The Other Side of Paradise Page 20

  To make a change, she went out dining and dancing, or swam at the Tanglin Club, or played tennis, or drove out to the Sea View Hotel for curry tiffin, or went sailing with Denys in Kittiwake and walked along the lovely beach with the pure-white sand and the pretty shells and the whispering casuarina trees, as they had done before the nightmare began.

  She had long conversations with people, too: her father who told her to keep her chin up because the war would soon be won; her mother who said that if she hadn’t been so silly as to get off the boat she would have been safe in Australia; Grandmother Penang who advised her never to show the Japs that she was afraid of them. Nana said, comfortingly, that bad things never lasted for ever and all she had to do was wait for good things to come again.

  She had a word with Ray, too – just to see what he might have thought, if he’d still been alive – pointing out that it had all been his fault that she was stuck in a prison camp. He didn’t seem to feel in the least guilty – in fact he agreed with her mother.

  ‘You were a bloody fool to get off the ship, Susan. I told you that.’

  She said resentfully, ‘Spending two and a half years in a place like this isn’t much fun, I can tell you. And I don’t think I can stand it much more, being shut up on my own. I’ll go mad soon.’

  ‘Stop moaning and feeling sorry for yourself. Think of the kids instead. You’ve got to look after them. You’ve got to see it through, for their sake.’

  When she started sobbing he put his arms round her and held her close, like he’d done before at the hospital.

  ‘You can hang on, Susan. You know you can. You’re not the sort to give up. You’ve got more guts than that. You’ve proved it already.’

  After a while, she felt better.

  One night, when she was lying awake, she thought she heard the sound of planes in the distance. Not Jap planes, because they made a different sort of noise. This was a deep droning sound: the sort of sound that big bombers with four engines might have made. After a while, there was another and very familiar sound – the crump, crump of exploding bombs.

  Fourteen

  ‘THE NIPS KEEP saying it’s just them practising,’ Stella told her when they had finally let her out of the punishment hut after a month. ‘But we don’t believe them. We all think it’s our bombers. The natives think so too. They say the Allies are bombing the oilfields.’

  ‘I wondered if I was imagining it – if I’d gone crazy, or something.’

  ‘Wouldn’t blame you for doing that. Doing solitary must be enough to drive anyone round the bend. Peter thinks it was all his fault, by the way. He’s been miserable while you were in there.’

  Poor Peter. She had a hard time convincing him that he wasn’t to blame for her punishment.

  ‘Of course you weren’t,’ she told him. ‘I knew what I was doing, and I chose to do it. And I’d do it again as well.’

  But he’d thrown away the packing-case bat and nobody played cricket any more.

  Lady Battersby died. She departed with perfect dignity and without fuss. They buried her in her navy-blue crêpe frock, wearing her leghorn straw and with her handbag over her arm – as they thought she would have wished. Miss Tarrant said the prayers and Miss Mumford’s camp choir sang ‘Abide With Me’.

  There were four rows of graves now. Those who hadn’t died of malaria, beriberi, dysentery, typhoid or something else unpleasant were growing steadily thinner and thinner, weaker and weaker from malnutrition and constant attacks of dysentery. Red Cross parcels never reached them, the camp kitchen garden couldn’t produce enough for all and they were existing on the same old diet of dirty rice and mouldy vegetables, tapioca leaves, dried fish, with the occasional hunk of some rotting, maggoty meat hacked into tiny pieces. Their limbs were sticks, their cheeks hollow, their ribs could be counted – unless beriberi had made them swell up like bloated pigs. Teeth were loose or had fallen out and the coconut hairs which made a good cleaning substitute for toothbrushes and toothpaste were in short supply. There was only one charm left on Susan’s bracelet – a little owl – and she exchanged it for a pineapple and three small hen’s eggs for Hua and Peter. Next time, it would be the gold bracelet itself. And, finally, the watch.

  A sack of letters arrived: the first to reach the camp in three years. Captain Hatsuho had made an announcement at morning tenko during a long speech about the wonderful generosity of the Japanese Imperial Army towards prisoners of war. They queued up patiently outside the guardhouse, standing in the burning sun for more than an hour until the letters were finally given out. There was nothing for Susan. No news from her father; none from her mother and grandmother – presumably living in Australia. Nothing for Stella either.

  ‘They think we’re dead,’ Stella said. ‘For all they know we drowned when the ship was sunk.’

  ‘But the Japs are always making lists of our names.’

  ‘Yeah, and they’re always making bonfires too.’

  Most of the letters turned out to be two and three years old and had obviously been hoarded for a very long time.

  Susan said, ‘Why bother to give them out now?’

  ‘Maybe they’re losing the war and it suits them to be nicer to us.’

  The natives kept telling them that the news was good: kaba baik, they repeated with nods and smiles. Kaba baik. But the Allied bombers had not been heard for a while.

  The well ran dry. Water had to be fetched from a stream a mile away and carried back in buckets and tins and pots – water for drinking and cooking and washing for six hundred people, and for the vegetable patch as well. The children helped to carry it, too. Susan watched Peter and Hua walking with their cans, chattering to each other in English. In two months’ time Peter would be eleven years old. He had grown quite tall, though he was painfully skinny. His face had changed from a small boy’s face and she could see how he might look as a young man. Hua, who was probably getting on for seven, had grown too, and her black hair was long and worn in two plaits which she braided herself at lightning speed. Her spoken English was perfect and, thanks to the camp school, she could read and write it as well. Peter had been learning French and German from the Dutch nuns and Miss Tarrant had given classes in English and History and Geography. Somehow both children had survived the fevers and the dysentery, and somehow they had escaped beriberi – perhaps because of the extra fruit and vegetables. But the gold bracelet and the watch had gone the way of the charms and the pearls and now there was nothing left to barter with.

  Soon after Peter’s eleventh birthday in May another rumour reached the camp. The war in Europe was finished and the Americans were defeating the Japanese in the Pacific. Nobody knew where the stories had come from or whether they were true. Kaba baik, the natives still kept insisting. Kaba baik. Good news.

  In July they were moved to a camp on the other side of Sumatra. At morning tenko Captain Hatsuho had told them via his interpreter how fortunate they were. They would be taken by train across the island to a place where there was plenty of shade and water and good food and comfortable accommodation.

  ‘You very lucky. Imperial Japanese Army very good to women and children.’

  Almost two hundred women and children now lay in their graves outside the camp as silent testimony to the Imperial Army’s goodness. The hospital was overflowing with dying and very ill patients and the remaining prisoners were half-starved, weak, worn out.

  They left in a downpour, travelling to the train in open lorries, the sick lying on stretchers, faces upturned helplessly to the rain. Instead of proper train carriages there were airless, seatless cattle trucks, and they spent the first night shut up in a siding where Miss Mathews, the teacher who had known all about Jane Austen, died before dawn. She went very quietly, holding Susan’s hand, and apologizing for being such a nuisance.

  The train journey across Sumatra took two days and they lived on cold rice and water. Several more of the sick had died by the time they arrived at their destination. They were herded out
of the cattle trucks by the guards, loaded into more open lorries and driven at top speed along rough tracks to the new prison camp in the middle of an old rubber plantation. The tin-roofed huts were already occupied by bugs and rats, but, for once, Captain Hatsuho had not lied about the shade, or about the water which ran clear in a rocky creek, though he had lied about the good food. Sweet potatoes, carrots, long beans, turnips, chokos and bringals were brought and dumped outside the guardhouse but, as usual, they were left to rot for three or four days before permission was given to collect them. Sometimes a lump of meat was delivered too – bullock and deer, stinking horribly but edible when cooked and, at least, they had plenty of wood from the rubber trees for the fires. Their new commandant was a little old sergeant called Yamada, who was usually drunk and fell off his soap box at tenko. It would have been funny if they had not been past laughter.

  A month later, the bombers came over again – close enough and low enough for the Royal Australian Air Force markings to be seen – and the prisoners went out into the compound to watch them and cheer. The guards suddenly became nicer. They no longer prodded with their bayonets, no longer yelled and scowled. Instead, they smiled and offered American Red Cross cigarettes. Permission was given to collect the rations as soon as they were left outside the gate, and the men delivering them said good morning politely instead of calling them foul names. At evening tenko Yamada was sober enough to make a very short speech. ‘War is finished. We are now friends.’ He didn’t say who had won the war.

  The next morning he and all the guards had disappeared.

  At midday an army vehicle drew up outside the guardhouse with a squeal of brakes and the driver got out. A white man – the first they had set eyes on for more than three years. Well over six foot tall, broad-shouldered, sun-bronzed, dressed in khaki shorts, shirt, and an Australian army bush hat with the brim turned up on one side.

  Nobody in the compound spoke and nobody moved. The digger walked slowly over to the gate and kicked it open with his booted foot.

  He stood, fists on hips, staring around at the crowd of women and children watching him in silence. He stared at their ragged clothes, their bare feet, their skeletal frames, their sun-blackened skins, their hollow eyes and sunken cheeks, their matted verminous hair, their sores and their scars.

  ‘Holy cow!’ he said softly. ‘Oh, my word! Oh, my bloody word!’

  Part Three

  LIBERTY

  Fifteen

  THE DAKOTA CAME in low over the sea to land on Singapore Island at dusk on an evening in September. The aeroplane touched down gently and rolled to a halt. After a while the passengers began to disembark, moving slowly like old people, though many of them were young. The crowd of photographers and reporters waiting on the tarmac pressed forward to record their arrival.

  The passengers stood on the aircraft steps, blinking in the popping glare of the camera flashbulbs – still stunned by their liberation.

  A reporter, notebook and pencil in hand, barred Susan’s way at the foot of the steps.

  ‘Can you tell us how you feel, miss? What’s it like to be a free woman again?’

  He was young and he looked so clean and smart. His hair was smooth, his suit pressed, his shoes polished. She was carrying her coolie hat, wearing her ragged old blue cotton frock and a pair of muddy Japanese army boots that felt like lead weights on her feet.

  She said, ‘It’s very nice.’

  ‘A bit more than that, surely?’ he coaxed. ‘How long were you a prisoner?’

  ‘Three and a half years.’

  ‘That’s a very long time. What was it like?’

  ‘Pretty awful.’

  ‘How did the Japs treat you?’

  ‘They weren’t very pleasant.’

  He scribbled in his notebook. ‘Can you give me some details? People will want to know how you women managed to survive.’

  ‘A lot of us didn’t.’

  He paused, but only for a second. ‘Do you have any idea how many died?’

  ‘I’m not sure exactly.’

  About half, in fact, but she didn’t want to talk about it.

  ‘What about these children with you?’ he persisted. Hua was clinging to her hand, Peter close behind her. ‘What’s the story there?’

  ‘They were in the camps, too.’

  ‘Would you mind telling me a bit about them? Their names, and so on. What it was like for them.’

  She looked at him, wondering how it would ever be possible to tell somebody anything about a Japanese prisoner-of-war camp who had never been in one.

  ‘I’m sorry, you’ll have to excuse me. I can’t talk about it now.’

  She walked on with Hua and Peter. Behind her, she could hear him accosting old Mrs Brook.

  ‘How does it feel to be free at last, madam?’

  It had been an effort to answer him at all. Others had wept copiously since they had been released but she had been unable to cry. The euphoria had evaporated and now she felt like a very old woman must feel. Everything was an effort: to speak, to walk, to eat, to drink and luckily, perhaps, to think.

  More Australian soldiers had arrived at the prison camp after that first digger in the jeep and there had been a lot of crying and laughing and hugging. It had been extraordinary and very wonderful to see and talk to white men again.

  The Aussies had been shocked by their appearance, though they had tried not to show it. She had seen them shaking their heads, heard them muttering and swearing to each other. They had taken complete charge. The hated white flag with its red circle had been hauled down and ceremoniously burned. They had chopped down trees and cut up firewood and mended leaking roofs. They had distributed cakes of soap and packets of cigarettes and provided food – tins of Australian butter and beef, bacon, milk, white sugar, salt, eggs. They had brought in freshly killed meat – chicken, pork, a whole bullock which they had skinned and cooked over a huge fire – and they had picked fresh fruit in the jungle: papayas, bananas, mangosteens, rambutans.

  Best of all, they had brought good manners and kindness. To be treated like a human being and a woman again after years of being treated like the lowest scum was extraordinary. No more slaps and blows and kicks. No more bayonet jabs, or screaming abuse. No more having to bow and scrape to evil little men, no more standing in the roasting sun for hours at their sadistic pleasure. Instead, there were smiles and jokes and gentle words and strong helping hands. A cache of Red Cross boxes had been discovered, hidden by the Japs. The boxes had contained medicines, medical supplies, blankets, pillows, mosquito nets: things that would have saved lives and made life more bearable. And there had been tins of food – salmon, meat, powdered milk, jam – and sacks of letters, kept back from the prisoners.

  They’d bombarded the Aussies with questions and discovered that Mr Roosevelt had died and a Mr Truman was President of the United States; that the Americans had dropped huge bombs on Japan, destroying whole cities and ending the war in the Pacific; that the King and Queen and Princess Elizabeth and Princess Margaret were all right, and so was Mr Churchill. There was still an England.

  They had stayed on at the camp for another month, waiting to be transported back to Singapore. Supplies were dropped by bombers – fruit juice, Nescafé, cocoa, cigarettes, matches, chocolate, sweets and fresh bread which they had not tasted for so long.

  Susan had asked one of the diggers, while he chopped firewood, if he knew what had been happening in Singapore. He had leaned on his axe, tipped his hat back, wiped his brow.

  ‘Nothing good. Not from what we’ve heard. The Japs locked up all the civilians in Changi clink – thousands of them. Men and women. Sounds like they had a tough time there.’

  ‘How tough?’

  ‘Lousy conditions, lousy food, lousy treatment – like you women here. And the Kempeitai were real bastards.’

  ‘The Kempeitai?’

  ‘The Nips’ secret police. Like the Nazi Gestapo. They interrogated prisoners. You don’t want to know about t
hem.’

  She said, ‘My father was in Singapore when the island fell. I still don’t know what happened to him.’

  He shook his head. ‘My word … sorry to hear that. But I dare say you’ll be able to find out as soon as you get back there. He’s probably OK. You don’t want to think the worst. No sense in that.’

  He was a nice young man and she knew he was trying hard to say the right thing. It was a big change to have a man speak kindly instead of yelling and screaming foul abuse. She couldn’t imagine how she had ever thought Australian speech so awful. It sounded wonderful to her now. Gentle, drawling, soft.

  She said, ‘We heard that the Japs massacred hundreds of patients and doctors and nurses at the Alexandra Hospital when they took Singapore. Is that really true?’

  He had nodded. ‘Yeah, we heard about that too. I reckon it’s true all right. The Nips have been doing all sorts of nasty things. Still, they won’t be doing them any more, that’s for sure.’

  They had been transported in lorries out of the prison camp and then by train to an aerodrome a hundred miles away, where they had waited patiently for many hours before Dakotas had swooped down from the skies to fetch them. The planes had been used for carrying paratroopers and had hard metal benches down each side instead of proper seats. They had bumped and roared down the runway and climbed up into the skies above Sumatra. The long imprisonment was finally over. She had felt too tired to care.

  At the aerodrome in Singapore they were given tea served in cups and saucers with milk and sugar, spoons to stir it, sweet biscuits to eat and cigarettes to smoke. And they sat on real chairs, at real tables. The Red Cross workers wore crisp uniforms; they had pale, soft complexions and shiny hair. The contrast to their own woeful appearance was depressing; even more so, the mirror in the ladies’ cloakroom which showed them how truly terrible they looked.