The Bird in the Bamboo Cage

by Hazel Gaynor

  ‘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.’

  I caught up with the others as they trudged up a road toward a rather neglected-looking sports field. With a breeze swirling around us we were soon covered with a fine film of dust. Winnie Morris spat on her finger and drew the Girl Guide trefoil emblem into the dust on her leg. We all copied, carefully drawing the three leaves that symbolized the three parts of our Promise: Faith, Loyalty and Service. Soon, our arms, legs and cheeks were covered with trefoils. As the newest members of the Chefoo Girl Guides, and the founding members of Kingfisher Patrol, we were ever so proud of the Promise badges Miss Kent had pinned to our Guide uniforms. ‘A reminder of the lifelong commitment you’ve made, to the Guide movement, and yourself,’ she’d said during the Promise Ceremony. With our uniforms packed away in our trunks, we didn’t know when, or if, we might have our next meeting of Girl Guides, so the trefoils we drew on our skin that first afternoon at Weihsien weren’t just for fun, but a reminder of the promise we’d each made. Sprout had once said the three-leaved shape represented the three of us: Plum, Sprout and Mouse. Thinking about it again made me sad that she wasn’t with us.

  ‘I do hope Sprout will be all right,’ I said, as Mouse kicked along beside me. ‘It isn’t the same without her.’

  ‘I’m sorry I’m not more like her,’ Mouse said. ‘You must find me rather quiet and dull in comparison.’

  ‘Oh, Mouse. You mustn’t think that. I don’t find you dull at all. I don’t want you to be like Sprout. I miss her, but I like you for you. For who you are.’

  ‘Really?’

  I smiled. ‘Really.’ I grabbed her hand. ‘Come on. We should probably head back before Miss Kent sends out a search party.’

  We passed a tennis court and gardens, a large church, a school building and an enormous hospital, where I presumed Sprout had been taken. Behind the hospital, furthest away from the guard towers, was a leafy lane, lined with acacia trees. It was sheltered and secluded and, as we turned to walk down it, we saw a boy and girl kissing. We ran off, giggling, until we passed a large toilet block. The stench of sewage was impossible to ignore. We covered our noses with our hands and ran faster, eyes smarting with the effort not to retch.

  We arrived back at the barrack-style houses hungry, thirsty and tired, but there was no time to rest.

  ‘Right, girls,’ Miss Butterworth chirped, rubbing her hands together as she always did when she was feeling industrious. ‘We’ll follow the same layout as we did at Temple Hill. The rooms are a little smaller, but we’ll make it work.’

  The basement room we’d been allocated was impossibly small. Reed mats appeared to be our beds, and the only protection from the bare floor and the cockroaches I saw scuttling about.

  For our meals, we were each given a small tin container, a spoon and a tin mug. We’d missed the first two meals of the day, so by suppertime we were ravenous. We lined up, as instructed, outside Kitchen 1, where we were given a ladleful of a watery stew that looked like dirty dishwater, and a blackened bread roll that was as hard as a rounders ball.

  We joined the rest of the Chefoo group and sat together at the end of one of dozens of long wooden tables. The other tables were occupied by people who looked like they’d been in the camp for a very long time, and I tried not to stare at them.

  Miss Butterworth said grace, thanking the Lord for all the good gifts around us and for providing food and shelter (at which I opened my eyes a fraction and stared at Mouse). We waited politely until the Amen before we tentatively spooned the grey stew into our mouths. It smelled like damp soil, and tasted worse. I imagined what Sprout would have said about it if she’d been there, but although it was disgusting, it was hot and it was food, and I didn’t wish to be ungrateful or impolite. I tried to ignore the gritty bits that crunched against my teeth as I took slow steady mouthfuls, and tried my best to swallow. I was so hungry, but I retched with each mouthful. Even Miss Kent and Miss Butterworth were unusually quiet as we ate, each of us focused on the process of chewing and swallowing, despite every instinct telling us not to. Even though the food was terrible, and we were too tired to hardly lift our spoons to our mouths, our teachers didn’t let up on their insistence on good table manners.

  ‘Don’t slouch, Nancy.’

  ‘Elbows off the table, Joan.’

  ‘Don’t speak with your mouth full, Winnie.’

  I hardly thought table manners mattered, given the situation. Winnie even said as much.

  ‘Everybody else is slouching and resting their elbows on the table, Miss,’ she grumbled.

  Miss Kent put her spoon carefully down into her tin bowl. ‘Which is precisely why we will not be doing the same, Winnie. There is no excuse for poor table manners. We wouldn’t tolerate it at Chefoo School, and we won’t tolerate it here, either. In fact, we will tolerate it even less here.’

  We ate the rest of the meal in silence.

  Back at our dormitory, Miss Kent instructed us to all gather round.

  ‘Once again, we find ourselves in a new and unfamiliar place, with new and unfamiliar people and rules. Things will be a little unusual until we find our feet, but let us not forget that we are resourceful Girl Guides, and can do anything we put our minds to.’ She smiled her best ‘We Will Be Brave’ smile. ‘There will be lots of ways for you to get involved in camp life,’ she continued. ‘You’ll be required to help in the kitchens and the garden, and to collect water, and fuel for the stoves when it gets colder in the winter.’

  Mouse raised her hand. ‘Will we still be here in the winter, Miss?’

  I very much hoped the answer would be no, because that would mean another Christmas without Mummy. I sometimes wondered if she would even recognize me after all this time. When she’d last seen me, I was only eight, and didn’t even know how to tie my shoelaces properly. What if she didn’t know who I was? What if, after all this time apart, we couldn’t remember what to do when we were together?

  Miss Kent fidgeted with a handkerchief as she answered Mouse’s question.

  ‘Hopefully not, Joan. But, if we are here for a while, then we will at least be prepared, and we will manage admirably.’ She cleared her throat. ‘There’s a communal shower block, and latrines. We’ll use chamber pots during the night, and empty them each morning.’

  We stared at each other, horrified by the prospect of sharing toilets and showers with strangers.

  ‘We’re like proper prisoners of war now, Miss, aren’t we?’ Mouse said.

  Miss Kent looked surprised, and didn’t answer immediately. I was just as surprised to hear Mouse speaking up so often.

  ‘We might not have the same liberties we once had, but freedom doesn’t end with high walls and guard dogs,’ Miss Kent said as she tapped a finger to her head. ‘Freedom is here, girls. In the mind.’

  I wasn’t quite sure what she meant, but her words stirred a quiet surge of determination in my tummy.

  ‘Now, that’s enough for our first day,’ Miss Butterworth announced. ‘Everyone get ready for bed, and let’s try and have a good night’s sleep.’

  We kept to our now familiar order of topping and tailing, mosquito nets suspended on an old fishing line above us, our smaller cases stacked neatly in one corner of the room. Mouse coughed and spat into a handkerchief as she got ready for bed beside me.

  ‘You’re not sick, too, are you?’ I asked. I didn’t want all my friends stuck in the hospital.

  She shook her head and opened the handkerchief to show me a small grey lump of meat. ‘I couldn’t swallow it,’ she whispered. ‘But I didn’t want to leave it in my bowl, either.’

  I was both appalled and impressed that she’d kept the lump of meat in her mouth for so long.

  ‘You’d better get rid of it,’ I whispered. ‘We don’t want to attract rats.’

  A trip to the latrines saw the end of
the meat, but I knew we couldn’t store food in our cheeks like hamsters, no matter how inedible it was.

  As we knelt on our mats to say bedtime prayers (there wasn’t room for us to kneel beside the mats, there being only eighteen inches between one and the next – Mouse had measured), I remembered my tea caddy. I hadn’t seen it since we’d boarded the steamer in Chefoo.

  My eyes flew open. ‘My tin! My special tin! I don’t know where it is!’

  Everyone opened their eyes and turned to look at me.

  Miss Kent didn’t look very pleased. ‘Goodness, Nancy. Whatever is the matter?’

  I burst into tears. ‘My tin. My special tin with Mummy’s letters and everything. I’ve lost it.’

  Within minutes, everyone was searching for it. The orderly pile of trunks was pulled asunder, each one opened to check that it hadn’t somehow found its way inside, but it was nowhere to be found.

  Mouse put her arm around my shoulder and patted my back and said not to worry.

  ‘Someone will find it, Plum. It’s most likely ended up with one of the boys, or something. We’ll ask everyone in the morning.’

  I bit my lip and tried to stay hopeful, but, despite Mouse’s reassurance, I had the most awful feeling I’d left it on the boat, and would never see it again.

  As the trunks were stacked neatly together again, and lamps were blown out, I curled up on my mat and tried to hold back the sensation that I was going to be sick. Mummy’s words were the only thing I had to keep her near, and now I’d lost them, and it felt as if I’d lost her all over again.

  I lay awake in the dark that first night at Weihsien. I listened to the familiar sounds of the other girls fidgeting and snoring beside me, and tried to ignore all the new and bewildering sounds beyond the barred windows: occasional shouting, men’s laughter, the distant lowing of water buffalo. I shut everything out and focused on the bird that sang beside the window. Miss Kent had told me it was called a whip-poor-will, or a nightjar. I was comforted by his strange little lullaby, in which he seemed to repeat his own name over and over. ‘Whip-poor-will. Whip-poor-will. Whip-poor-will.’

  It was the first of many nights when he would sing me to sleep.

  ELSPETH

  Our worst fears had been realized. Along with some fifteen hundred other souls, we were to be interned at Weihsien Civilian Assembly Centre. It was almost impossible to comprehend, impossible to accept that we’d been taken somewhere so primitive and so far removed from the comfortable lives we’d known not two years earlier.

  From the outset, it was clear that life behind the high compound walls would be a very different experience to that which we’d left behind at Temple Hill. In addition to the hostile stares from the new guards, and the menacing barbed wire and strict rules set out by Mr Tsukigawa, Weihsien was far bigger, and populated by a bewildering variety of people.

  ‘It’s all rather … mixed, isn’t it,’ Minnie remarked as we reorganized our sleeping arrangements.

  ‘That’s one word for it, yes,’ I agreed. I made no attempt to conceal the sarcasm in my voice. ‘No wonder the children gawp and stare.’ I gawped and stared myself. I’d already noticed several morally questionable women hanging around the men’s shower block, and Minnie had discovered empty bottles of alcohol in the dustbins. ‘When I think of all the effort we went to at Chefoo School to shelter the children from external influences. What a pointless exercise that was. Now they’ll be exposed to goodness knows what.’

  ‘At least the camp committees seem to have everything well organized,’ Minnie said as we swept the floor and washed the windows to make our room a little more hospitable.

  In a small way, I agreed that it was a relief to find routines already established, and elected chairmen and monitors in charge of the various committees.

  ‘Yes. I suppose there is that to be grateful for,’ I agreed, albeit half-heartedly.

  There was really very little to be grateful for, but searching for positives in our situation had become as much of a habit as searching for bedbugs. They weren’t always easy to see, but we knew we would find them eventually, if we could just summon the energy to keep looking.

  After twenty-four hours, we’d experienced the full Weihsien schedule of roll-call, breakfast, tiffin, supper and curfew. Meals consisted of a millet-type porridge for breakfast, inedible stew for lunch, and a watery soup for supper, and everything was served with dry bread and black tea. Fresh milk wasn’t available. We’d quickly discovered that the food committee kept any Red Cross supplies of Carnation powdered milk for the very young and elderly, who needed the calcium the most.

  We were all very worried about the lack of calcium in the children’s diet, aware that they needed it to develop strong bones and teeth. While they kept themselves reasonably clean and well-presented on the outside, we couldn’t always tell what was happening to them on the inside; what damage their poor diet was doing to them, or what long-term emotional toll their prolonged separation from their parents would have on them. The children in our care had been brought up to believe that it was unmanly to cry if you were a boy, and silly and spoiled to cry if you were a girl, so they kept their feelings as tightly locked up as the great compound gates that had closed behind us.

  As I lay awake on my mat during those first awful nights at Weihsien, I wondered which would prove to be the most harmful aspect of our captivity when – if – an end to it ever came: the physical deprivation, or the emotional.

  It was just one more question to which I didn’t have an answer.

  At the start of our second week in camp, I woke with crippling cramps and pains in my stomach. I spent the day running back and forth to the latrines, and lay on my mat, groaning, between visits.

  Apart from the insufferable tedium and indignity of daily roll-call, the latrines were one of the worst things about camp life. Without a reliable supply of running water, the cesspools were regularly overwhelmed, and the nauseating stench was unbearable. I pitied the so-called honeypot girls, local Chinese women who came into the camp several times a day to remove the stinking sewage. It was a stark reminder that however bad things might be, there was always someone suffering a greater indignity.

  My fifth trip to the latrines in less than an hour happened just as the women arrived to empty them. I gagged and retched as the buckets of waste swayed on the bamboo poles suspended from their shoulders. One of the women seemed to be in some discomfort. From the roundness of her belly it was clear she was pregnant, but the other women, oblivious to her struggles, ignored her.

  I covered my nose as I approached her, forcing myself not to look at the contents of the buckets.

  ‘Here, let me help,’ I said.

  She flinched as I reached out a hand, but then she looked at me.

  ‘Miss Elspeth?’

  ‘Shu Lan?’

  I was so surprised and pleased to see her, and yet horrified to see her at the same time. Her eyes were empty; her face tired and drawn.

  Neither of us knew what to say. We stood in silence, floundering in questions and shame and uncertainty, and all the while the stench from the cesspool buckets engulfed us.

  ‘You are alone?’ she asked. She glanced anxiously over my shoulder, her gaze never straying from the guards on patrol nearby.

  ‘We are all here,’ I said. ‘We arrived two weeks ago.’

  ‘The children, too?’

  I nodded. ‘The whole school.’ I had so many questions. ‘How are you?’ I asked. ‘And Wei Huan? Is he with you?’ I thought about Charlie’s quiet concern when he’d told me about Wei Huan taking a beating from the guards at Temple Hill.

  At Wei Huan’s name, Shu Lan dipped her head. ‘My husband is forced to work for the puppet regime.’

  ‘Here? At Weihsien?’

  She nodded again, and placed a hand on her swollen belly.

  I offered an encouraging smile. ‘When is your baby due? Wei Huan must be very happy.’ I recalled how he’d once told me that flowers required patience
and love and care, just the same as children, and that he longed for the day when he would become a father.

  ‘Not his child,’ Shu Lan said, her face set hard as she tipped her chin toward the guards patrolling the watchtower in the distance. ‘Theirs.’

  The horror of her words sent a shiver across my skin. ‘I’m so sorry,’ I offered. ‘I’m so very sorry.’

  ‘I do not need your pity, Miss Elspeth. I need your help.’ She trembled as she spoke.

  By now, the other women had gathered their buckets and were ready to leave. Our conversation had sent a ripple of concern spreading among them and they regarded me with disdain and distrust. One of them spoke to Shu Lan brusquely, clearly urging her to hurry up. Their raised voices caught the attention of Trouble, who was passing by.

  He marched over to us, shouting something at Shu Lan as he poked her with his bamboo stick, before adding a particularly hard thrust to her stomach.

  She cried out in pain and sank to the floor. I reached down to help her, but he pushed me roughly aside, sending me tumbling to the ground where I cowered beside Shu Lan, shielding us both with my arms.

  ‘You again, Elspeth Kent.’ He kicked Shu Lan’s bucket of waste, deliberately sending the contents spilling over my clothes and hands. ‘Clean it up,’ he snapped as he pointed his stick at the honeypot girls. ‘All of it.’

  Some of the women rushed to fetch buckets of water and a broom as Trouble stalked away, leaving me sprawled on the ground in the filth. Two of the younger women scooped Shu Lan up from the ground and rushed off, half-carrying, half-dragging her between them. As I watched her go, someone grabbed my elbow and helped me to my feet.

  ‘Not very pleasant, but nothing that won’t come off in the wash, and at least he didn’t strike you. Awful pig of a man. Come on. Straight to the shower. I’m Edwina, by the way. Edwina Trevellyan. Eddie will do.’