China to Me (47 page)

I was feeding Carola when the phone rang at six.

“Mickey?” said Charles. “The balloon's gone up. It's come. War.”

Chapter 38

All over the world, how many people are telling a story like mine? Thousands; millions. It seems to me now that I felt the weight of the world's numbers at that minute, and then I thought of Carola, and then I thought of how to behave, all in a split second. But I was stupid for a little.

“Where?” I asked.

“All over. Pearl Harbor and Malaya and everywhere else.”

“How do you know?”

“I can't tell that,” said Charles impatiently. “Well, can you manage? I'm going down to headquarters. You had better phone Hilda.”

“Yes, I'll do that. You call me back if you have time.”

This was two hours before the general alarm was given, but Ah King and the rest must have been waiting, just as I had been waiting, for the news. He was in the hall fully dressed when I hung up, and he looked at me, silently inquiring, and I nodded. “I must pack,” I said. “Call Ah Choy and tell her. We'll take all the baby's clothes and my winter things. Two suitcases.”

Hilda hadn't heard officially, but when I told her she was calm and everyday in her manner. “So that was it: Selwyn's gone downtown already. Very well, my dear, I'll come and pick you up on one of my trips. Could you be ready this afternoon? I'll be going up and downhill all day.”

We talked about supplies, and distribution of people, and a lot of things I don't remember. “I do hate to pack,” I told myself crossly. Then I think I must have gone in and sat down by the cot. I crouched over the sleeping baby for an hour. I don't remember anything about how I felt. Being a nursing mother rather dulls your brain, and very likely I wasn't feeling anything.

Charles called again at eight, to find out if I was arranged for.

“I could probably get away long enough to take you up there,” he began doubtfully, and even then I felt glad that he was willing to go back on his Spartan word that much. But it wasn't necessary, I said. “Hilda's all fixed; she's coming for us. You have their phone number? Charles, you'll be all right?”

“Me? Nobody's going to get me. They protect staff officers,” he said, laughing. “I'll be locked up underground, honeybunch. … Listen. Hear it? There they are now.”

Through my free ear I heard the siren. Through my telephone ear I heard it too, just a second later. It was a weird effect. Then the bombs, those familiar bombs that I had been hearing since 1937, off and on. … The year's dream was broken. I woke up.

Charles was talking through the hooting of the siren. “Well, Mickey, I'm sorry about all this.”

“Darling, you didn't do it!”

“Anyway, Carola's too young to care; that's a good thing. … All the best.”

Click.

I went out on the stone terrace and looked across the bay, and there at Kai Tak was smoke bubbling up. Inside his veranda, my neighbor across the way was sucking his pipe and staring at it. We had never spoken before.

“Good morning,” I said. “Here it is.”

“Yes.” He shook his head. “Japan's committed suicide.”

I went indoors and crouched over the baby again.

“Come and eat breakfast,” said Ah King.

Ah Choy, the wash amah, folding up clothes in the bedroom, turned to me as I came in. “You scared, missy?” she asked.

“Nooooo. You're not scared, are you, Ah Choy?”

“Yes,” said Ah Choy, and began to cry.

I went back and sat over Carola.

Hilda Selwyn-Clarke is an admirable woman, and I wonder now why my fortnight's association with her is marked by so much irritation. It must have seared my soul. Perhaps like a lot of other people I blow off steam by getting angry with the nearest object, instead of letting go and being frankly terrified. Also, I've never liked feeling like a guest too long at a time; I like to be boss in the house.

We were crowded in the Selwyn-Clarke house, big as it was; we had a Chinese doctor and his wife and son, and Constance Lam, a girl who adored the doctor and who was now acting as housekeeper for the mess, and Miriam, a Chinese nurse who was Mary's governess, and the Valentines — Douglas Valentine was Selwyn's assistant, and Nina, his wife, was head of the A.N.S. — and a lot of other odd bits and pieces, doctors and such. On the third day the Armstrongs arrived. They had been warned out of their house next to the Peak tram, because the Japs had begun shelling the face of the mountain with obvious intent to put that tramway out of order. Oh, we were crowded, and the wonder is that we didn't all blow up, but we didn't. We behaved almost admirably. If we slipped now and then, if somebody talked loudly for a moment, we hushed it up straight away. If Hilda seemed shockingly self-centered to me, and obsessed with the welfare of her own people, I know that my seeming oblivion to Carola got on her nerves terribly. I don't deny that I avoided that baby. I made sure that Ah Cheung was standing by, and that she had her food, and I turned up for her feedings when it was time, but for the rest I stayed out of her way. It just hurt too much, looking at her.

“I can't understand that woman,” Hilda said angrily to Vera. “Why, when Mary was that age, if she cried I cried too.”

“Which must have been a great help,” said Vera.

You are to understand that we were under constant fire. I'm not going to write much about that part of it because it is impossible to give you the feeling of it. If you've been in a war you know. If you haven't you can't know. The first day was child's play, but the second day we had more than air raids; we had shelling from the approaching Jap forces across the bay, and from a few of their ships that had stolen up close to the island. It is probably an idiosyncrasy of mine, but I prefer bombs to shells. I'm more used to them. You can see the plane they are coming from, and you can hear the bomb coming down, and you know where you are. To be sure, in Hong Kong you are out in the open, or crouching inside some ridiculous stucco doorway, because there is nowhere else to go: Hong Kong had not prepared many dugouts, you remember. But anyway, once a bomb has popped, it has popped, and the plane can't stay in one place pegging away at you. Shells are different. Shells keep coming and hitting at the same spot. Shells are the devil. Especially were they unpleasant up there on the crest of the mountain, on the tipmost top of the proud Peak.

In those early days none of us admitted that things weren't going to be quite all right. We waited patiently at first, and then impatiently, for planes to come up from Singapore and drive away these impertinent little pests. No planes came. Instead we listened to the radio and discovered that the Japs were having quite surprising luck down in Malaya. But the radio didn't tell the truth either. They kept talking about troops from China attacking the Jap forces in the rear. They talked about us: gallant little Hong Kong, the fortress. People sent encouraging messages, very important people, even the King of England. It all went according to plan, because the authorities really knew, remember, that Hong Kong couldn't be held. We were supposed to delay the enemy, that was all; the enemy was to be delayed from going south for three months.

Hilda and I went downtown on Monday afternoon, and on Tuesday, and on Wednesday. I saw Charles in town on Wednesday, and he looked grim, and he was quiet. I wasn't. I was jittery, worrying about him. Hilda kept me fairly well stirred up. Hilda has a strong histrionic sense, and she must have found some compensation in letting it rip. She talked dramatically and made wide, sweeping gestures like a woman on a lecture platform. She gasped a good deal, and said, “Oh, my God.” She stuck pins into me about Charles and Carola. Her idea of comforting talk for a nursing mother was not mine: she would stand, streaming with tears, watching me as I glumly nursed the baby, and she would say:

“You'll never keep her alive. Never. Why, I won't keep Mary alive, and she's almost six.”

Other people will tell the story of the battle of Hong Kong better than I can. I watched it, and traced what was happening pretty well, but the chess games of military strategy don't interest me, even when I've been a pawn. The Japs came into Kowloon on Wednesday, almost three weeks ahead of schedule. The Royal Scots were supposed to have held the front line, but the Royal Scots didn't.

In our house, preoccupied with medical service, this withdrawal from Kowloon was marked by Nina's indignation over her girls, the A.N.S. There were many of these auxiliary nurses stationed in Kowloon, in hospitals and at first-aid posts, and Selwyn had left them there. Nina was being besieged by outraged husbands and mothers and fathers, demanding to know why their womenfolk had been thrown to the Japs. Strictly speaking, I suppose Selwyn was right; I suppose there isn't a question of it. Nurses must be left to take care of the wounded, and in the old days when war was more civilized, the days in which Selwyn was mentally living, doctors and nurses were treated with respect by the enemy. Maybe. I have my doubts. I think people have always misbehaved in wartime, and they always will.

Looked on as a plain problem in ethics, Selwyn was justified. But this wasn't a bloodless problem. These girls were our girls. Nina knew them all. Nina felt responsible for them. She was a harassed and ghost-ridden woman during those days, and she hated Selwyn bitterly for a while.

Florence Ho-tung, whose husband was a doctor in the medical service, felt very much the same way. She herself was an A.N.S., but she had three small children to look after, and her old father, Sir Robert, had collapsed, and the family always depended on Florence more than on anyone else. Her older sister Irene had a baby almost as young as Carola; they were with her too. And now K. C. Yeo, her husband, was trapped over in Kowloon, remaining behind with the others. Florence telephoned to apologize to Dr. Selwyn-Clarke, but she really could not go on nursing for the time being. She was needed at home. It was all too much.

“You must invite her to lunch, my dear,” said Selwyn to Hilda.

I found Nina a comforting person during those first days. She was good-looking, and dignified and gracious in her uniform. She maintained a strong, sturdy sense of humor in managing Hilda. She didn't seem to be afraid. Most of all, she didn't go to pieces over her two little boys, who were at school up in Tsingtao, and from whom, of course, she was now completely cut off since the Japanese had occupied North China without opposition. Without Nina I might have misbehaved somehow. I was becoming irritably aware of my own shortcomings. I was no longer the tough baby who had sat it out in Chungking, and galloped around the streets of Nantao under bombardment. I was a craven, trembling female: a nursing mother. I knew it and I couldn't help it, though I tried. Anybody would have tried, under the chilly gaze of Dr. Selwyn-Clarke. He kept me going, and so did Nina, in spite of Hilda.

After Wednesday, when I saw Charles in town, until Sunday I had only one phone call from him. During that time I spent most of the day in the War Memorial Hospital, listing the inadequate medical supplies and rushing home at intervals to nurse Carola. I tried to space those visits home between air raids, but after a few days most of our daylight time was taken up by planes. They came over informally, one by one, and they kept wandering about until the air-raid siren meant nothing at all. It was always too late anyway. Usually the plane had come and gone before it gave its warning. We turned gray trying to keep the children indoors. Little John Armstrong was particularly insistent on getting himself bombed; his father could manage him, but his father came home only at night. During the day he was working downtown, ladling out rice to the Chinese coolies.

The housekeeping slipped into chaos. At last we imported Ah King to the house, for Hilda's servants all ran away. I felt better after that, though we had little time to talk to each other. Sunday afternoon Charles came marching in, his helmet cocked on one side of his head. Alf Bennett was with him, and Max Oxford. They were maddeningly efficient and warlike: they had come up on business, not pleasure. “Who lives over there?” demanded Charles, first off, as they came to a halt before the cellar where we were hiding with the children. He nodded toward a neighboring villa.

“Nobody at the moment, but some tommies are using it,” I said. And off they clanked, march, march, march, to play at soldiers. I stood outside the cellar, watching them go, and my heart was full of anger. Pretty soon, though, they came back. They were going to allow themselves a little time to visit, after all.

“Ah,” said Max, surveying Carola with his nose wrinkled in fastidious distaste, “growing some hair at last, is it?”

“Why do you frowst in this cellar?” demanded Charles.

Hilda and I looked at each other. The guns which flanked us were silent just then, but we knew they would soon speak. “We like it,” said Hilda. “However, if you'd like to sit upstairs …”

We arranged ourselves stiffly in the drawing room, and Ah King brought drinks. If I had hoped for a quiet cuddle with Charles I was disappointed. Hilda concentrated on him. She wanted to know what was happening. She had a lot to say and to ask. Charles held my hand and tried to say things in between.

“Why are you shaking?” he asked.

“I'm worried about you.”

“Don't be silly, Mickey. Anyway, I've fixed it. You and Carola are going to be all right if anything happens to me. I sent the will to your brother-in-law.”

“Don't talk like that.”

“Don't be silly, Mickey.” But he looked pleased, though dirty. Then Hilda butted in again, her voice quivering with hysteria, and we couldn't talk any more.

All of a sudden the shelling began, and the guns replied. Charles looked startled. “Is it often like this?” he demanded.

“Oh yes,” I said airily. “All day.”

“Well, really …” The house shook. The air shook. The heavens shook. We took the boys outside so that they could have a really good look. “This,” I said gently, “is why we frowst in the cellar.”