The Challenging Heights (13 page)

‘Dear Dicky Boy,

This letter is being written to you from Baltimore. I am flying now with Clyde Richards. I left Murphy’s outfit because he was getting serious and becoming involved with mid-air refuelling. Any goddam fool knows it can’t be done but he persists. We do regular shows, as well as a few other things which are financially good and the weather here is
always
okay for flying…’

Dicken tossed the letter aside. Zoë was not only in America, she was even beginning to sound American. Not that there was anything wrong with Americans, but it was a poor sort of marriage with himself in Iraq and his wife in the States. She didn’t seem to be suffering from missing him but, he had to admit, neither did he miss her.

His position with Hatto’s flight was still only temporary when they heard that a nationalist insurrection had broken out against the Western Powers in China and that Shanghai was likely to be besieged. The insurrection, led by a man called Chiang Kai-Shek, had been growing for some time but as usual, because the politicians in Westminster thought more of economy than safety, the air force had been cut to the bone and volunteers had to be asked for from men serving abroad who could be rushed to China to help.

When the notice appeared on the board, Dicken was immediately reminded of Nicola Aubrey. The last he had heard of her was that she was heading for China, where her diplomat father had been posted from India, and he remembered bitterly that the only show of affection he had received from the family had been an ill-spelt letter from her youngest sister, Marie-Gabrielle. Now, suddenly, he saw a chance of finding them again.

‘I’d like to put my name down,’ he told Hatto.

Hatto eyed him shrewdly. They had known each other long enough for him to be aware of Dicken’s problems. ‘What about going home?’ he asked. ‘You’re due.’

Dicken shrugged. ‘I don’t think it matters all that much,’ he said.

China was in a state of unrest. With all the foreign concessions and treaty ports that had been set up in the last century in a turmoil, the Chinese had suddenly realised that the western nations who had battened on to them were holding areas of their country with nothing more than a few soldiers and gunboats and, led by Chiang Kai-Shek, they were suddenly aware that there were enough of them to drive out the foreign devils.

The journey was by air to India, in easy stages via Basra, Bushire, and Bandar Abbas, then from Karachi across India to Calcutta. At Calcutta Dicken picked up a ship to Hong Kong, and from there to Shanghai took a Chinese-owned coastal vessel called the
Shuntien,
whose vital areas like the bridge and the engine room were enclosed by pirate-proof grilles. Because another ship had been taken over only two weeks before by men hidden among her passengers and burned out to the water-line, all her officers wore arms and there was a great deal of speculation about each other among the passengers.

Among them was a burly American Catholic priest, Father Bernard O’Buhilly who, with the aid of a group of nuns, ran a mission in the Louza district of Shanghai. He had been to Northern India for a holiday and was returning refreshed and ready to take up the cudgels again on behalf of his faith.

‘’Tis a dreadful country, boy,’ he insisted. ‘But, sure–’ his arm waved expansively ‘–just take a look at it and you’ll know why I always come back.’

The sunset was flooding the heavens with crimson, the sea with amaranth. Bathed in the glare, the whole ship was red, the black hull as if rusty, the white upper works coral, the brass flashing crimson sparks. For a moment they stood in silence as the ship drove through a sea like a field of jewels, scattering flashes of amethyst, garnet and ruby, then the priest sighed.

‘If only the human element were half as beautiful,’ he said. ‘And by that, me boy, I mean the white human element as well as the yellow.’ He glanced at Dicken. ‘You wouldn’t be one of us, would you?’ he asked, and when Dicken shook his head, he sighed and smiled. ‘Ah, well, you can’t win every time.’

It was O’Buhilly, an ardent cigarette smoker and lover of Irish whiskey, who explained the situation. ‘When the Manchu dynasty was overthrown by revolutionaries in 1911,’ he said, ‘the first president was Yuan Shih-K’ai but, sure, when his generals rose in revolt and he had to flee, it occurred to the generals that, since they had the troops,
they,
not the politicians, were the holders of power. Since then China’s become the sport of the military. At the moment ’tis two governments there are, a ghostly one with no power and few troops, clankin’ its chains in Peking, and one in Canton. But, sure, both are controlled by their generals who support or betray for money whichever they represent. They organise the opium trade, sell positions, tax the people and finally retire to Japan or Singapore with immense fortunes. They don’t fight – they prefer to accept or offer bribes – and the poor are oppressed while the soldiers are like bandits. The whole of China’s become a battlefield.

‘However–’ the burly priest held up a finger ‘–’tis now all changed. Chiang Kai-Shek is a touch different from the rest. He is educated. Trained in Russia and head of the Whampoa Military Academy. And he’s quarrelled with the Russians and the Chinese Communists and wants the whole of China for himself.’

‘Will he get it?’

‘That, me boy, remains to be seen. But ’twould be a better chance than most he had, I’d say.’

They knew they had reached the Yangtze hours before they saw land because of the oozy yellow nature of the sea and eventually they found themselves in the mouth of the river, still thirty miles wide with a thin brown line in the distance that was all there was to be seen of the land.

The Whangpoo, where the ship dropped anchor, was a muddy tributary twelve miles up the Yangtze. The surface of the water boiled with life, sampans moving across it in ones, twos, groups and fleets like swarms of water beetles. Tugs nudged at vessels anchored in midstream, and river steamers, black-and-red-funnelled and looking as if, with their tiers of decks, they had far too much freeboard for safety, trudged westwards into the hinterland, their sirens rumbling indignantly at the junks which swept indifferently across their course on the tide, huge eyes painted on bows and poops that lifted from their decks like those of Elizabethan galleons.

The sun was going down like a burst pomegranate behind the city, the anchored steamers grey silhouettes on a yellow background. The
Shuntien
’s
arrival alongside set off the most tremendous din, the noisy greetings and farewells of the old China hands indicating that they felt that they, not the Chinese, owned the country. Multitudinous Chinese clerks, compradores and shore workers poured through the ship, high-pitched voices chirruping cheerfully in their own language as they grinned and kow-towed to the Europeans in the hope of a good tip. Ashore, it was even more ear-battering, more dazzling to the eye with the garish Chinese symbols outside the shops and the bright red and yellow banners billowing over the doors, more offensive to the nose with the smell of drains, night-soil barges moving downstream, and the odour of thousands of unwashed bodies. The high-pitched yelling of the street traders and coolies was interspersed with the fretful honking of motor car horns, and the rising and falling song of working gangs unloading sacks from a merchant ship further up the Bund where the junks covered the water like a heaving mat.

The city itself was a strange mixture of Orient and Occident, and more American than European with its big square hotels, huge advertisement hoardings and brash electric signs. There were hundreds of motor cars, many of them large American importations, hooting their way in and out of the rickshaws, the wheelbarrows, the flooding pedestrians, the trams that groaned and shrieked round unbelievably tight corners packed with coolies, luggage, vegetables and live poultry.

The biggest city in China, it was built in two parts, the old city and the modern area built round the International Settlement and the French Concession. Skyscrapers towered above wide modern boulevards where the luxury of the Westerners contrasted sharply with the ant-like life of the Chinese who swarmed through the streets. Surrounded by the cancerous growths of Chinese towns, the city was the centre of all business in the Far East, and occupying it with honest people doing honest business were men controlling piracy, slavery, drugs, and, ironically, all Christian missionary effort. Alongside bankers and businessmen and earnest churchmen were touts, pimps, white slavers, thieves, smugglers and pickpockets and, in spite of the Sikh policemen and a ferociously efficient Customs service, every morning the newspapers carried some new sensation of murder, gang rivalry, smuggling or the sacking of some upcountry town.

With every kind of currency available, the city’s constitution had been founded less on law than do-as-you-please-and-no-questions-asked, and the streets stank at night of opium and were filled with the chatter of singsong girls and streetwalkers, many of them White Russians who had found their way south after the Revolution.

The Chinese population was as mixed as the European, consisting of people who had sold their lands and migrated to the city, and the younger sons and daughters from the impoverished countryside of China, in Shanghai to earn money as sweated labour in the factories that had been pushed up by European financiers. As they went about their business, the wealthy had to pick their way between the starved corpses of the poor.

The city had the tallest buildings in the East, but it also had the most scrofulous slums, and running off the finest boulevards were narrow alleys with open drains. The climate was extreme, with sleet, snow, fog and frost in winter to kill off the poor in their thousands, and a humid heat in summer pressing like a blanket over the buildings. The Bund, one of the most famous streets in the East, curved along the river bank for nearly a mile to the British Consulate, with the great trading houses – Jardine Matheson, Sassoon, Butterfield and Swire, the Glen Line, the Chartered Bank, the
North China Daily News
office – stretching in between. The smell was of cooking from the thousands of tiny stalls offering food, and every street held its quota of hawkers, letter writers, boot black boys, sellers of illicit silver dollars and dirty photographs, and blind, deformed or mutilated beggars, among them occasionally even a White Russian driven to poverty and trying to raise the price of a bottle of booze.

With trouble expected, there were soldiers from France, Annamites from French Indo-China, Japanese, Italians, Swedes, Norwegians, Portuguese, United States marines, Punjabis and Gurkhas, and half a dozen famous British regiments. To say nothing of the Shanghai Defence Force, a locally-raised unit comprising every nationality in the East, which had commandeered the rooftops of high buildings on the city’s outskirts and placed machine guns and even light artillery up there where they could command the entrances to the city.

The RAF were operating from the racecourse, flying DH4s, and the CO turned out to be Cuthbert Orr. Large in stature, tough, indifferent to authority, he considered his rank gave him the right to run his command the way he felt fit. ‘I’m not a bloody clerk answering messages from the brass at the top,’ he pointed out. ‘And this place’s a shambles, with the Chinese internal politics getting rougher by the day. Friendly Chinese warned us long since that an army was being assembled in Canton to capture the place and for once somebody took some notice and there are now about 25,000 troops entrenched round the boundaries. If anybody draws a deep breath, some poor bugger falls into the river.’

He wasn’t happy at the situation. There were plots, bombs and arms smuggling, wheelbarrow riots, rickshaw strikes, and regular stoppages in one or other of the local services – taxis, water, electricity, tramway.

‘All stirred up by political factions for their own ends,’ he said. ‘The foreign-educated students have noticed Western methods of getting your own way and they’ve adopted them. They want independence and I can’t honestly say I blame them. After all, the English run their Customs, the French run their postal services, and all foreigners are exempt from Chinese law, while some of the bastards operating out here would be in clink if they tried the same thing back home. It doesn’t make it easy for the Chinese to take into account the benefits they receive from European know-how, while the Russian Communist Party, of course, is fishing in troubled waters for its own benefit.’

He paused and gave a wry smile. ‘Half the Chinese generals on both sides are crooks, of course. They’re mostly ex-warlords who terrorised the countryside until Chiang’s Kuomintang party got going; then, according to their whims, they joined one side or the other. They’re still corrupt and still bloody cruel, and the Europeans don’t help. During the war, people in other places served in uniform; this lot merely enjoyed themselves, making fortunes and building damn great houses for themselves. The admiral who’s running the show hates the buggers and I don’t blame him.’

The Nationalist army was expected any day and the troops were lining up for the confrontation that was bound to come. The Peking Government’s army was little more than a rabble, but the Cantonese had been drilled by roofless German ex-officers and had some semblance of military appearance. British and American warships were gathering in the river among the swarming junks and sampans, and Western arrogance was tempered by apprehension.

The Chinese had already tried their hands at Hankow and other places up the Yangtze and had found that what they’d been told about there being enough of them to beat the foreigners was right. There just weren’t sufficient Europeans to stand against the Chinese mobs and the first refugees were already heading downriver to the safety of Shanghai, their possessions gone, their faces grey with strain, their children wailing with terror.

Life in Shanghai hadn’t altered much, however. The navy was being reinforced and a fresh Punjabi battalion had just arrived. By this time, there were eight British battalions, and more were expected, but unfortunately there was no common command and every contingent had different orders.