Fragrant Harbour (16 page)

One day I sat down on my bed and felt something lumpy beside me. I pulled back the blanket, a torn green British
army-issue
item, and saw two oranges, one of which had been peeled and fanned out into the shape of a flower. This was one of Ah Wang’s tricks. I had no idea how he did it, but from then on, once every ten days or so, I found small gifts of food under or in the bed – packets of pak choi and other Chinese greens, cooked fish wrapped in a lotus leaf, slow-cooked pork. The food was always cold and there was never very much of it, especially after I’d shared it with my roommates, but it felt as if it was keeping me alive. I was both moved and frightened to think of Ah Wang, no one’s idea of a born hero, running these risks on our behalf.

The colony was not thriving as part of the Greater East Asia
Co
-Prosperity
Sphere. There were far fewer people about; the second half of the proverb ‘trouble in Hong Kong, go to China’ was
having
its effect. Power and water supplies were erratic. Schools ceased to function and so, more or less, did medical services. It was a great surprise quite how bad the Japanese were at running things. Although our part of Victoria was not affected, because there were so many soldiers about, in other parts of the colony looting and petty crime were rampant. There were sketchily obeyed curfews and random shootings. The Japanese shot
people
more or less indiscriminately, and – almost as bad – went around from dawn to dusk slapping faces. They had to enlist the help of gangs to try to keep the peace. Wilson had again been
right; without the help of the police, who had fled, been locked up or killed in the fighting, law and order was a big problem. The fifth columnists who had helped the Japanese saw it as their right to take what they wanted.

During the war, there was a great temptation to wonder what was happening elsewhere. That was one reason the long hours at the Bank were always so welcome. When I came round the corner and could see the stone lions at the foot of 1 Queen’s Road Central and knew that before long I would be breathing the cool air of the Bank’s high-vaulted ceiling, my heart always felt easier. Otherwise I would be worrying and daydreaming. What was happening to David and my grandmother? Just how badly was the war going in Europe? (The Japanese published an
English-language
newspaper, the
Hong Kong Daily News
, which fed us a steady diet of Allied defeats.) What was happening in China? Where was Maria? Was she still alive? Would we be sent to internment camp? (There were always rumours about that.) If we were, would there be enough food? What would happen if the Japanese caught us? And then the question which I couldn’t stop myself asking, which was why: why me, why us, why here, why Maria, why were any of us doing what we were doing in the place where we were doing it? Why had we been abandoned?

Perhaps it is appropriate that the only time I had anything resembling a real conversation with Wo Man-Lee was also the only time I asked him a question about his motives. I was
working
on the floor of the Bank, in the main pool, a tiresomely
undemanding
job which consisted largely of strolling around with my hands behind my back looking as if I knew what I was doing, and waiting to be asked to step in and solve small disagreements with dissatisfied customers. It was one of the parts of banking that was most like working in hotel management. We weren’t very busy; the part of the Bank which dealt with the public never was. I was promenading up and down when I heard a raised voice, looked across, and saw to my utter amazement Wo
arguing
with one of the tellers. It was the first time I’d seen him in a non-clandestine context, and I thought for a moment I was going to faint with the shock. The teller caught my eye and wordlessly implored me to come over.

‘Can I help?’ I said in English.

‘Gentleman have problem,’ said the alarmed teller, also in English.

‘Perhaps I can be of some assistance,’ I said, again in English, pointing to a desk and two chairs in the corner beside the
counters
, just out of earshot of the tellers. Wo followed me over. He seemed to be enjoying himself. At the same time there was a ferocity in him. He walked across the Bank’s main lobby as if he were thinking about buying the building. I pulled a chair out for him. He liked that. We sat down.

‘This is madness,’ I said.

‘Something has gone wrong.’

‘What?’

‘I’m going away for a little while.’

‘The Japanese …’

He shrugged. I was one of the few people who could betray him, since I was one of the only people who knew the identity of our main Chinese point of contact. I understand now, thinking back, that he must have considered threatening me, or killing me, and rejected those alternatives on purely practical grounds. He could hardly threaten me with anything worse than what the Japanese might do. And he couldn’t know which of my
colleagues
I might have told about him, so killing me would not guarantee his safety. Only disappearing from view could do that. Of the thirty-six alternatives, running away is the best.

I was sitting there without speaking. We can’t possibly have looked much like a senior banker in discussion with a client. There were certainly informers among the staff. I said, loudly:

‘Well, if there’s nothing else I can help you with …’

He straightened his jacket and stood up. I did too; our faces were close. Without planning to, I found myself asking:

‘Why? Why are you doing this?’

Wo shot his cuffs while looking at me. He might have been amused, or angry, or neither.

‘Maybe you win,’ he said. He walked away.

The Kempetai, the Japanese military police, raided our quarters at dawn the next day. I was woken up by being kicked in the back. Half a dozen shouting soldiers, under the command of two or three members of the Kempetai, were standing in the room I
shared with Cooper and two others. They overturned the
mattresses
we slept on and tore our clothes into shreds. One of them repeatedly screamed what I took to be a Japanese phrase. I remember thinking, that’s odd, he must be swearing – but I’ve been told there’s no swearing in Japanese, isn’t that interesting? Then I realised he was saying, ‘Where radio? Where radio?’

We had nothing clandestine in our room. I no longer knew where the radio was hidden. I had told Mitchell, our radio expert, about Man-Lee’s warning when we returned to quarters the night before. He had merely nodded.

Before long the soldiers stopped searching the room and began beating us instead. They took turns kicking us on the ground and hitting us with the butt end of their rifles. The Kempetai men supervised this. The first blows to my head and lower back were excruciating, but after that I felt nothing. As someone said, being beaten is like eating very hot food, in that after the first few bites you don’t feel anything.

The shouting and beating went on for some time. When they were kicking the others one prayed for it to go on.

Then we were, one at a time, dragged to our feet. They tied our hands behind our backs with twine, and forced us down the stairs. Cooper, who was immediately in front of me, fell. He slid down the half-flight in front of him and smacked into the wall at the bottom. Two of the guards kicked him once or twice, a little half-heartedly. They were breathing hard from the exertion; that was something I always noticed about beatings, what hard work they seemed to be for the men inflicting them. The soldiers pulled Cooper to his feet. At bayonet point, we clambered into the back of a lorry. Several Bank people were already in it, staring at the floor under the rifles of several very excited Japanese soldiers. The most senior Bank people were not there. The flap of the lorry was pulled down behind us and the interior of the vehicle was a strange hot green twilight. The lorry started and drove up the hill to a building I did not recognise. We were turned out, punched and kicked some more, and thrown into two windowless rooms whose former purpose was hard to decipher. The doors clanged shut, and we were left in the dark.

‘Another fine mess you’ve gotten me into,’ Cooper said to the room at large.

We did not speak of anything consequential, acutely aware as we all were that the guards might be listening. Since we had not been caught in the act, it was not difficult to work out that we must have been betrayed by an informer. It was a comfort not to be alone – and a mistake on the part of the Kempetai. We were left for perhaps half a day, enough time to discover that there was a bucket in the corner of the room.

They took Walker, the oldest of us, first. Four guards burst into the room and dragged him out. It wasn’t clear whether he was chosen at random. Nobody spoke while he was gone; it must have been about an hour. Then the door opened and they threw him onto the floor. He was unconscious and in the daylight which came in when they opened the door – already, after that brief time in total dark, the light was head-splitting – I could see that he was bleeding heavily from his scalp. The guards then grabbed Cooper and took him away.

They worked through all of us in sequence. I was the last to be taken – I was also the youngest – so by then Walker had come around. They had not asked him any questions, merely beaten him. It felt strange to hope that they would do the same to me. I will not describe what happened in detail, other than to say we were subjected to three sessions each, over about three days. The favourite means of the Kempetai involved covering the face with a towel and then pouring water over it. The victim feels that he is drowning. They did not ask questions; not of me, anyway. Perhaps once a day the guards brought a bowl of rice into the room and exchanged an empty plastic lavatory bucket for our full one.

The third of my sessions with the guards was, I later learned, the longest. It took me some time fully to come round from it. The experience was like waking from an anaesthetic. Dreams blurred into reality; faces and voices came and went. I saw my parents, Masterson, my brother, my grandmother, Maria, all talking both over and at me. I was aware of feeling pain and at the same time feeling disconnected from it. I was back home in Faversham for much of this time, lying in bed on a Sunday morning listening to sounds coming through the window and voices from downstairs. It was comforting and strange to know that my parents were waiting there for me while at the same time I was aware that they were dead.

When I came properly around I was lying on a camp bed. I felt great generalised pain, which it took a few moments to interpret: my head had a blinding, throbbing, localised pulse above my temples; my ribs ached when I breathed; something had wrenched my lower back over my kidneys; my knees and feet were on fire; my knuckles were black and so were my remaining fingernails. I could smell cigarette smoke. I turned my head. That hurt a great deal. Masterson was sitting on a folding chair beside the bed with his legs crossed, smoking a roll-up. He had never been fat, and was now twenty pounds lighter. He had aged by thirty years.

‘Where am I?’

‘Not in Kent, I’m afraid, Tom. You’re back with us now, aren’t you? We’re in Stanley. This is the camp hospital.’

For the first time since the outbreak of war I found myself
crying
. That hurt. Masterson put a hand lightly on top of my
shoulder
, and that also was painful. But I was very glad not to be dead.

Curiously, since I had no recollection of anything having been done to my legs, it was those injuries which kept me in bed for two weeks. There were no painkillers in camp. We had helped smuggle some in, but they were finished long since. I found the passivity of just lying there waiting to get better very hard to take.

Cooper was up and about before me, using an impromptu pair of crutches made out of old brooms. He told me that the others were all right, though a few had been beaten so badly they were in the prison hospital. We were mere internees; the people in the prison were regarded by the Japanese as criminals, and were treated much worse.

Cooper was in a subdued but strangely good mood; his stock with Miss Farrington was unrecognisably high. One day he even brought her to see me. She was a sweet, mild-mannered, slightly mousy brown-haired colonial daughter who bore not the
slightest
resemblance to the tormenting, elusive phantom of his
bachelor
longings.

The camp doctor came in daily. There wasn’t much he could do now that the drugs had run out, but he checked that my bones were setting correctly. The only actual breaks were in my ribs and fingers. I received a check-up visit from the dentist who told me I had a bruised jaw but that my teeth were intact. Masterson
visited
me every day, chatting and – one of the favourite internment camp activities – gossiping.

‘They’re putting on a Coward play in a few weeks’ time,’ Masterson told me. ‘First play while we’ve been in here. Not sure that it’s appropriate really but then I don’t much like Coward. Too poofy.’

After two weeks, on my first day out of bed, I moved across to a folding chair and sat beside the window. It was then that I found out what had happened. Cooper came in and sat on the bed.

‘Your last day in here, then,’ he said. I had been warned that once I was up and about – though the ability to sit in a chair stretched that definition, I felt – I would be assigned somewhere to live.

‘Good,’ I said. Cooper gave me a thin smile which made it clear he had something else on his mind.

‘Tommy,’ he said, and as soon as I heard that I knew that
something
had gone wrong. My first thought was: Maria. So when he told what had happened my initial momentary reaction was one of relief. ‘There’s some bad news. We were betrayed, you know that. We’ve been keeping it from you until you were stronger. The thing is, they got both ends of the operation. The people in camp with the radio, as well as us. Fourteen of them. All BAAG people. I’m afraid Wilson was one of them. They were tortured and then executed on the beach.’

He moved his own head, perhaps involuntarily, to watch the window. Part of the camp had a view of Stanley Beach.

‘Why didn’t you tell me earlier?’ I said, more for something to say than for any real reason. It wouldn’t have made any
difference
. Cooper didn’t have anything to add, and nor did I. We sat in silence for some time. I couldn’t think of anything I wanted to know or say. A day or two later we heard over the bamboo
telegraph that Ah Wang the cook had been executed. That’s all we knew – no more than that. For me, that was the worst moment of the war. A few more Bank people were moved from the camp to the prison. But they never came for me.

Stanley camp was a compound, consisting of a block of flats and a number of bungalows and impromptu structures in the grounds of what had been St Stephen’s College. About two
thousand
civilians were interned there. There were roughly an equal number of men and women, and a few hundred children whose parents had ignored the order to evacuate, or who had been born after it. Stanley prison was immediately adjacent to the camp, but the Japanese had given us orders to avert our gaze from it. Occasionally groups of prisoners were led from the prison down to one of the beaches, where they were executed. The preferred method was beheading.

Prisoners of war were kept some distance away, in Sham Shui Po on Kowloon side. In many cases, men who had joined the Volunteers were kept in Kowloon as POWs while their wives were locked up in the Stanley. They weren’t allowed to communicate but they were allowed to send each other money, so they would send Bank of Yokohama bills to the value of five yen as a way of saying they were still alive. Then the spouse would send it back. Some of those banknotes kept going back and forwards to the end of the war.

After the crackdown, most of the bank people – other banks as well as the Bank – had been moved to Stanley. Some were still in the hands of the Kempetai, and others were in the prison
hospital
. Mitchell died there. Many others did too. I was one of the lucky ones. I gave up speaking Cantonese or admitting that I could. My escape from the Kempetai had been too close. I felt I had used up all my luck. It helped that the Taiwanese guards spoke a different dialect. I couldn’t stop thinking about the fact of our betrayal, and the fate of Wilson and Ah Wang.

But it was a relief to be in Stanley. The camp was less
claustrophobic
than life in quarters and at the Bank had been. The air and sunshine were the best thing. Compared to the internees, we bankers were pale as maggots. The setting, in a bay surrounded by hills, was incongruously lovely. Some people, more finely grained than I, felt the physical beauty of the location kept them
alive. The worst things about Stanley were the overcrowding, the absence of privacy, and the food. I was assigned a room in the main barracks which I shared with three other people: one of them, inevitably, was Cooper.

The camp was for the most part self-organising. The Japanese left the internees to run it – they didn’t have the resources to do it themselves. There was an extraordinarily complete structure of committees and block representatives, organising everything from cooking to laundry to medical care to lectures. It was often irritating and petty, but there was something impressive about it too. Civilian hierarchies were duplicated inside the camp with a numbing completeness.

The whole day was structured around food. In Chinese the word for food is the same as the word for rice, and that’s what it was like in camp: rice soup – congee – for breakfast; congee for lunch, sometimes with a few fragments of vegetable. Dinner was the big culinary event of the day. It consisted of rice with
anything
that the cooks could find to make it more interesting – a tiny piece of fish, or once, late in the war, some tired old buffalo from the New Territories, or, again late in the war, the occasional
supply
of luncheon meat from a Red Cross parcel. I grew to like the burnt, stuck-together rice one sometimes found at the bottom of the saucepan. Its charredness gave it the illusion of flavour. It’s a taste I still have to this day.

After breakfast the rest of the morning was spent doing chores and allotted tasks – in my own case, gardening and maintenance duties. One did things as slowly as possible, to conserve energy. There was a rest period after lunch and then – after the sunshine, the best thing about camp – lectures. This made a big difference. I did some work on my schoolboy French thanks to the camp doctor, who had spent some years in Paris as a young man. Professor Cobb – the only man in camp, according to those who knew him, who did not appear to have lost any weight during internment, because he was already skeletal – gave lectures on Chinese literature. Those were my favourite. We learnt later that people in the prison were made to sit on a bench in solitary
confinement
and stare at a blank wall all day, ‘meditating on their crimes’. Some men’s minds broke. I am sure that mine would have.

The diet induced feelings of lethargy that were close to
overpowering
. Many internees had already died. The rations were only just enough to live on, and the emaciated camp inmates could be killed by what should have been small setbacks – a cough, an upset stomach. The thing which kept people alive was a belief that the war would end and we would be released. When people let go of that hope they did not last long.

After I had got my strength back, or as much of it as I was going to get back on a diet of rice gruel, I did the rounds of people I’d known outside. Morale was surprisingly high, not least because when it dropped, people tended to die. All the ex-Bank people preferred being in camp to being outside. Everyone was
paralysed
with anxiety about what was happening to our colleagues in the hands of the Kempetai; but we also knew there was nothing to do, nothing we could do. The great nagging worry was that the Kempetai would find out more about BAAG and arrest and
execute
more people; but that had been the worry before, too.

I was walking back to the barracks one day for a lie-down after doing some slow-motion weeding in the vegetable patch when I saw a figure I knew I knew but couldn’t quite place. That was a familiar sensation in camp, when people were so physically changed. This woman was coming out of the door in front of me. She was wearing a clean flower-print dress which had
apparently
been taken in to compensate for lost weight. Something about the purposeful angle of her head and her walk was familiar. She was carrying a bucket in the crook of her arm as if it were a
handbag
.

‘Mrs Marler?’ I said. She turned. I hope I kept my face straight: it was Mrs Marler, mahogany brown, and so thin that her face was a crowded field not of lines but crevasses. Her mouth was set firmly downwards. She had no idea who I was. ‘Tom Stewart – from the
Darjeeling
. The chap who learnt Cantonese for a bet?’

‘Ah!’ Mrs Marler was smiling now, her teeth yellow and, because of receding gums, very long. ‘The nuns’ chum! Yes, of course!’

She told me she was a ‘blockhead’: camp terminology for
leader
of one of the inmates’ committees. I asked after her husband and her face changed again.

‘Bert’s not … he’s a bit down in the dumps. I don’t … Perhaps
you might come and see us? It might cheer him up.’ And then, becoming firm again: ‘Come round after lectures tomorrow. And call me Beryl.’

The next day, after hearing Professor Cobb on the subject of Tang Dynasty poetry – especially his favourite, Wang Wei – I went to see the Marlers. They had what looked like a former
boiler
room in a bungalow inhabited by about two dozen people. There was space in it for a camp bed, which they folded away during the day. Beryl had somehow got hot water and so there was tea.

Marler was sitting on the floor. He was looking down as I walked in. I could see that something had gone wrong; not just physically but in his spirit. It was as if the air had been let out of him.

‘Mr Marler! How nice to see you!’

He looked up. He may have thought he was smiling. She was fussing with cups.

‘Stewart.’

‘You look well,’ I said in Cantonese, cheerfully, to show I was making a joke. At first he didn’t react. Then, very slowly, he said:

‘You kept it up, then.’

‘Oh yes – best thing I ever did. I’m in your debt, Mr Marler. I can’t tell you how useful it’s been. One of things I miss most about being in camp is not being able to keep it up – I’m worried I’ll forget before the war is over.’ That didn’t come out quite right. ‘I mean, my memory’s like a sieve, I’ll have forgotten all the Chinese I know in no time.’

‘I’m sure we’ll be out long before that happens,’ said Beryl, brightly. Her husband didn’t say anything. ‘Have you noticed in the
Hong Kong Daily News
how the sites of the terrible defeats the Allies are suffering keep getting closer to Japan? Terribly
encouraging
. It won’t be long now, it really won’t.’

As if speaking from the bottom of a well, Marler said:

‘They’ll execute all internees before they lose. None of us is leaving Stanley.’

His despair was so raw it was like a social gaffe. One felt fear when people began to talk like that: in our hearts, all internees knew that despair was contagious. Neither Beryl nor I knew where to look. She and I talked about nothing for ten minutes and then I
left. A week later Marler was dead. When it happened, it could happen very quickly.

‘We should open a hotel somewhere else,’ said Masterson one day, a few months after Marler died. We were on duty in the kitchen, washing vegetables. This was important because of the use of night soil – human excrement – as a fertiliser. In Masterson’s top pocket I could see a rolled cigarette, a special treat waiting for when he stopped work. He had been known to swap food for tobacco, a fact which led to one of the few real arguments we ever had.

Cooper, who had been in the middle of a disquisition on some aspect of Miss Farrington’s many virtues, looked a little
nonplussed
. Then, recovering, he began:

‘Mary says –’

‘Kowloon, you mean? Like the time with Mr Luk? Going into competition with the Peninsula, only less snooty?’

Masterson shook his head. ‘Somewhere else altogether. Out in the country. On Lantao, or one of the islands, or even Stanley.’