A Woman of Our Times. Rosie Thomas
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of the meagre portions of grey rice.
The smell had become a fifth limb that Lieutenant Archer dragged with him everywhere, even outside the camp to the working parties at Kai Tak airport, to the munitions dumps, wherever their Japanese captors herded them. The pains of hunger and sickness, perversely, seemed to be part of another man’s body, so that he could observe them without emotion. Sometimes he could hear other men moaning or screaming, but he made no sound himself. He could turn away from the sights, pitiful or nauseating, until quite soon he had no need to do even that much because they grew familiar through repetition, and he became as indifferent to them as were the rats that ran over them all where they lay.
It was only in the later years that the sights came back to torture him. Starvation, maltreatment and disease. In Shamshuipo Simon knew that was all that lay ahead for him and the five thousand other men in the camp. He began to regard the men who were dying, and those who were already dead, as the lucky ones.
But in answer there always came the thought of Rosemary, his wife, and the baby son he had never even seen, at home in England. Even though he knew in abstract what war meant at home, Simon always imagined his family with a soft glow around them, as if of firelight, and then he would painfully remember the sweetness of love and domesticity. The will to live returned, burning more brightly.
Lieutenant Archer, naked except for a loincloth knotted between his legs, crawling with vermin and exhausted from malnutrition and hard labour on building the Kai Tak runway, sat on a concrete floor and played with the broken end of a packing case. He turned the wooden strut in his hands and numbers ravelled in his head. In the filthy labyrinth their unassailable logic helped him to stay deaf and blind to everything around him.
Slowly, tenaciously, Simon began to devise a kind of numbers game. He needed markers, and so he collected buttons from decayed battledress. Out on a working party, he watched the ground for round, smooth pebbles and when he found them he held them in his mouth until the return to Shamshuipo.
While some of the men screamed out their misery and others gnawed silently on it, Simon tilted his packing case at an angle and let the round pebbles run down the slope. He thought of choices and options, all the fruitful possibilities of freedom that had been closed off to him, and he built them into his game instead. He tried to carve wishbone shapes from twigs, although he was past wishing, but he had no knife blade or other sharp instrument. He began to collect spent matches instead. The Japanese guards all smoked, and they dropped the matches like largesse. Even the men were able to smoke sometimes. They collected flies that swarmed through the camp and plagued their captors as indiscriminately as themselves. They sold them to the guards, one hundred dead flies per cigarette.
So Simon shuffled between sprawled bodies and picked up the burnt matches. He made a kind of glue from hoarded grains of wet, cooked rice, kneading them into a fine, grey paste. He stuck the matches together to make wishbones. The balls rolled, and dropped through the wishbone-gates when Simon opened them. He could open or close the gates, and so he had created minuscule choices for himself. With increased concentration he added the numbers, challenging himself with new and harder combinations, scratching the columns of figures with a white stone on to the concrete floor.
He hunched over his packing-case board as if it offered him freedom.
In time, the game attracted the attention of the other men, those who were still able to take notice of anything around them. Simon showed one or two of the men how to position the button markers, and to set the pebbles rolling to meet them along matchstick paths. None of them had energy or ingenuity to spare, and interest in Simon’s contraption soon flagged. He was able to keep it to himself, refining the apparatus and allowing the numbers to replicate cleanly inside his head.
The guards saw no reason to bother themselves with a contraption of sticks and stones, but still Simon generally kept it hidden under his scrap of blanket whenever one of them was near.
Then came a day when he was absorbed in watching the pebbles following the paths he had decreed for them, and so he didn’t see a guard they called the Fat Man making his way between recumbent prisoners. The Fat Man was stopping every few yards to point at a man, who was then jerked to his feet and hustled away. The Fat Man was choosing those men who still had some strength left. There was clearly some task waiting to be done by the few who still might be fit enough.
It was too late when Simon looked up. His eyes met the corpulent guard’s, who responded by pointing straight at him. With an automatic, belated movement Simon tried to cover up the packing case with his blanket. As the Fat Man’s fellows pulled him to his feet, Simon saw the guard’s eyes flicker inquisitively to his game. The pointing finger moved to it, and beckoned.
The game was pulled out for the Japanese to inspect.
Simon waited. There was nothing for him to do but watch. He saw the Fat Man’s big, shiny round face bend to the game, the rolls of flesh distending his filthy tunic, and the broad, black half-moons spreading under his armpits. As he stood there Simon caught his richly oily and fishy scent in symphonic contrast to the common stench of Shamshuipo.
The guard glanced at him, curiosity making sharp points of light in his flat black eyes.
‘What?’ the man asked Simon.
The Fat Man was hated for his knowledge of a few words of English as much as for his appearance and behaviour. Simon masked fear and disgust with a polite smile. He looked like a grinning skull.
He answered, ‘It’s a game. A game of skill and numerical calculation, involving the setting of two-way gates in various combinations to permit balls to reach pre-positioned markers via a kind of maze, or labyrinth. Each of the gates is awarded a numerical value, and the points scored are totalled when the balls reach their markers. Lowest score wins.’
The guard was staring at him, his face a suspicious mask. Simon knew that he couldn’t have understood more than two words of his mannerly explanation. He broadened his smile, and scooped up the tunic buttons to reposition them.
‘It goes like this. The numbers form a labyrinth of their own, a wonderfully logical structure that is colourless, odourless, beautiful and safe. Unlike this terrible place.’ The guard blinked. Simon let the pebbles drop along the matchstick gullies. Everyone watched them as they went.
The Fat Man’s face split like a pulpy fruit into a wide smile, to match Simon’s.
‘Crever,’ he said, and held out a huge hand for the buttons.
Simon let him play for himself. He could smell the man too strongly now, and he realised that his proximity was making him shiver with fear. The Fat Man was engrossed, but his companions called roughly to him. Reluctantly he lifted his head, and then thrust the packing case end back at Simon. He jerked a banana thumb to indicate that it should be stowed away again beneath the blanket. Simon did as he was ordered.
There was a moment then when the Fat Man considered him. Simon shrank, but there was nowhere to hide himself. And then, miraculously, the Fat Man shook his head. Simon understood that, whatever ordeal was being prepared for the few strong men, he was not going to be made part of it. The Fat Man lumbered on down the lines. Simon sat down in his place. He had no choice but to sit, because his legs gave way beneath him. His terror was the final weakness. None of the men who had been picked out ever came back. Simon never knew where or why they had been taken, but he supposed that in some way his game had saved his life. Afterwards, the Fat Man ignored him.
Simon kept the game hidden from that day on. It became a kind of lucky talisman. He believed that if he could keep it, he would survive.
When at last the Shamshuipo prisoners were moved from Hong Kong to Japan, Lieutenant Archer managed to smuggle his piece of packing case with him. It stayed with him in the new camp, thrust under his tatami mat. He sat on it and slept on it for two years. The years were terrible, but they were better than the ones that had passed in Hong Kong. Simon survived because he was set to work on the docks, and he could steal enough food to stay alive.
On 15 August, 1945, he heard a formal, measured voice speaking ornate phrases out of a Japanese foreman’s wireless. Soldiers and civilians were running,