‘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 deep grass. Staring at the silent air, they seemed oddly self-conscious, as if they had forgotten who they were.
Showing off to Peggy, I climbed through the fence behind G Block and walked towards a burial mound two hundred yards from the camp. I mounted the stairway of rotting coffins, with their small skeletons asleep under quilts of silky mud. Standing in the overbright air, I signalled to Peggy as she pressed against the wire, breathlessly waiting for me to be shot. I could see the burnt-out hangars and cratered runways of Lunghua airfield, surrounded by the wrecks of fighter aircraft, and the unchanged skyline of Shanghai that had formed the horizon of my mind for the past three years. Despite myself I kept glancing over my shoulder at the camp, seeing the cement buildings and wooden huts for the first time from this strange perspective.
By leaving the camp I had stepped outside my own head. Had the atom bombs in some way split the sky, and reversed the direction of everything? I felt uneasy in the open air, a tempting target for some brooding Japanese sentry. I jumped down from the coffins, leaving my ragged footprints in the soft quilts, and ran to the safety of the wire. Ignoring Peggy’s angry eyes, I went back to G Block and lay behind the curtain of my cubicle, glad for once to hear Mr Vincent’s voice, complaining to his wife about the failure of the allied authorities to notify us properly of the war’s end.
But did I want the war to end? The next day, when the Japanese guards returned to Lunghua, I felt secretly relieved. Already there were signs that life in the camp was breaking down. Led by the Ralston brothers, a gang of men had tried to break into the kitchens, while others had looted the guard-house. The food-stocks were almost exhausted, and our daily ration was down to a bowl of congee. The American bombing raids had imposed a kind of order, which both the prisoners and their guards had respected. Now the sky was empty and exposed, a house without its roof.
Fortunately, the Japanese commandeered the guard-house and posted sentries outside the kitchens. But the soldiers were pale and uneasy, and Private Kimura avoided my eyes, aware now that he would never see his family again. Even Sergeant Nagata was subdued, waving me away when I hovered around the guard-house, trying to think of something to encourage him. He sat stiffly at his rifled desk, and ignored the English and Belgian women who stood outside his window in their tattered cotton dresses, screaming abuse at him until necklaces of spit glistened on their breasts.
At last came the Emperor
