Authors: John Lanchester
After some time – I couldn’t see the hands on my watch – the ground began to flatten and although there was still no path, the going over the scrabbly uneven ground was less difficult. If I had to guess I would have thought I was heading more or less south, in the direction of Shek Kong. I decided that I would walk for what felt like an hour or two more and then, if I hadn’t come to a village, give up for the night. As I reached that conclusion, I felt the first fat drops of tropical rain fall on my face. It had clouded over without my noticing. I promised myself that I would never go for another walk and that I would make a point of
remembering
my vow, even when I felt safe and dry.
Then three things happened: I felt the ground give under me; I felt myself land on something soft but unyielding, unsteady, in fact alive; and I heard someone saying, loudly and at close quarters, ‘Ow! Fuck! Get off!’
The instruction was unnecessary. Whomever I had landed on twisted away, causing me to roll off, fall sideways, and smack my head against the earth. The next thing I knew a torch was being shone in my face, blinding me, and a cockney voice was saying:
‘Who the hell are you?’
In the background were other voices. I heard someone approach.
‘What’s going on, Sergeant?’ someone said in tones of
command
.
‘Some bugger’s just fallen into my foxhole, sir,’ said the nearby voice.
‘Could someone explain what is happening, please?’ I said.
‘Hoick him out, lads, and let’s have a shufti,’ said the in-charge voice. Two pairs of arms came over the side of the foxhole and I pulled myself up on them. The men were soldiers. Then the torch
was in my face again and for a moment there was silence.
‘Well he doesn’t look like a Nip spy, I’ll say that for him,’ said the man in charge. Then in a harsher tone he said: ‘We’re the Royal Hong Kong Regiment and we are on exercises. Who are you and what are you doing?’
‘My name is Tom Stewart, I’m a civilian, and I’m on my way home from a walk up Tai Mo Shan.’
‘Do you often go walking up mountains in the dark, Mr Stewart?’
‘I fell asleep, it got dark, and I got lost. These things happen.’
‘Do you often go walking on your own?’
‘Yes.’
‘Do you often get lost?’
‘It’s been known to happen. As you may know, civilian maps aren’t very good.’
‘What happens when you get lost?’
‘I ask directions.’
‘What happens when they don’t speak English?’
‘I ask again in Chinese.’
‘Do you now?’ said my interrogator, softer and more curious. He thought for a moment. ‘Sergeant, could you show Mr Stewart the way to the truck. The rest of us will carry on with the exercise. We’re due to finish at dawn, Mr Stewart. You can sit in the truck and have a brew, and then we’ll give you a lift. You’ll be back in town in time for work. Most of us have got our jobs to go to in the morning. We can have a little chat on the way home. I’m Major Walter Marlowe, by the way.
*
‘How could you not have told me?’ said Maria. It wasn’t quite the very first thing she said to me after four years, but it was close. Her anger made me angry in return. I wanted to tell her to calm down, or grow up. But in fact she had already done both of those things. She looked the same only more so. Her face was unlined and her eyes were deeper and browner than I had remembered. She was no longer wearing her habit but a sort of mission
uniform
that made her look more like a nurse than a nun. Her cap exposed more of her hair than I could remember seeing; it was inky-black Cantonese hair, almost blue-black, in a short bubble cut that looked incongruously fashionable.
The subject of discussion was Wo Ho-Yan and his brother Wo Man-Lee. Her reaction was shock: as if my news about
Ho-Yan
was the worst possible welcome I could have given her. She looked as if she was struggling to control herself.
‘I know that you did me, us, a great service,’ she eventually said. ‘But … oh well, it is done.’
‘You never told me what the problem was.’
She sighed. ‘Trouble. Crime. Gangs. The brother has a – he has a reputation.’
‘Well he seemed all right to me. People don’t always stay the same.’
‘I do not believe you know him well.’
‘Then let’s not discuss it any further. I’ve said I’m sorry.’
This was not how I had envisaged my reunion with Maria. Her mission had decided to pack up and move in the autumn of 1939. They went to Canton, but there were difficulties of lodging and resources with the nuns already there, so they had continued on to Hong Kong, arriving at the end of the year. Their train had been strafed by the Japanese fighters from the aircraft carrier. Sister Benedicta had stayed behind in Canton and either would or would not be coming to join the mission soon. The community, as Maria called it when she was in her pulpit manner, was scattered among their friends and co-religionists in the colony. Maria was staying with Father Ignatius, their Irish priest, in Happy Valley.
Over the next months I saw her at least once a week. She
enlisted
me to help give an English class to her pupils, who despite being dispersed in lodgings all over Hong Kong and Kowloon, met several evenings a week. I was there to be a representative English speaker and to take part in conversation practice. ‘Even Sister Benedicta says that English is the language of the future,’ said Maria. There was something wonderfully touching about the serious faces peering towards me as I read out passages from the
South China Morning Post
. The best thing was describing plots from films and then discussing them with the class. They often found the behaviour of characters hilarious or incomprehensible. A repeated stumbling block was the question, where were the characters’ families and why had they left them?
Maria also had a class out in the New Territories, near Fanling, where she borrowed a schoolroom to instruct some of her mission
who were living in the area. She made the trip once or twice a week, and a few times I went with her. I once told her pupils the plot of
Stagecoach
. A hand went up.
‘But where are the people family?’ someone asked. ‘Why they not here?’
‘They are refugees,’ I said. The class all nodded and the ones who had been slouching sat up.
‘You are becoming a skilled teacher,’ Maria told me after that lesson. When the class was over we would go to the house of one of the students for a stew made out of fish heads. The country air in the New Territories always smelled clean, as if it had just rained – unless the wind was coming from the direction of the tannery.
The atmosphere of that time was the strangest I have known. The war in Europe, which went from being a non-event to being a disaster, was constantly discussed, and it made our own war seem like a horrible inevitability, coming towards us with the logic of a bad dream. People behaved oddly. I had never seen
collective
hysteria before – a quiet hysteria, which one could hear in the pitch of voices or in sudden silences, rather than in anything obviously shrill and public. Everyone knew about what the Japanese had done in Nanking, the mass rapes and mass killings. They wouldn’t behave like that to Westerners, of course.
*
One afternoon towards the middle of 1940, my secretary Ah Wing knocked on my door to tell me that someone had come to see me. His expression was so grave and excited that I could tell this visitor was out of the ordinary. I nodded and he showed into the room a tall heavy-set man in his early fifties wearing a dark suit and tie. I knew him immediately by sight: John Wilson, one of the senior figures in the colony’s government – I didn’t know his exact job. (Minister of Defence, I later discovered.)
‘Mr Stewart? Might I have a moment?’ he said in an
unexpectedly
soft voice. ‘I thought we could go for a stroll?’
I tried to seem calm and unsurprised. No doubt the lower half of my face was flapping like a fish. I took a packet of cigarettes and my hat and we set off for the botanical gardens. We crossed Connaught Road, went by the new Hong Kong Bank building and up the hill. He climbed without breathing any harder.
‘How long have you been here now?’ he asked in his gentle voice. ‘A few years?’
‘Almost five, sir, to my surprise.’
‘Get a chance to visit home before the war broke out?’
‘I’m afraid not, sir.’
‘Family?’
‘A grandmother and a brother. They are both fine, the last I heard, sir.’
‘Hard not to worry, though, isn’t it? But you’re liking it here?’
‘Yes sir, very much.’ We arrived at the lower end of the
botanical
gardens, which were looking more than usually lush. As always there were fewer visitors than the place deserved, though two or three elderly Chinese men were doing t’ai chi exercises at the end of the park. Wilson looked around and slowed his pace.
‘Think there will be a war?’
‘Yes, sir.’
‘Got any plans?’ For a moment I did not understand. I thought, giddily, he was asking me for strategic advice. Then I thought he was asking if I planned to join the Volunteers – which in fact I had considered, in a vague way which I was hoping would somehow make the actual necessity for choice or action recede. Did the Hong Kong government, or the colonial office, recruit soldiers one by one? Could this possibly be an efficient use of resources?
‘Plans?’
‘Ideas about what you might do. If there is a war.’
‘Well, fight in it, I suppose.’
‘Think we’ll win?’
‘I beg your pardon?’
‘Think we’ll win? If there’s a war.’
‘Well, yes, of course. Eventually.’
He smiled at that.
‘Eventually – that’s a good answer. But do you think Hong Kong is defensible? If the Japs come, could we keep them out?’
‘I don’t know enough to know, sir.’
‘No one knows enough to be sure. But I know enough to make a decent guess, and the answer is that we can’t. There aren’t enough of us and there isn’t enough water. If we can’t hold the reservoirs, we lose the colony. If we defend the reservoirs, then we don’t have enough manpower to defend the rest of the colony.
If we attempt to hold a line across the New Territories, which is what we’ll try to do, we’ll be stretched too thin. It’s a simple
problem
; our reserves are limited and theirs aren’t. If they want to commit enough men to taking Hong Kong, they can.’
I felt sick. I did not want to know or hear any of this. ‘So what do we do? Run off to Singapore?’
‘Does that idea tempt you?’
‘Not particularly, no.’
‘Just as well. Singapore has enough troubles of its own. No, we can’t just run away and leave Hong Kong. Women and children will be evacuated, soon, and the rest of us will stay and fight.’
Wilson seemed with these words to have reached some sort of conclusion. He stopped in front of a tree with dark green foliage and drooping purple-blue buds; a jacaranda, as I know now but didn’t then.
‘We’ll win the war, in your words, eventually. The Americans haven’t been doing anything to help, as you may be aware. They’re jealous of the Empire in general, and Hong Kong, it seems, in particular. But sooner or later the Japanese will take them on and if they do that, sooner or later, they will lose. In the meantime, we’ll have lost Hong Kong and most of us will be dead or in prison.’
I felt a wave of bitter regret. What was I thinking when I set out to fulfil my childish ambition to ‘go to China’? I had wasted my life. I was going to die or swelter in jail. Wilson stood still looking at his jacaranda. He did not seem disturbed by his own vision of the future. For a long moment neither of us spoke. My mind
gradually
began working again. I said:
‘What do you mean, most of us?’
After that, Wilson turned and looked at me, hard, as if for the first time.
‘Know anything about sums, maths, keeping the books, that sort of thing?’
‘A little, yes.’
‘Enough to learn a bit more, and a bit more still?’
‘Yes.’
‘Kept up the Cantonese?’
We hadn’t mentioned my Cantonese before this.
‘Yes.’
‘Fluent?’
‘It’s difficult for a European. But I’m not bad.’
‘Kept up the walking?’
‘Well, yes.’
He nodded. ‘Walter Marlowe told me he bumped into you.’ Seeing my expression he added: ‘Major Marlowe of the Hong Kong Volunteers. He said you nearly broke his sergeant’s leg.’
‘His sergeant nearly broke my neck.’
‘Said your map reading wasn’t up to much.’
‘It was pitch-dark. Sir.’
‘He also said you were, and I quote, “an independent-minded little bugger”.’
I didn’t know what to say. I watched the men doing their t’ai chi, all three making waving motions with their arms while they swayed from side to side. It was impossible to describe without making it sound comic, but the sight itself was never comic. The participants always looked serious and dignified and calm. Wilson paused and then went on:
‘Fancy doing something a bit more interesting than rotting in prison?’
The start of the war was a shock but it was not a surprise. In the preceding weeks, Japanese attempts at provocation, including raids over Hong Kong’s border with China, plane overflights, and incursions into our territorial waters, had increased. It was clear that they would invade. The official line was that Hong Kong would fight to the death. I’m glad I never believed that.
The first Japanese bombs dropped on the colony on the same day that we heard the news about Pearl Harbour. I was in ‘my’ office at the Hong Kong and Shanghai Bank when I heard a
distant
noise like that of a series of paper bags bursting. But the noise had a deeper reverberative note and hung in the air in a new way. I could hear the noise of aeroplane engines at high revs. I stood and went to the window. Looking north-east I could see three columns of smoke. Without my noticing it, Cooper had crossed the room and was standing beside me.
‘Fucking hell,’ he said. ‘It’s started. Kai Tak. They’re bombing the airport.’
Another series of explosions came from somewhere out of sight. I didn’t know it until some time afterwards, but that first series of Japanese bomber attacks destroyed all of Hong Kong’s RAF planes and anti-aircraft batteries – all its air defences.
Cooper and I looked at each other. For the last couple of months I had been spending spare mornings in this room in the Bank’s HQ at Queen’s Road Central, learning to bluff my way through the rudiments of banking. This was Wilson’s plan.
‘The Japanese will need to run the colony. They can’t just let it all collapse. There are a few things they must do. Utilities is one. But they can bring in their own people for that. And they’ll try to steal everything that isn’t nailed down. Policing will be a problem for them. And they’ll need to keep the economy
running
. Which means they’ll need to keep the banks running. Which means they’ll need some bankers. And that’s where you come in.’
The idea was that I would be inserted into a list of key Bank personnel. (Bank in this context, as in most Hong Kong contexts, meant Hong Kong and Shanghai Bank.) I would appear on the payroll and on staff registers as something fancy like deputy chief accountant. I would acquire a bluffer’s knowledge of how the Bank worked. Then when we were under Japanese occupation, I would use my Cantonese to help with whatever it was I was asked to help with. Roughly six people knew about this.
‘Remember: don’t call us, we’ll call you,’ Wilson told me.
‘Isn’t it better if I know a bit more?’
It would be untrue to say I blush at the memory of asking that question. But it was one of the stupidest things I ever said.
‘No, it’s better if you know a bit less,’ said Wilson, gentle as ever.
Cooper, who had been swallowed whole by the life of the Bank and whom I had seen at irregular intervals since we’d arrived in Hong Kong, was my instructor. He had spent the intervening six years in a sequence of not-quite-love not-quite-affairs, usually with the daughters of Bank and colonial bigwigs. He was
currently
pursuing a Miss Farrington, whose father was something in government. Women and children had, by order of the
government
, been evacuated from the colony in mid-1940, but people with connections, or nursing qualifications, were able to wangle their way into staying. Miss Farrington had done that. Cooper described her evasions and withholdings in a way which made it clear she hadn’t the slightest intention of reciprocating any of his feelings.
‘What do you say, old boy? Sound promising?’ he asked me.
‘Only the bold deserve the fair,’ I said, borrowing a Masterson line. He used it whenever a couple were visibly mismatched,
usually
a hideous middle-aged man escorting some, to use the
then-current
word, ‘popsy’.
‘Good advice,’ said Cooper uncertainly. His inability to keep his mind off his private life was both an irritation and a comfort. It was combined with a striking ability at his job. He had
absolutely
no interest whatsoever in his work – less, I would say, than anyone I ever met, since even the most bored and resentful kitchen porter will acknowledge his job by complaining about it. Cooper never even did that. He simply chugged through his paperwork as imperturbably and remorselessly as a tugboat
through heavy seas, light seas, harbours, channels, anything. His feelings were elsewhere. It made him a very effective administrator.
The office I was sharing with him, for the purposes of my indoctrination as, and impersonation of, a member of the Bank’s staff, was twelve feet square, with – a sign of Cooper’s relative eminence – a view out towards the harbour. He had decorated it with a single bad Chinese painting and a temperamental African violet over which he fussed, shifting it from location to location, and experimenting with different levels of watering, all
unsuccessfully
. He would have done better, I thought, if he treated it less like one of his love objects and more like part of his job. Our office was on the third floor, above the level of the main banking hall, ‘the largest air-conditioned space in the world, when it opened’, according to Cooper. The roof of that main hall was
decorated
with an extraordinary socialist-realist painting of Chinese labourers, dockworkers, factory workers, farmhands, all nobly engaged in collective toil. ‘It’ll come in handy if the Communists win the war,’ was Masterson’s joke about it. I often tried out this line on Bank employees, and none of them ever laughed.
I liked the feeling of being inside the Bank, behind the public façade, in the smell of paper and business. As a trade, with its emphasis on maintaining appearances, separating morality from practical judgement, and keeping the customer intimidated, it had many similarities with hotel-keeping.
I had privately wondered whether the war would bring out the shaky romantic Cooper or the unflappable administrator. This was a way of not asking myself about myself. Wilson’s offer, by giving me the prospect of something to do, had also helped
insulate
me from the reality of the imminent invasion. I was repaid for this, when the first bombs dropped, with a wave of pure terror unlike anything I had ever felt. I began to pant as I stood at the window. I didn’t think it was possible for my heart to beat so quickly and I was possessed by a realisation that I was going to drop dead there and then – dead of fear, pure and simple.
Cooper was looking at me. ‘Steady on, Tommy,’ he said.
I thought, nobody apart from my brother calls me Tommy. I felt a chink of reason shine through on my panic, and then felt the fear begin to ease. Cooper saw that.
‘Fucking hell,’ he said again, with a sigh.
For the rest of the day people kept coming in and out of our office, bringing news and rumours. Many Bank staff were in the Hong Kong Volunteers, so the Bank was only half manned, and the mood could have been mistaken for festive. A fortnight before, two battalions of Canadian infantry had arrived in the colony, bringing the fighting strength to six battalions. This was taken as an optimistic sign that the colony was to be held until reinforcements could be sent. The Canadians featured in much of the gossip and speculation, with the truth – that they were recruits straight out of training camp – not getting much of a look-in. The Japs were dropping a couple of bombs before
turning
their back on the colony. The Japs had no stomach for a
proper
scrap. Hong Kong would be impregnable, like Singapore. The Japs had frightened themselves off with their reconnaissance over the border. The Japs knew they could never get past the
Gin-drinkers
’ line. (That was the defensive chain of bunkers and dugouts in the New Territories.) The Japs couldn’t bomb, the Japs couldn’t fly, the Japs couldn’t react to unexpected situations, the Japs couldn’t see in the dark.
Wilson’s instructions had been that, if at all possible, I should be found at my desk when the Japanese arrived. ‘That will give us a flying start,’ he said. So I stayed where I was and spent the day breathing the fear and nonsense and watching the window for planes overhead.
After work I crossed the road and queued for a North Point tram in Des Voeux Road. I had decided to go and see Maria, either at the mission in Wanchai or in Happy Valley where she taught. The streets were strange. Normally Hong Kong was all noise and movement and colour. On that day the movement and colour were as usual but there was almost no noise. People rushed on their errands, grim and intent and frightened. It did not make me feel any stronger.
The tram was packed but quiet. I stood squeezed between a Chinese woman carrying five huge string bags of food –
decapitated
chickens, not-quite-fresh fruit, and green vegetables tied in bundles, evidently the end-of-day market bargains – and an office worker apparently on his way home, chewing already very thoroughly chewed nails while he read a folded-up Chinese
news-sheet. We leaned against each other as the tram rattled from side to side. At Wanchai I fought my way to the doors. Happy Valley Road and Des Voeux Road were both busy, and I
scrambled
across in defiance of traffic. It crossed my mind that it would be a bad day to be run over by a tram.
The alley that led up to the mission building was between two furniture shops specialising in camphor-wood chests. One of them was closed and shuttered, as if its proprietor and family had already fled. The owner and chief artisan of the other shop was taking the other approach. He sat cross-legged on a stool in the front of his premises, glasses on his nose, executing a carving on the untinted wood before him. Behind him I could see stacked furniture and a small shrine to the goddess of compassion.
I went up the hill. Excitement, haste, and anxiety made me short of breath as I strode between the two open gutters. When I got to the mission I knocked at the double doors, waited, knocked louder, waited, and then pushed my way in. The hallway, which I had never seen empty, was now silent. On the walls were
exhortatory
posters and notices of church events. The classroom was just off the hallway: it was empty, and that was the strangest thing I saw that day, since I had never seen it without teachers or pupils, or nativity-play rehearsals, or small discussion groups, or solitary readers, or one-on-one duos engaged in remedial tuition. I went back into the hall and called up the stairs:
‘Father Ignatius? Sister Maria? Anyone?’
Only the echo. Then I went up the stairs and explored the
private
rooms of the mission building. The first doorway across the landing was exactly above the hall downstairs. I opened it and saw a dormitory, home to several Chinese families. Curtains
separated
the space into separate living and sleeping areas, some with bedding on the floor, others with folding chairs arranged in little groups, everywhere full of clothes and trinkets and shoes and lanterns and things. There were old cooking smells, and the feeling of a room occupied by many bodies in close proximity. I stood in the doorway for a few moments. At that time I had never been invited into a Chinese home. I wondered where everyone had gone. I left the mission and on a hunch pushed further up the hill before starting back towards the middle of town. In about a quarter of an hour, I came to St Joseph’s, the main Catholic
church on the island. It didn’t sound as if there was a service in progress but I went in anyway.
The church was not just full, there was scarcely room to stand. A priest I had never seen before was standing facing the altar, leading the congregation in silent prayer. No one turned and looked as the door closed behind me. I tried to spot Maria, but it was impossible to identify a single person from behind in a congregation of several hundred. I decided to stand and wait for the end of the service.
‘May we also remember in prayer our brethren elsewhere in Asia,’ said the priest, who had turned to face the congregation. From his accent I realised he was Portuguese. ‘In India, in the Philippines, in Siam, in Burma, in China, in Japan also. May we remember them in our tribulations. Our Lord who sees into all men’s hearts …’
I stopped listening. There were more prayers and another period of silence before the service ended and the congregation began slowly to break up. There were more Chinese than I had expected – some of them, I supposed, recent refugees. Many of them would have a very vivid picture of what the Japanese were likely to do. I looked for Ho-Yan more out of hope than
expectation
, but he wasn’t there. None of the passing faces was familiar. Then I found myself standing opposite the compact, soutaned figure of Father Ignatius in the crush outside.
‘Father – I came looking for Sister Maria. I wanted to be sure she was all right.’
When I heard myself say it, it sounded odd. I was grateful to him for taking my worry entirely without surprise or side.
‘I’m worried too, Mr Stewart,’ he said in his quick, clever County Cork voice. ‘She went up to the mission school in the New Territories on Friday and we were expecting her back last night. I’m sure Our Lady is taking good care of her but it would still be comforting to have some news.’
His saying this made me suddenly remember. The play – I was an idiot. Maria had told me that the community out near Fanling was performing a nativity play and she had promised to help.
‘In any case, with the bombing, she’s probably safer there,’ he added.
‘When she gets back tell her I was asking for her,’ I said.
‘I’ll do that.’ Father Ignatius shook my hand and gave me a man-to-man, or priest-to-man, straight look. I made my way up
through the crowd outside the church, who seemed reluctant to leave its precincts. They were scruffier and more racially varied than an Anglican congregation. I remember thinking that the churches would be busy that night.
It was by now early evening. I couldn’t face the thought of going home and sitting on my own, waiting for whatever would happen to happen, so I set off back downhill to the Empire, telling myself that I was going to check on things and see how Masterson was.