The Kindness of Women. J. G. Ballard

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      ‘Jamie …!’ Peggy tried to box my ears. A doctor’s daughter from Tsingtao, she was a year older than me and pretended to be easily shocked. As I knew, she was far more protective than Mrs Dwight. When I was ill it was Peggy who had looked after me, giving me some of the younger children’s food. One day I would repay her. She ruled the children’s hut in a firm but high-minded way, and I was her greatest challenge. I liked to keep up a steady flow of small outrages, but recently I had noticed Peggy’s depressing tendency to imitate Mrs Dwight, modelling herself on this starchy widow as if she needed the approval of an older woman. I preferred the strong-willed girl who stood up to the boys in her class, rescued the younger children from bullies, and had a certain thin-hipped stylishness with which I had still to come to terms.

      ‘If your father’s going to shoot anyone,’ Peggy remarked, ‘he should start with Dr Sinclair.’ This vile-tempered clergyman was the headmaster of the camp school. ‘He’s worse than Sergeant Nagata.’

      ‘Peggy …?’ I felt a rush of concern for her. ‘Did he hit you?’

      ‘He nearly tried. He always looks at me in that smiley way. As if I was his daughter and he needed to punish me.’

      Only that afternoon one of the ten-year-olds had come back to the hut with a stinging red forehead. Our real education at the Lunghua school came from learning to read Dr Sinclair’s moods.

      ‘Did you tell Mrs Dwight?’

      ‘She wouldn’t listen. Just because they’re kind to us, they think they can do anything. She’s more frightened of him than I am.’

      ‘He doesn’t hit everybody.’

      ‘He’ll hit you one day.’

      ‘I won’t let him.’ This was idle talk, and my next Latin class could prove me wrong. But so far I had avoided the clergyman’s heavy hands. I had noticed that Dr Sinclair left alone the children of the more well-to-do British parents. He never hit David Hunter, however much David tried to provoke him, and only cuffed the sons of factory foremen, Eurasian mothers or officers in the Shanghai Police. What I could never understand was why the parents failed to protest when their children returned to their rooms in G Block with ears bleeding from the clergyman’s signet ring. It was almost as if the parents accepted this reminder of their lowly position in Shanghai’s British community.

      Bored with it all, and deciding to show off in front of Peggy, I picked up a stone from the step and hurled it high into the air over the parade ground.

      ‘Jamie, you’re in trouble! Sergeant Nagata saw that …’

      I froze against the door. The sergeant was standing on the gravel path twenty feet from the children’s hut. As he stared at me he filled his lungs, his face bearing the weight of some slow but vast emotion. However complicated the British at Lunghua seemed to me, there was no doubt that Sergeant Nagata found them infinitely more mysterious, a stiff-necked people whose armies in Singapore had surrendered without a fight but nonetheless acted as if they had won the war. For some reason he kept a close watch on me, as if I were a key to this conundrum.

      Why he should have marked out one 13-year-old boy among the two hundred children I never discovered. Did he think I was trying to escape, or serving as a secret courier between the dormitory blocks? In fact, most of the adults in the camp shied away from me when I loomed up to them, eager to play blindfold chess or offer my views on the progress of the war and the latest Japanese aerial tactics. My nerveless energy soon tired them and, besides, I was forever looking to the future. No one knew when the war would end – perhaps in 1947 or even 1948 – and the internees coped with the endless time by erasing it from their lives. The busy programme of lectures and concert parties of the first year had been abandoned. The internees rested in their cubicles, reading their last letters from England, roused briefly by the iron wheels of the food carts. Mrs Dwight was not the only one to see the dangers of an overactive imagination.

      ‘Jamie, look out …’ Mischievously, Peggy pushed me through the doorway. I stumbled on to the gravel, but Sergeant Nagata had more pressing matters on his mind than a head-count of the war children. Slapping his roster-board, he led his entourage back to the guard-house. I was sorry to see him go – I enjoyed squaring up to Sergeant Nagata. There was something about the Japanese, their seriousness and stoicism, that I admired. One day I might join the Japanese Air Force, just as my other heroes, the American Flying Tigers, had flown for Chiang Kai-shek.

      ‘Why isn’t he coming?’ Disappointed, Peggy shivered in her patched cardigan. ‘You could have escaped – think what Mrs Dwight would say. She’d have you banished.’

      ‘I am banished.’ Not sure what this meant, I added: ‘There might be an escape tonight.’

      ‘Who said? Are you going with them?’

      ‘Basie and Demarest told me.’ The American merchant seamen were a fund of inaccurate information, much of it deliberately propagated. As it happened, escape could not have been further from my mind. My parents were interned at Soochow, far too dangerous a distance to walk, and the British in charge might not let me in. They were terrified of being infected with typhus or cholera by prisoners transferred from other camps.

      ‘I would have gone with them, but Basie’s wrong.’ I pointed to the guard-house, where Private Kimura was saluting the sergeant with unnecessary zeal. ‘They always close the gates when Sergeant Nagata thinks there’s going to be an escape.’

      ‘Well …’ Peggy hid her pale cheeks behind her arms and shrewdly studied the Japanese. ‘Perhaps they want us to escape.’

      ‘What?’ This struck me with the force of revelation. I knew from the secret camp radio that by now, November 1943, the war had begun to turn against the Japanese. After the attack on Pearl Harbor and their rapid advance across the Pacific, they had suffered huge defeats at the battles of Midway and the Coral Sea. American reconnaissance planes had appeared over Shanghai, and the first bombing raids would soon follow. Along the Whangpoo river Japanese military activity had increased, and anti-aircraft batteries were dug in around the airfield to the north of the camp. Lunghua pagoda was now a heavily armed flak tower equipped with powerful searchlights and rapid-fire cannon. The Korean and Japanese guards at Lunghua were more aggressive towards the prisoners, and even Private Kimura was irritable when I showed him my drawings of the sinking of the Repulse and the Prince of Wales, the British battleships sent to the bottom of the South China Sea by Japanese dive-bombers.

      Far more worrying, the food ration had been cut. The sweet potatoes and cracked wheat – a coarse cattle feed – were warehouse scrapings, filled with dead weevils and rusty nails. Peggy and I were hungry all the time.

      ‘Jamie, suppose …’ Intrigued by her own logic, Peggy smiled to herself. ‘Suppose the Japanese want us to escape, so they won’t have to feed us? Then they’d have more to eat.’

      She waited for me to react, and reached out to reassure me, seeing that she had gone too far. She knew that any threat to the camp unsettled me more than all the petty snubs. What I feared most was not merely that the food ration would be cut again, but that Lunghua camp, which had become my entire world, might degenerate into anarchy. Peggy and I would be the first casualties. If the Japanese lost interest in their prisoners we would be at the mercy of the bandit groups who roamed the countryside, renegade Kuomintang and deserters from the puppet armies. Gangs of single men from E Block would seize the food store behind the kitchens, and Mrs Dwight would have nothing to offer the children except her prayers.

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