The Kindness of Women. J. G. Ballard
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necessary phrases in his laboured English.
Bored by this time-wasting, Sergeant Nagata strolled behind us, slapping our heads at random. My ears rang, as they had done after the bomb in the Avenue Edward VII. I was sure we would soon be too deaf to understand Mr Hyashi’s halting questions.
At one end of the wooden bench, his chest and face bruised by the rifle stocks, was a 29-year-old Londoner called Mariner. After being discharged from the Shanghai Police for robbing a rickshaw coolie he had become a foreman at the Shell terminal, and had scarcely stirred from his bunk since entering the camp. Beside him were the Ralston brothers, stable lads who had come out from England to work at the Shanghai racecourse. They joked nervously with David Hunter, who sat between them with his head lowered, blond hair streaked with blood.
Why David, with his caring parents, should have tried to escape from Lunghua puzzled me, and clearly puzzled Mr Hyashi.
‘You walked … through the … fence?’ He pointed at Mariner. ‘You?’
‘We didn’t walk, no. We climbed through the fence,’ Mariner explained half-facetiously. ‘You know, stepped like …’
The older Ralston inclined his head, dripping blood on to my arm, and said in a stage-whisper: ‘I knew I got these cuts somewhere.’
Both Ralstons tittered, and Sergeant Nagata stepped behind them and slapped their heads with his hard fist. They fell forward across the table, dazed but still smiling in a cracked way, and unable to hear Mr Hyashi’s next question for which they were punched again.
I frowned at David, warning him to keep a straight face, but he was caught up by the Britishers’ horseplay. Without thinking, David began to titter with them, tears streaming across his cheeks. He avoided my eyes, as if he was glad to be caught and was prepared to be punished. Like the Chinese, they laughed because they were frightened, but to Mr Hyashi and Sergeant Nagata they were being deliberately insolent in a peculiarly British way, never more arrogant than when they had blundered into defeat.
Baffled by them, Mr Hyashi took up his position at the head of the table, forced to preside over this deranged meeting for which his diplomatic training at the Foreign Ministry in Tokyo had not prepared him. He stood a few inches from me, and I could feel him trembling as Sergeant Nagata slapped the laughing Ralstons. I was so frightened that I, too, wanted to laugh, but already I was wondering what would happen when the sergeant discovered my attempt to break into the food store.
Mr Hyashi gazed down at me, noting my lowered eyes. Relieved to find one small point of sanity, he placed his unsteady palm on my head, as if to reassure himself that I was real.
‘You not … trying to escape?’
‘No, Mr Hyashi.’
‘Not?’
‘Mr Hyashi, I like Lunghua camp. I don’t want to escape.’
For the first time Mr Hyashi raised his hand to restrain Sergeant Nagata. ‘Not escaping. Good.’ He seemed immensely relieved.
The older Ralston leaned against me, his eyes dazed by the blows. ‘Look after yourself, lad. You’re on your own here.’
‘Everyone in Lunghua …’ Mr Hyashi began, as if addressing the assembled camp. He searched for a phrase, and then let the air leak from his lungs, visibly resigned that he would never master this strange language and its stranger people. Covered in blood, Mariner was lying across the table, but the Ralstons were still uncowed, ready to provoke the Japanese and force them to do their worst. I admired them for their courage, as much as I admired the Japanese. I never understood why the only brave Britishers were the ones I was never allowed to meet, while the officers my mother and her friends danced with at the Country Club had surrendered without a shot at Singapore.
Mr Hyashi pointed to me, and turned a wavering forefinger towards the door. Five minutes later I was back in the children’s hut, regaling Peggy and an astonished Mrs Dwight with the saga of my attempted escape.
On the following day the first American daylight raid took place over Shanghai. Flying from airfields near Chungking, Fortress bombers attacked the dockyards at Yangtsepoo. At last the war was coming home to the Japanese. As they strengthened the anti-aircraft defences of Lunghua airfield all concern for the escape attempt was forgotten. After a night in the guard-house cells the three men returned to convalesce on their bunks in E Block. A shocked David Hunter, his face still bruised, watched me from the window of his parents’ room, refusing to wave back to me as I stood on the parade ground.
To my relief, no one learned of my attempt to break into the food store. The Japanese cemented the bricks into the wall, assuming that the escaping prisoners had tried to supply themselves with rations for their long cross-country walk to the Chinese lines four hundred miles away.
To anyone who would believe me, I pretended that I had joined the escape party at the last moment. Mrs Dwight expected nothing less, but Peggy shook her head over my boasts in her kindly, sceptical way. She knew that I was too wedded to Lunghua to want to leave it, that my entire world had been shaped by the camp, and that I had found a special freedom which I had never known in Shanghai.
One day the war would end, but for the time being I was busy learning to cope with the stony couple whose room I shared. Around my bunk I constructed a small hutch, where I tried to recreate the peaceful interior of the food-store. Sitting on the ash-tip as Mr Sangster tossed the evening’s coals at my feet, I waited for the American bombs to set fire to the sky, and thought of the white dust and the cracking coffins in the Avenue Edward VII.
Below me the fresh mortar marked the outline of a secret door into an interior world. Far from wanting to escape from the camp, I had been trying to burrow ever more deeply into its heart.
Everyone was shouting that the war had ended. Prisoners leaned from their windows, waving to each other across the parade ground and pointing to the sky. Peggy Gardner and a delegation of missionary women gathered outside the guard-house and peered through the door at Sergeant Nagata’s ransacked desk. I stood by the open gates of the camp, looking at the dusty road that followed the long arm of the Whangpoo river towards the south. The August sky was veiled by layers of haze that enclosed the empty landscape like an immense mosquito net. Threads of cloud ran through the pearly light, stitching the sky together. Vapour trails left by the American reconnaissance planes dissolved over my head, the debris perhaps of gigantic letters spelling out an apocalyptic message.
‘What do they say, Jamie?’ Peggy called to me. ‘Is the war really over?’
‘Ask Sergeant Nagata. I’m going to the river.’
‘Sergeant Nagata’s not here any more. You can go back to Shanghai now.’ She plucked at the patches on her dress, sorry to see me leave but not yet sure that I had the necessary nerve. ‘If you want to …’
‘I’ll come back tonight. Wait for me at the hut.’
For all the excitement, no one was in any hurry to evacuate the camp, as Peggy had noticed. For days we had listened to rumours that the Americans had dropped a new super-bomb on Japan, destroying the cities of Nagasaki and Hiroshima. Some of the prisoners even claimed to have seen the bomb-flash. The squadrons of B-29s had broken off their attacks on Lunghua airfield, but armed Japanese soldiers still waited by the anti-aircraft guns. One morning we woke to find that Mr Hyashi and the guards had vanished, slipping away under the cover of the night curfew. We stood by the perimeter wire, like children abandoned by their teachers and unsure whether to leave the classroom.
All day we watched the Shanghai road, expecting a convoy of American vehicles to speed towards us out of the dust, though everyone knew that the nearest Americans were hundreds of miles away on the island of Okinawa. Bored by this stalemate, a few men from E Block stepped through the wire and stood in the