China to Me (69 page)

The Red Cross was at last functioning, though in a limping way, and had succeeded in getting funds to Hong Kong for relief work among the volunteer dependents, whom Selwyn still had hanging around his neck. Zindel was a Roman Catholic and he discovered to his distress that a lot of the women who were applying for relief as soldiers' wives were actually unmarried, though they had children by these men. Catholic Zindel tried earnestly to straighten the matter out by demanding that they show him marriage certificates before they got their money, but too many people had lost their documents in the war to make this fair or feasible. Selwyn was opposed to Zindel's moral attitude, maintaining that common-law wives could be just as hungry and just as needy as the more regular incumbents of the British Army. According to British law they were entitled to help. In my own case I refused indignantly to make a claim for an allowance. “I'm not a dependent of Charles,” I argued when Selwyn put it up to me. “I never was. Carola, yes. I'll apply for Carola, but not for me.”

“Would you not be willing to sacrifice your pride in order to be a test case?” he urged. “If they give in on your account it would be a great blessing to all these wretched women who can't get help. Think it over.”

Very reluctantly I did agree at last and made my claim. Zindel turned me down, though the Japanese were behind me on that. In their simple morality, a man's own woman is his woman, and of course is a dependent, church blessing or no church blessing. They were shocked by Zindel, and I believe that he did ultimately give in, in the other cases, though I never put in another claim. Carola at once got her regulation twenty-five yen a month, and the sum was boosted later to keep pace in its forlorn, lagging way with the rapidly rising cost of living. Nobody pretended that this figure was in any way adequate, being about one fifth of the necessary amount, but it was all the Red Cross could get for the purpose, and that was that.

At the same time funds were sent in from Geneva for Stanley Camp, and for the military prisoners who were not receiving other money. Did you know that according to the Geneva Convention only commissioned officers in military prison camps are paid? Privates go without. That's the truth, and a shocking truth it is. That is one reason why our enlisted men in Stanley were starving. The officers at least had their pay and could pool their resources and buy extra food, but if they had not sent half their monthly money to the men there would have been even more death from malnutrition in the enlisted men's camp. Regarding the pay, the Japs did abide by Geneva rules. It certainly didn't cost them much to do so.

Sometimes thereafter the men got Red Cross money; more often they didn't. There was one unsavory interlude when the Swiss in Tokyo were caught out, juggling with Red Cross funds from Geneva in such a way that they profited heavily on exchange. Infuriated, the Japanese closed down on everything for months. Before the matter was cleared up we had appalling casualties in Hong Kong, from hunger. It should be known as the Swiss Famine, and it went on for more than two months. I doubt if the starvation and suffering in Hong Kong troubled the Tokyo Swiss very much. That year they had something to celebrate, and they celebrated it with enthusiasm: a record of one hundred years of peace in Switzerland.

A fresh blow suddenly fell. Charles was discharged from hospital, though his arm had not recovered. What with epidemics and malnutrition, they needed room at the hospital, and his recovery if it ever did take place would be a long slow process. Except for his arm he was quite strong again, and well enough to take his place in Argyle Camp over in Kowloon with the other officers. Sergeant Sieno told me this apologetically when I turned up at hospital early in November with my parcel. Owing to their nonsensical passion for secrecy, Sieno couldn't tell me what camp Charles had gone to, though there was only one prison camp for commissioned men.

“He's gone to Argyle, of course?” I asked.

Sieno sighed. “I don't know. You must go to Argyle and ask there if they have Boxer. I cannot tell you; it is not permitted. Military secret!”

I was sure and didn't need confirmation. On Monday, parcel day for Argyle, for the first time I joined the other women who rode across the bay to the mainland on the nine o'clock ferry, fought for places on an overcrowded Number 1 bus, and got off about half a mile before they reached headquarters in order to be able to walk past the camp. I discovered to my delight that now I was closer to Charles than I had been at Bowen Road. Our men were waiting at the corner of the barbed-wire enclosure, lounging about carelessly beneath the eyes of the guards who sat in lookout posts high up on stilts, always watching for signals. (Signals of all kinds were forbidden between the prisoners and the public outside.) The men were on only slightly higher ground than we were. At Bowen Road Charles had stood on top of a hill; my view had been foreshortened and unsatisfactory.

Two by two or one by one we walked along, across the street, at a distance of about three hundred meters. We could not stop, or loiter, or look squarely at the camp, nor could we approach closer, for if we did any of these things there would be an enraged shout from the guards, or even an attack. One sentry stood in the road brandishing his bayoneted rifle, waiting eagerly for somebody to break the rules. We walked slowly as we dared, and the men stood there grinning, picking us out as we came by. Charles always walked along step for step with me, up to the other end of the enclosure, and waited there until I had turned the corner into headquarters. His arm slowly grew better; I could see it. At first he carried his helpless left hand behind him, carefully supporting it with the right. As the months went by he became able to swing the injured arm, though the fingers were still immobile. The Japs were supplying massage to him. For this reason too I was glad he had been transferred, although now he was very far away from the house in Kennedy Road. After all, what difference did it make? Only a sentimental one.

I continued to carry parcels to Bowen Road Hospital just the same, because Charles's friends there still depended on me. But at Argyle I had to make a bigger effort for Charles himself. The rules there were less elastic and the Japs spurned homemade food, which meant that I had to spend lots of money on strictly sealed, commercial tinned foods. I planned the weekly parcel with intense care, and after delivering it I went home feeling rather smug, sure that I had sent enough food to keep Charles well for the following week. It was rather a shock, then, to receive his first card from Argyle:

Dear Mickey:

Many thanks for your Monday parcels. They are all the more welcome as I am sharing them with seven other men who get nothing otherwise. …

I cursed and worried and forthwith began trying, willy-nilly, to plan parcels eight times as big as those I had been sending hitherto. If De Roux had not helped me on this work I couldn't have done it. He knew all there was to know about local shopping, and he had Chinese friends who helped me with supplies and advice. He sent his houseboy to carry the extra basket for me. Charles, I am pretty sure, didn't go hungry. At least I sincerely hope he didn't. Making sure that he didn't was my whole existence, save for the effort I put in at home to seeing that Carola too was adequately fed. My universe shrank to the dimensions of a digestive tube. There was nothing else to think about, no world outside, nothing. My stream of consciousness went something like this:

“Eight eggs a week for Charles, two for Carola, that ought to be about even considering their respective sizes and weights. … If I buy a dozen tins of bean curd that will last him six weeks. Will there be any bean curd left in six weeks' time? Shall I invest more money and buy two dozen? Prices will never go down, only up. … I have a dozen slabs of chocolate. Chocolate is one thing Charles assured me in his last card that he doesn't share, so I must go on sending chocolate. I wonder if we can get chocolate until the end of the war? One dozen, twelve Monday mornings, three months. Better not buy more though prices are going up; it won't keep that long. How long will this war go on? Marmite is too expensive. We can try that other stuff, Yeastrel; it costs only half as much and tastes the same. Marmite is vitamins; is Yeastrel equally good? There's no way for Charles to let me know. What can I send for protein? They get no meat or fish. Should I go on hoarding those prunes for Carola? If I open the big tin they'll spoil before she can eat them all, whereas if I send them in to Charles he'll eat them immediately. But it's wicked to give prunes to a man when there's a baby in the family and not many prunes in town. … Still, Carola can eat fresh oranges when they're in season, and I don't think the prisoners will be allowed to accept oranges. Must go to Kowloon this afternoon; Sophie says one shop there has Japanese tinned fruit at a reasonable price. Oh damn, there goes my shoe leather. Now what can I wear to walk past the camp? Wooden clogs? Eight eggs a week for Charles, two for Carola; it doesn't sound right somehow. Remind Selwyn to give me more cod-liver oil if he can spare it. Eight eggs …”

Then there was soap. Or rather, there wasn't. Charles needed a cake of soap every fortnight. We ran out of soap in Hong Kong, until local factories started making it, and they produced inferior stuff without fatty materials which spoiled and crumbled to dust unless you used it up right away. And jam: the supply was dwindling in the market, yet the men needed it. A prisoner could eat lots of jam.

All of these petty troubles shrank to their true proportions after Christmas had come and gone and January had dragged by. In February 1943 the Reign of Terror opened with a bang. It coincided with Wang Ching-wei's belated declaration of war on the Allies.

By this time I was alone in the Kennedy Road house. Phyllis had gone into Free China with the old Gittins parents; Reeny sent for them via the Underground, even sending money with an enthusiastic account of her new job in Kweilin. They got out just before the route was closed by the Japanese take-over of Kwangchowwan. Auntie, frightened away by the fact that we now had to pay rent to the government for tenancy of the house, had moved over to Robinson Road and was living with another old lady, a crony of hers. Losing Auntie's dither was not hardship exactly, but I didn't like living alone. I had become accustomed to vast crowds in the house, and these empty, echoing rooms scared me.

Maria de Roza, the masseuse, turned up at the right moment and gladly accepted my invitation to share the house. She was living with her mother in Kowloon, but she had other sisters and brothers to take her place, and my house was near town, and if Maria was ever to find work again it would be necessary to live near town. That worked out all right. Maria was a nice girl and we left each other alone in a satisfactory way.

Life was getting complicated for the local young girls. Some of them were already expert little tarts, partly because their schools were closed, they couldn't find jobs, and they were bored. They would haunt the cafés, coming in in pairs or alone. They would sit at tables until parties of soldiers or sailors or gendarmes picked them up, but competition with the regular hostesses was keen, and these restaurant girls resented amateurs. In the end most of them, like the others, took jobs as hostesses; it was simpler and it avoided this professional difficulty. A few of them were cleverer, and if they did practice the oldest trade in the world it was in private. They went only to parties, not public cafés. I have seen girls I knew well slipping into geisha houses where presumably they met their hosts in private rooms. I would sigh and shake my head for all the world like one of my own old aunts, or like any respectable old cat. I felt old and respectable.

The Reign of Terror had been in force some months before I was aware of it. Among my best friends was a Chinese dentist well known to all the “foreigners” in Hong Kong long before the war. After I came back to May Road I made the disturbing discovery that my teeth were going bad and my hair falling out. Johnny could do nothing about the hair condition, which was due to my bad diet, but he did work hard on my teeth, and he insisted on putting off the reckoning indefinitely. He was a darling. He did his best for all of us. It was one of the biggest shocks I received during the war when Johnny disappeared. It was horrible. His wife and children, his mother and friends were wild with worry before they found out that the gendarmes had spirited him away, and then the worry was even more intense.

Johnny was held for a month. It was the first time we had run into this manifestation of Japanese justice and we learned a lot from it. The gendarmes never admitted officially that they had taken him prisoner. Inside, they never told him why he had been thus kidnaped, either. They starved, beat, and tortured him, and on the day he was released they cautioned him never to tell anybody where he had been, but to announce to the world that he had been ill and in hospital. He still doesn't know why they did it. I heard from him all the details of his torture, from the “water treatment” to the thumb-hanging.

We thought that the arrest might have had something to do with gendarme suspicions of Selwyn and the vast net of espionage which they obviously thought Selwyn was managing. But it was all so vague, and Johnny's family had been so terrified, that we couldn't make it out. Following this arrest, others came on us thick and fast. One by one almost anybody might disappear, Chinese, Indians, Eurasians, and especially Europeans. The gendarmes did not always maintain much secrecy in their methods; in the case of one young Chinese friend of mine they simply marched into his bedroom at four in the morning, robbed the room of all the money and jewels they could find, insulted his wife with foul words, and dragged him out in handcuffs.

There were around town quite a few British and one or two Americans who had been, as we called it, “guaranteed out” of Stanley by neutral friends. At one time Oda had seemed quite eager to get as many people out of camp as possible, and if a Swiss or Portuguese or French citizen would sign a paper promising that his friend would not work against the Japanese and that his expenses would be met, these enemy nationals were permitted to come into town and live comparatively freely, as I did. The Foreign Affairs officials lived to regret this kindness, for the gendarmes found excuses to arrest one after another of the free enemy nationals. Some were released after weeks of bad treatment and questioning; others were not, and are still there, unless they are dead. I was not overly worried for myself. Officially I was Chinese, not an enemy, and though all Chinese didn't escape, I hoped for the best.