Hiroshima Joe (52 page)

Stoker Blue from Adelaide ignored this wisecrack.

‘Billy, who understands Nippo, travels in our truck to the plating works, told me he heard one of the shopkeepers say he was clean out of something he couldn’t quite make out and he wasn’t sure when or if he’d get a new supply.’

‘Think they’ll pack it in?’

‘Who knows?’

‘Anyway, who gives a brass farthing if the bastards are hungry or not? Let ’em bloody starve. Taste of their own sodding medicine. If they got any.’

This irony was greeted with hoots of derisory guffaws and slow hand-clapping. The friendly mockery quickly petered out as soon as a guard appeared approaching across the yard.

*   *   *

A week later the weather broke. Great clouds gathered on the horizon in the middle of the day and, by evening, the sky was covered with a dull blanket. The rain was a dismal drizzle at first but it gradually increased until it was a torrential downpour. Water spouted off the roofs and cascaded into the dirt. The guttering could not cope and the latrine sumps filled to overflowing. The honey-carters did not call and the prisoners were obliged to dig a pit at the edge of the compound in which to pour the effluent of their community.

Digging the pit in the pelting rain was back-breaking work. The wind had risen as well to make matters more difficult. Sandingham took his turn at the shovels, lifting the cloying mud out of the quagmire to be slapped and paddled into a wall around the rim. In this way, they hoped, the dug earth might act as a dam and deepen the volume of the cesspit. By the time it was completed it was twenty feet long by ten wide and ten deep. Before they commenced using it it was a foot deep in greyish-brown water. The remainder of the rest day was spent filling the pit from the latrine with a bucket chain.

When the rain abated and they returned to the timber yard the prisoners were faced with a panorama of semi-dereliction. The wind had lifted part of the corrugated-iron roof and twisted it back on itself. The wing of metal sheeting sticking up had acted as a funnel and guided two inches of rainwater into the sawing shed. The damage and chaos were considerable.

‘Look at it,’ remarked CPO Bairstowe. ‘Like the deck after a mess night. Only no broken bottles or smashed pianos.’

The machines were damp, the electric motors shorted out with the water. The stock of planking was dripping wet and the plywood, soaked through, had warped and buckled to uselessness.

‘No wuk!’ bawled the
hancho.
His next sentence translated approximately into, ‘Let’s get this bloody shambles tidied up.’

It took more than that day, amidst squally showers, to get the roof battened down and the shed cleared and dried out. The wet timber and plywood was stacked in the farthest corner of the yard and ignited with a can of diesel fuel and used gearbox oil, for which act the
hancho
got a resounding telling-off from the touring foreman late in the afternoon. Vehicular fuel was scarce enough and the oil could have been better used for heating in the winter.

Twice in the week following the storms the timber yard was subjected to air-raid alerts. When the sirens were heard from the city ten miles away, or relayed by phone from a command centre of some sort, the
hancho
would rush into each of the buildings and blow three short blasts on a football referee’s whistle. This was a signal to switch off all the machinery and lighting and line up at the door in Indian file. At a command from the
hancho
the file would jog out of the building and over towards the stockpile of untouched tree trunks. In the centre of this a bunker of sorts had been constructed. It was really just a low log cabin affair, over which the raw trunks had been piled higgledy-piggledy until they were ready for the saws and planers. Although makeshift it seemed likely to provide ample protection from anything but a direct hit.

Once in the bunker, which had only the one entrance, the guards would squat by the door while the prisoners and their Japanese co-workers would sit cross-legged in rows. They were forbidden to speak. When the all-clear sounded, or the
hancho
was called to the telephone by the ringing of the exterior yard bell, they struggled out in lines and paraded in the yard for ten minutes’ physical jerks, conducted by the
hancho,
to shift the cramp of the air-raid shelter.

The first raid was a non-event. They could hear the high-altitude drone of bombers but not bombs dropping or any form of retaliatory ground-to-air fire. The second was not a raid as such but the timber yard was buzzed five or six times by a pair of fighters. They flew in low from the coast, the hum of their engines expanding to a crashing crescendo as they passed overhead at under five hundred feet. They banked towards the hills inland and returned. No gunfire occurred either from the cannons on the aircraft or the ground.

When they were gone, the prisoners chattered about the visitation.

‘Recce. They’ll invade near here. US Marine landing zone.’

‘Wasn’t a strafing run…’

‘Maybe this area’ll be a parachute-dropping zone. It’s flat. Got some cover.’

‘Chump! Got muddy fields as well. Fancy dropping into the clag?’

‘Sussing out the lie of land for likely targets.’

‘Looking for the camp, maybe. Liberation plans?’

Their ideas swerved from the possible military justifications of such a flight mission to the optimism of release.

*   *   *

‘Today’s 27 July.’

‘So what, Smudger?’

‘It’s me wedding anniversary.’

No one replied. A year before, someone might have offered to send him flowers or beg a peek at his sexy letters – of which he had received none – or rib him for remembering. Now they threw each other glum looks which took on an even sadder air from the guttering peanut-oil lamps.

To change the subject and draw Smudger off his misery, someone said, ‘What do you think that mission today was for? Not bombing again.’

‘I know what it was all about,’ commented one of the Americans. ‘We saw it in the docks. Leaflet raid. A B29 flew over at about twelve thou’ and dropped leaflets. I got one. Some drifted on to the quay. The Nips were fast as hell collecting them up so that we didn’t get to see, but I found one later blown under a crate. It’s in Nip.’

He rummaged between the cracks of his bunk, under the centre of his straw mat, and extracted a many-folded sheet of white paper.

Sandingham handed the leaflet to one of the Dutch officers who could read Japanese. The man studied it for a few minutes, holding it at an angle and close to the smokey flame.

‘What’s it say, Jan?’

‘It is from the American High Command,’ he explained. ‘It is quite long but what it says, in short, is that if Japan does not surrender then the Allied forces will destroy Hiroshima.’

Mishima, thought Sandingham, and
bukimi.
The idea was there. All that was to follow was the act itself.

‘What did the Japs in the docks think of this?’

‘Not a lot, sir,’ said one of the others who worked in the dockyards.

The senior British officer had entered the barrack in time to hear the translator’s interpretation. Now the dock-worker was speaking.

‘I only heard a few of the guards chattering and couldn’t understand much of their jabber. But the Jap who works the crane hoist on my jetty, who’s a decent sort of bloke – he let me know they were laughing at it. Scoffing at it. They don’t think it’s on, I suppose.’

On his bunk, Sandingham resolved to tell Mishima of the leaflets and, the next day, as soon as the opportunity arose, he did so.

‘I, too, have seen one of them,’ was the reply. ‘It scares me very much. I think there will be a big air raid on Hiroshima.’

He confirmed that many people took the threat the leaflets promised lightly.

‘There is one good thing,’ Mishima said later in the day. ‘My house is a long way from the centre of the city or the industrial sites where they will drop their bombs. My wife and I shall be safe or have time to run. The nearest place to bomb to my house is the railway station, and that is nearly a mile away.’

*   *   *

All day long at the timber yard Sandingham had had a sense of apprehension which he could not quite put into words.

The day had started cloudy but had cleared to become a warm and fine afternoon. By evening the rainy weather was a thing of the past but it left its legacy of air filtered clean of dust and summer heat. Driving back to the camp in the lorry, he had seen the countryside around bathed in a charm and beauty hitherto unseen or unacknowledged.

His uneasiness transferred itself to his friends.

‘What’s up, Joe? Feeling ill?’

‘No. Just odd.’

‘Gut-ache?’

‘No. Not exactly. Sort of emptiness. Sort of butterflies or stage-fright mixed with a little nausea.’

He stared at his arms and legs in the pure rays of the evening sun and studied the shadows that lingered under his taut skin. His joints were boney and his muscles, though not badly shrunken, showed very obviously the fact that he was starving. He looked at his comrades as if for the first time and knew that they too, were slowly dying of malnutrition. He caught a glimpse of his reflection in the rear window of the driver’s cab. His cheekbones were becoming prominent and his eyes sunken with the mascara of hunger tingeing the lids and spaces under his lower lashes. His skin was pallid and the paleness was accentuated by the bare sunlight. Yet he was still, to his own astonishment when he gave it thought in the sleepless night hours, unscarred by any of the terrible diseases that wracked some of his colleagues.

‘Empty belly, empty mind,’ advised a fellow officer.

That night there were two air-raid warnings but the prisoners were left undisturbed in their barracks. Only four times in the previous three months had they been taken to the shelter constructed beside the main guardhouse, between it and the
eiso.
Even then the aircraft had flown on. The guards were certain that the bombers were either not interested in their area or else knew of the lettering on the roof and therefore avoided the place. The hassle of getting all the prisoners up, out to the shelter, through the inevitable
tenko
that would be necessary, and back into their huts was just not worth the effort.

Sandingham could not doze off. Each time the alert came he slipped softly through the sleeping, grunting, fidgeting sleepers to the shutter crack and peered out. The starlight was prominent but he could not see or even hear aircraft.

Eventually he was able to let his mind slip into an uneasy doze from which he kept waking himself by moving and itching.

*   *   *

At morning
tenko,
just after six o’clock, the prisoners were informed that the truck taking those who were employed in the timber yard to work would be an hour late. The five lorries transporting those who went to the Mitsubishi shipyards and the docks left on time at a quarter to seven.

At half-past seven, after the commandant had been informed of the all-clear having being given, Sandingham and the others boarded their truck and settled themselves into the back. There had been a warning given just after seven, as the truck was arriving, and this had delayed their departure. The warning had apparently been a false alarm.

The tarpaulin cover had been removed from the framework several weeks before and, instead of the well-patched canvas awning, they now had a morning-blue summer sky over their heads.

The road to the timber yard was busier than usual, Sandingham thought. Cyclists and some motor vehicles came and went in both directions. Pedestrians were somehow more numerous, too. He wondered why, then realised that it was probably due to the fact that the air-raid warning had delayed some from leaving home and now they were seeking to catch up on their daily routines. What was more, he was usually in the timber yard by now and so was not familiar with the public activities of this time of the morning.

At a crossroads, the lorry stopped to allow a bullock cart to negotiate the junction. The animal was nervy and did not want to get too near to the vehicle. To allay its fear, the driver backed up the side lane and switched off the ignition.

There was a comparative silence punctuated only by the owner of the cart trying to cajole the bullock forward.

‘Hear it?’ Toni asked.

Toni Ardizzoni was from New York. Little Italy. Corner of Greene and Spring, where his father had a delicatessen, of which Toni was inordinately proud: he hoped to inherit it, or at least manage it, after the war. Toni had been responsible for making the shop’s fresh tortellini. He had also flown B29s as a navigator.

‘What?’ Sandingham could hear nothing in the aftermath of the chuddering of the motor.

‘Another aircraft.’

They all looked up. Even one of the guards gave a quick turn of his head towards the sky.

‘Can’t see anything.’

The bullock was padding the ground, its hooves kicking the dirt about with fear and frustration.

‘I can. Left of the small cloud. It’s a plane. No – it’s two, I think.’

‘Got it.’

‘What is it, Toni?’

‘That high, it’s gotta be one o’ my babies. Movin’ slow, too.’

As he spoke, they saw the dot alter course. Another dot and possibly a third followed it on a parallel change of direction.

‘They’re veering off. Weather planes?’

‘Mebbe.’

The bullock was smacked on its rump with a bamboo cane. It took some tentative steps forward. The cart lurched behind it and the driver waved his hand to urge the animal on. It jittered and tried to skip in its shafts. A wicker basket containing two emaciated cockerels fell off the rear of the cart and rolled in the dust, the occupants squawking with annoyance. Once over the crossroads, the carter waved his thanks to the driver who returned the gesture.

Reaching to the ignition key, he was about to twist it when it happened.

There was a sharp flash on the horizon. It was a blue colour, like an electric spark of magnificent proportions. A few seconds later there was a warmth in the air like a summer breeze but not blowing, not moving at all.