The Bird in the Bamboo Cage

by Hazel Gaynor

  She reached for my hand. ‘It’s nice to see you.’ Her words were so faint I could hardly hear her.

  I didn’t know what to say. Everything I thought of felt silly and unimportant.

  ‘Dorothy wanted you to sing to her,’ Miss Kent whispered. ‘To help her fall asleep.’

  ‘What shall I sing?’

  ‘It doesn’t matter. Anything.’

  ‘One of our favourites,’ Sprout whispered.

  In the silence of the hospital room, I felt shy and tongue-tied and couldn’t think of a single song, but eventually the words came and I started to sing, softly at first, and then a little louder, and Connie joined in. We sang and sang, one song after another – ‘All Things Bright and Beautiful’, ‘This Little Light of Mine’, hymns and rounds, our Six Songs from Brownies, the haunting words of ‘Taps’, on and on through the night until eventually the words became a tired jumble on my lips, and I fell asleep. I dreamed of a field full of sunflowers, their bright faces turned toward the sun.

  Nurse Prune woke me at first light with a gentle shake of my shoulder. Without a word, she took my hand, and led me quietly from the room. Connie wasn’t in her chair. Sprout looked dreadfully pale, her bedsheets horribly still.

  Still half-asleep, I followed Nurse Prune to a little office, where she wrapped a blanket around my shoulders and gave me a cup of hot black tea. I was glad of the warmth of both.

  After a few minutes, Miss Kent stepped into the room. She closed the door quietly behind her. Everything was so quiet; so still. She crouched down in front of me, and pulled the blanket closer around my shoulders. Her eyes glistened, so that I could see my reflection in them. She seemed to be searching for the right words; for the best way to tell me what I already knew.

  ‘She’s dead, isn’t she, Miss?’

  She gave the smallest nod of her head and gently squeezed my shoulders. ‘I’m so sorry, Nancy.’

  I’d known from the moment Connie had woken me in the middle of the night. I’d known by the way that Miss Kent had smiled encouragingly at me. I’d known, and yet I couldn’t bear it to be true.

  Miss Kent brushed a tear from my cheek. ‘She won’t be in any pain now, Nancy. She’s with God, in Heaven. Shall we say a prayer for her?’

  ‘Will she hear it?’

  ‘I’m sure she will. Yes.’

  I closed my eyes and placed my hands together and listened to every word of Miss Kent’s prayer. After the Amen I kept my eyes closed, because Sprout was dead, and I didn’t want to open my eyes to a world without her.

  Miss Kent sat beside me and held my hand. For a long time we didn’t say anything, but quietly watched the sky grow lighter beyond the window, and listened as the first birds began to sing.

  ‘I’m afraid I’ll forget her,’ I said.

  ‘You won’t.’ Miss Kent squeezed my hand. ‘The people we love the most are always with us.’

  I wanted to go back to the first time I’d met Sprout on the boat from Shanghai, and spend every moment together all over again. I wanted her to tell me all about New England in the fall. I wanted to really listen to her when she chattered on, so that I would never forget her lovely American accent, so free and loose. I wanted to give her my last humbug, and my best marble, and the heart-shaped pebble I kept in my tea caddy. I wanted to run with her across the bay at Chefoo School, tripping and stumbling in the sand as the wind blew our laughter up into the clouds. More than anything in the world, I wanted my best friend to always be there, because I didn’t know what I was going to do, or how I was going to be, without her.

  Sprout was buried the next day, beneath a blossom tree in a quiet corner of the cemetery, behind the guards’ house. Master Harris made a headstone from a piece of wood to mark her resting place. He engraved it with the Girl Guides trefoil, and a kingfisher. It was the most beautiful headstone I’d ever seen.

  For the first time since arriving in Weihsien, the whole Chefoo School group gathered to say goodbye. The girls of Kingfisher Patrol stood together, hand in hand. I stood at the end of the line, my right hand held tight in Mouse’s. My left hand hung idle by my side.

  Tears streamed down our cheeks as the final prayers were said. Poor Connie was inconsolable. Sprout was my best friend, but she was Connie’s little sister. I reached for Connie’s hand. What else could I do? Even Miss Kent and Miss Butterworth couldn’t hide their distress. Every one of us wept for our dear brave friend.

  As the low winter sun settled over the distant rice fields, we sang ‘Taps’, our voices captured in misty breaths that drifted slowly up to the heavens. I closed my eyes and sang as clearly as I could, so that Sprout would hear me. ‘All is well, safely rest, God is nigh.’

  Miss Kent asked me to wait when everyone else began to leave.

  ‘There’s something I’d like to do, Nancy. Could you help me?’ She pulled a small square of folded cotton from her pocket, and opened it up. Seven sunflower seeds were inside. ‘Take one,’ she said.

  I stared at the little seeds and thought about the sunflower at Chefoo School; how we’d diligently watered it and measured it, and how disappointed Sprout had been to leave it behind.

  ‘Should I plant it?’ I asked as I chose a seed.

  Miss Kent nodded. ‘A sunflower for Sprout. Perhaps just in front of the headstone.’

  I took the seed and pushed it deep into the earth. Miss Kent did the same.

  ‘Who is your seed for, Miss?’

  ‘For all of us, Nancy. So that we’ll always be with her.’ She smiled a thin smile, and I smiled back, because it was such a nice thing to have done. ‘Oh, and before I forget, I thought you might like to have this. I checked with Connie, and she agreed you should have it.’ She put her hand into her pocket and pulled out a brass trefoil Promise badge. ‘It was Dorothy’s. I thought it would be fitting if her Promise was kept by her best friend.’

  I took the badge from her and traced the tip of my finger around the three leaves: Plum, Sprout, Mouse. We’d promised we would be friends forever.

  ‘Thank you, Miss. I’ll keep it safe. Always.’

  She looked at me in a funny way and took a step toward me. ‘Nancy, I …’ She held out her hand and let it rest against my shoulder a moment before gently pulling me to her, and holding me in an embrace.

  I held my arms stiffly by my sides as my cheek pressed against her coat. I closed my eyes and remembered Miss Kent making her promise as I’d clung tight to Mummy’s hand, afraid to let go among the chaos and clatter of rickshaws and handcarts, and the shouts of beggars and fishermen on the wharf in Shanghai. ‘How about I keep a special eye on Nancy until we get to Chefoo? We’ll be the new girls together, Nancy. How about that!’ It was four years since Miss Kent had made that promise; four years since I’d watched my mother become a small blue dot in the distance. Now, surrounded by Weihsien’s high walls, I pressed my cheek closer to Miss Kent’s wool coat and she tightened her embrace in response, I felt as if a thousand arms were wrapped around me, enfolding me in kindness, keeping me safe.

  Too soon, Miss Kent pulled her arms away. She smoothed her cardigan beneath her coat, even though it didn’t need smoothing, and straightened her spectacles even though they were already straight.

  ‘Best catch up with the others,’ she said. ‘Run along now.’

  I pulled my socks up and set off at a sprint, the winter wind whistling through my fingertips as I imagined Sprout running beside me.

  ELSPETH

  1944

  Our tight little group of girls was deeply affected by Dorothy’s death, and the ripple of shock and grief spread beyond the wider Chefoo community to the rest of the camp. Any death forced us all to face our own mortality, and doubt and guilt tormented me as I wondered if I should have written to Dorothy’s parents before we left Chefoo, or insisted she was too ill to travel, and remained behind with her at Temple Hill. I stumbled into the gaping hole of her absence every morning, her death the first thing I thought about when I woke up.

  Poo
r Connie walked around like a ghost, and the rest of the Chefoo children were sullen and subdued. Bad dreams, and the painful cracks of broken hearts, disturbed us all in the difficult days and weeks that followed. Nancy and Joan were especially inconsolable. They asked if they could paint a sunflower on the wall of our sparse little room, ‘So that she’ll still be with us.’ Their unceasing capacity to endure the most harrowing events was quite beyond my comprehension. Watching them remember their friend in such a touching and beautiful way broke my heart all over again.

  Dorothy’s death was also a stark reminder of the terrible conditions we were living in, and the silent dangers of poor nutrition and inadequate medical supplies. We’d already discovered that Weihsien winters brought chilblains and pneumonia, and had been warned that dysentery and tropical diseases were rife in the summer months. Our war became one of small daily battles, as we shared out the precious eggshells and looked wearily at the charts we’d drawn up to record the girls’ victories in the various challenges and competitions we’d fabricated from the most awful tasks. We’d pressed on with the familiar and the routine. We even held our meeting of Kingfisher Patrol in the week of Dorothy’s death. The girls voted unanimously to go ahead because it’s what she would have wanted.

  ‘It isn’t enough, Minnie, is it,’ I sighed as I sank down onto my mat. ‘Encouragement and distraction, Guide patrols and semaphore displays, ground-up gritty eggshells. It will never be enough, will it?’

  ‘It’s all we have,’ Minnie said, her voice unusually firm. ‘Guide patrols and semaphore displays can go a long way when you have as little as we do.’ She took my hands and pulled me to my feet. ‘We promise to do our best, don’t we? If our best isn’t enough, then so be it.’

  Had I truly done my best for Dorothy? It was hard to know.

  I visited her grave every day.

  Trouble watched me from a doorway of the guards’ house as I made my daily vigil. I felt his eyes on me, like an insect crawling over my skin, but avoided making eye contact, and kept my head down.

  ‘You will miss curfew,’ he called, after watching me for several nights. ‘Go back.’ He pointed his stick in the direction of my accommodation block.

  ‘I will visit the child,’ I replied, defiant. ‘Then I will go back.’

  I was too exhausted to care about the consequences of disobeying him, but the fact that he let me carry on worried me. I knew he was biding his time; waiting for the right moment to finish what he’d started when I’d interrupted him with Connie. It was the continual threat that it might be today, that afternoon, that evening, that was so unbearable. And he knew it. Like the kingfishers Shu Lan had told us about, he had me trapped. He was waiting for the perfect moment to pluck his feather.

  After Dorothy’s death, we all felt the importance of new life, and encouraged the older girls to help the women who’d arrived in camp already pregnant, and who had to face the terror of childbirth without the usual medical interventions or sanitation. Thankfully, internment had also brought several midwives to Weihsien, but they weren’t equipped to cope with the worst complications, and we all prayed for everything to go smoothly whenever anyone went into labour. There was little we could do to prevent the howls and deep moans drifting between the thin walls of the accommodation blocks. I laboured with every woman, breathing a sigh of relief when a plaintive cry signalled that the infant had been safely delivered, and offering a prayer for the fragile souls of those who never found their voice.

  But despite the girls’ interest in the babies once they were born, they were rather less enamoured with the process of how they got there in the first place. Their bodies seemed to mature overnight, and our cramped living quarters left no room for any privacy in which to get used to their new bumps and curves, and the onset of their monthlies. I lost count of the number of times I had to reassure another horrified girl when she showed me her bloodstained bedsheets.

  Minnie and I did our best to handle it all as matter-of-factly as we could, but it wasn’t always easy. Supplies of sanitary items were severely lacking, and we had to resort to torn-up towels and bedsheets as sanitary napkins, which the girls washed and reused as necessary. Their initial squeamish embarrassment at the pink-tinted water they poured away outside was soon replaced by a numb indifference. Exhaustion, hunger, and the menacing presence of guards with guns didn’t leave much room for prudery or embarrassment, but it was those whose monthlies hadn’t arrived that I was most concerned about. Poor nutrition had left many deficiencies, and some of the young bodies had simply stalled. I worried about the long-term damage being caused to girls like Nancy Plummer, one of those left behind.

  ‘I hope there won’t be any lasting issues down the road,’ I said as I changed into my uniform for Guides.

  ‘Let’s hope not,’ Minnie agreed. ‘There’s no pain greater than the ache in your arms for a child you’ll never hold.’

  ‘Oh, Min. I’m sorry.’

  ‘Don’t be. Look at all the children I’ve been blessed with in the end.’

  She smiled, but the pain was evident in her eyes.

  It was a pain I felt myself. Harry had always said I’d be a wonderful mother. It was one of my greatest sadnesses to have never discovered if he was right. As I tied my scarf, my thoughts drifted back to my old jewellery box, with a ballerina that danced to ‘The Blue Danube’ when you lifted the lid. I smiled as I remembered dancing around the front room with Harry, ‘One two three, one two three,’ as we dipped and rose on our toes and heels and whirled around and around until we fell onto the sofa in a tangle of love and laughter. It seemed impossible that I had ever known such simple, happy times.

  ‘Elspeth Mary Kent? Are you even listening to me?’

  I turned to Minnie, and held my hands out in apology. ‘I’m sorry. Miles away. As per.’

  ‘You look as if you’ve seen a ghost,’ she said as she buttoned her shirt and adjusted her Promise badge. ‘Whatever were you thinking about?’

  ‘Ghosts,’ I said as I pushed a few loose curls into my bun and put on my hat. ‘I was thinking about ghosts.’

  ‘You were thinking about Harry, weren’t you?’ she added, softly.

  I nodded, and straightened my skirt. I’d already taken it in at the waist a number of times and yet it was still loose enough to fall to the floor as soon as I undid the zip.

  There were no secrets between us now. We’d shared every painful memory, every happy moment, every favourite song and book and film star. Hunger, weakness and exhaustion left little room for secrets and shyness. Besides, as Edwina Trevellyan had said in her usual forthright way, ‘We might all be dead tomorrow. We might as well talk now, because we won’t be much good to each other when we’re rotting in a ditch.’

  ‘Shu Lan’s baby must be due soon,’ Minnie added as we set off to the meeting room together. ‘I wonder how she is?’

  I’d thought a lot about Shu Lan since Nancy had given me her note. I hadn’t seen her since, nor Wei Huan, who seemed to have disappeared, if he’d ever been here at all. Perhaps it was too dangerous for him to come and find me. Perhaps something else was keeping him silent. I asked the honeypot girls about Shu Lan whenever I could without drawing the attention of the guards. After what had happened the first time I’d spoken to Shu Lan, they weren’t keen to talk to me. ‘No news,’ was the best I got.

  As the weeks and months passed, I found myself watching and waiting, never quite sure which I should fear the most; Shu Lan’s baby being sent to me, or not.

  The long hard winter eventually released its grip on north-eastern China, and spring arrived with a welcome burst of warmth and blossom on the trees. We stumbled into the gentle sunshine like the eager green shoots that poked through the soil in the vegetable garden; desperate for warmth and light. Even with the help of the Red Cross food parcels, which occasionally found their way to us and caused great excitement among the children and enormous relief among the adults, food and medical supplies were still worryingly low. We were s
o desperately isolated, cut off from the rest of the world, and reliable information about events happening beyond the compound walls was hard to come by. I was still desperate for any news of Alfie, or his battalion. Minnie didn’t ask about him anymore, and I didn’t mention him. It was like he’d disappeared all over again.

  Only occasional scraps of news reached us through Charlie’s careful ‘tinkering’ with the Commandant’s unreliable radio equipment, and through the ‘bamboo radio’ that operated inside the compound. Despite the dangers involved in relaying the information through the farmers to the secret operatives inside camp, the secret chain of communication was a vital lifeline to the outside world. We were desperate for good news, desperate to hear that the tide was turning in favour of the Allies. By spring, the feeling was that the war wasn’t going as well for Japan as it once had, and reports of more Allied victories in the Pacific brought fresh hope of liberation. But that, in turn, brought fresh fears about what our captors would do in the event of Japan’s surrender. I swayed between celebratory visions of going home, and horrifying visions of mass execution, and somewhere in the middle I got on with the next chore, the next lesson, the next meal.

  It was a relief when someone else took over for a while and, more often than not, that person was Uncle Eric. He was such a marvellous and valued addition to the compound and put the rest of us to shame with his relentless quest to help others, and to entertain the children. His ‘Sports Days’ were always eagerly anticipated, and although the dusty pathways we’d christened ‘Main Street’ and ‘Sunset Boulevard’ were poor substitutes for an Olympic running track, he never once complained and always set up his races with the same care and passion as if they were being held in a stadium.

  ‘He’s quite remarkable, isn’t he,’ Charlie said as we watched Uncle Eric set off, full pelt, with a crowd of excited children racing behind him.

  ‘The children adore him,’ I agreed. I felt unusually relaxed as we sat in the dust, bathed in spring sunshine. ‘He exudes goodness, and hope. And he works so hard around camp. I don’t know when the man ever rests.’