The Kindness of Women. J. G. Ballard

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СКАЧАТЬ Often she looked unwell, but I was determined to keep her out of the camp hospital. Lunghua hospital was not a place that made its patients better. We needed extra rations to survive the coming winter, but the food store was more carefully locked than the cells in the guard-house.

      As the all-clear sounded, the internees emerged from the doorways of their blocks, staring at the camp as if seeing it for the first time. The great tenement family of Lunghua began to rouse itself. Listless women hung their faded washing and sanitary rags on the lines behind G Block. A crowd of children raced to the parade ground, led by David Hunter, who was wearing a pair of his father’s leather shoes that I so coveted. As he moved around the camp my eyes rarely left his feet. Mrs Hunter had offered me her golfing brogues, but I had been too proud to accept, an act of foolishness I regretted, since my rubber sneakers were now as ragged as Private Kimura’s canvas boots. The war had led to a coolness between David and myself. I envied him his parents, and all my attempts to attach myself to a sympathetic adult had been rebuffed. Only Basie and the Americans were friendly, but their friendliness depended on my running errands for them.

      Mrs Dwight approached the children’s hut, her fussy eyes taking in everything like a busy broom. She smiled approvingly at Peggy, who was holding a crude metal bucket soldered together from a galvanized-iron roofing sheet dislodged by the monsoon storms. With the tepid water she brought back from the heating station Peggy would wash the younger children and flush the lavatory.

      ‘Peggy, are you off to Waterloo?’

      ‘Yes, Mrs Dwight.’ Peggy assumed a pained stoop, and the missionary patted her affectionately.

      ‘Ask Jamie to help you. He’s doing nothing.’

      ‘He’s busy thinking.’ Artlessly, with a knowing eye in my direction, Peggy added: ‘Mrs Dwight, Jamie’s planning to escape.’

      ‘Really? I thought he’d escaped long ago. I’ve got something new for him to think about. Jamie, tomorrow you’re moving to G Block. It’s time for you to leave the children’s hut.’

      I emerged from one of the hunger reveries into which I often slipped. The apartment houses of the French Concession were visible along the horizon, reminding me of the old Shanghai before the war, and the Christmas parties when my father hired a troupe of Chinese actors to perform a nativity play. I remembered the games of two-handed bridge on my mother’s bed, my carefree cycle rides around the International Settlement, and the Great World Amusement Park with its jugglers and acrobats and sing-song girls. All of them seemed as remote as the films I had seen in the Grand Theatre, sitting beside Olga while she stared in her bored way through Snow White and Pinocchio.

      ‘Why, Mrs Dwight? I need to stay with Peggy until the war’s over.’

      ‘No.’ Mrs Dwight frowned at the prospect, as if there was something improper about it. ‘You’ll be happier with boys of your own age.’

      ‘Mrs Dwight, I’m never happy with boys of my own age. They play games all the time.’

      ‘That may be. You’re going to live with Mr and Mrs Vincent.’

      Mrs Dwight expanded on the attractions of the Vincents’ small room, which I would share with this chilly couple and their sick son. Peggy was looking sympathetically at me, the bucket clasped to her chest, well aware of the new challenge I faced.

      But for once I was thinking in the most practical terms. I knew that I would be easily dominated by the Vincents, the morose amateur jockey and his glacial wife, who would resent my presence in their small domain. I might try to bribe Mrs Vincent with the promise of a reward for being kind to me, which my father would pay after the war. Unhappily, this choice carrot failed to energise the Lunghua adults, so sunk were they in their torpor.

      If I was going to bribe the Vincents I needed something more down to earth, the most important commodity in Lunghua. Ignoring Mrs Dwight, I seized my cinder-tin from beneath my bunk, shouted a goodbye to Peggy and set off at a run for the kitchens.

      Spitting in the cold wind, the glowing cinders seethed across the ash-tip behind the kitchens. Naked except for their cotton shorts and wooden clogs, the stokers stepped from the steaming doorway beside the furnace, ashes flaming on their shovels. Now that the evening meal of rice congee had been prepared, Mr Sangster and Mr Bowles were raking the furnace and banking the fires down for the night. I waited on the summit of the ash-tip, enjoying the sickly fumes in the fading light, while I watched the Japanese night-fighters warming up at Lunghua airfield.

      ‘Look out, young Jim.’ Mr Sangster, a sometime accountant with the Shanghai Power Company, sent a cascade of cinders towards my feet. The ashes covered my sneakers and stung my toes through the rotting canvas. I scampered back, wondering how many extra rations had helped to build Mr Sangster’s burly shoulders. But Mrs Sangster had been a friend of my mother’s, and the horseplay was a means of steering the most valuable cinders towards me. Small favours were the secret currency of Lunghua.

      Two other cinder-pickers joined me on the ash-tip – the elderly Mrs Tootle, who shared a cubicle with her sister in the women’s hut and brewed unpleasant herbal teas from the weeds and wildflowers along the perimeter fence; and Mr Hopkins, the art master at the Cathedral School, who was forever trying to warm his room in G Block for his malarial wife. He poked at the cinders with a wooden ruler, while Mrs Tootle scraped about with an old pair of sugar tongs. Neither had the speed and flair of my bent-wire tweezers. A modest treasure of half-burnt anthracite lay in these cinder heaps, but few of the internees would stir themselves to scavenge for warmth. They preferred to huddle together in their dormitories, complaining about the cold.

      Squatting on my haunches, I picked out the pieces of coke, some no larger than a peanut, that had survived the riddling. I flicked them into my biscuit tin, to be traded when it was full for an extra sweet potato or a pre-war copy of Reader’s Digest or Popular Mechanics, which the American sailors monopolised. These magazines had kept me going through the long years, feeding a desperate imagination. Mrs Dwight was forever criticising me for dreaming too much, but my imagination was all that I had.

      As I knew, criticising everyone else was a full-time British occupation. Sitting on the ash-tip, while Mrs Tootle and Mr Hopkins scratched at the spent clinkers in their doomed way, I looked down at the camp. The British had nothing to which they looked forward, unlike the Americans, whose world was always filled with possibilities. Every American was an advertisement for confidence and success, like the vivid pages in the Saturday Evening Post, while every Englishman was a sign saying ‘trespassers prosecuted’. One day, my father had told me, I would go to school in England. Already I feared that the England I visited after the war would be a larger version of Lunghua camp, with all its snobberies and social divisions, its ‘best’ families with their strangled talk of ‘London town’ brandished about like the badges of an exclusive club, a club I would do my best to avoid joining. The last heat faded from the cinders below my feet. The night air was chilled by the flooded paddy fields and the maze of creeks and canals around Lunghua. I watched the exhaust of the Japanese fighters, warming myself with the thought of their powerful engines. Mr Hopkins had wandered away from the ash-tip, carrying his few coals back to his invalid wife, but Mrs Tootle still stabbed at the dead clinkers. There was an evening curfew at Lunghua, but the Japanese made little effort to enforce it. In the unheated huts and cement buildings of the former teacher-training college the internees went early to bed, assuming that they had ever got up in the first place. Mrs Dwight and the missionary ladies were used to my roving the adult dormitories with my chessboard, gathering the latest rumours of war.

      I slid down the slope towards Mrs Tootle and selected three choice pieces of coke from my tin.

      ‘Jamie … I can’t take those.’

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