The Other Side of Paradise (25 page)

‘It’s Peter,’ she said. ‘Trouble.’

Her heart started to race. ‘What’s happened?’

‘He was playing cricket and batting the ball hard, like they all do, and it went and hit one of the guards. They’ve made him stand out in the sun all day as a punishment. The poor kid’s been there for hours.’

Peter was all alone in the middle of the open space where they lined up for
tenko
, standing with his shoulders hunched, arms hanging at his sides, staring down at the ground.

Stella held her back. ‘Best not to go near him, Susie. Some of us tried to take him some water earlier but the guards say that if we do he’ll have to stay there all the longer. It’s Hatsuho’s orders.’

She shook off Stella’s hand. ‘I’m going to speak to that bastard.’

‘It won’t do any good. Miss Tarrant and Sister Beatrix have already been to see him.’

‘Now it’s my turn.’

The commandant was seated behind his desk, his interpreter at his side. Susan took off her hat and bowed.

‘Captain Hatsuho, I have come to ask if you will permit the boy Peter Travers to go free, now that he has been punished.’

She listened to the rant that followed, the Jap talk that sounded like stuttering gibberish.

The interpreter said, ‘Captain Hatsuho say punishment not finished yet. Boy very bad. He must stay many more hours to learn respect for Japanese soldiers.’

She said, ‘It was an accident. He didn’t mean to hit the guard. He was only playing a game of cricket.’

‘Captain Hatsuho say not accident. Boy not sorry.’

‘I’m sure he is sorry. Very sorry. Peter is only a child. He’s ten years old, that’s all.’ She looked at the commandant. ‘Do you have a son, Captain Hatsuho?’

A faint flicker passed over his face. He does, she thought.

‘Doesn’t your son like to play sports sometimes? I’m sure he does.’

There was another volley of Japanese, followed by English.

‘Japanese boys do not do bad things. Japanese boys always have respect. English boy very proud. Same like all English mens. And English womens. Very bad thing.’

She waited a moment, then she said, ‘Peter’s mother was killed by Japanese bombs in Singapore. His father is probably dead too. He has suffered very much. If it were your son, would you wish him to suffer more? I beg of you to allow him to go free.’

She watched Hatsuho’s face and knew his answer before the interpreter translated it.

‘The boy must stay. Punishment not finished.’

‘Then I will stay with him.’

‘That is not permitted.’

‘Try to stop me.’

She bowed and walked out of the hut to where Peter was standing all alone in the middle of the compound. She put her coolie hat on his head, took him by the hand and stood beside him, the two of them together.

They went on standing there as the sun went down and night fell and instead of being very hot it became very cold. They stood there as the sun came up again, all the next morning and all the next afternoon. At the evening
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Peter was allowed to go, but Susan was taken away to the punishment hut where they had locked up Lady Battersby. It was a very small tin hut, only six feet square, with no window, no furniture, only a bucket in one corner.

She lost count of the days spent sitting on the concrete floor with nothing to read, no one to talk to, nothing to look at and nothing to do. She recited all the old poems to herself, sang all the songs, played an endless alphabet game: all the countries she could think of beginning with A, all the towns, all the rivers, all the birds, all the fish, the flowers, the vegetables, the fruits, the trees … and then back to the beginning again, moving on to the letter B, then C, then D – all the way through to Z. When she had finished, she started again at the beginning.

To make a change, she went out dining and dancing, or swam at the Tanglin Club, or played tennis, or drove out to the Sea View Hotel for curry tiffin, or went sailing with Denys in
Kittiwake
and walked along the lovely beach with the pure-white sand and the pretty shells and the whispering casuarina trees, as they had done before the nightmare began.

She had long conversations with people, too: her father who told her to keep her chin up because the war would soon be won; her mother who said that if she hadn’t been so silly as to get off the boat she would have been safe in Australia; Grandmother Penang who advised her never to show the Japs that she was afraid of them. Nana said, comfortingly, that bad things never lasted for ever and all she had to do was wait for good things to come again.

She had a word with Ray, too – just to see what he might have thought, if he’d still been alive – pointing out that it had all been his fault that she was stuck in a prison camp. He didn’t seem to feel in the least guilty – in fact he agreed with her mother.

‘You were a bloody fool to get off the ship, Susan. I told you that.’

She said resentfully, ‘Spending two and a half years in a place like this isn’t much fun, I can tell you. And I don’t think I can stand it much more, being shut up on my own. I’ll go mad soon.’

‘Stop moaning and feeling sorry for yourself. Think of the kids instead. You’ve got to look after them. You’ve got to see it through, for their sake.’

When she started sobbing he put his arms round her and held her close, like he’d done before at the hospital.

‘You can hang on, Susan. You know you can. You’re not the sort to give up. You’ve got more guts than that. You’ve proved it already.’

After a while, she felt better.

One night, when she was lying awake, she thought she heard the sound of planes in the distance. Not Jap planes, because they made a different sort of noise. This was a deep droning sound: the sort of sound that big bombers with four engines might have made. After a while, there was another and very familiar sound – the crump, crump of exploding bombs.

Fourteen

‘THE NIPS KEEP
saying it’s just them practising,’ Stella told her when they had finally let her out of the punishment hut after a month. ‘But we don’t believe them. We all think it’s our bombers. The natives think so too. They say the Allies are bombing the oilfields.’

‘I wondered if I was imagining it – if I’d gone crazy, or something.’

‘Wouldn’t blame you for doing that. Doing solitary must be enough to drive anyone round the bend. Peter thinks it was all his fault, by the way. He’s been miserable while you were in there.’

Poor Peter. She had a hard time convincing him that he wasn’t to blame for her punishment.

‘Of course you weren’t,’ she told him. ‘I knew what I was doing, and I chose to do it. And I’d do it again as well.’

But he’d thrown away the packing-case bat and nobody played cricket any more.

Lady Battersby died. She departed with perfect dignity and without fuss. They buried her in her navy-blue crêpe frock, wearing her leghorn straw and with her handbag over her arm – as they thought she would have wished. Miss Tarrant said the prayers and Miss Mumford’s camp choir sang ‘Abide With Me’.

There were four rows of graves now. Those who hadn’t died of malaria, beriberi, dysentery, typhoid or something else unpleasant were growing steadily thinner and thinner, weaker and weaker from malnutrition and constant attacks of dysentery. Red Cross parcels never reached them, the camp kitchen garden couldn’t produce enough for all and they were existing on the same old diet of dirty rice and mouldy vegetables, tapioca leaves, dried fish, with the occasional hunk of some rotting, maggoty meat hacked into tiny pieces. Their limbs were sticks, their cheeks hollow, their ribs could be counted – unless beriberi had made them swell up like bloated pigs. Teeth were loose or had fallen out and the coconut hairs which made a good cleaning substitute for toothbrushes and toothpaste were in short supply. There was only one charm left on Susan’s bracelet – a little owl – and she exchanged it for a pineapple and three small hen’s eggs for Hua and Peter. Next time, it would be the gold bracelet itself. And, finally, the watch.

A sack of letters arrived: the first to reach the camp in three years. Captain Hatsuho had made an announcement at morning
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during a long speech about the wonderful generosity of the Japanese Imperial Army towards prisoners of war. They queued up patiently outside the guardhouse, standing in the burning sun for more than an hour until the letters were finally given out. There was nothing for Susan. No news from her father; none from her mother and grandmother – presumably living in Australia. Nothing for Stella either.

‘They think we’re dead,’ Stella said. ‘For all they know we drowned when the ship was sunk.’

‘But the Japs are always making lists of our names.’

‘Yeah, and they’re always making bonfires too.’

Most of the letters turned out to be two and three years old and had obviously been hoarded for a very long time.

Susan said, ‘Why bother to give them out now?’

‘Maybe they’re losing the war and it suits them to be nicer to us.’

The natives kept telling them that the news was good:
kaba baik
, they repeated with nods and smiles.
Kaba baik
. But the Allied bombers had not been heard for a while.

The well ran dry. Water had to be fetched from a stream a mile away and carried back in buckets and tins and pots – water for drinking and cooking and washing for six hundred people, and for the vegetable patch as well. The children helped to carry it, too. Susan watched Peter and Hua walking with their cans, chattering to each other in English. In two months’ time Peter would be eleven years old. He had grown quite tall, though he was painfully skinny. His face had changed from a small boy’s face and she could see how he might look as a young man. Hua, who was probably getting on for seven, had grown too, and her black hair was long and worn in two plaits which she braided herself at lightning speed. Her spoken English was perfect and, thanks to the camp school, she could read and write it as well. Peter had been learning French and German from the Dutch nuns and Miss Tarrant had given classes in English and History and Geography. Somehow both children had survived the fevers and the dysentery, and somehow they had escaped beriberi – perhaps because of the extra fruit and vegetables. But the gold bracelet and the watch had gone the way of the charms and the pearls and now there was nothing left to barter with.

Soon after Peter’s eleventh birthday in May another rumour reached the camp. The war in Europe was finished and the Americans were defeating the Japanese in the Pacific. Nobody knew where the stories had come from or whether they were true.
Kaba baik
, the natives still kept insisting.
Kaba baik
. Good news.

In July they were moved to a camp on the other side of Sumatra. At morning
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Captain Hatsuho had told them via his interpreter how fortunate they were. They would be taken by train across the island to a place where there was plenty of shade and water and good food and comfortable accommodation.

‘You very lucky. Imperial Japanese Army very good to women and children.’

Almost two hundred women and children now lay in their graves outside the camp as silent testimony to the Imperial Army’s goodness. The hospital was overflowing with dying and very ill patients and the remaining prisoners were half-starved, weak, worn out.

They left in a downpour, travelling to the train in open lorries, the sick lying on stretchers, faces upturned helplessly to the rain. Instead of proper train carriages there were airless, seatless cattle trucks, and they spent the first night shut up in a siding where Miss Mathews, the teacher who had known all about Jane Austen, died before dawn. She went very quietly, holding Susan’s hand, and apologizing for being such a nuisance.

The train journey across Sumatra took two days and they lived on cold rice and water. Several more of the sick had died by the time they arrived at their destination. They were herded out of the cattle trucks by the guards, loaded into more open lorries and driven at top speed along rough tracks to the new prison camp in the middle of an old rubber plantation. The tin-roofed huts were already occupied by bugs and rats, but, for once, Captain Hatsuho had not lied about the shade, or about the water which ran clear in a rocky creek, though he had lied about the good food. Sweet potatoes, carrots, long beans, turnips, chokos and bringals were brought and dumped outside the guardhouse but, as usual, they were left to rot for three or four days before permission was given to collect them. Sometimes a lump of meat was delivered too – bullock and deer, stinking horribly but edible when cooked and, at least, they had plenty of wood from the rubber trees for the fires. Their new commandant was a little old sergeant called Yamada, who was usually drunk and fell off his soap box at
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. It would have been funny if they had not been past laughter.

A month later, the bombers came over again – close enough and low enough for the Royal Australian Air Force markings to be seen – and the prisoners went out into the compound to watch them and cheer. The guards suddenly became nicer. They no longer prodded with their bayonets, no longer yelled and scowled. Instead, they smiled and offered American Red Cross cigarettes. Permission was given to collect the rations as soon as they were left outside the gate, and the men delivering them said good morning politely instead of calling them foul names. At evening
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Yamada was sober enough to make a very short speech. ‘War is finished. We are now friends.’ He didn’t say who had won the war.

The next morning he and all the guards had disappeared.

At midday an army vehicle drew up outside the guardhouse with a squeal of brakes and the driver got out. A white man – the first they had set eyes on for more than three years. Well over six foot tall, broad-shouldered, sun-bronzed, dressed in khaki shorts, shirt, and an Australian army bush hat with the brim turned up on one side.

Nobody in the compound spoke and nobody moved. The digger walked slowly over to the gate and kicked it open with his booted foot.

He stood, fists on hips, staring around at the crowd of women and children watching him in silence. He stared at their ragged clothes, their bare feet, their skeletal frames, their sun-blackened skins, their hollow eyes and sunken cheeks, their matted verminous hair, their sores and their scars.