Hiroshima Joe (9 page)

There was a knock on the door. Sandingham looked up, startled. He realised he must have been dozing. A corporal entered. He looked haggard and tired. Even though it was winter, the armpits of his battle-dress were ringed with dark sweat stains. He smelt of cordite and brass.

‘First light, sir.’

Sandingham had to go. He had been instructed to leave the truck and its driver at the battery and make his own way back to Fortress HQ. Quite how he hadn’t been told. It would take him two hours to walk.

He explained his problem to the major.

‘There’s a motorbike in one of the storerooms,’ offered the other. ‘Brought up here by a despatch rider. Got a granite splinter in his arm two days ago. Why not take that?’

The major led Sandingham through a maze of stone-lined corridors. The motorbike was a heavy, olive-green BSA B30 with the typically masked front light and the rear bulb removed. He sat astride it, turned the ignition key and kicked the starting pedal down. The engine refused to fire at first, but finally it bucked into life and Sandingham took leave of the major after twisting his cap around so that its peak lay over the back of his neck.

‘Take it easy, Captain. Remember what they say.’

‘What do they say, sir?’ he replied over the chattering of the motorcycle, but the major had turned and re-entered his concrete stronghold.

It was light enough not to need to use the shuttered headlamp. Sandingham stopped just outside the battery to ponder which route would be best. He could go back up to the top of The Peak then ride down the mountainside on the Peak Road, half of his journey out of sight of Kowloon, he could go down the steep Old Peak Road where he would be in view from the mainland for most of the way, or he could drive down to the Hong Kong University buildings below and then go through the western end of the city on Hong Kong Island. He chose the last way: although the road was cursed by many bends it took him through the wooded western slopes of the mountain.

It was going to be a dull day. While he had been sipping the major’s rum and nodding off the sky had clouded and the stars had been extinguished. Now a light mist hovered above The Peak.

He rode slowly, careful to avoid the potholes caused by recent shelling, savouring the cool air upon his face, a welcome relief after the stuffiness of the battery office. The world had the silence and peacefulness of early morning and it was hard to believe that war was all around him, hiding in the air and the sea and the buildings across the harbour. Birds flitted through the branches of the trees and he thought he saw a monkey at a bend in the narrow road where it crossed a trickle of stream. Near the university, however, the illusion dissolved when he saw a Hillman pulled in by the side of the road, its window shattered.

He made for the waterfront, stopping short of Des Vouex Road West in the cover of the harbour-facing buildings. The streets which ran to the quays were blocked or sandbagged. Two soldiers were leaning on a table taken from a shop, their rifles propped against the wall though they both still had on their steel helmets. A brew-up was just ready and the sight of the small fire burning on the pavement made Sandingham realise how thirsty the rum had made him.

They had not expected an officer on a despatch rider’s mount and at first didn’t change their stance. As soon as they saw Sandingham’s uniform, however, they jumped to their feet and saluted, simultaneously flicking their half-smoked cigarettes along the gutter into a puddle.

‘Easy,’ he said.

They relaxed and grinned sheepishly at him.

‘Any action during the night?’

‘We ’ad some chinkies come over, sir,’ said one of the pair. ‘Come in one of them sampans, like.’ He spoke with a West Riding accent and it suddenly struck Sandingham as very odd to hear such a voice under a wooden, white-painted sign with red Chinese characters on it.

‘We open’ fire in t’dark,’ continued the man, ‘but they yell at us in English. Sergeant come up, says, “Stop firin’, you dumb bastards. ’Em’s friends.”’

‘We ’elp ’em up the steps,’ said the other. ‘It were lucky we didn’t ’it any of ’em.’

They offered him a mug of tea and he readily accepted it, taking one of the soldier’s billy cans while the soldier got hold of a rice bowl from under the table and drank from that. Sandingham took out a flat, yellow tin of State Express 555 and offered the cigarettes round. Both soldiers thanked him, took one each, and put them in their breast pockets. He lit one for himself from the fire.

The tea warmed him. He wanted to ask the two soldiers if they had any food but knew that would be tactless. Supplies were running low and their distribution growing more difficult by the day. The Chinese population were having to form long queues for rice and other staple foods and the soldiers and Hong Kong Police had been given the order to machine-gun looters.

After he had finished his cigarette, Sandingham walked down the short street to the quayside on Connaught Road, leaving the motorbike propped on the kerb out of sight of the harbour. There, tucked into the ground floor of a small godown, was a machine-gun nest manned by three soldiers. Even fifty yards from the tea-drinkers the atmosphere was completely altered. These men were alert and scanning the harbour across their entire arc of fire. They made to rise as he entered.

‘Don’t get up,’ he said, as if he were a schoolmaster entering a room of studious boys whom he did not want to disturb.

The harbour surface was still dawn-grey. Nothing moved on it. The usual traffic of junks and sampans and small craft was totally absent. A grey slick against the hills was Stonecutters Island. From behind it a trickle of smoke was rising and spreading like a drop of paint in murky water.

‘Nip ship,’ said a lance-corporal whose task it was to feed the ammunition belt into the breach. He spoke with deliberately clipped syllables and his two mates quietly laughed at his joke.

Sandingham was amazed how three men, days if not hours away from their deaths, could be so blasé, so humorous. He felt a shiver pass up his spine; but he joined in with their laughter.

*   *   *

The room itself shared a sultry air of great weariness with its occupants. The clock on the gloss-painted wall by the door, like those usually found in rural railway station waiting-rooms, with large Roman numerals on a white-painted face, had stopped at ten minutes to two, though whether a.m. or p.m. no one either knew or cared. The maps pinned on the boards were smothered in red pencil lines, squiggles and arrows, and the three tables were littered with signals, message pads, red- and blue-coloured pencils, cipher and encoding books, artillery manuals, rulers and set-squares, various bits of personal military issue and more maps, some folded, some opened, some torn and most out-of-date if only by hours. One of them seemed to sum it all up. It was a small-scale map of Hong Kong harbour. A wit had drawn a scarlet line down the centre of the water and drawn ‘Them’ over the mainland and ‘Us’ over the island. The nine hills of Kowloon had been roughly shaped with indelible pencil into a crude goal-mouth: a second was drawn on Wong Nai Chung Gap. Another hand had written below ‘Japs 1: Diehards 0 – half-time score.’

At the biggest of the tables sat Sandingham. His chin was cupped in his hands and his eyelids were drooping. Even having shaved with cold water had not helped fight the fatigue that was seeping through him. Before him was an enamel plate on which was a thick slice of bread smeared with a sort of jam and next to that a cooling yellow mush. He had drunk the weak tea in one draught from a chipped white mug that matched the plate.

‘I sometimes wonder if the British Army doesn’t survive on tea, tinned jam and powdered eggs.’

He looked up. He had forgotten that Bob Bellerby was across the chaos of paper from him. He too had a plate of simulated scrambled egg in front of him and, similarly, his had not been eaten. He preferred to push the food round his plate with a fork, building it into small anaemic-coloured hills, dunes and bunkers.

‘If it had a knob of butter on it…’ Sandingham said, looking woefully at the unappetising attempt at the breakfast that one of their brother officers had produced by balancing a saucepan on a one-man, solid-fuel field stove.

‘… it would still be inedible,’ answered Bob.

When the telephone rang on the table beneath the light, and the officer in charge went to answer it, Bob surreptitiously dumped his share of the food into the wastepaper-basket where it clung glutinously to the top of the discarded notes. He tore several sheets from a message pad, crumpled them then spread them over the remains.

An orderly came in to refill the mugs of tea. The officer for whom he had been batman had been killed in the first days of the Japanese advance over the border with China. He had died in a slit trench on Crest Hill, overlooking the railway line and the Lo Wu crossing point. He had been bayonetted. The batman had watched from higher up the hill, and had succeeded in turn in killing the enemy soldier. His shot had hit him in the neck. Even at forty yards he had seen the blood spurt out in a little spray from the severed jugular. Later, he had found the Japanese soldier’s body further down the hill, his hand stuck to his neck by a massive, hardened clot. He had felt no emotion at all.

‘’Nother cup, sir? ’Fraid there’s no sugar.’

His accent was south London, flat of tone and lifeless. Or perhaps, Sandingham thought, that was just the way it seemed. Most things seemed flat; dead or dying. He had to keep awake. He was still on duty. To give way to sleep now would lead to inefficiency, perhaps negligence. If he were negligent someone would be let down, possibly even killed: or he might let himself down and the chain of events in his life would be altered minutely in the present, magnifying as time passed until he, too, might be killed by this long-lost and forgotten moment of inattention. It was like stepping on a butterfly now and causing a bird to die far in the future. By allowing himself to sleep he might be initiating an act of suicide: a bizarre thought. He could kill himself by sleeping.

‘Jay! We’ve got two hours.’

‘What!’

He was jerked back to the present. Bob had placed his Sam Browne belt on the table and was checking his Webley .455 pistol. A box of bullets had been ripped apart and the little brass cases lay scattered about on the maps, looking like miniature fingers. Bob scooped up a handful and put them in his trouser pocket. The lieutenant-colonel from across the room came over and did likewise. Sandingham took the remainder.

‘Time off. C’mon, let’s go.’

The tea in the mug was brackish, the water over-chlorinated, but he drank it before they left the room. It somehow prepared him for the daylight, and there was no way of knowing when or if another cup would arrive.

He realised that increasingly he was pondering upon many of his most ordinary actions. Would this be the last time he would ever write his name, look at his watch, scratch his brow? In eternity? He could not accept such a concept even in the company of the dark angel. The chaplain at school had always warned him of that: beware the dark angel and be prepared for his visitation.

As they went outside it was still overcast. The cloudbase had risen a few thousand feet but the day was still grey and cheerless. There was no sound. No birds, crickets or cicadas were chirruping. No traffic was moving: or very little.

‘It’s like before a storm. Or an earthquake.’ Sandingham sensed Bob was thinking the same. ‘Where are we going?’

‘I’ve a new billet. Secret.’ Bob Bellerby grinned like a schoolboy who had a tree-house to which parents couldn’t climb. ‘How was Repulse Bay?’

‘Paradisiacal.’

They had reached a parade ground around which a border of white-washed stones was arranged. Wherever the British soldier stayed more than a day, Sandingham thought, he inevitably painted stones white and arranged them in a square. Two thousand years from now an archaeologist digging in the rubble of history would find one of the stones and instantly assume with conviction that an army was once here and that army had fought a battle and …

They both saluted the major as he came up to them. He acknowledged them.

‘Captain Sandingham, Bellerby: good morning, though’ – he looked apprehensively upward at the sky – ‘I can see little good about it.’

He rubbed his hands together to generate heat in the palms. Sandingham felt, by transference, the chill of the day.

‘Nip in the air, sir?’ asked Bob.

The major guffawed loudly and briefly.

‘Very good, Bellerby! Not losing your touch for an apt remark. Keep it up! If your pecker stays aloft, your men’s will.’

He turned on his heel and walked smartly across the diagonal of the parade ground.

There was a whistle – faint, like a dog call vibrating from far away, its note screwed just within the audible reaches of the human ear. Sandingham and Bob instinctively fell flat on the ground, covering their heads with their arms.

The shell did not explode with a bang, more of a thump, landing in a flower bed of wintering geraniums across the parade ground. A rush of warm air blew up Sandingham’s back and both men were showered with fine grit, earth and pebbles.

‘Run!’ Bob Bellerby was up, tugging at Sandingham’s elbow. He glanced in the direction of the major who was on his feet apparently unhurt, and brushing down his uniform with a show of indignant annoyance.

Sandingham clumsily rose to his feet and the two men sprinted uphill until they reached a long row of barrack huts which afforded some cover.

‘Bombardment?’

‘Not yet. Ranging shot. There’ll be more.’

As if to prove the statement, another shell came in low and crashed into a vehicle-repair garage well down below them. A pall of rubber smoke began to escape from the rear of the building. A dark flame flickered in a window. The first shot was high. This one was low and to the left. The Japanese gunners, assuming Fortress HQ to be in the vicinity, were trying to centre their fire on the main parade ground square.

They ran on, but without the urgency they had mustered under direct fire. The barracks was situated on the lower slopes of The Peak. At its highest point, a tall brick wall topped with loops of barbed wire and broken glass formed the perimeter defence. This had been breached by shell-fire some days before. At night a sentry was posted near the gap but in daylight it was unattended. No one had sought to rebuild it. There were more pressing duties.