wheel-locked rickshaws and their exhausted coolies, the gangs of aggressive beggars and pickpockets. Refugees from Chapei and Nantao streamed into the International Settlement, shouting up at the impassive facades of the great banks and trading houses along the Bund. Thousands of Chinese troops were dug into the northern suburbs of Shanghai, facing the Japanese garrison in their concession at Yangtsepoo. Standing on the steps of the Cathay Hotel as the doorman held my cycle, I could see the Whangpoo river filled with warships. There were British destroyers, sloops and gunboats, the USS Augusta and a French cruiser, and the veteran Japanese cruiser Idzumo, which my father told me had helped to sink the Russian Imperial Fleet in 1905.
Despite this build-up of forces, the war obstinately refused to declare itself that afternoon. Disappointed, I wearily pedalled back to Amherst Avenue, my school blazer scuffed and stained, in time for tea and my favourite radio serial. Hugging my grazed knees, I stared at my armies of lead soldiers, and adjusted their lines to take account of the latest troop movements that I had seen as I rode home. Ignoring Olga’s calls, I tried to work out a plan that would break the stalemate, hoping that my father, who knew one of the Chinese bankers behind Chiang Kai-shek, would pass on my muddled brain-wave to the Generalissimo.
Baffled by all these problems, which were even more difficult than my French homework, I wandered into my parents’ bedroom. Olga was standing in front of my mother’s full-length mirror, a fur cape over her shoulders. I sat at the dressing-table and rearranged the hair-brushes and perfume bottles, while Olga frowned at me through the glass as if I were an uninvited visitor who had strayed from another of the houses in Amherst Avenue. I had told my mother that Olga played with her wardrobe, but she merely smiled at me and said nothing to Olga.
Later I realised that this 17-year-old daughter of a once well-to-do Minsk family was scarcely more than a child herself. On my cycle rides I had been shocked by the poverty of the White Russian and Jewish refugees who lived in the tenement districts of Hongkew. It was one thing for the Chinese to be poor, but it disturbed me to see Europeans reduced to such a threadbare state. In their faces there was a staring despair that the Chinese never showed. Once, when I cycled past a dark tenement doorway, an old Russian woman told me to go away and shouted that my mother and father were thieves. For a few days I had believed her.
The refugees stood in their patched fur coats on the steps of the Park Hotel, hoping to sell their old-fashioned jewellery. The younger women had painted their mouths and eyes, trying bravely to cheer themselves up, I guessed. They called to the American and British officers going into the hotel, but what they were selling my mother had never been able to say – they were giving French and Russian lessons, she told me at last.
Always worried by my homework, and aware that many of the White Russians spoke excellent French, I had asked Olga if she would give me a French lesson like the young women at the Park Hotel. She sat on the bed while I hunted through my pocket dictionary, shaking her head as if I were some strange creature at a zoo. Worried that I had hurt her feelings by referring to her family’s poverty, I gave Olga one of my silk shirts, and asked her to pass it on to her invalid father. She had held it in her hands for fully five minutes, like one of the vestments used in the communion services at Shanghai Cathedral, before returning it silently to my wardrobe. Already I had noticed that the White Russian governesses possessed a depth of female mystery that the mothers of my friends never remotely approached.
‘Yes, James?’ Olga hung the fur cape on its rack, and slipped my mother’s breakfast gown over her shoulders. ‘Have you finished your holiday book? You’re very restless today.’
‘I’m thinking about the war, Olga.’
‘You’re thinking about it every day, James. You and General Chiang think about it all the time. I’m sure he would like to meet you.’
‘Well, I could meet him …’ As it happened, I did sometimes feel that the Generalissimo was not giving his fullest attention to the war. ‘Olga, do you know when the war will begin?’
‘Hasn’t it already begun? That’s what everyone says.’
‘Not the real war, Olga. The war in Shanghai.’
‘Is that the real war? Nothing is real in Shanghai, James. Why don’t you ask your father?’
‘He doesn’t know. I asked him after breakfast.’
‘That’s a pity. Are there many things he doesn’t know?’
Still wearing the breakfast robe, Olga sat on my father’s bed, her hand stroking the satin cover and smoothing away the creases. She was caressing the imprint of my father’s shoulders, and for a moment I wondered if she was going to slip between the sheets.
‘He does know many things, but …’
‘I can remind you, James, it’s Friday the 13th. Is that a good day for starting a war?’
‘Hey, Olga …!’ This news brightened everything. I rushed to the window – superstitions, I often noticed, had a habit of coming true. ‘I’ll tell you if I see anything.’
Olga stood behind me, calming me with a hand on my ear. Much as she loved the intimacy of my mother’s clothes and the ripe odour of my father’s riding jacket, she rarely touched me. She stared at the distant skyline along the Bund. Smoke rose from the coal-burning boilers of the older naval vessels. The black columns jostled for space as the warships changed their moorings, facing up to each other with sirens blasting. The darker light gave Olga’s face the strong-nosed severity of the mortuary statues I had seen in Shanghai cemetery. She lifted the breakfast robe, staring through the veil of its fine fabric as if seeing a dream of vanished imperial Russia.
‘Yes, James, I think they’ll start the war for you today …’
‘Say, thanks, Olga.’
But before the war could start, my mother and father returned unexpectedly from the Country Club. With them were two British officers in the Shanghai Volunteer Force, wearing their tight Great War uniforms. I tried to join them in my father’s study, but my mother took me into the garden and in a strained way pointed to the golden orioles drinking from the edge of the swimming pool.
I was sorry to see her worried, as I knew that my mother, unlike Olga, was one of those people who should never be worried by anything. Trying not to annoy her, I spent the rest of the afternoon in my playroom. I listened to the sirens of the battle-fleets and marshalled my toy soldiers. On the next day, Bloody Saturday as it would be known, my miniature army at last came to life.
I remember the wet monsoon that blew through Shanghai during that last night of the peace, drowning the sounds of Chinese sniper fire, and the distant boom of Japanese naval guns striking at the Chinese shore batteries at Woosung. When I woke into the warm, sticky air the storm had passed, and the washed neon signs of the city shone ever more vividly.
At breakfast my mother and father were already dressed in their golfing clothes, though when they left in the Packard a few minutes later my father was at the wheel, the chauffeur beside him, and they had not taken their golf clubs.
‘Jamie, you’re to stay home today,’ my father announced, staring through my eyes as he did when he had unfathomable reasons of his own. ‘You can finish your Robinson Crusoe.’
‘You’ll meet Man Friday and the cannibals.’ My mother smiled at this treat in store, but her eyes were as flat as they had been when our spaniel was run over by the German doctor in Columbia Road. I wondered if Olga had died during the night, but she was watching from the door, pressing the lapels of her dressing gown to her neck.
