are making a beeline for me. They’ve taken to keeping dogs; long lean wolfhounds with heads too big for their bodies. They let them run ahead, off the lead and laugh when they see groups of children scrambling out of the way, frightened. Those two are a pair of sadistic bastards, even under their sheep’s clothing.

  I am chopping logs out in the exercise yard. We get given a catty – about a pound and a half – of firewood a day, and although the weather’s getting pretty warm, we still need to keep the fires going to cook food and boil water.

  ‘Bridge,’ Fuji says to me. Kob refuses to speak English. Seems he decided to dump his enemies’ language as soon as he was no longer required to hand out a short back and sides with a smile, and accept paltry tips from rich white men.

  I wonder what the hell they’re talking about. I’m buggered if I’m going to call him Sir, so I just stand there with the head of the axe resting at my feet, looking down. If you don’t do that you get a clip to the back of the head.

  One of the dogs sniffs at the tip of the axe and whines. Fuji strokes its glossy fur.

  ‘We want to play bridge, and we want you and your wife and Dr Campbell to join us,’ he says.

  I cough.

  ‘That would make a five and not a four,’ I say, wondering if I can bluff my way through this one. I never did bridge or whist in Hong Kong – I left all that to Elsa, although she complained that bridge was for fat old women and that she was only going along with it to please me. She used to make me laugh when she said that kind of thing.

  Fuji tells me to bring Elsa and Campbell with me to their headquarters at 7.00 pm. I go and find Campbell, expecting him to say that this is it, our chance to make a stand, show the bastards who’s boss.

  ‘But they are the ones who are in charge,’ he says to me.

  ‘Not if we take to our arms and bloody well fight,’ I say. ‘There are three thousand of us.’

  He shakes his head. He looks far too relaxed, as if he’s in a holiday camp, for God’s sake.

  ‘What arms? It’s over, Tom,’ he says, friendly enough.

  ‘So what are we here for?’ I counter. I’m determined to

  have a fight with someone. If not with him, then one of the generals. />
  ‘We’re here because they’ve got no idea what to do with us. Civilians. The worst kind of prisoner.’

  ‘So we just do nothing?’

  Elsa comes out of the kitchens. The door doubles back on its hinges and bangs against the wall. She comes straight at me, puts a hand on my arm. I feel a mixture of desire and rage as I pull away from her.

  ‘Tommy.’ She sounds embarrassed.

  ‘Look, Tom,’ Campbell says in that annoyingly easy tone of his. ‘All we can count on until we hear otherwise is ourselves.’

  If Mimi had been with me she’d have given them a bollocking. She wouldn’t have put up with this either.

  The superintendent’s house has a plain but impressively large porchway, and a verandah running right around the building on the first floor, with the roof jutting out above. As we walk up the drive, someone inside switches the lights on. For a moment, it’s like going to any party, anywhere, on a bad night when everything’s already gone wrong; trying to muster up the energy to socialise, to laugh at jokes that aren’t funny, and smile at people you don’t like.

  The house has either been left untouched by the fighting, or they’ve done a better job than us at clearing up. We are taken into a large room with a view over Tweed Bay, and a parquet floor. There is a table set out for us in the middle of the room, with five rattan chairs around it. A lamp hangs low over the table, throwing out an oblong of light. I haven’t seen an electric bulb for a while. It makes me blink.

  Fuji gestures at me to sit with him and Kob.

  ‘General Kobayashi will observe us this evening,’ he says. ‘You can teach him by playing in a pair with me.’

  ‘How much do you know of the game already?’ I ask, hoping that it’s less than I do. If so, I’ll be free to make things up as I go along, and send them back to Tokyo with some cock-and-bull version, and no one need know any different.

  ‘Some,’ he says, running a hand through his hair.

  I can see that Elsa is scared stiff. She shuffles the cards face down, staring down at their red-and-white chevrons, and deals two hands, one for Fuji and me, the other for her and Campbell. Kob sits just behind me, looking over my shoulder.

  Elsa considers her hand, points something out to Campbell silently, but he shows little interest. This isn’t his kind of thing at all. He seems quieter than usual, quite thoughtful. His big ears stick out at the sides of his face like door handles and his ginger hair is growing down over his ears. We are all starting to look uncared for, even Elsa. Her hair is straggled and dirty.

  She spreads out a vertical column of cards on the table.

  ‘Diamonds,’ she says.

  Fuji inclines his head towards me, as if this is a serious business and he trusts me to give him the information he needs. I whisper some bullshit about bids and contracts and tell him we should pass. He follows my instructions to the letter. We win. I suspect Elsa is also adapting her game to the current circumstances, to make sure we arrive at the required result.

  ‘Milk,’ she says, spreading out her final hand. Her fingers are trembling. ‘I need powdered milk for my little girl.’

  I see Campbell looking at her, and wonder what he’ll say afterwards.

  Fuji grins, showing his perfect teeth and the tip of his thick, pink tongue. He turns back towards the sideboard to get a pack of cigarettes.

  ‘Of course,’ he says, flipping back the top of his lighter. ‘May I offer you a drink?’ A servant comes out of the shadows in the corner of the room and serves us whisky on the rocks. His soft-soled shoes make a slapping sound on the floor as he moves round the table. There’s a wireless on the sideboard behind him, with pillar-like strips at each side, the white circle of its tuner like a compass in the middle, and two black dials below. It would be so easy to lean over, flick the switch.

  The whisky hits the back of my tongue like a fireball.

  I clear my throat.

  ‘I was wondering what you plan to do with the old tennis courts,’ I ask.

  Fuji and Kob look at each other. Fuji has drunk his whisky too quickly and has reverted to the same position he’s been sitting in most of the night, his cards in one hand and the other folded into his arm. He looks like an old woman knitting.

  ‘Nothing,’ Kob says, his eyes thinner than his lips. Seems he remembers his English when he really needs to.

  ‘I was wondering if we could turn it into a garden. Grow vegetables and the like.’

  Campbell is looking at me. I can tell how nervous he is, that he regrets not having the guts to come out with this himself.

  No one says anything. The room seems too bright: the electric lights, the new wireless on the sideboard.

  Finally Fuji says, ‘Yes. Do what you can with it.’

  They offer us another whisky and we all accept. Even Campbell is more animated than I’ve ever seen him as we walk back to our quarters.

  ‘Well done, my man,’ he keeps saying. ‘Great stuff.’

  Elsa laughs intermittently, the way she used to at parties. As I walk ahead of her and Campbell I feel like the tallest person in the camp and I start to sing ‘Bread of Heaven’. Elsa groans and apologises to Campbell, her voice affectionate – ‘He likes a song when he’s drunk.’ One of the guards lets a shot out of a gun across the fence that they are watching night and day to stop Chinese black marketeers selling us fags and sugar. I stop singing.

  28th June

  I turn to at six most mornings. The sun rises furiously in the sky, grabbing the day by its throat. The camp is silent as I walk through the quarters over to the tennis courts. I work without thinking, turning clods of earth with a two-pronged fork which has to do the job for now, and by the time the whistle is blown for congee I realise that two hours have passed.

  Campbell says I’m to have top-up rations, as will anyone else who commits to working at least five hours a day with me. The promise of extra food is enough. Soon there’s a group of men with me in the mornings, walking over the rise from the Indian quarters.

  We plant anything we can get our hands on. If our rations include fresh tomatoes, or melons – which are a rarity – the flesh is often puckered and spoiled, bleeding juice, but the women who work in the kitchens cut out the seeds and pass them on to us. People with friends in Hong Kong get them to send bulbs in their relief parcels. Although they are confiscated on arrival more often than not, the occasional packet gets through.

  Before long there are rows of green seedlings emerging out of the earth, and runner beans climbing up bamboo poles. Once I’ve made a start, there’s no stopping me. We have a go at corn, eggplant and beet spinach. The tomatoes are doing well. My rooftop plants have started to take, and I transfer them to the larger plot. It’s too early to put root vegetables in, but I’ll put carrot tops straight into the earth when the time comes, and I may even give paak tsoi and peanuts a try.

  ‘We could end up being completely self-sufficient at this rate. No more kowtowing to the Japs,’ I say to Elsa.

  She’s sitting next to me above the Indian warders’ quarters, cutting down a pair of my trousers to make them into shorts. Three sewing machines survived the fighting, and the women pass them round the camp as and when they need them. Needle and thread are coming through from the Red Cross, although not as much as they would like. The kids are constantly growing out of their clothes, despite the poor rations, and anyway a lot of the mothers seem to enjoy sewing for the sake of it, just to pass the time. They’d make clothes out of anything. A young woman walked past me yesterday wearing a sun top put together from flour sacks, embroidered with pink flowers around the edges where the sacking met the pale white mound of her breasts. She was carrying a bag of rice from the ration distribution garage over to the kitchens, leaning forward to take the weight of it on her back. One of the corners of the bag had split and the rice poured out like water from a leaking tap. A group of children ran after her and fell upon it avidly, stuffing it into their mouths, and pushing each other away. They swallowed it so fas
t it made some of them choke, so that in the end they had to use their fists to tap each other on the back, and watch half-chewed, off-white kernels spray their way through the air and land in the dirt at their feet. The girl carried on walking, taking no notice, her firm buttocks sticking out of her tight shorts like ripe greengages.

  ‘Come for a walk with me, cariad,’ I say to Elsa, putting a hand over hers, feeling the needle catch against my skin.

  ‘I can’t,’ she says.

  ‘Why not?’

  ‘What about Mari? I can’t just leave her.’

  ‘She’s fast asleep, isn’t she?’

  ‘Yes, I know, but she’s got this cough.’

  ‘What cough?’ I sit up.

  ‘It’s all right,’ Elsa says. ‘The duty doctor said it was a slight chest infection, and Oscar Campbell’s signed a chitty for her to be given a multivitamin tablet every day. But she gets this tickle in her throat, and she’s been waking up at night, needing water.’

  The sun is setting over Tweed Bay, and the heat is starting to drain out of the day. In the distance two figures wearing pointed hats are carrying nets slung over their shoulders towards one of the boats in the shallows. They bend over as they work. The nets look like sails folded up on themselves. One of the men has his trousers rolled up. The other one is wearing wellingtons. The one in wellingtons starts to disentangle a bundle of rope in the boat. They both get in, gingerly, as if they are getting on a bit, although it is hard to see from here with the sun behind them. One of them sits in the stern of the boat, still unsnarling the rope that runs from one hand to the other in knots, while the other one stands up and starts to push the boat out to deeper water with an oar.

  ‘You should have told me,’ I say. ‘Straightaway, so I could have done something.’

  ‘You’re always so busy with that garden,’ says Elsa.

  ‘What do you mean, that garden, as if it’s got nothing to do with you?’