by Hazel Gaynor
‘Come along, Winnie. On we go,’ I said, as brightly as I could.
She stuck out her bottom lip, folded her arms, and kicked petulantly at the ground with the toe of her shoe. ‘I’m too tired.’
I glanced at Minnie, who thankfully stepped in, aware that I was losing my patience.
‘Come along now, Winnie,’ she chirped. ‘We’re all tired, but we’re almost there, and we can’t very well leave you behind, can we?’
At that precise moment, I would have happily left Winnie behind, and anyone else who volunteered, for that matter.
Winnie huffed out a breath as she stood up. ‘My father won’t be pleased to hear about this. I was sent here to prepare for my Oxfords, not to go marching about from one school to another.’
‘I should think your father won’t give a fig about you marching about,’ Nancy replied. ‘There’s a war on, Winnie, in case you hadn’t noticed.’
I was tired and anxious, and in no mood for Winnie’s petulance. Something in me snapped. ‘You’re quite right, Winnie,’ I said as I organized the girls back into their pairs. ‘Your father won’t be at all pleased to hear that you were disobedient and lazy. I don’t think he’ll be very pleased at all.’
She stared at me, speechless for once, and picked up her case.
We walked on, our singing a little less cheerful.
Our little troop fell silent as we reached the Temple Hill area of town. The guards at the front brought us to a halt, and over a hundred pairs of weary feet came to a standstill.
Our new home loomed in front of us, a large compound of missionary houses that, like everything else in Chefoo, had been commandeered by the Japanese Army. Our exhausted silence was filled by a flock of birds that chattered in the blossom trees above our heads until a shrill whistle was blown to bring us to attention, and the startled birds took flight. I could have wept as I watched them fly away. How I envied their wings; their freedom.
Up ahead, our headmaster was deep in conversation with an official-looking man in uniform.
‘Our new Commandant?’ Minnie whispered.
‘Possibly,’ I replied. ‘He looks officious enough.’
Whoever he was, he made Commander Hayashi look almost friendly in comparison. He was tall and angular, lean and healthy-looking, with an air of hard authority. He spoke in clipped, firm sentences that carried a tone of simmering menace. Even the other soldiers looked wary of him.
After standing about for an age, the children grew fidgety. I knew they were tired and hungry, but only a few grumbled. I admired their ability to adapt and change to each new and bewildering situation. Fortunately, their naivety prevented many of them fully comprehending what was happening. Easily distracted by a game or a song, they followed instructions and did as they were told, just as they did in the classroom. As I so often did when I found myself in a sticky situation, I drew on my Guiding experience and set the girls off in a memory game that passed along the line and kept everyone busy until we were instructed to pick up our belongings, and follow the guards.
We entered the compound through an elaborate gateway that resembled a traditional Chinese temple with a red pagoda-style roof. Ornate lettering and symbols decorated the tall columns on either side of the entrance. In different circumstances I would have stopped to admire it, but I had no energy for culture or architecture. All I could think about was getting to wherever it was we would now call home, making our beds, and getting a decent night’s sleep.
The children trudged silently along as we were led down a narrow road, flanked on either side by colonial-style houses. They might have once been welcoming family homes, but now stood empty and neglected, and lent the whole place an uncomfortable air of melancholy.
‘Not exactly Raffles Hotel, is it,’ Minnie said as she joined me at my shoulder. ‘I wonder what happened to the families who used to live here.’
‘I’d rather not think about it,’ I replied.
The boys and their masters filed off together into one of the houses. I wondered how there would ever be room for them all, especially with some of the older boys now as tall as the adults. The dozen or so very youngest children went with Amelia Prescott, Eleanor Yarwood, Nurse Eve and the other two Chefoo School nurses to another house. They would at least be a little less squashed on account of their being smaller in number and half the size of the boys. At the very end of the street, we reached the house where Minnie and I were to be accommodated with two dozen girls.
Minnie hesitated in front of the short pathway, which led to a black door. The glass panes were dusty and dirty. One pane was completely broken.
‘Shall we?’ I said, as we stared at the imposing building.
Minnie offered an anxious smile as she stepped aside to let me pass. ‘After you, Miss Kent.’
I lifted my chin and pushed back my shoulders. Whatever degree of trepidation I felt, I was determined to look confident as I approached the unwelcoming door. It was already slightly ajar, the lock apparently broken.
I pushed the door open and stepped inside, avoiding a pile of broken glass on the floor which I kicked aside with my shoe before encouraging the girls to follow, carefully, one at a time. ‘Come along, girls. That’s it. Hurry up.’ I touched the top of each head as they entered, counting to make sure we hadn’t misplaced anyone on the way.
The girls crowded into the sparsely decorated downstairs room, which, I presumed, had once been a living room, but which now looked like a room for anything but the living. They whispered and speculated as they took in their new surroundings. Nobody quite knew what to make of it. There wasn’t much in the way of furniture, just the odd chair and a few old packing crates. There was no table in the dining room. No curtains at the cracked windows. The floor looked like it hadn’t been swept for weeks, possibly months. Blank rectangles and squares decorated the walls where family portraits and treasured artwork must have once hung. Bare light fittings dangled limply from the ceiling. Any remnants of furniture bore the now-familiar seals declaring them to be the property of the Great Emperor of Japan.
I took a deep breath, and held my head high. ‘I know it doesn’t look much right now, but we’ll soon have it shipshape and cosy, isn’t that right, Miss Butterworth.’ I stared pointedly at Minnie for support, the shock on her face all too evident.
‘That’s right, Miss Kent,’ she replied, playing her part admirably. ‘We’ll have it feeling like home in no time. For a start, I think a pair of curtains would help these windows look a bit happier.’
I sighed quietly. It was going to take far more than a few hastily thrown together curtains to make this hollow house feel anything like a home.
Dorothy Hinshaw stuck her hand in the air. Always the first with a question.
‘Yes, Sprout? I mean, Dorothy?’ I was so used to hearing the girls use each other’s nicknames, I almost used them myself.
‘Where will we sleep, Miss?’
‘That is a very good question, and one I will answer as soon as I’ve taken a look upstairs.’
‘You can call me Sprout if you like, Miss,’ she added. ‘Everyone else does.’
I offered a small smile. ‘Very well. Sprout.’
The girls giggled, amused to hear me use her nickname.
Minnie stayed with the girls while I walked up the carpet-less stairs to assess the condition of the bedrooms. They were even worse than I’d imagined. The upstairs rooms were musty and cold, the walls riddled with mildew and damp. Apart from a single Queen Anne chair placed beside a window, there was not one item of furniture. Not one bed. Not one chest of drawers.
I walked quickly from room to room, but it was the same throughout. More broken windowpanes let in a cold breeze, and piles of mouse droppings in the smaller of the rooms offered evidence that we weren’t the only occupants. I slumped against the doorframe, imagining what Alfie would say if he was standing beside me, his arms folded. ‘Blimey, Els! Looks like you’ve got yourself into a right pickle this time. I don’t think you’
re going to be able to sing your way out of this one!’ I kicked at the wall in temper and frustration. I was angry with Alfie for being so bloody silly as to go missing; angry with Harry for being so bloody stubborn and going back down the mine to look for his friends after the first collapse; angry with my mother for never being proud of me; angry with the soldiers for invading our school and spoiling my plans to go back to England. Mostly, I was angry with a God I’d struggled, all my life, to truly believe in.
‘Why?’ I groaned, wringing my hands in despair. ‘Why are you doing this to us?’
I pulled at my collar as I struggled to breathe, suffocated by my past, by the helplessness of the present situation, by the relentless pressure to be jolly and hopeful while feeling so utterly desperate and afraid.
Minnie arrived at the top of the stairs. ‘Elspeth?’ she called. ‘Who are you talking to? Is everything all right?’
‘I’m here,’ I called. ‘Everything’s fine.’
‘I wondered where you’d got to. I didn’t want the …’ She stopped talking as she reached the bedroom doorway and saw the state of the room. ‘Oh, dear. Everything isn’t fine at all, is it.’
I let out a long sigh. ‘It’s awful, Minnie. All of it.’
She placed an arm around my shoulder and gave it a firm squeeze.
‘Now, now. I shan’t be having any of that sort of talk. We’ll grab a broom and some hot water and make the best of it. Besides,’ she said, holding out the kitten who she’d brought upstairs with her, ‘Tinkerbell is quite fond of the place. She says she’ll take it.’
I smiled as I lifted the warm little bundle of fur to my face. Tinkerbell mewled and licked a tear from my cheek.
After climbing another flight of steps to a loft area, I settled on that being where we would all sleep. It was at least a little warmer and drier, and there was space for all of us to be together. I didn’t especially want to relinquish the privacy of my own room, but nor did I want to have the children sleeping, unsupervised, in a separate room while there was a broken lock on the front door of the house.
I took a moment to compose myself before I made my way downstairs and clapped my hands to get everyone’s attention.
‘Miss Butterworth and I have carried out an inspection,’ I announced, ‘and we’ve decided to set up a dormitory-style camp in the loft. We’ll roll out our mattresses, and make it jolly.’ The girls didn’t look convinced, their eyes straying from Minnie and me to the bare floorboards and mould-riddled walls. ‘Rome wasn’t built in a day,’ I added, forcing a smile. ‘The sooner we get started, the sooner we’ll have the place looking shipshape. We might have left our school, but that’s no excuse to let our standards slip. You’ll be expected to keep your uniforms and hands and faces neat and tidy, as usual.’
‘Will we all sleep in the same room, Miss?’
‘Yes, Nancy. For the first few nights at least. Until we’re settled. After that, we’ll see.’
‘Will we still have Guides?’ she added.
‘Of course! We’ll have lessons and prayers, and Girl Guides, the same as usual. We can use one of the rooms downstairs as our meeting room. Now, more than ever, you must all remember your Guide laws and Promise, and try to do a good turn every day. There might be a shortage of furniture, but there will never be a shortage of ways in which you can be helpful.’
‘We will all need to help with domestic duties,’ Minnie added. ‘Cooking and cleaning, washing and mending, so you’ll all be earning plenty of points toward your Homemaker badges.’
The girls cheered up a little, happy to hear their beloved Girl Guide meetings would still take place and that they would still be able to earn new badges.
The prefects helped to organize the girls into an orderly line from the front door all the way up the stairs to the loft. In a human chain, we passed our possessions from one person to the next, and so on and so on, until I declared us moved in and closed the door. I tried not to think about the absence of a key.
Once all the children were occupied with various chores to make the houses more habitable, or sent off in groups to explore their new surroundings, Mr Collins called a staff meeting in the kitchen of the boys’ house. It was no better than our own, a little worse even, if that were possible. For a home intended to accommodate a family of four, they really were dreadfully cramped. Charlie, Tom, Eleanor, Amelia, Nurse Eve and I nodded a rather grim greeting to each other. I offered a hopeful smile, but felt it fade before it had even reached the edge of my lips.
‘There’s no point pretending otherwise, so let me start by acknowledging that the conditions are rather, what one might call, lacking,’ the headmaster said as he opened the meeting. ‘The compound previously belonged to an American Presbyterian Mission, but has clearly become rather run down since it was abandoned. I’m confident we will all muck in and do our bit to have things looking much better sooner rather than later. Our priority, as always, must be the children’s moral, physical and intellectual education. I’ve drawn up a number of activities and routines to address all aspects of their welfare.’
A stubborn part of me wanted to ask about the adults’ welfare. I was exhausted, dirty, hungry and thoroughly wretched. As I listened to Mr Collins while he set out the daily routines – breakfast at seven-thirty, lessons at nine, tiffin at twelve, and so on – I looked around and wished one of us would be brave enough to admit how frightened we were, and how helpless we felt. But nobody said a word. We diligently volunteered for our share of activities and responsibilities, and carried on, just as we always did.
Charlie was put in charge of Physical Education. He’d already measured the distance from the compound gate to the Sanitorium, which Nurse Eve and her colleagues had been relieved to discover was in a reasonable condition.
‘The distance is exactly one mile if repeated fourteen times,’ Charlie explained as we walked back to our houses together. ‘Perhaps we can award prizes for the boys and girls who record the most miles between now and Foundation Day. Give them something to work towards.’
Foundation Day was an occasion we celebrated to mark our founders’ establishment of the China Inland Mission School. I liked the idea of retaining the anniversary, even though we’d left.
‘But Foundation Day is months away,’ I replied.
Charlie looked at me and offered a grim smile of resignation.
‘Yes, Elspeth. It is.’
He didn’t need to say anything else, but I saw the question in his eyes: how many miles would the children run before the war, and our ordeal, was over?
The day had started early and had offered more than its fair share of challenges by the time the low autumn sun began to set in the late afternoon. Our new home looked worse when stripped of sunlight, so I was relieved when two of the older boys knocked on the door and delivered several lightbulbs.
‘Where on earth did you get them?’ I asked. It was the one thing I hadn’t thought to pack; hadn’t at all considered we would require.
‘From the Boys’ School. Master Harris had us take as many as we could from the light fittings before we left.’
‘Well, wasn’t that wise! Thank you, boys. And please thank Master Harris for his foresight. At least we’ll be able to see each other now!’
After locating a set of stepladders in an outhouse, I gave the girls an impromptu demonstration on how to attach a lightbulb to the fitting.
‘You must make sure the switch is off before starting, and have someone hold the bottom of the ladder at all times.’
Of course, they were all eager to have a go, and the bulbs were taken in and out until everyone had taken a turn. When all the bulbs were in place, Minnie did a countdown from ten and the lights were switched on at the same time. The girls cheered as our dark unfamiliar home was lit up like a Christmas tree. It reminded me of our family trips to Blackpool to see the illuminations. For a brief moment everything felt a little better, but the front door suddenly flew open and the man I’d seen talking to Mr Collins ear
lier marched inside.
‘I am the camp Commandant, Major Kosaka,’ he announced, his voice loud and authoritative.
Three Consular guards flanked him as the door banged loudly off the wall. Minnie and I instinctively moved to shield the girls, who stared at our new ruler.
Major Kosaka’s petite moustache reminded me of an illustration of Adolf Hitler I’d seen in a satirical magazine. A sword hung from a thick leather belt as he stalked around the room, intermittently prodding and poking at our belongings with a large bamboo stick.
‘You,’ he barked, pointing at me. ‘Name?’
I was accustomed to the curt commands, and replied without hesitation.
‘Miss Kent. Elspeth Kent.’
‘How many here?’
‘Twenty-six, in total. Twenty-four children, and two adults.’
One of the guards made a note on a piece of paper attached to a clipboard.
‘Roll-call in compound square,’ he continued. ‘Tomorrow morning. Seven o’clock.’
As he made to leave, a ball of wool rolled down the stairs and landed at his boot, followed by Tinkerbell who batted at the wool with her paws before pouncing on Major Kosaka’s boots.
Nobody dared move.
He bent down slowly, and picked the kitten up by the scruff of her neck.
I rushed forward. ‘Please. Don’t hurt her.’
He glared at me. ‘No pets. Get rid of it.’
He dropped the kitten to the floor and kicked her out of the way with the toe of his boot. The girls shrieked. Minnie rushed forward and scooped Tinkerbell into her hands as Major Kosaka and his henchmen marched out of the house.
Several of the girls started to cry, and only calmed down when we assured them that Tinkerbell wasn’t hurt, and that we wouldn’t get rid of her.
‘We’ll find somewhere to hide her,’ I said. ‘A Guide is a friend to all animals …’ I nodded to indicate that the girls should continue.
They diligently took my cue, and recited the rest of the law in unison.
‘All Girl Guides take particular care of our dumb friends, the animals, and are always eager to protect them from stupid neglect or hard usage.’