The Harbour

by Francesca Brill

  A small orchestra on a platform at the end of the room played ‘The Best Things in Life are Free’. Swathes of red curtain were draped behind them and potted palms perched on either side. The dance floor was packed with couples and the atmosphere was frenetic and loud. Men, mostly British, stood at the bar, their voices raised over the music. Many of the women at the tables and out on the floor were Chinese.

  Stevie’s head spun as she let Harry lead her around and around in the dance. The skirt of her dress slipped between her legs, the cool of the silk was soothing to her hot skin. It had been eight months since the baby had been born and this was the first night she had agreed to leave Hal, as he had quickly become known. She had drunk several gin-slings in order to relax enough not to fret about him. Lily was looking after Hal and was under instructions to sit on the sofa in such a way that she could see him in his basket through the open bedroom door. She was only supposed to leave the sofa if she was in urgent need of the bathroom. Stevie’s breasts had returned to normal, to her great relief, and her stomach though softly rounded didn’t perturb her. She saw it as a badge of honour. The agony of her milk coming in and having nowhere to go had been resigned to the general memory of discomfort from those first few weeks. The regime of bottles and powdered milk and porridge and rice was fully operational.

  In the first few weeks after Hal’s birth Stevie had only been brought out of her daze by the generous cable of congratulation from Jishang, which had differed so far in tone from the communications she had received from her mother and sisters that she had cried in gratitude. It said: BOY OH BOY A BOY STOP SINCERE CONGRATULATIONS FROM OLD BOY. She knew it represented a kind of truce. A few months earlier she had broken the news of her pregnancy in a carefully worded cable over which she had agonised for days. The nonchalance of his reply had stung more than she could have predicted. He really did not seem to mind, there was no hint of emotion in it. ‘So you will stay in Hong Kong. Shall I return your apartment here to the rental agency?’

  The communications that followed had been entirely work-related and he had not once asked her how she was feeling. A part of her had been grateful but a larger part longed for him to rage at her so that she could yell back and assuage some of her guilt. The only time Jishang had sounded aggrieved was when it became clear that she was not going to finish the manuscript of the book before the birth of the baby. It occurred to her that the book had been their shared project, their baby, and now another was taking precedence.

  In contrast her mother had not made any attempt to control her outrage. Every word she wrote – and over the months there were many – was dipped in indignation and self-righteous resentment. Her grandchild a bastard! Her daughter a harlot! Her own reputation in tatters! The local church praying for her! Her sisters, in turn, offered a disapproving chorus of concern for the situation rather than for her and none of them was able to understand that Stevie might actually be happy. Soon she stopped opening the letters and they lay pristine in the back of a drawer, mumbling from their offended moral high ground into the dusty dark wood.

  Her concerns were more immediate. Both she and Harry were desperate to reclaim the island that had been their affair. Harry was disconcerted by the amount of stuff that the baby had brought into their lives. He couldn’t go into the bathroom without newly washed damp nappies attacking him from the washing line that now hung permanently between the bath and the door. There was constant washing, folding, attending to these squares of cotton. The apartment smelled of linen and baby pee and milk. He didn’t mind but he was bemused by it all. Stevie had been living it for every hour of the day and night whilst Harry felt like a visitor to this new land. His colleagues saw more of him than she did.

  This night, though, was theirs.

  Stevie caught the glare of Phyllis Clarke-Russell as she swirled past with her husband, the Director of Public Health. She was one of the few British women to have avoided the evacuation. She had taken advantage of the last-minute decision to make it voluntary and not mandatory, and had opted to stay in her domain. Phyllis quickly looked away. Her disapproval of the scandalous situation was palpable. Stevie felt relieved that she had escaped the full brunt of Hong Kong gossip about her by being so caught up in the exhaustion of her new Hal-centred world.

  ‘Really. Parading themselves like this, it’s disgraceful.’ She had heard the rustle of predictable outrage from the smug cocktail drinkers in the lobby as she and Harry had walked in. Stevie was immune to it. She had never cared much for the opinions of others and she actually felt a pang of victory in stirring things up. After all, Hal was their private business – how serious could the public consequences possibly be?

  She surrendered to the music and the heat of Harry’s hand on the small of her back. She didn’t see the hotel manager skirt the dance floor unusually fast and approach the platform, attracting the bandleader’s attention. Without compromising his rhythm the bandleader leaned down and listened to the whispering manager. He furrowed his brow and let his baton fall to his side. The orchestra faltered, then stopped playing. A scratchy double bass note was the last to linger.

  The dancers came to a standstill too, confused by the sudden silence. Harry dropped his hand from Stevie’s back and looked at her before the manager’s announcement cut through the quiet. He talked too loudly into the microphone, unused to it.

  ‘Ladies and gentlemen, your attention please.’ There was a nervous giggle from a table at the side. ‘I’m sorry to interrupt but I have an urgent announcement.’ He cleared his throat. ‘All military personnel are advised to report to their posts immediately. Thank you.’

  The silence lay heavy. Gradually a low rumble of frightened conversation rose and almost all the men in the room started picking up jackets, kissing their partners, making their way out.

  Harry turned to Stevie, his voice low and calm. ‘There’s money in my accounts both here at the Bank of Hong Kong and in England.’

  Stevie shook her head. ‘I don’t understand.’

  ‘Yes, you do. You know what to do.’ And she did understand. She shivered and fear blurred her vision. Harry was already on his way to the door, his jacket in his hand. There was no time to take it in. In seconds the room was emptied of men. It was a ballroom of women, each silent and alone.

  Stevie had got as far as the street when the unearthly scream of a siren punctured the city, letting the air out of it and deflating it beyond all recognition.

  Chapter Sixteen

  Fear smelt like overblown lilies.

  Stevie crouched by Hal’s cot. He slept on and off. She rocked herself back and forth. The sirens cut into her mind, paralysing her. Should she pick him up and run through the streets? What if the bombs fell? She had lived with bombs before when she had taken a detour to Chungking, the seat of the Kuomintang Nationalist Chinese government. She had not been afraid then. What had happened to her?

  There was an explosion so loud that the room shook. The central light swung, casting terrible shadows, like a ghost train she had once been on as a child.

  Across town, Lily curled into herself under a teak table destined for the Communists of Free China. She had tried to reach her family as soon as Stevie, alone and tear-stained with the news, had run back into the apartment the night before. But she had only got as far as her uncle’s furniture warehouse. Hours passed as death rained down.

  In the village of Kun Lung Wai an elderly Chinese man ran through the street. The tremors from the shelling sent up clouds of dust. In his arms was a shiny new first-aid box. Stumbling, he came to the small girl who lay bleeding where she had fallen. He dropped to his knees and struggled to open the box with trembling hands. He did not see the black boots striding towards him. There was a shot. The old man keeled over, the first-aid box slipping on to the dusty road.

  The shells came one after another across the harbour from Kowloon and dive bombers screamed over Central as the air assault continued. It was relentless. The air in the streets was thick with acri
d smoke but all Stevie’s awareness was here where Hal was refusing to take the bottle. His shrill screams bore into her. She hadn’t moved from his side for twelve hours. Her dancing dress was stained already with sweat and tears. It was hours later that the door opened and Lily was there. Having failed to get across the harbour she had decided to go back to Stevie and Hal. They fell into each other’s arms.

  It takes time to calibrate a new existence and to navigate a new world.

  Harry could smell the fear too. But from where he was, it smelt of stale sweat and heavy cotton twill. He was in the shelter under Government House with a few of his men and the recently appointed Governor, who was so new he barely had a grip on the geography of the island. He had arrived less than two months ago from his previous posting in Barbados; a position that had probably prepared him to mix a perfect cocktail but certainly not to wage war with a battle-hardened and implacable enemy. His staff were not much better equipped – his second in command had in fact arrived the day before. Harry understood this to be quite in keeping with London’s dismissive and conflicted attitude towards Hong Kong. An attitude that meant they had not been able to grasp, even now, that Great Britain was in real danger from those funny little men from the Far East.

  ‘Where the hell are our planes?’

  ‘They were all put out of action in the first offensive yesterday, sir.’

  ‘All of them?’

  ‘Yes, sir. There weren’t very many in the first place and they were all at Kai Tak.’

  ‘The air force is effectively out of action?’

  Harry nodded. This was an agony – watching the faces of the men who were supposed to be in charge finally realising quite how bad things were and knowing that he and his colleagues had been trying to communicate this more and more desperately for months. It was not as if the Japanese hadn’t announced their intentions loudly from every international podium and at every opportunity for years. Before the two-month-old embargo the Japanese air force had been flying planes with American engines running on American fuel and loaded with shells marked ‘Made In England’. He remembered the recent Reader’s Digest article which had stated categorically that the Japanese air force was a joke and that the Japanese were incapable of efficient flying because they had an inferior sense of balance.

  There was a shout from across the room from a radio operator.

  ‘Smugglers Ridge. There’s nothing coming back, sir.’

  Harry could picture the bunker. He had been there only last week. It looked north through wooded country towards the border and south to the coast and the harbour. Steep steps led down underground. The only light came through the gun-slits in the concrete and the air shafts above the narrow corridors with cheery names like Shaftesbury Avenue and Regent Street. Wind blew over the ridge and whistled in the electric cables overhead. It was the key position in the defence plan. And already there was silence on the radio, just the white noise of broken communication. Here was the harvest of years of indecision.

  Defend to the last? Defend until support could arrive? Don’t bother to defend? Abandon the mainland and defend the island? Make a token defence to save face? If only Churchill’s personal conviction that the Colony was, in fact, indefensible had been known more widely. ‘If Japan goes to war with us,’ he had said, ‘there is not the slightest chance of holding Hong Kong or relieving it. I wish we had fewer troops there but to move any would be noticeable and dangerous.’ An even smaller garrison would have announced to the world that Churchill was essentially prepared to abandon Hong Kong to its fate. It consisted of two British infantry battalions, two Indian Army battalions, a few bits of artillery both mobile and fixed, the Local Volunteer Force made up of bankers, dentists, accountants and boys, a few small warships, two flying boats and three torpedo bombers without any torpedoes. Fifteen thousand men at most. Courageous residents, both military and civilian, who had already been betrayed by their government and by their own prejudices. The Japanese army was twenty-six miles away, fifty thousand experienced and brutalised soldiers.

  The year before, Harry had written a report on the fact that the Japanese combat boots were far superior to those of the British soldiers. They were light, supple, rubber-soled, while the British boots were heavy, hob-nailed leather, unchanged in design since the Boer War. He was fairly sure the report had gone unread. There had been too much talk in white ties over whisky sodas and not enough trench-digging or preparation of food, water and electricity supplies. The island would not survive on cocktails alone. There had been a last-minute change of mind, hence the arrival of the Canadian boys, but it was, in his opinion, far too little far too late.

  ‘We’re evacuating Kowloon, sir.’

  ‘Jolly good men, jolly good.’

  ‘Got a message for the troops, sir?’

  There was a short silence while the Governor gathered his thoughts. He was pale under his Caribbean suntan. ‘Fight on. Hold fast for King and Empire. God bless you all in this your finest hour.’

  Harry caught Ken’s eye and saw a shared flicker of mutiny there.

  The journey through the streets of a terrified and paralysed city was surreal. Familiar and yet not so. Some shops were open, defiant in the face of the chaos that raged around them. Some were sealed and shuttered as if they would never open again.

  Stevie had explained to Lily that they had to get to the harbour, that there was a boat waiting for them and Lily had shown Stevie how to tie Hal into a cotton scarf, wrapping it around her body so he was tight against her chest, his head to one side. They had tried with a silk scarf first with a print of the Eiffel Tower on it, but the knot kept slipping. Lily carried Stevie’s rucksack, into which they put a few nappies, the tin of powdered milk, the bottle and a small blanket. Stevie had slipped a lipstick that had been lying on the three-legged telephone table into her cardigan pocket. They had been halfway down the stairs before Stevie shouted ‘Oh my God, Victor!’ and to Lily’s regret they had gone back up to find him. He lay, shivering with inexpressible monkey fear, in a huddle under the sofa. Stevie had to coax him out with the last of their supplies of chocolate, but it was Lily who had to carry him wrapped round her front as she crept through the night streets like a beetle with an all enveloping carapace.

  People gathered on corners, whispering. Rumours of pillaging spread as quickly as they were invented. The Japanese were already on the island. No, they were miles away and this bombardment was just a smokescreen, and their goal was elsewhere. The British army was on the mainland repelling the Japanese with great success. Or they had already been defeated and were at that very moment being massacred en masse. The Japanese were planning to use the island as an enormous jail. They were planning to enslave the entire population. They were going to liberate the Chinese and set them on the British. They were going to do a deal with the British and kill all the Chinese. The British were finished but the Communists were attacking the Japanese army from the rear and would decimate it within hours. This had been the plan all along.

  The information void attracted more and more bizarre speculation. Nothing was certain except that the island was being bombed from the sky and shelled from the mainland.

  Then came the news of Pearl Harbor. The Americans were entering the war. It would be over in days. No, they had a secret treaty with Japan in which Hong Kong was sacrificed in return for Singapore. No, it was the other way round.

  Stevie and Lily had gone a long way towards the harbour before they had to take shelter. A plane flew low over the island, low enough for those on the Peak to see into its windows. They crouched behind a shuttered market stall, Stevie’s pulse making a bass line to Hal’s timpani. The bomb fell far enough away for them to take comfort in survival, but near enough for them to feel the aftershock. Not much later they stumbled towards the sea. The boats heaved and scraped against each other in confusion. Stevie ran ahead, crossing the bridge of boats with sure feet. Suddenly she stopped. She twisted around, trying to get her bearings. Where was Yang
’s junk? Surely it had been here, between the peeling yellow hull and the old river boat. Lily saw the panic in her eyes.

  ‘What is it?’

  ‘It’s gone.’

  ‘These boats never go anywhere. Look again. Maybe over there?’

  ‘No.’ Stevie repositioned her feet for balance. ‘It’s gone.’

  And they stood for a moment, silent but for the lapping of the waves and the distant emergency sirens carrying across the water. A warehouse further along the harbour’s edge was on fire, the flames reflected in the water, a beautiful cocktail of orange and blue. Stevie felt only relief. She had done as Harry had asked and now, by a miracle of convenience, she could stay near him with a clear conscience. Lily, seeing her smile, sighed in irritation. She would never in a thousand lifetimes understand her. But she sure as hell was not going to let her or the baby die on her watch.

  Harry waited in the hut on a small jetty on the far side of the island. The swarm of mosquitoes distracted him from worrying too much about what was going to happen. At dawn, a lean, modern motor launch slipped across the harbour from a fishing inlet on the mainland, unseen by most of the lookouts and expected only by very few.

  Harry looked up – a streak of bloodied mosquito smeared on his shin where he had just slapped it. Yes, the sound of a boat. He checked his watch – absolutely spot on time.