China to Me (32 page)

“Morgan Crofton is wild to get back to Europe and join up,” I said disapprovingly at lunch one day at the Clark-Kerrs' table. Sir Archibald pricked up his ears.

“You don't think he should feel that way?”

“He should join,” I admitted, “but he shouldn't want to join. He shouldn't enjoy getting into a war.”

We had a long argument. I think it very likely that I was talking nonsense, but I can't remember what we said. I remember instead that the Clark-Kerrs were having servant trouble; Sir Archie wanted to live on Chinese food and Lady Clark-Kerr couldn't seem to convince the cook that she meant it. She was just as pretty as rumor had said, but fantastic as an Ambassador's wife, whom one expects to look like a large burlap bag filled with flour and tied around the middle with rope. “Tita” Clark-Kerr is much more like a doll, with golden curls and tiny perfect features. The trace of Chilean or Spanish accent in her speech adds to the baby-doll effect and totally belies the dangerous truth that she is an intelligent and well-informed woman.

It was soothing to lunch with those people. If the British still functioned through their diplomatic channels so smoothly, perhaps the civilization that I had become used to and fond of, with all its faults, might yet survive. Sir Archie, Tita, John Alexander — they all did seem to know what they were doing, though at the moment all they were doing was to concentrate on Tita's poor forehead, which had a big painful boil on it. Between gossip and political discussion of a light, large sort, Sir Archie applied hot compresses to his wife's brow. But we did talk, and he talked sense. He wasn't optimistic. That too was soothing. I don't know anything that upsets me more and makes me less sure of our survival than the hearty sort of Briton who tells me that they are bound to Muddle Through, and that they Lose Every Battle but the Last.

After lunch Sir Stafford Cripps came in for a visit. I beat a retreat as soon as he got there, but I saw something that amused me before I went. Sir Stafford, a lugubrious, parchmenty person, looked at Tita's boil and said, “What's the trouble?”

They told him about it, and he brightened up in a ghoulish sort of way — Sir Stafford knows a lot about doctors and bad health.

“You don't want to use hot water, you know,” he said authoritatively. “It spreads the infection. You want to bring it to a head and lance it, don't you? Use cold water, the coldest you can get.”

Immediately the Clark-Kerrs ordered cold water and changed their treatment. Just like me, I reflected as I rode downhill from their house. I'm a pushover for any sort of medical treatment, no matter who suggests it. There is a moral in that anecdote if you want to find it, but I haven't time.

It was decided that Corin should break her connection with the Co-ops and let somebody else, whose personal life was less full, take on the task of saving the Chinese. It was also decided by me, with the hearty concurrence of Jacques, that my connection with the Fourth Estate come to an end when June did, and Corin could take my place. Meantime none of us did any work worth speaking of, because the Japanese reflected their ally's success in Europe by giving us a burst of activity hitherto, as they say in the papers, unprecedented.

As I remember it, life for a month or so was just one rush to get into a tunnel. The walk between my place and the Press Hostel was always anxious because if I was caught halfway it meant a long way to run before I got to a safe place, either end. The chief danger wasn't the bombs, but the local police, who had ordered all residents to be off the street before the second alarm, which we called the “Urgent,” and which meant that the planes had arrived at the city limits. Anybody out after the Urgent was to be shot. Some people were. We really couldn't complain. The watch system was good.

We always had the first alarm fifty minutes before the Urgent, just as the enemy planes crossed over the border of Szechuan Province a long way off, out on the plains, and fifty minutes was enough to get into a tunnel anywhere in town if you ran, and if the tunnel authorities knew you and would let you in. For the Chinese there was a regular system, which was later applied to us. They were given tickets and told where they were to run to. We just went, by virtue of our whiteness, into the nearest hole. But the public ones weren't very nice; they were overcrowded and you had to stand up. Our hostel dugout, as we have seen, had benches and chairs, and a limited attendance. I liked it better than the press one, but experience was to show that it wasn't safe.

Early in May it became evident that the Japs knew where the Chiangs lived and were trying to destroy their house. This was too bad for the Chungking Hostel because we weren't far away from the palace. One day a bomb fell in the front garden where we had so often whiled away the moonlit nights looking for bombers, and a few tons of rich mud were thrown out into the street and our roof was slightly cracked. We went on living there anyway. But we couldn't trust our dugout: the roof was sagging dangerously. It was duly condemned and after that all the guests went to Kung's tunnel.

Often on Sundays I broke my old rule and consented to go over to the South Bank for lunch. I was much more inclined to accept invitations of the sort nowadays, for the South Bank was safe from bombs if you stuck to the diplomatic district, which was supposed by the rules of war to be immune. The Japs dropped leaflets, warning all third nationals and diplomats who still lived on the North Bank to move over to that charmed neighborhood before they were blown to bits. The British embassy said, “Pooh, pooh.” We still felt somehow safe in that stately building. I walked over there early one morning and found that Tita Clark-Kerr had come down for the day with her husband. Time hung heavy on our hands, even after an air-raid signal sounded, and we decided to wash our hair. The two of us went upstairs to one of the luxurious bathrooms that looked so good to me, and got to work.

We had finished washing and were setting our locks, Tita doing wonderfully well with her pale blonde ringlets, when the Urgent sounded. We paused and looked at each other questioningly.

“Shall we?” I asked. After all, it was her embassy, not mine.

“No,” she decided. “We'll catch cold down there and I look a fright.” So we went on pinning and chattering. All of a sudden there was a whirling sort of noise and Sir Archie stood there, red in the face with haste and anger. “Go downstairs immediately,” he said in an awful voice. “The idea!”

Complaining bitterly, but under our breaths, we obeyed him. It was just as well we went when we did. That day bombs fell almost on the lawn. We felt the concussion and didn't like it at all. Later — but it happened a good deal later, and I will wait for the proper time to tell it.

I ought to take time off here to talk a bit about my emotional reactions to the Japanese, but I didn't have any after the first few raids. At first I did; I felt hatred and defiance and a furious impotence, crouching in a hole in the ground without the chance of even hitting back. Later I lost any personal feeling about it. Subconsciously I put the raids into the same category as earthquakes and measles. They seemed more like acts of God than deliberate attempts on the part of human beings to kill me. This was due, no doubt, to the fact that we didn't see planes as much as we had done at first, in the carefree, daring days when we stayed aboveground and took risks. I was still afraid. A big “crrrump” sounding near by always put my stomach out of order and was followed by a strange desire on my part to go to sleep. Sooner or later in a dugout I always went to sleep. But my fear was not an angry fear.

I regained all my personal animosity that day that I washed my hair, however. In the afternoon, after four hours underground, Morgan Crofton and I walked back together to the hostel, and we had a hard time getting there. Many city streets were in flames and the way was blocked, so we had to crawl roundabout through back alleys and over fences to get home. We saw no dead bodies; casualties were growing less because the people were learning to take shelter. But the destruction was enormous and I was hot with anger.

“I would laugh,” said Morgan, “if we were to find the hostel spread all over the ground.”

Well, we did.

Chapter 26

One half of the building, the back part, had disappeared completely save for pieces of the walls and roof which were lying on the slope of the hill back of the hostel. There was a lot of debris spread out in the street in front of the door too. By the time we arrived they had cleaned up quite a bit of it, so that traffic was able to get through, and we were allowed to go in the front door. My room was still there, open to the sky more or less, but there. All my belongings, however, were thickly coated with plaster dust. All the guests who had come out of near-by dugouts were there, doing what Morgan and I were doing — salvaging our property. We decided that the rooms were still habitable, at least until something else could be rigged up. Why, the flush toilet was actually still working! It is true that the bathroom door had been torn from its hinges, but if you propped it up again the room was usable.

We spent a rather grim evening. Although the bombers hadn't yet hit the electric power plant and we had light, everyone was wondering what the rest of the season was going to be like if the spring had brought so much variety into our lives. The hostel manager bustled about, getting us to pack up whatever we didn't need so that he could put it into safety. Really valuable things, he promised, he would place down in the dugout where they would be out of danger of rain and bombs. Everyone had in mind going over next day to Chialing House, to see what could be done about taking rooms there.

Chialing House was an imposing plaster edifice out along the main road some distance from the hostel. It had been built with loving care and a lot of expense by a government group headed by H. H. Kung, for the purpose of entertaining distinguished visitors who were not foreigners and who couldn't stay in the hostel. Kung also used it for big official parties. That was where he gave his cocktail party and reception for Mme. Sun. There were tall red pillars in the main hall, and lots of windows overlooking the river, and hanging terraces. But when it came to rooming facilities, Chinese tradition in hotelkeeping had triumphed. The rooms were small and uncomfortable and there weren't as many of them as you expected when you looked at the place from outside.

I went to bed early, tired out as I always was after a long bombing. An air raid leaves you, for some strange reason, aching in your bones, as if you had been walking for many miles instead of sitting in a stuffy little cave all day. Probably I wouldn't have waked at all, in spite of a lot of noise and thumping that trickled from the real world into my dreams, if one of the men hadn't come in and pulled my arm.

“Get up, get up before you're brained,” he called, and hurried out again. I sat up, tangling myself in the mosquito net which appeared to my fuddled senses to be sopping wet. I heard a queer noise that came again and again: “Smack. Smack.” Then I realized I, as well as the net, was soaking, and that a heavy rain was coming down from heaven, right through the holes in the ceiling and onto me. The smacking noise was plaster that was getting wet and falling in slabs from the mangled remains of the roof. It was really dangerous to stay there. I groped around in the dark and got a dressing gown, and hurried out, slipping on the slimy floor.

Downstairs everyone was huddling in the lounge and the lobby, looking cross. There was a good deal of comforting helpful efficiency on the part of the hotel boys. They put me to bed with Maya in a small dining room, stretched out on tables and wrapped in blankets. It was about midnight, and I dozed off, in spite of the noise and the glaring lights, until falling plaster woke me again. This time it was no joke, for the rain had soaked through the floor upstairs and now large gobs of plaster were falling on the first floor, all over the place except the middle of the lobby, which was protected from upstairs by a strip of intact roof. We were herded into this safety zone and stood there miserably, sharing umbrellas and looking sour.

It was all so awful that we became hysterically silly. Morgan was brewing hot soup with bouillon cubes and a thermos of water, and he insisted that we drink the stuff. Some American boy brought out a jug of local wine and we had a bit of that, though it tasted like fusel oil. We laughed and whooped and sang, and our blood began to run again, and I was feeling better until Maya said, “Thank God for a sense of humor.”

As soon as morning dawned Morgan jumped into his battered car and drove over to Chialing House and booked rooms. He helped me move most of my things that morning, just in time, for the hotel was filling up with people from all over town who had been bombed out.

“They'll bomb here next,” he said, “but for the time being it will do.”

I went to Holly's dinner party that night, a gallant effort considering that half the roof of the dining room was gone. Guest of honor was Wu Teh-chen, deposed Mayor of Canton. I hadn't seen him since Hong Kong days and he greeted me with enthusiasm. Wu's English is good but just a trifle academic. “Well, well, Miss Hahn!” he cried, shaking hands. “How are you after all this bombing? Still intact?”

It is a tribute to the Pawley family's peculiarly original flavor that more people haven't heard of them. They have a long and fascinating history which dates back to the last generation, when the father of the four boys settled his family on an island in the West Indies and brought them up to do business in a big and imaginative way. I suppose Kipling had the Pawley type in mind in his earlier phase when he was enthusiastically fond of Americans for their initiative and poetry and practical sense of values. Nobody could have lived long at the Chungking Hostel without noticing that there seemed to be rather a lot of Pawley around the place, popping in and out. The thicker-set one who didn't say much, and who rather drawled when he talked, was Ed. The thin nervous one who talked a lot, rapidly, and swung his watch chain round his finger was Bill. At that period we saw only those two Pawleys, but more were to follow. But it was Bill who told me about their factory in Loiwing. They came and went, Ed spending more time in town than Bill. I was slow to realize what an enormous thing it was that they had done, building an entire city in the jungle at the Burma border, bringing large numbers of American engineers and mechanics out there to live, and giving them all the comforts that could be thought of to make them happy about being thus cut off from home. I wanted very much to see the place, but it wasn't to be my destiny. First I couldn't afford the time, then I couldn't afford the plane fare, and in the end (1942) the Japs found Loiwing and wiped it out, all the hygienically screened bungalows and the employees' dance hall and the Capehart and the movie house and the hospital and, of course, the factory and the planes. The Pawleys were always spectacular in a modest way. Once they flew a panda from Chengtu: not a giant panda but a regular one. It looked like a surprised raccoon with the tail of a red fox.