Guide leaders, Miss Kent and Miss Butterworth, were known as Brown Owl and Tawny Owl during our meetings. They were different at Brownies. Less strict. It was part of the reason we all enjoyed it so much.
‘We’ll be doing Christmas paper craft this evening,’ Brown Owl announced when we’d all sung our Six Songs and she’d finished inspecting our hands, nails and hair. ‘I’ve asked Shu Lan to help. I’m sure you will all make her feel very welcome.’
We always admired the intricate ‘window flowers’ Shu Lan made and hung at the dormitory windows every spring as symbols of good fortune and happiness for the new season. She called them chuanghua. We watched in awe as she started to make delicate paper snowflakes with the same skill and precision. We did our best with our scissors, but our snowflakes were simple and clumsy, while Shu Lan’s were as beautiful as the real thing. Only Mouse managed to make anything half decent.
‘That’s ever so good,’ I said, offering her an encouraging smile.
Joan ‘Mouse’ Nuttall – nicknamed because she was always so quiet – muttered a ‘Thank you.’ I felt a little sorry for her, although I’d never admitted it to anyone. Like a doll you’ve grown tired of playing with, most of the time I forgot she was there.
‘You make many folds, and then, very carefully cutting,’ Shu Lan explained as we all started again with a fresh piece of paper.
Sprout’s sister, Connie (who was ever so grown up, and styled her hair just like Princess Elizabeth) had once told us that Shu Lan, and some of the other servants, had come to Chefoo as refugees from the city of Nanking, where something terrible had happened a few years ago. She wouldn’t say what the terrible thing was, only that it was something to do with the Japanese Imperial Army, and that lots of Chinese people had died rather horribly. I tried not to think about it as I watched Shu Lan make her paper snowflakes. I found her fascinating. She was so beautiful I had to force myself not to stare, because that was rude.
Apart from the local fishermen we often saw at the bay, and the occasional rickshaw puller rushing past the school gates, the school servants were the only Chinese people we saw regularly. When the wind blew in the right direction, we could hear the bells from the Buddhist temples, and from the upstairs dormitory windows we sometimes watched the little hongtou sampans on the bay, and the graceful junks with their bamboo sails spread wide like enormous wings. At harvest time, we liked to watch the farmers and their water buffalo working in the fields, traditional bamboo hats shading the farmers from the baking sun, the women pulling the ripe plants from the ground, often while carrying their babies on their backs. That was the China I’d imagined when I’d looked in Edward’s atlas before we’d left England; the China I’d been so excited to visit. Part of me wanted to climb over the school walls and run through the rice fields; to know what life was like for a ten-year-old Chinese girl.
While we worked, Miss Kent asked Shu Lan to tell us about her great-great-grandfather, an imperial metalsmith who’d made beautiful jewellery using feathers from kingfisher wings.
‘The feathers are placed close together, to look like enamel,’ she explained. ‘The jewellery is very delicate.’ She described the elegant aristocrats – wives and daughters of emperors – who’d worn the treasured pieces. I enjoyed the story until we learned that the kingfishers were captured in nets, their feathers taken from them while they were still alive in order to preserve their beautiful blue colour.
‘But that’s cruel,’ I said.
‘And yet it is a Chinese tradition, and a highly valued skill,’ Miss Kent countered. ‘We can’t simply dismiss things that are unfamiliar to us as cruel, Nancy. We must learn to understand, and respect.’
Even so, I was relieved when Shu Lan explained that the activity was now illegal. We finished our snowflakes in silence.
That night, I dreamed of lost things and of kingfishers trapped in a metalsmith’s net. I was still dreaming when I was woken by the sound of an approaching aeroplane. The dormitory was dark as I crept out of bed and tiptoed to the window. The floorboards were cold. They creaked beneath my bare feet.
As I opened the shutter, a Japanese plane flew low over the school chapel and headed out across the bay. In the distance, a line of soldiers marched toward a truck. The Japanese army had occupied the city of Chefoo a year before I’d arrived at the school, so I was used to seeing the soldiers coming and going on operations against their enemy. We understood that Britain wasn’t at war with Japan, so although it was unusual for one of their planes to fly so close to the school, I hardly gave it a moment’s thought and turned my attention instead to the fat snowflakes tumbling from the sky. I pressed my forehead to the glass, delighted by the spectacle.
I watched until I began to shiver from the cold and climbed back into bed. I pulled the sheets up to my nose, wrapped my arms around myself, and listened to the soft patter of snow at the window. I imagined Mummy lying awake somewhere too, remembering a time when we’d watched the snow together, missing me so much that her bones ached. I wished, more than anything, that I was with her and not stuck at school, and hoped I really would see her in the spring.
But wishes and hopes are fragile things, easily crushed by the marching boots of enemy soldiers.
I rose before dawn, my sleep disturbed by the prospect of the difficult conversations the morning would bring, and by Japanese soldiers roaring past the school gates in their noisy trucks until the small hours. While I knew they posed no threat to a western missionary school, I didn’t care to be so close to other people’s disputes, especially when it kept me awake half the night and left unsightly bags under my eyes.
I washed and dressed and made my bed, hospital corners precisely tucked in, the eiderdown smoothed of any unsightly creases. A cursory glance in the mirror left me wishing I could remove the lines from my face as easily. I missed the Elspeth Kent I used to see in the reflection; the carefree young thing who’d smiled for a week when Harry Evans asked her to dance. I hoped I might still find some scraps of her in England. Stitch her back together. Make Do and Mend. After all, wasn’t that what the Ministry encouraged?
The decades-old floorboards creaked and cracked beneath my shoes as I made my way along the corridor and downstairs, past trophy cabinets and the many proud moments of the school’s history. Once outside, I took a moment to glance toward the waters of the bay and then hurried on across the courtyard, beneath the branches of the plum trees, to the old stone chapel. My footsteps echoed off the flagstones as I walked to the altar and bent my head in prayer before settling into a pew. I sat in silent thought, remembering the wedding day that had been cruelly taken from me, and the other I’d walked away from. I was six thousand miles away from home, and still they haunted me: the man I should have married, and the man who had nearly taken his place. Ghosts now, both of them.
Pushing my memories aside, I took my letter of resignation from my pocket. I’d agonized over the words for so long they were imprinted on my mind. It is with much difficulty, and after a great deal of personal anguish and reflection, that I must inform you of my intention to leave my position at Chefoo School and return to my family in England … For weeks it had idled among the pages of my Girl Guide Handbook. I would give it to the principal of the Girls’ School after assembly that morning, and confirm my intention to return to England on the next available steamer from Shanghai. There was no reason to delay further, although the prospect of telling Minnie Butterworth – my dearest friend on the teaching staff –wasn’t quite so straightforward. Calling off a wedding and travelling halfway around the world had been easy in comparison.
I
