The Other Side of Paradise (23 page)

Sometimes, to stop herself thinking about being hungry, she thought about clothes instead and what she would choose to put on, if only she could. At home in Cavenagh Road she had had at least fifteen pairs of shoes and dozens of evening gowns, cocktail outfits, day dresses, sundresses, skirts and blouses, tailored costumes and frivolous hats. Now she had one ragged frock, no shoes and a palm-leaf coolie hat. Some of the Dutch women still had powder and lipstick but there was nobody to wear it for: certainly not the Japs. Nobody had seen themselves in a proper mirror for many months, or cared any longer how they looked. Nothing could be done about their scabby, sunbaked, scarecrow appearance, so it had ceased to matter.

Occasionally, when the hunger pangs gnawed unbearably at night, she put on one of her favourite dresses, her highest heels, her best jewellery, her brightest lipstick and went out dining and dancing. She ate the most scrumptious dinner at Raffles, or at the Coq d’Or or the Coconut Grove – five courses at least – and danced the night away to gorgeous music with a smoothie like Denys, or with Bill, or Hugh, or Teddy or Jack. The good-looking sub lieutenant invited her to another dance at the naval base and she wore her pale-pink tulle gown and her silver sandals, stuffed herself to the gills at the supper buffet, drank glass after glass of champagne and danced till dawn.

Once she went out with Ray, but that was a big mistake. She had taken quite a lot of trouble: washed and curled her hair, put on her newest frock, her peep-toe platforms and dabbed herself with
Je Reviens
– all prepared to be nice to him. It had been a waste of time. He took her back to the shack on the hill, the one with the Hawaiian music and the lovely view but no food. She’d eaten all the fruit in the cocktail and they had argued about everything. The only comment he had made about her appearance had been to say that her shoes were ridiculous.

‘What do you mean, ridiculous?’

‘You’ll go and break your ankle if you don’t watch out.’

‘Do you expect me to wear dreary sensible things?’

‘I don’t expect you to do anything sensible.’

He’d driven her home in the ordinary old car and stopped outside the house. Then he’d reached across to push the passenger door open, just as he’d done before.

‘Gentlemen usually get out to open the door.’

‘I’m an Australian, not a gentleman.’

‘That’s fairly obvious. You’re also supposed to kiss me goodnight.’

‘Is that an order?’

‘It’s the custom. Not that you’d be any good.’

She’d got out, slammed the door and stalked off.

She bartered another of her gold charms – a handsome lion with a flowing mane – for a length of brightly coloured cotton from a native at the wire. One of the Dutch women, called Ine, owned a sewing machine and she made a new frock for Hua and a shirt for Peter in return for a third charm – a little gold sampan. There was just enough material over to make a suntop for herself, and Ine gave her an old curtain to wear knotted round her waist as a sarong. The blue frock was hidden away in her rice-sack mattress, with her watch, her pearls and the remains of the charm bracelet concealed in its hem.

Mrs Brook, one of the older women in her hut, had managed, like Lady Battersby, to cling on to her handbag when her ship had sunk and had saved a little zip-fastened travelling sewing kit, complete with needles, miniature cotton reels, and a pair of scissors. Susan borrowed the scissors to cut Hua and Peter’s hair. Her own she left to grow long, tying it back with threads pulled from a rice sack.

She taught the smallest children in the camp school all the English nursery rhymes and poems that Nana had taught her. They sat cross-legged in a circle round her and recited them in a loud chorus.

Sing a song of sixpence
,

A pocket full of rye
,

Four-and-twenty blackbirds

Baked in a pie
.

When the pie was opened

The birds began to sing
;

Was not that a dainty dish

To set before the king?

The king counting out his money, the queen eating her bread and honey were acted by the children, and so, with relish, was the maid hanging out the clothes and having her nose pecked off.

She remembered songs to teach them, too: ‘Old Macdonald’, ‘Row, Row, Row Your Boat’, ‘Widdecombe Fair’, ‘One Man Went To Mow’, ‘The Grand Old Duke Of York’.

Hua could speak very good English now – so good that she seldom spoke her own language any more. Susan kept talking to her in Cantonese so that she wouldn’t forget it by the time they were liberated, but there seemed no chance of them being freed for a very long time. There were always rumours; the camp lived and died by them. The Americans had landed in Sumatra and were sending the Japs packing. Singapore would soon be retaken. Everyone would be home by Christmas. Hitler had been assassinated and Germany had signed an armistice with England. Nobody knew what to believe but the rumours kept up their spirits and their hopes.

Then Hua, who had seemed immune from the disease, fell ill with malaria. Susan sat beside her in the hospital as she lay semi-conscious on the
bali bali
, trying to cool her face with a rag and a tin of tepid water. The raging fever was followed by the child shivering and shaking with cold beneath the rice sack.

Stella came over. ‘One of the Dutch women bought some quinine from a Chinese bloke at the wire. She said it cost a fortune, but then they’ve got the money. Might be worth a try.’

The Chinaman appeared the next day – a tiny man with a big hat that hid his face. Unlike the other pedlars, he carried no trays or baskets.

Susan spoke to him in Cantonese. ‘You have quinine?’

‘Perhaps.’

‘A little girl is very ill with malaria. She needs quinine. Without it she will die.’

‘Very expensive.’

‘I have no money.’

He shrugged and turned away.

‘I have something else.’

He waited.

She put her closed fist through the wire, opened her fingers slowly to reveal the string of pearls: the ones she had been given for her eighteenth birthday and had worn at her first dance.

‘Will these pay for it?’

He put out a hand – his palm small and creased as a monkey’s paw. She withdrew hers quickly.

‘Give me the quinine first.’

A smoke-coloured bottle appeared like a magician’s trick from the depths of the loose garments that he wore. She took it from him. The label said in handwritten English
Quinine
and when she shook it, whatever was inside rattled. It might be the real thing, or it might not. There was no way of knowing.

‘Quinine?’

He nodded.

‘You swear?’

He nodded again.

She put the necklace slowly into his hand. It vanished immediately.

The Chinaman lifted his head and she saw his face for the first time. It was as creased as his palm, his eyes gleaming slits.

‘Quinine very good. The girl will live.’

They were sent to do coolie labour outside the camp, hacking away at the jungle growth with
changkols
– iron hoes so heavy they could hardly lift them and which gave them horrible blisters on their hands. Later on, they used the
changkols
to make vegetable patches in the camp and planted seeds saved from the rotting vegetables dumped off the lorry – seeds from long beans, carrots, cabbages, all watered carefully with the precious water ration. One of the older, kinder guards brought in tapioca and sweet-potato cuttings which they stuck in the earth. The seeds sprouted like Jack’s beanstalk and the sweet potatoes and tapioca took root and flourished. To brighten and civilize their lives they planted flowers.

Every Sunday church services were organized by Miss Tarrant and the Dutch nuns. The women knelt in the dust to pray and stood to sing hymns without music. Except for the sick, every prisoner attended.

A truck arrived at the gates early one morning to deposit more prisoners – dumped out like the rotten vegetables. More Dutchwomen and children and, among them, an English girl called Rita. They had come from a camp at Palembang.

Room was made for Rita in Susan’s hut – precious inches given up for extra space. They gathered round her in the hut to hear her story. She had been a typist in an import–export company in Singapore and the Japs had already crossed the Causeway on to the island when she had escaped on a launch with a group of civilian engineers. The launch had left after dark, just as the Japanese aircraft had arrived to drop their bombs. The whole waterfront from Keppel Harbour to the post office had been a mass of flames, from end to end. They had crept down the coast, following a Royal Navy launch which had guided them through the minefields. By dawn, just when they had begun to think they were safe, the engine had suddenly broken down. None of the engineers could restart it and they had drifted helplessly until they finally ran aground somewhere on the coast of Sumatra and were captured by the Japs. They had been taken to a makeshift camp where there were other Dutch prisoners – men and women kept in separate quarters. After several days, one more prisoner arrived.

‘He was a newspaper correspondent in Singapore,’ Rita said. ‘He’d got out even later than us, on the very day that Singapore surrendered.’

Susan said, ‘He wasn’t called Lawrence Trent, by any chance?’

Rita shook her head. ‘I never knew his surname but his Christian name was Roy. He was an Australian and he said he’d been at the Alexandra Military Hospital when the Japs got there, the day before the surrender. He told us that the Japs had shelled the hospital and then they went in and massacred the patients and the doctors and nurses – shot them and bayoneted them in the operating theatre and in the wards all over the hospital. After that, they ordered more people outside in the gardens and killed them, too. Hundreds of them.’

There was silence in the hut.

Rita went on. ‘He managed to escape by hiding in a ditch until it was dark, then he went down to the docks and hired a sampan out to a small ship that was just leaving. It was going through the Malacca Strait when it was attacked and sunk by Japanese bombers. He said he was picked up eventually by a Japanese ship.’

Susan said, ‘Did he say who’d died at the Alexandra? Did he give any names?’

‘No. He just said it was a whole lot of people. Doctors and nurses and patients. Two hundred, at least. Maybe more. It was a bloodbath, he said. An indescribable bloodbath.’

Mrs Cotton said, ‘What else did he tell you?’

‘Well, he’d heard that the Japs had murdered thousands of Chinese in Singapore – raped the Chinese women and girls and cut the men’s heads off with swords and stuck them up on poles.’

‘What about the Europeans?’

‘All white European civilians were ordered to go to the
Padang
in front of the Cricket Club and then they were marched off to Changi Prison. Men and women, he said. The troops had already been taken prisoner when they surrendered, of course.’ Rita looked round at the stunned faces. ‘That’s all I can tell you. The Japs moved us women away to another camp soon after. They kept sending us from one place to another and we’ve spent months travelling round till we ended up here.’

The others went on asking questions. The tiniest new titbit was seized upon, chewed over and digested. Susan didn’t listen any longer. Instead, she went outside the hut and walked alone along the compound wire. Stella was on duty at the hospital hut but she’d hear the news soon enough. Good or bad, true or false, it always travelled like wildfire throughout the camp. She passed the old Jap guard who had given them the sweet-potato and tapioca roots and he gave her a toothy grin, but she turned her head away from the hateful sight of him.

Stella said, ‘They’ll pay for it one day. They’ll be punished. When this war’s over.’

She’d spoken quietly but Susan knew the depth of her feeling. They were walking round the compound – fruitlessly round and round. Caged animals in a terrible zoo, ill-treated by brutal keepers, thrown putrid scraps for food, stared at and mocked by onlookers outside the wire fence.

‘There’s a chance it may not be true, Stella. The newspaper correspondent could have got it all wrong.’

‘He was there at the hospital, wasn’t he? That’s what he told Rita. Strewth, he was an eyewitness. Of course it’s true. I’ve seen the Nips in action too, remember? There’s nothing they like better than killing us – the more the merrier so far as they’re concerned. And they don’t care
how
we die. They can shoot us, bayonet us, cut our heads off, blow us up, starve us, torture us, let us die from disease and neglect – it’s all the same to them, just so long as we die. All those people at the Alexandra – doctors and nurses and patients, for God’s sake – they must have loved killing
them
. It was easy. They were unarmed, defenceless – the patients lying in their beds, the doctors and nurses trying to save them. The Nips must have had wonderful fun. A real party.’

Ray would be dead. So would Geoff. So would Vincent. So would Denys, almost certainly. Her father would have been marched off to prison with thousands of other civilians. Harmless, hardworking, loyal Chinese, like Cookie, would have been horribly butchered.

Susan covered her face with her hands. ‘It’s unbearable, Stella. Unbearable.’

Stella put an arm round her shoulders. ‘You’ve got to bear it, old chum. You don’t have a choice. None of us do. We’ve got to keep going, somehow. We’ve got to learn how to stay alive.’

At Christmas, they gathered to sing carols: ‘Once In Royal David’s City’, ‘While Shepherds Watched’, ‘O Come, All Ye Faithful.’

Miss Tarrant had put on a nativity play with the camp children. Peter, after some persuasion, played the part of Joseph; one of the little Dutch girls was Mary and the baby Jesus was of stuffed sacking. Hua was an angel with palm-leaf wings. Susan had managed presents for them: for Peter a sword made from two pieces of firewood bound together and smoothed with rough-backed leaves, for Hua a doll out of scraps of material begged from around the camp and sewn with Mrs Brook’s needle and thread.