China to Me (51 page)

All over hospital the patients were trying to eke out their diet with sweets. There was a certain kind of Australian jam, IXL brand, that flooded the market, fortunately. The men loved it. Charles could take a small tin of apricot jam and devour it in one day. Healthier men could eat much more jam than that. Instinctively they were trying to make up for the lack of fats and sugars that already was bothering them in their diet.

We knew the hospital basement was full of supplies: cases and cases of sardines in oil and fruit and everything else. But the authorities were trying to save it all for the lean months ahead, never admitting to themselves that the Japanese would not be likely to let them reap the benefits of their caution. And upstairs the young men grew hungrier and hungrier.

It made me laugh, withal bitterly, when Hilda and Mary trailed into the Queen Mary the day after my epic hitchhike. Hilda was airy about it. “Quite impossible, my dear. We had seven hits on the roof of the hospital the day you left. Constance is supposed to have packed your things and they are mixed in with mine. I'll sort them out in time. My dear, it's heaven at Margaret's. I have her bedroom.”

“Oh, she did make room then?”

“Why, yes. I believe there were some people there, but Margaret asked them to move. Why?”

“Nothing. … Did you bring my hairbrush?”

“Probably,” said Hilda. “Of course I shall never understand why you dashed off as you did, without even packing a bag.”

We were on chilly terms for some days. I know it was petty of me but I couldn't help it. Hilda was the director's wife and now at last, in Selwyn's own hospital, she reaped the benefit of her position. She did as she liked there, and acted like the hostess of the place. She gained in stature hourly, only collapsing when her husband came home of an evening. I began to picture to myself those long cozy sessions she had with Margaret in the flat, over a bottle of whisky; they had tried me in the balance and found me wanting. “Rushing off like that, like a madwoman, my dear, abandoning her child . … Incredible!”

The British hospital system, and the whole Western-world idea of social relief, develops petty tyrants to a dangerous degree. I was to discover that very shortly. On the day Carola was given back to me I met Margaret, the almoner, in the corridor of the hospital and she hailed me. Her brown eyes were looking hard.

“How long do you intend to hang on with the Weills?” she demanded. “What are you going to do when they are put out of their house?”

Instead of retorting, “It's none of your business,” I asked, “Huh?”

She spoke crisply but breathlessly. I suppose she was scared, but it didn't show. “All the houses in the neighborhood are to be dispossessed,” she said. “They are to be filled with soldiers who are going to protect us from snipers. So the Weills will be forced to move, and where will you go then?”

“Canavals' house, I suppose.”

Margaret took a deep breath. “You had better go away completely,” she said. “They will want the Canaval house too, very likely. They are going to protect us from snipers.” She spoke passionately. “You are hampering the war effort by remaining,” she said. “And another thing: you shouldn't come here every day. This hospital, by virtue of the fact that we are taking in soldiers, is no longer a civilian hospital. It's military. Now in a military hospital visitors aren't permitted except once a week, often not at all. You come here in the morning, outside of visiting hours, and sit with Charles all day. You aren't a relative of his, you know. I've heard a lot of talk about it and action will be taken soon. I'm sorry,” she said, “but there it is.”

Fortunately I didn't try to answer: I recognize panic when I see it. I walked off and left her, but I went to see Hilda and raised hell.

“You've been working Margaret up. I won't have it. If necessary I'll appeal to Selwyn. Nobody takes care of Charles all day but me; they're shorthanded and they know it. Now — ”

Whatever tension had strung Hilda up to this amazing pitch broke down. “Oh, my dear, you're hysterical. I haven't told Margaret to say anything . … I'm sorry.”

We set to work together making swabs, and when Margaret came back things were near sanity again. The two women now concentrated on another problem. How was Hilda to be smuggled out before the Japanese swooped down and took her prisoner, and tortured her, and murdered her? They seemed to take it for granted that Hilda of all people was in the gravest danger. She had helped Chungking; she was known as a leftist.

“You must dye your hair black and be entered here on the books as Rose Smith,” decided Margaret. “Later we'll smuggle you out. Your friends can be trusted.”

“Oh, the Chinese won't give me away. But Mary? Selwyn would never consent to my breaking for freedom and taking Mary with me.”

“Then let's do this. …”

They talked on, and on, and on. Hilda's voice trembled, as though she were wallowing pleasantly in danger. I didn't think that she was in that much peril. Japan, it seemed to me, was now more seriously at war with Western nations than she had been with China or China's champions. I thought for an uneasy moment of my own record — The Soong Sisters, and Candid Comment, and a lot of other things — and then with genuine relief I decided that I wasn't important enough for the Japs to worry their heads about. I have always been an optimistic ostrich, but it gives me satisfaction now to reflect that this time I was right. I held my tongue, though. Hilda was in the saddle, not Emily Hahn and her Carola. I made swabs.

Chapter 41

Gwen priestwood and her government lorry dropped by every day. The war may have shown up a lot of people in a shocking way, so that I still blush for them when I think of it, but it brought out the most surprising heroism in others. It proved to me that I had been wrong in my opinions of practically everybody from the beginning.

It was Christmas morning when Gwen came in. The Governor had already made his rounds the afternoon before. Charles was still too ill to be told the truth, they decided, so the Governor told him a lot of pretty lies about how magnificently we were doing, though when Alf Bennett dropped by later he savagely contradicted all of it.

“They're running a regular ferry service over to North Point in broad daylight,” he grumbled, “and God knows what's happened to Repulse Bay. We need you, old boy; why did you go and get wounded? My Japanese is inadequate, to say the least.”

Gwen, though, was cheerful and full of fight, and fresh from having driven her lorry through very hot territory.

“Helen and Gustl Canaval,” she reported, “have given me permission to raid their house. I want to get clothes for you, Charles — ”

“But I'm all right,” said Charles. “You've brought most of my kit already.”

“Also,” continued Gwen, “the Canavals have a cellar of sorts, and since looting seems inevitable, it might as well be me.”

“I'll go with you,” I said.

I had always thought the Canaval house (next door to Mme. Kung's) very near to the hospital. Today, though, what with a Jap plane sailing about overhead and exhibiting an awkward interest in our khaki-colored van, it didn't seem so near after all. As we reached the Canaval driveway, notorious for its awkward steepness, Gwen peered up at the plane and said doubtfully, “I don't think they'd waste a whole bomb on us, do you?”

“N-n-n-o,” I said mendaciously. We drove down the hill and knocked on the door. The plane hovered about, still curious. A frightened servant answered our hail, overjoyed at seeing us, and he made no difficulties at all when we raided the house. Woolies, pajamas, books, and two dozen small bottles of rye whisky rewarded our search, and we felt very cheery as we started back, even though we stalled on the hill just as the plane swooped down to take a good look. Gwen was right; they didn't waste a bomb. We brought the whisky back safe to the Queen Mary and distributed it in the privates' wards, all but one pint bottle.

Nothing marred our simple enjoyment of the day until three in the afternoon, when Hilda ran in. Her hair was mussed up and there were tears running down her cheeks, and a break in her voice.

“Do you know the news, Charles?” she blurted. “We've surrendered. The firing is stopped. There's a white flag on the police station across the road. Selwyn just phoned me.”

I suppose Charles was the only really surprised staff officer in town. You see, they hadn't been telling him the truth. He didn't say anything but “Yes, Hilda?” but he looked very grim and set his jaw. Hilda sank down on a chair and talked, and talked, and talked. Neither of us listened. Charles said once, “They didn't tell me,” and that was all. After a long time I realized Hilda was still talking, and I didn't want to hear her. I thought it was the end of everything. I thought they would take Charles away immediately. There wasn't any time. “Hilda,” I said, “I want to speak to Charles alone.”

“Why, certainly, my dear.” She was surprised but amiable.

She hurried out to spread the news. Wiseman had gone out already in a wheel chair, and we were really alone, for the first and last time. I don't know what I said. I cried on his good shoulder, I remember that, and asked him what would happen to him. Charles said that they would treat him all right, and that we must just try to see the war through.

“In the end they can't win,” he said. “I don't see how they can, do you? Against America and England and Holland and China? We must try to survive, that's all. I'm only sorry you're caught.”

“They'll take you away from me,” I said.

We heard three loud explosions; that was the big guns they were blowing up, he said. Wiseman rushed in to ask us if we thought it was the truth. Other boys came in then, old friends of ours, walking wounded with their arms in casts, or their heads bandaged, or their teeth missing. I sat there and tried to be normal. I wanted to go back to Carola but I didn't want to leave Charles. I suppose I've never been quite as unhappy and frightened in my life. It is no use trying to write about these things.

Veronica came in to tell me it was time to go home, and she was fighting mad at the Army for surrendering, and then tearful, and then mad again. She walked over with a swing of her fine figure and stared out at the countryside beneath the veranda. “There they are,” she said suddenly. “Japs. Little beasts. Swarming all over.”

I went and stood next to her and looked. It was true. They were on the roads outside the hospital and inside the grounds; little misshapen gnomes they looked like, dirty and shabby and grinning and busy. They were carrying things into the flat buildings, the doctors' and nurses' quarters. The roads were choked with Jap trucks. The lovely country was covered with Japs. It had happened at last. After running away from their bombs in Nanking and Nantao in 1937, after running the gantlet dozens of times in Shanghai, after escaping them for a year by ducking into Chungking ground, I had been caught. Now. With Carola, and Charles wounded in hospital.

I had seen Japanese armies before. I saw the Victory March in Shanghai. My stomach felt queasy, and I knew we would have to face it now or I would begin to be really afraid. I picked up my bag.

“Come on,” I said to Veronica. “Let's go.”

Charles, watching me out of the door, smiled a little. He must have been afraid too.

That morning, though we were busy with Christmas junketing, I had seen a truck drive up with a lot of white girls in it, mostly in A.N.S. uniform. I didn't see them close up, but I remembered later having wondered where they came from. Three of them had climbed down out of the back of the lorry in a weary, hopeless way, and they had linked arms and walked into the hospital clinging to each other. Now at the door when I met Susie and Sophie and the others I heard about it.

“We're walking,” they explained to me. “Mother doesn't dare bring the car because the Japs will snaffle it. They're taking cars wherever they see them. Those girls who were brought back today are in a bad way. They were caught in Happy Valley in a first-aid post.”

“Why?” I asked stupidly. “What happened?”

Susie stared at me and said, “Rape.”

I said to myself, “Nonsense. It doesn't really happen.” I also said, “Rape is impossible. Unless, of course, you use a sandbag or a bayonet.” I said to myself, “I won't be taken in by horror stories. No, no, no; I'll hold on to myself.” I said, “If I am raped I won't care. It won't be my fault. It will mean nothing; it is like being wounded. Charles would agree with me.”

Just then, as we left the hospital grounds a few yards from the gate, two Japanese came along. One was a private and the other, since he was carrying a sword, must have been an officer. The private hailed us “Oy!” We pretended first not to hear; he yelled louder, angrily. We stopped. My eyes met Susie's. She sat down suddenly on a rock.

The officer grinned and walked off so he couldn't see us. The private approached us at a run and motioned that he wanted to look at our arms. It was our wrist watches he wanted, not our virtue. The relief of it made me shaky in the knees. What's more, he missed my watch; I wear it on the right wrist and he didn't look for it there, under my leather jacket. As he took the watches from the others Susie found the nerve to say, “You have one already.” She touched it lightly. “Shame!” said Susie banteringly.

The private grinned awkwardly. He hung his head and grinned like a naughty schoolboy, showing his great teeth like battered tombstones. But he took the watches. Then he let us go on. He stank; I was aware of that.

We found Japanese all over the house. They had taken complete possession of the upper house, and three officers had elected to live in Mother Weill's living room. Mother Weill was everywhere all at once, talking Japanese in a broken way that was still effective, arguing, giving orders to her servants, working away like a machine. We had no time to repine. She rushed at us like a whirlwind and shoved us indoors, out of sight of the licentious soldiery, up the back stairs to the bedrooms. The officers seemed to be all right, she whispered. We were to stay out of sight. Yes, Carola was safe.