China to Me (48 page)

Charles stood there looking from right to left, and Alf looked at him, and so did Max. “You've got to get out of this,” said Charles.

“Where to?” I asked.

“Well, anywhere else. I didn't realize … You're between two batteries here, you see.”

“Are you,” said Hilda, “telling us?”

“You ought to go to the Canavals' house,” said Charles, “in Pokfulam. They wouldn't mind. Or Repulse Bay.”

“And what about food?”

He looked miserable, and I said quickly, “It's really not that bad. It just sounds bad. They haven't come near us yet, and anywhere else will be the same.”

“You're between two batteries,” said Charles.

Alf broke in, his voice rough with disapproval. “You can say the same for every house in the Colony, old boy,” he said.

It was time for them to go. Charles and I walked up the driveway arm in arm, and we were laughing. “I can't help it,” he said, “when I think of all these fat Chinese bankers. They've been running away from this for years. And now, at last, right in the heart of the British Colony — caught!”

“Yes,” I said, giggling, “it's damn funny.”

Alf and Max turned their backs while we kissed each other good-by, and I came back to the house feeling fine.

“It just occurred to me, my dear,” said Hilda, “that you might have wanted to see Charles alone. Next time, why don't you take him upstairs?”

But there was no next time.

It was an open secret that the Japs were landing on the island. We could see it happening, from a certain point on the Peak. Not that we took much time to go out walking, but sometimes we had to go over to the distributing center for our milk and supplies, which were rather spasmodically given out. One day we had dozens of loaves of bread and nothing else, and another time we had pounds of spoiling beef, and nothing else again. That, by the way, was a large factor of our defeat: the failure of transportation. It was sabotage, mostly. The Chinese chauffeurs had dozens of little ways to do it; they swiped the carburetor, for instance, or just drained the gas tank, or wrecked the truck, or took it, load and all, to a prearranged place to wait for the Japs and never came back. Selwyn was doing his damnedest, making armed escorts go along with the trucks whenever he could find somebody to go. But we were running short of drivers. They tried to persuade me to join up, but Charles objected on the grounds of Carola's milk supply. A girl we knew, Gwen Priestwood, was borrowed from the A.N.S. to drive a lorry and she was doing very well.

We still had the radio, and a semblance of peace after dark when the planes stopped coming over. We heard about the sinking of the Prince of Wales and the Repulse, down at Singapore; we were all struck speechless except Hilda, who gasped loudly and said, “Oh, my God.” After that we stopped talking about help coming from the south. We knew. We saw less and less of Selwyn, but whenever he did turn up he brought fresh strength somehow. I never knew anyone who could radiate it the way he did. And yet I can't say, honestly, that I liked him. Constance adored him and wanted only to die for him. Hilda presumably loved him, or she wouldn't have married him and had his baby. There I was, rather disliking him if anything, critical of his technique, still swayed by his personality until I, too, would have died if he had suggested it. Very odd.

“You know,” said Nina once in her offhand way, “Selwyn thinks he's God.” That struck me; it rang with truth. Later I was to realize it sharply. It was more than the ordinary careless remark; it summed up the situation.

The radio from London told us blithely that we were putting up a splendid and winning fight. The Japanese were being cleared off the island, said the radio. That evening they had moved into the Repulse Bay Hotel, incidentally, but I'm not going to waste much time talking about that. At the present date I can think of five books people have written about the Repulse Bay Hotel and the Japanese; why should I add to it? I wasn't there. I was shivering on the Peak, listening to the radio. Dr. Harry Talbot had come in from the hospital to try to cheer us up; we sat in the cellar and he sang to the children. He has a nice voice. Afterward we stood out under the stars and he talked blisteringly about the war.

I saw a certain amount of corruption in high places, but it doesn't seem terribly important now. There was a man who wandered drunkenly about the Peak, alternating between d.t.'s and sudden forays into the war. Sometimes he thought he was doing Red Cross work, and then he was a nuisance in the hospital. Sometimes he thought he was back in the last war, and then he lay on his large belly in a trench he had caused to be dug in his front garden. Sometimes he distributed Food Control supplies. He sent Hilda two sacks of rice from the Food Control stores, and several bottles of booze. Hilda owned up to the booze when Selwyn came home and he gave them to me and told me, curtly, to take them back, which I did.

Until our wartime home was broken up, though, I didn't get a real look at the disorder that generally prevailed. In Selwyn's house, until the last, we may have been distressed but we held the fort and maintained a semblance of principle and order. I smile now when I realize how innocent I was, until that day that Selwyn told us to move into the War Memorial. The Japs were landing in such numbers that he had decided we had better shift. He had always held this plan in mind, a sort of ideal picture of hospitals and their use for the civilian population during battle. “The women and children,” he had said, “will retire to the hospitals for safety.” Blueprint stuff.

I was on duty in the War Memorial, and the whole thing was sprung on me. Suddenly I saw Bridget and John Armstrong walking single file, with Mary behind them, through the hospital corridor. After them came a coolie with a couple of suitcases. After them, Ah Cheung carrying Carola. I hurried over to ask what it was.

“We're moving,” said John shrilly. “The Japs are coming.”

I went back into the dispensary and sat down. Then after a minute I realized that Mrs. Murdock, the woman in charge, was feeding me aspirin and handing me a handkerchief, quite urgently. Dr. Kirk stood behind her, looking kind. I must have been crying.

“I'm sorry,” I said.

“Never you mind,” said Mrs. Murdock. “You should have seen me the first day when my husband left.”

“There, there,” said Dr. Kirk, patting my shoulder.

“What do they do to officers?” I asked.

“There, there,” said Dr. Kirk.

Chapter 39

I wasn't fated to stay long in the War Memorial Hospital, but my impressions of that short interval are vivid. It would be difficult to convince the American public of the strange state of affairs that obtained in Hong Kong with regard to the nurses. We call them nurses; the English call them all, regardless of church, sisters. Nurses are lower creatures, according to the English; the little cuties that we know as probationers are nurses, over there. That isn't particularly strange. What is strange is that the sisters, wherever I encountered them and almost without exception, suffered from hallucinations. They thought they were crosses between police matrons and queens. I had not noticed this from my eminence as a citizen in good standing with a bank account, though during my confinement I did resent being bullied, as one always does in an old-fashioned hospital. Now, as a refugee, it was different.

The War Memorial, owing to its location on the Peak, never did play much of a part in the hostilities. Now and then some soldiers were brought in, if they had been wounded near by, but there never was much fighting near the top of the mountain and the bombing casualties were picked up downtown or out in the suburbs; it was simpler and nearer to take them to St. Paul's in Happy Valley or to the Queen Mary around the island, in Pokfulam. This was just as well, I suppose, for the War Memorial, though it was the swankiest place among hospitals in the town, had been more of a nursing home than a real hospital, and it wasn't well equipped with medicines or anything else. None of the hospitals were well equipped as far as drugs and dressings were concerned. For some years the government had held them down to pennies; when I had Carola, for example, they hadn't been able to give my ankle a fresh bandage until I myself telephoned the chemist in town and had a bandage sent out, C.O.D. The same went for all extra medicaments. Such supplies as they had on hand were held against the great day, but when the day came the supplies were still inadequate. The government hospital, the Queen Mary, had a splendid X-ray and electrical therapy outfit, but it was short on surgical beds. I recall vividly that the War Memorial had only three splints in the whole building, which was awkward when the soldiers began to come in with broken limbs.

Although they weren't loaded down with patients, the sisters were frightened and harassed, and bitterly resented us, the refugees. Not only the Selwyn-Clarke household, but the whole Food Control Committee moved in on them that day, for they had been bombed out two or three times and they thought the hospital at least would be left standing. If we hadn't been the family of Dr. Selwyn-Clarke, the director, we would have been turned away. In spite of Selwyn's orders, most refugees were. The sisters gathered in their own rooms and talked about the horrors of war, or galloped about being unpleasant to everyone. They still felt a bit safer than the rest of us, however; they were unconsciously sure that they had the immunity of the sacrosanct. Doctors and nurses are always left alone, they told themselves. It gave them a certain smugness.

The worst factor of the War Memorial was an American gentleman whose name, fortunately, I cannot remember. He sat in an office on the ground floor and snarled at people. When he was tired of saying no upstairs he went down to the kitchen and said no there. The kitchen was overburdened: not only were meals being cooked there, but instruments had to be boiled, and the more refugees who gathered the more people were milling about in the kitchen, trying to prepare food and boil water to drink. The American got to the stage where he stood at the kitchen door and wouldn't let anybody come in at all. He must have thought he was being efficient and organizing things. He wouldn't let the sisters in to boil instruments. He wouldn't let any of us in to get water. He wouldn't let anybody do anything, until at last we ignored him and went ahead anyway. It was an interesting study. People often tend to go dictator under stress. They start ordering other people about and threatening them with dire penalties.

In the course of the day we all started being hungry. It was the beginning of a long period of hunger for us, but we didn't know that. At first we were hungry because we couldn't get in to cook our food, but next day it became evident that we didn't have enough food to go around, cooked or uncooked. I then saw how things worked out in wartime. The Food Control people had plenty of food, naturally, and they had the first sitting in the little room next to the kitchen, when the American manager had at last been removed. They had potted meat and bread and all sorts of things. We watched with bright-eyed interest until it was time for our turn, and then we didn't have anything to eat at all but a dollop of rice or cereal. It hurt our feelings. It made me furious. It startled Hilda, who was accustomed to being the wife of Dr. Selwyn-Clarke, in spite of all her broad-minded political tendencies. Hilda was looking very thoughtful. The War Memorial wasn't really Selwyn's own stamping ground; it was a private concern. Selwyn's hospitals were the government ones, the Queen Mary on the island and the Kowloon Hospital on the mainland. Hilda began to wonder.

I was in a worse position; I was Hilda's poor relation without even the standing of a relation. I envied Vera Armstrong, who had taken her family back to their own house, saying that she preferred the shells to the hospitality of the War Memorial. We had been given a room, and cots were dug out somehow. I don't really blame the sisters for resenting us, knowing that they were worried about their equipment and that they still expected a flood of wounded to come in later. They probably resented Hilda on general principles anyway. I don't exactly blame them; I can understand them. But I don't love them much.

We slept that night, about eleven of us (including Selwyn, who hated sharing his room with anybody), in a hospital room. I was out on the porch, nearest the tall glass windows, and at midnight something smashed the window and showered me with bits of glass. I wasn't cut, because it was cold and I had rolled up like a caterpillar in my blanket. The next day we all had to crowd inside the room and it was pretty dismal. The shelling was getting much, much worse, and for two days I hadn't heard at all from Charles, and he didn't know we had moved.

Also the milk situation was beginning to get me down. I had started the war with what I always considered a spare case of powdered milk, twelve two-and-a-half-pound tins of Cow and Gate. Until the war we had used cow's milk with lactic acid for supplementary feeding, but now that was impossible and we had to break into the Cow and Gate. Carola's appetite was increasing, and each tin was good at the most for eleven days, on our half-and-half schedule. I began counting up the time that the whole case would last. Then I wondered how I could go on, in the face of all these removals, carrying the big clumsy cans with me. I had a dream of myself trying to catch a train or a plane or something — you know those dreams — and I had the cans and the baby to carry, and I kept dropping one or the other. Then I realized that when the looting started they would probably take my cans of milk away anyway. I asked Selwyn what he thought, and he said:

“Bury the tins in the garden, by night.” But now we had moved away from the garden: that wouldn't do. I would just have to step up my own milk, I decided. It had never increased as much as it should, but if Carola helped, and if we kept working at it, perhaps … I had read a book about that, by Trubee King.

But Carola wouldn't co-operate. She preferred the Cow and Gate. She just took my milk as a sort of polite gesture, and she wasn't going to take any more than she was used to. I thought about it, and thought, and thought. There wasn't enough work to keep my mind off it. There wasn't enough food to keep me going anyway.