by Hazel Gaynor
Chapter 21
Elspeth
September 1943
We left Temple Hill at first light, in a convoy of dirty trucks. The loose tarpaulin flapped at the sides, letting in a cold breeze as we rumbled along.
“Bunch up, girls,” I instructed as I buttoned the collar of my coat. “Keep tight together. It’ll help keep you warm.”
Their cheeks were pale, their eyes tired and confused. I couldn’t even bear to look at Minnie, who sat opposite me; couldn’t allow any emotional cracks to seep through the fragile veneer of my resolve. I pushed my deepest fears far from my mind, fixed a reassuring smile on my face, and focused on the immediate needs of the children, which were thankfully plenty. Handkerchiefs, reprimands, and reassurance were dished out as and when required. Dorothy was transported under the careful watch of Nurse Eve, who offered me a reassuring smile whenever I caught her eye.
After a mercifully brief but unsettling and uncomfortable journey, the trucks jerked to a stop. As I peered through the gaps in the tarp, I saw we’d arrived at the harbor.
“We’re going on a boat?” I whispered to Minnie, horrified by the thought of leaving land.
“Apparently so,” she replied, peering through the tarp beside me. “Charlie was right then.”
He’d guessed that if we were being taken to the camp at Weihsien, as we suspected, we would travel by boat, around the Shantung peninsula to Tsingtao, and from there, be transported by road or rail to our destination.
A rising sense of panic washed over me as the soldiers barked orders at us. All was noise and confusion, and I could hardly think straight as they hurried us along, looking on sternly as we struggled to unload our trunks and smaller cases.
“Hurry up, Elspeth Kent.”
I flinched at the voice. Just as I’d feared, Trouble was coming with us, wherever it was we were going.
When the last of the children had collected their belongings, I helped Nurse Eve and the other two nurses with the most sickly children, several of whom were too weak to walk and had to be carried to join the others on the wharf. Poor Dorothy looked like death warmed up. I pulled her close to me and held her hand as we all huddled together and waited for further instruction.
“Not long now, Dorothy,” I said. “We’ll be on our way very soon and then you can rest again.”
Her silence was dreadfully upsetting. More than anything, I wanted her to ask one of her infuriating questions, or be too busy chatting to Nancy to pay any attention to me.
The worst part of being moved again wasn’t leaving, but the empty void of not knowing our destination. Everything felt very different from the last time. We weren’t simply relocating to another school in a different area of Chefoo; this time we were leaving the city entirely. The sight of the small steamer moored alongside the wharf made my stomach lurch. Even the usual chirp and chatter of our little flock was silenced by uncertainty and apprehension. Only the adults spoke, in low voices, making sure we wouldn’t be overheard as we took it in turns to speculate and reassure one another.
Despite the rush of our departure from Temple Hill, we’d made sure everyone was turned out as neatly as possible, but even so, in my patched-up skirt and threadbare cardigan, I felt more like a prisoner than ever. My shoes were scuffed, my coat was coming apart at the seams. Even my ugly red armband was faded by the sun and frayed around the edges. As I looked around at our rather forlorn group, it struck me that we were all rather frayed around the edges; one loose thread away from unraveling altogether.
The children did their best to be patient, but the youngest were tired, hungry, and confused, and the older children were unusually sullen, their faces drawn. I knew they were lacking in essential vitamins, and it was starting to show. Their once plump cheeks had sunk into valleys. Their bright eyes lacked the luster of full health. We’d done our best to shield them from the very worst of things, but they were old enough to understand that this wasn’t a jolly expedition, but something far more serious.
After an age, we were finally instructed to board the steamer.
I tripped over a stray suitcase as we moved forward, arms flailing as I fell awkwardly to the ground. The guards laughed.
Charlie rushed to help, taking my elbow to lift me up.
“Anything broken?” he asked, his eyes full of concern.
“No. I’m fine.” I stood up and brushed myself down. “Rather embarrassed, but nothing broken.” I blinked tears from my eyes. Don’t be such a baby, I scolded myself. Pull yourself together, Elspeth.
“Best hurry,” he urged as one of the guards blew a whistle and the ship’s horns sounded for departure. “We don’t want to be left behind.”
“Don’t we?”
We studied each other for a fleeting moment, and I knew he was thinking what I was thinking. What if we dared to make a run for it? How far would we run, and where would we go?
“Perhaps another time, eh,” he said, a smile of resignation at his lips.
“Another time,” I replied.
My knees smarted from where they’d taken the brunt of my tumble and my wrists ached from where I’d braced myself, but there wasn’t time to make a fuss. The low rumble of the anchor being raised made the gangway shake as we stepped aboard and made our way down to the ship’s cargo hold, where the entire Chefoo group was packed tightly together, like too many books wedged on a shelf, with hardly a gap between us.
“Well, this will never do,” Minnie muttered as she assessed the cramped conditions. “I’m sure we can do better than this.”
I looked on wearily as she organized the children into neat rows, each child alternately sitting one way, then the other, so they faced each other with their feet beside their neighbor’s bottom, rather than sitting side by side. It made a surprising difference and provided everyone with a precious few inches of extra room.
“Simple mathematics and spatial awareness,” Minnie said as she squashed into the space beside me, her feet extending well past my hips. “I really should have been a scientist, you know.”
But despite Minnie’s problem-solving skills, there was still very little privacy to be found. For all that we’d lived and worked together for many years, the situation in the ship’s hold presented an entirely new level of domestic entanglement. We quickly learned that hats were a nuisance, and that body odor was unavoidable, and that there was little we could do but accept the excruciating indignity of it all.
The ship’s hold was dark, cold, and horribly claustrophobic. A nauseating stench of damp wood and salt water laced the air. The portholes had been covered by sacking, presumably so we wouldn’t be spotted and rescued by any passing American warships. A makeshift curtain of sorts divided the hold in two; girls and women on one side, boys and men on the other. It hardly made one jot of difference, but we were too tired to care.
“Take off your armbands and tie them around your mouths and noses,” I suggested when the children complained of the terrible smell. “It might block it out a little.”
Our conversations were muted and muffled beneath the fabric.
Eleanor Yarwood passed around a bottle of very expensive-looking perfume that still had a few precious drops of amber liquid inside.
“Shalimar,” she said. “We might as well use it. I don’t exactly have any special occasions to save it for.”
I tried not to think about how much it had cost as we passed the bottle around and each took a drop. The smell was exquisite. I closed my eyes and imagined I was on my way to a dance, dressed to the nines, my skin laced with the scent of fine perfume, but my temporary escape didn’t last long.
Conditions during the journey were testing to say the least. We tried our best to be polite and considerate, but there simply wasn’t enough room to prevent one’s elbows from continually bumping into a neighbor’s, and there was nothing to be done about an itch somewhere awkward, other than to scratch it, or grin and bear it. As the hours pressed on, I thought about the struggles we’d faced when the sold
iers first arrived at Chefoo, and the struggles Temple Hill had presented us with. All of it had been manageable, but this . . . this was different. It was degrading, and demoralizing.
Despite being under Japanese control for two years, I’d never felt more like an enemy prisoner.
* * *
There was nothing we could do other than to somehow endure the cramped conditions and the relentless seesawing of the ship. We roused the children after a restless night, arms and legs wrapped around each other like a litter of puppies. Limbs that were so carefully restrained at the start of the night were splayed every which way come the morning, any politeness and embarrassment eventually replaced by the physical urge to stretch out.
During the daytime, we took it in turns to lead the children in Psalms and songs to bolster their spirits, and told them stories of difficult journeys and hardships endured. Shackleton’s Antarctic expedition, dramatically recounted by Charlie, became a firm favorite. But the dark, endless nights posed their own challenge, and I came to dread the setting of the sun. When the last of the children had finally fallen into a sleep of pure exhaustion, I curled up beside Minnie, and retreated to some other place in my mind, far away from the suffocating cargo hold I found myself in. I drifted in and out of sleep as the ship rocked and rolled. Sometimes, I dreamed about Harry. Other times, I worried about Alfie. Mostly, I clung tightly to whatever small scraps of hope and dignity remained.
Some of the children vomited endlessly. Others were pale and quiet. Nurse Eve kept a special eye on Dorothy, who, thankfully, slept most of the way, apart from when she was roused to make sure she drank water, or for her temperature to be checked. It was still on the wrong side of acceptable.
“How is she doing?” I asked.
Nurse Eve shook her head, despondently. “The sooner we get to wherever we are going, the better.”
The terrible, unavoidable reality of the situation weighed heavily on my mind, so that I found it hard to breathe when I thought about it for too long. But the question nagged and nagged at me: What if Dorothy didn’t pull through? What if, after everything we’d been through, we lost her?
“Any improvement?” Minnie asked as I returned to my space beside her.
I shook my head wearily. “None. She’s still running a fever. I wish it were me who was poorly. I wish I could take her fever away and see her back on her feet, bossing the others around and being her usual mischievous self.” There was no longer any point in denying my fondness for the girls. They’d become my family in the past year; the children I’d never had. “I feel so helpless.”
Minnie sighed, and patted my hand. “We all do, Elspeth. We all do.”
* * *
After three insufferable days, the steamer finally came to a stop, and we disembarked, blinking like moles as we emerged into the daylight at the port of Tsingtao.
“What now?” Minnie asked, yawning as we stared at a railway station platform on the other side of a dusty road.
“I don’t know.” I sighed as I watched our Japanese guards assemble in front of us. “And I wish, with all my heart, that we didn’t have to find out.”
Chapter 22
Nancy
Wake up, Plum. We’re here.”
A dusty breeze blew through the canvas tarpaulin of the truck. I blinked and rubbed grit from my eyes as Mouse shook my shoulder to wake me.
“Where are we?” I asked. I sat up and peered through a gap in the tarp as we passed through a tall gateway, decorated with Chinese writing.
“We’re at Weihsien Civilian Assembly Center, Nancy,” Miss Kent replied. “Our new home.”
The motion of the truck rocked me from side to side. I was too exhausted to brace myself, hardly caring who, or what, I bumped into as Mouse shoved in beside me. Together, we looked out at the barbed-wire fences surrounding the high gray-brick walls, and gazed up at the tall watchtowers, patrolled by guards with guns.
“Who are all those people?” Mouse asked as the trunks lumbered along a sort of main road lined with acacia and juniper trees, and where people of all ages and races, sizes and shapes waved as our convoy of trucks rolled past. “And what are they all doing here?”
“Whoever they are,” I said, “they seem pleased to see us.”
Most of the people were Westerners, like us, with white skin, although their arms and legs had been deeply browned by the sun. The women wore loose-fitting dresses, and some of the men wore khaki shorts, with nothing on top. Their ribs poked through the skin on their bare chests, their arms as skinny as some of the Chefoo boys’. I’d never seen men look so thin, and couldn’t stop staring. After spending the past two years with only the other Chefoo children and teachers for company, it was fascinating to suddenly see so many new and different people.
As the line of onlookers outside the truck gradually thinned, my gaze turned to the gray-brick buildings that ran, in long rows, off the main street, barrack-style with red iron railings at the windows. Between these smaller buildings were larger blocks with signs on the walls saying NO. 1 KITCHEN, NO. 2 KITCHEN, and so on. As a group of young children ran alongside the trucks, I stuck my arm through the gap in the tarpaulin and waved to them, calling out a tentative “Hello!” to acknowledge their shouts of welcome.
“Nancy! Please keep your arms in the truck.”
I jumped at Miss Kent’s voice. “I’m sorry, Miss. I just . . .”
“And don’t talk to strangers,” she added, rather sternly.
“She looks ever so tired, and cross,” Mouse whispered beside me as we turned our backs to the tarp. “Best do as she says.”
After taking a left turn and following the wall alongside NO. 3 KITCHEN, the convoy of trucks eventually came to a stop.
“We’ve arrived, children,” Miss Kent announced, clapping her hands to rouse those who were lucky enough to still be dozing. “Here we are.”
Two by two, like a reverse of the Ark, we clambered out into the sun, both relieved and afraid to have arrived at our destination.
“What now?” Mouse asked.
I shrugged. It was too big a question to answer.
We’d hardly been out of the trucks five minutes when a new Japanese guard directed us to a large parade ground, where we were ordered to line up in neat rows. Two very stern-looking men in uniform climbed onto a high platform in front of us. They exchanged a few words before the more senior of the two began to speak. We’d become accustomed to the way in which orders and instructions were shouted in clipped sentences, rather than politely explained.
“I am camp commandant, Mr. Tsukigawa. This is chief of police, Mr. Nagamatzu. You will obey the rules of Weihsien camp.” Several other guards stood close by, guns at their hips. They kept their eyes on us as Mr. Tsukigawa listed instructions about camp rules and regulations. “Roll call each morning. Meals three times a day. Curfew at ten.” On and on he went.
Little clouds of dust swirled in mini tornadoes at my feet as I swatted at flies that buzzed annoyingly around my head. With Mr. Tsukigawa’s voice droning on in the background, my mind began to wander. I was hungry and tired, and swayed like a field of kaoliang blown in a summer breeze. I must have nodded off because one minute I was staring at the back of Miss Kent’s head, thinking about my mother, and the next minute, Miss Butterworth was shepherding me back into line.
“Stand still,” the commandant shouted. “No moving.”
“Am I in trouble, Miss?”
Miss Butterworth shook her head and pressed a finger to her lips.
It was all terribly serious. Much more so than at Temple Hill.
I forced myself to stand perfectly still while the commandant explained, in rather broken English, that there were nine camp committees, each in charge of Discipline, Medicine, Finance, Food, Education, Engineering, Quarters, General Affairs, and Employment. When he finally finished his announcements, we were instructed to follow a group of guards along a road that ran parallel to the main street. They left us outside one of two large buildings, s
igned NO. 23 and NO. 24, and left us to figure the rest out for ourselves.
“I don’t like it here,” I whispered to Mouse.
“Me neither,” she agreed. “I don’t like it at all. Hopefully we won’t be here for long.”
“Now, girls, gather around.” Miss Kent clapped her hands and beckoned us toward her like a mother duck flapping her wings. “I know you’re all tired and hungry after our long journey, but there are lots of things to organize before we can eat and get some rest, so I need you all to be patient and show our new . . .” She paused, fishing for the right word. “And show the people here how well-mannered and polite you are,” she continued. “We’ll no doubt be of great interest as new arrivals. Everyone will want to know where you’ve come from, and more besides. While there’s no need to be rude, I’d encourage you not to engage in prolonged conversations. We Chefusians will stick together for the time being.”
When she’d finished, we were given permission to stretch our legs, but not to go too far. As the others dispersed, I hung back.
“Run along now, Nancy,” Miss Kent chided when she noticed I hadn’t gone with them. “Off you go.”
“Is there a hospital, Miss? You said there might be a hospital with doctors and medicine for Spr . . . Dorothy. She was so listless during the journey and I’m dreadfully worried about her.”
After we’d got off the train that had brought us from Tsingtao, I’d seen Sprout being lifted into a truck by one of the male teachers and Home Run, who’d offered to help. For a terrible moment I’d thought she was dead, she looked so pale and still, just like a piece of marble, but she’d opened her mouth to take a sip of water. I hadn’t seen her since.
“There is indeed a hospital, Nancy. Dorothy has already been taken there. The nurses will make her as comfortable as possible. I’ll let you know when you might be able to see her. Now, off you go.”