Empire of the Sun (36 page)

At noon, when Lieutenant Price appeared, dressed like a corpse in the scarlet canopy of the parachute canister dragged by his men, Jim gathered together his bundle of magazines and returned to G Block. He spent an hour sorting them into their correct order, and then set out on a tour of the camp. Avoiding the hospital, he climbed through the wire and explored the overgrown terrain between the camp and Lunghua Airfield, hoping to find the turtle which he had released in the last weeks of the war.

But the canal beside the fence contained only the body of a dead Japanese airman. Sections of Lunghua Airfield – the pagoda, barracks and control tower – were now occupied by an advance brigade of Nationalist troops. For reasons of their own, the Japanese aircraftsmen and ground crews made no attempt to escape, and lived on in the gutted hangars and workshops. Each day the Nationalist soldiers took a few of the Japanese and killed them in the waste ground to the south and west of the airfield.

The sight of this dead Japanese airman, floating face down in the canal among the Mustang drop-tanks, unsettled Jim as much as the bodies of the Britons in the camp hospital. From then on he decided to remain within the safety of the camp. He slept at night in Mrs Vincent’s bed, and spent the days sampling the American canned food and chocolate, and sorting out his collection of magazines. By now he had assembled a substantial library, which he stacked neatly on the spare bunks in his room. The copies of
Time, Life
and the
Reader’s Digest
covered every conceivable aspect of the war, a world at once familiar and yet totally removed from his own experiences in Shanghai and Lunghua. At moments, as he studied the dramatic accounts of tank battles and beach-heads, he wondered if he himself had been in the war at all.

But he continued to collect the magazines from the floor of the commandant’s office, concealing within them a few extra cans of Spam and powdered milk, part of a long-term reserve that he had sensibly begun to stockpile. Already it was clear to Jim that the American air-drops were becoming less frequent, and sooner or later they would stop. Now that his strength had returned, Jim was able to scavenge busily around the camp and was never more pleased than when, under a bunk in D Block, he found a tennis racquet and a tin of balls.

On the third morning, as Price and his men stood with the binoculars on the roof of the guardhouse, waiting impatiently for the American relief planes, an ancient Opel truck arrived at the gates of the camp. Two bare-chested Britons, sometime Lunghua prisoners, sat in the driving cabin, while their Chinese wives and children rode in the back with their possessions. Jim had last seen the men, foremen at the Moller Line dockyards, in the stadium at Nantao, lifting the hoods of the white Cadillacs on the morning the war had ended. Somehow they had made their way to Shanghai and collected their families, who had not been interned by the Japanese. Finding themselves destitute in the hostile city, they had decided to return to Lunghua.

Already they had collected their first booty. A silver parachute canister lay like a bomb on the floor of the truck, dwarfing the dark-eyed children in their Chinese tunics. Jim watched from Basie’s window in E Block, smiling contentedly as Tulloch and Lieutenant Price climbed down from the roof of the guardhouse. They strolled over to the gates but made no attempt to unlock them. A rambling argument ensued between Price and the former Lunghua prisoners, who pointed angrily at E Block, deserted now except for the fourteen-year-old boy laughing to himself at the top-floor window.

Jim drummed his fists on the concrete sill, and waved to the men and their glowering Chinese wives. After three years of trying to leave the camp they were now back at its gates, ready to take up their stations for World War III. At long last they were beginning to realize the simple truth that Jim had always known, that inside Lunghua they were free.

The gates were opening; a bargain had been struck. Lieutenant Price had taken a fancy to the Opel. Within a minute the two Britons and their families sped across the parade ground towards D Block, followed by the first Mustangs of the morning. As they soared over the camp the wash from their engines drove a foul wind through the empty buildings, a reek of offal borne on a plague of thousands of glutted flies.

The Chinese beggars sitting by the gates shielded their faces. But Jim inhaled the heady stench, shutting out his thoughts of the hospital and the dead Japanese airman in the canal beyond the wire. The time had come to forget the dead. In its way the camp was coming alive again. The days of powdered milk and chocolate bars had made him stronger, but not yet equal to the long walk back to Shanghai. Other people would be returning to the camp, and perhaps his mother and father would join him there. Even with the reduced American air-drops there would be a constant supply of food. Jim looked down at the silent kitchens behind the guardhouse, and the rusting collection of metal carts. Already he was thinking of a sweet potato…

His shoes rang through the empty corridors, and down the stone steps. As he raced from the foyer he heard the throbbing engine of the Opel. Tulloch and the Seaforth Highlander were loading parachute canopies and cartons of canned food over the tail-gate.

‘Jim! Hold it!’ Tulloch beckoned to him. ‘Where do you think you’re going?’

‘G Block, Mr Tulloch…’ Gasping for breath, Jim leaned against the Opel’s shaking fender. In the doorway of the guardhouse Lieutenant Price was feeding cartridges into the ammunition clip of his rifle, the ritual of a man counting his secret gold. ‘I want to reserve a room for my parents – they might be coming to Lunghua. I’ll reserve a room for you, Mr Tulloch.’

‘Jim…Jim…’ Tulloch placed his hand on Jim’s head, trying to steady the over-excited boy. ‘It’s time you found your father, lad. The war’s over, Jim.’

‘But the next war, Mr Tulloch. You said it’s going to begin soon.’

The Packard mechanic helped Jim on to the floor of the truck. ‘Jim, you need to get the last war over before you start the next. We’ll give you a lift – you’re going back to Shanghai!’

38
The Road to Shanghai

The truck careened from one side of the Shanghai road to the other, throwing Jim on to the agitated bundle of parachute silk. He clung to the cartons of K-rations stacked around him, and listened to Tulloch and Lieutenant Price shouting to each other above the bellows-like roar of the engine.

Through the fading camouflage on the rear window, Jim could see the policeman’s bandaged hands, deliberately raised from the wheel as he allowed the speeding truck to wobble and drift from the centre of the road. The tyres reached the verge, ripping up a storm of dust and leaves. Tulloch sat in the passenger seat beside the jar of rice wine, holding the rifle through the open window. He pounded on the dented hood, as the apartment blocks of the French Concession appeared between the bomb-torn trees.

For all the dangers of Lieutenant Price’s driving, Jim was glad that the two men were in such high spirits. For the first mile the lieutenant had been unable to find second gear, and they had laboured along the Shanghai road at a noisy walking pace that threatened to boil the water from the radiator. Then an air-drop at Hungjao brought back Price’s driving skills. They hurtled along the farm tracks and canal embankments, following the parachutes towards the landing ground, cheered by the prospect of even more American merchandise to be sold in the black markets of Shanghai.

Others, however, had reached the treasure before them. For half an hour they trundled around the deserted paddy fields, unable to find a single parachute canister. Price waved his rifle, threatening an entire world of silent canals.

Fortunately, Price’s anger soon abated. After returning to the Shanghai road the lieutenant steered the truck towards the body of a dead Japanese despatch rider lying beside a motorcycle. The dead man’s head burst in a spray of bloodied maggots and brain tissue that drenched the roadside trees. This feat of steering put Price in an excellent mood, which Jim hoped would last long enough for him to reach Shanghai and jump from the truck at the first traffic lights.

Jim looked back at the distant rooftops of the camp. It was strange to be leaving Lunghua, but he realized that once again he had been imprisoned by the camp as he had been during the war. At a single word from Tulloch, the apparently secure world he had begun to rebuild for himself out of one small room and a few tins of Spam had collapsed at his feet.

They passed Lunghua Pagoda at the northern edge of the airfield, the barrels of its anti-aircraft guns still pointing to the sky. Jim searched the ruined hangars for any sight of the young kamikaze pilot, sorry that he had never been able to repay him for the mango. A mile to the east was the Olympic stadium at Nantao. The Chinese characters on the shell-pocked façade, celebrating the generosity of Generalissimo Chiang, rose ever more vividly above the parking lot, as if China’s feudal past had returned to claim its time.

The truck swerved, skidding across the camber. On a whim, Lieutenant Price had turned on to a mud track that ran towards the stadium. Jim heard Tulloch protest, but then the wine jar was passed across the steering wheel. They sped between the first of the earth bunkers and rifle pits that guarded the former Japanese headquarters. Lines of crumbling tank ditches crossed the fields, their slopes strewn with webbing and ammunition boxes.

Jim lay back on the bale of parachute silk. He had known all along that the sight of the Olympic stadium would prove too large a temptation. Since his arrival at Lunghua Camp the group of Britons had never ceased to question him about the looted furniture in the stands. Jim had been forced to embroider his memories, in order to ensure his supplies of canned goods and magazines from the commandant’s office. By now his make-believe had seized Price’s imagination, and it was too late to turn back.

A hundred yards from the parking lot they left the road and stopped in a culvert between two tank-trap embankments. Price and Tulloch, both drunk on the rice wine, stepped from the driving cabin. They lit cigarettes, staring slyly at the stadium.

Price tapped the side of the truck with his rifle. In a mocking voice, he called out: ‘Shanghai Jim…’

‘Just a detour, Jim,’ Tulloch assured him boozily. ‘We’ll pick out a case of Scotch, and a few fur coats for the girls in the Nanking Road.’

‘I didn’t see any fur coats, Mr Tulloch, or any Scotch. Lots of chairs and dining tables.’

Lieutenant Price pushed Tulloch aside. ‘Dining tables? Do you think we came here to have lunch?’ He stared at the façade of the stadium, as if its shabby chalk challenged his own pallid skin.

Jim avoided the rifle barrel aimed at his head. ‘There were cupboards and wardrobes.’

‘Wardrobes?’ Tulloch swayed between them. ‘That could be it, Lieutenant.’

‘Right…’ Price calmed himself. He touched the cigarette burns on his chest, tapping out a secret code of pain and memory. ‘I told you the boy had his eyes open.’

The two men crossed the road and entered the parking lot. Price leaned against a trackless tank, and spat the prison phlegm from his lungs through an open hatch. Jim hung back among the lines of trucks, thinking of Mr Maxted. Was he still lying on the blood-stained grass? Having eaten so much, Jim felt guilty, and remembered that he might have sold his shoes. For all the looted cocktail bars it contained, the Olympic stadium seemed sombre and threatening, a place of omens. Here he had seen the afterglow of the atomic flash at Nagasaki. Its white glare still lay over the road of their death-march from Lunghua, the same pale light that he could see in the chalky façade of the stadium and in Lieutenant Price’s lime-pit skin.

Fanning away the flies with a copy of
Life,
Jim sat on the running board of a truck. He studied a photograph of American marines raising the flag on the summit of Mount Suribachi after their battle for Iwo Jima. The Americans in these magazines had fought an heroic war, closer to the comic books than Jim had read as a child. Even the dead were glamourized, the living’s idea of the dead…

Two Mustang fighters flew overhead, leading a Superfortress that lumbered in from the west, its bomb doors open, ready to scatter its Spam and
Reader’s Digests
across the empty fields. The engines drummed at the ground below Jim’s feet, shaking the lines of derelict vehicles.

Jim lowered the magazine, and noticed that armed men were running from the entrance tunnel of the stadium, their voices drowned in the noise of the aircraft. The Superfortress ambled through the sky, but the men scattered in panic from the tunnel, as if expecting the stadium to be bombed. A bearded European in the leather jacket of an American pilot raced across the parking lot, followed by two more men carrying shotguns. A bare-chested Chinese with a pistol belt around his black trousers scuttled along at a crouch, leading a group of coolies with bamboo staves.

Pursuing them through the tunnel was a platoon of Nationalist soldiers, rifles raised to the strong sunlight. They stopped to fire at the fleeing men, letting off a ragged volley of shots. Jim opened the door of the truck and climbed into the driving cabin. Fifty feet from the entrance tunnel Tulloch lay in the white dust that had fallen from the façade of the stadium. Lieutenant Price ran past him towards the line of trucks, his face like a lantern scanning the ground. Shaking off his bandages, he leapt the perimeter wall of the parking lot and plunged into the flooded paddy field beyond the road.

The Chinese officer fired a last pistol shot at Price’s splashing figure, then knelt in the stadium entrance. Rifles raised, his men approached the rusting vehicles. They made a token show of flushing out any wounded members of the raiding party, turned and retreated to the safety of the stadium. Tulloch lay dead in the sun, his blood leaking into the chalky dust.

Blue and scarlet parachutes were falling over Hungjao. Jim slid across the seat, opened the door on the far side of the cabin and slipped on to the ground. Screened by the ammunition wagons and field guns, he ran towards the perimeter wall.