Hiroshima Joe (49 page)

Bowen Road was narrow and twice the taxi had to pull in to the kerb to allow through a private car approaching from the opposite direction. Each time this happened, Sandingham half-expected a bullet to crack through the window.

The taxi finally passed the sentry at the gate, who nodded them through and halted by a row of parked staff cars and an ambulance. Sandingham paid the driver and added a tip he could ill afford. He was relieved, even surprised, to have arrived safely.

The powerful smell of carbolic and medication met him at the door to the out-patients’ admissions office. He knocked and walked straight in.

‘Can I help you?’

The orderly on duty, a corporal, did not get up from behind his desk. He saw no need to rise for a civilian and especially one that wasn’t all that well dressed. It was important for Sandingham to gain the upper hand.

‘Don’t you stand up for a senior officer in the RAMC any more, corporal?’

The veiled, threatening tone of sarcasm in his voice, if not his appearance, suggested an officer’s grip on command.

‘I’m sorry, sir.’

In struggling to rise, the orderly banged his knee firmly on an open drawer. The pencils inside rattled.

‘I want an appointment to see a doctor. It is quite urgent as I’m on my way through to Seoul and due to take off this afternoon. Two…’ A slip was about to be born and he corrected it. ‘Fourteen hundred hours.’

‘Can I see your movement orders, please, sir?’

‘No. They’re with my baggage at Kai Tak. Under guard. You know how it is.’ He winked the wink of an officer to a subordinate.

‘Yes, sir. If you’ll just sit here for a moment, sir, I’ll see what I can do for you. May I have your name, sir?’

Sandingham gave it and sat on a chair by the door. The orderly picked up a telephone. He talked on it for a few minutes, trying several extensions. Finally, he hung up.

‘Dr Gresham will see you, sir. If you’ll…’

There was a rap on the door and another orderly came in.

‘Garner. Take…’

‘Captain,’ Sandingham interpolated.

‘Take Captain Sandingham to Dr Gresham. Room –’

‘Yes, corp.’

He turned jauntily on his heel and went out into the passage, his boots scuffing on the polished stone floor. For effect, Sandingham raised his eyebrows as the private went out.

‘National Service,’ explained the corporal. ‘Can’t do nothing with ’em, sir.’

Sandingham followed the private and was conducted along corridors painted in cream and green gloss until they reached a matching green door. The private knocked, waited and opened it for Sandingham. The doctor was seated at a general-issue desk signing sheets of foolscap.

‘Do have a seat. Be with you in a moment, Captain.’

His rank had evidently been phoned through ahead of him.

The doctor screwed his fountain pen into its top and looked up.

‘What can I do for you?’

‘I’m not feeling at all well,’ Sandingham informed him. ‘I wondered if you could help me.’

He described the symptoms in some detail while Gresham left his chair and came round the corner of the desk to perch on the front of it, listening in a friendly manner.

When Sandingham was done, the doctor said, ‘Right-o. Strip to your underpants, will you?’

As he was undressing, the doctor watched him. These were not the clothes of a staff officer in civvies on his way to Korea. The undergarments were shabby, the trousers creased and worn shiny at the seat. They smelt faintly of sweat and cheap soap.

‘Sit on the couch. Now…’

He examined Sandingham in silence for at least five minutes, except for a curt ‘Breathe in’ or ‘Cough’ or ‘Does that hurt?’ until he removed his stethoscope and straightened up.

‘I’ll go on with my examination,’ he said, ‘after you tell me why you’ve lied through your teeth to get in here.’

Holding back as much as he felt he could, Sandingham admitted that he was a resident in Hong Kong, had little money, had been in the Army and been a Jap PoW, was down on his luck and needed help. He made sure that he did not exhibit any of the signs of pomposity upon which he had relied with the corporal to get him the appointment.

Gresham sighed. ‘I can understand why you are reluctant to go to a local quack,’ he said when Sandingham stopped. ‘How long have you been addicted?’

‘Three, maybe four years.’

‘Drink much?’

‘Beer, some scotch. Not a lot. Can’t afford it.’ Sandingham smiled self-deprecatingly.

‘Now that we know you don’t have a plane to catch, we’ve got a bit more time. I think we’ll need it.’ Gresham picked up the phone. ‘Rollings? Dr Gresham here. Cancel my rounds for the morning. Ask Dr Tailling if he’ll take them. Or Dr Frazer. And ask Dr Stoppart if he’ll be so good as to pop along to my room.’ Pause. ‘No. Now, if he could.’

He caught Sandingham’s concerned look.

‘No need to worry. I’m not shopping you.’ He hung up the telephone. ‘I just want another doctor to see you. Second opinion. Two consultations are better than one – like heads,’ he joked, to put his new patient at his ease.

Dr Stoppart joined them within a couple of minutes. He was in his fifties, dangled a pair of pince-nez spectacles on a black ribbon round his neck and wore a charcoal-grey suit. Gresham had on his uniform.

The two doctors examined Sandingham for over an hour. As they were drawing their study of him to a close, a Chinese orderly arrived with a tea trolley and they each took a cup of tea, obtaining a third for Sandingham, ensuring that his was weaker than their own.

The cross-examination then began. They asked about his general health prior to the appearance of the symptoms, his appetite and diet, his sex life, his hotel room, his contacts, his opium usage, his tobacco and drinking habits (again) and his family background.

‘Let me recap now,’ Stoppart summed up, replacing his spectacles on his nose and scanning a sheet of paper upon which he had taken notes. ‘You live alone in a hotel, don’t mix socially, haven’t had a woman for some months. You smoke opium at the rate of about three ounces a week, but this has been greatly reduced of late. You don’t seem to drink too much but you don’t eat well. Your parents…?’

‘My parents are dead,’ Sandingham said.

‘Can you tell me what they died of?’

Sandingham, leaning his elbows on his knees, looked at his feet. The cup in his hand shook and the ripples converged on the centre of the tea.

‘My father died during the war,’ he said, adding with embarrassment, ‘I don’t know what killed him.’ He looked up with muted defiance to defend himself against the critical stares he expected: there was none. ‘My mother’, he continued, looking down once more, ‘passed on in the autumn of 1937. She caught flu – it was very cold that winter – which developed into pneumonia.’

Stoppard sensed the emotion in Sandingham’s voice and exchanged a professional glance with Gresham.

‘Finally,’ he asked, ‘you’ve lived here permanently since 1947?’

Sandingham nodded slowly, heavily.

‘Have you had.…?’ Stoppard reeled off a formidable list of diseases. Sandingham had had quite a number of them.

‘Tell me, one last clarification – I’m sorry to have had to shoot so many queries at you like this – you were a PoW in Hong Kong and Japan.’

‘Yes,’ replied Sandingham.

Scratching his head meditatively, Stoppard admitted after a long pause that he was unsure and wanted blood and urine samples tested.

‘To tell you the truth, Sandingham, I can’t be certain what is wrong with you. You could have a number of deficiency ailments and some of your symptoms are most likely related to your opium-smoking. You could be suffering from a sort of jaundice even, though your liver seems not too distended. Your blood pressure is up, certainly, but…’

‘You are also anaemic,’ Gresham commented.

‘What I’d like to do is take a drop of your blood and get you to leave us samples of your urine and faeces. We’ll keep your presence here quiet – completely confidential. But we must make out records and admit you on to our lists as an out-patient. We are able to treat ex-servicemen. And you can rely on our discretion – the secrecy of the surgery. But you must return to us to keep your bookings. Will you do that?’ He glanced at Gresham and Sandingham tried to interpret his meaning: perhaps, he thought, the doctor was afraid he’d turn out to be one of those patients who, once equipped with a bottle of pills, disappeared never to return. ‘We’re not going to take you on if you put yourself off most of the while.’

‘Thank you,’ Sandingham replied humbly.

Gresham dabbed surgical spirit on the vein in the crook of Sandingham’s elbow and drew off ten ccs of blood. It oozed like scarlet oil into the glass syringe. He was given a specimen bottle and told to urinate into it behind the screen. This he did.

‘We also want another sample, as you know,’ said Gresham.

‘A thought,’ Stoppart said. ‘Can we have a specimen of your semen?’

Forty minutes later, all the samples were provided and Sandingham was told to rest in a waiting-room for the duration of the lunch-hour. He asked if he might have a meal and Gresham gave him a chit for the purpose. He ate steamed fish, mashed potatoes and runner beans, with rice pudding for dessert, in a cafeteria with the male nursing and orderly staff.

At a quarter to three he was summoned back to Gresham’s office where he found the doctor on his own.

‘We’ve carried out early tests,’ Gresham told him. ‘Nothing firm as yet. Can you return tomorrow?’

Sandingham said that he could, and was about to go when Stoppart entered without knocking.

‘Excuse me, Jim.’ He handed a report card to Gresham and turned to address Sandingham. ‘Where were you a PoW?’

Gresham read the diagnosis on the card: the most interesting feature was the result of the slide of semen. It wasn’t that the patient had VD. It was that he was sterile.

‘Sham Shui Po camp and then Japan. I think I told you.’

‘You did. What was the name of your camp in Japan?’

He gave it.

‘What was it near?’

‘What do you mean?’ Sandingham rejoined. ‘The sea? The hills?’

‘Were you near a zinc works? Did you work in a metal factory? Tin or electro-plating? Galvanising? Did you work with sulphur?’

‘No. I was slave labour, all the time I wasn’t in solitary confinement, at a timber yard.’

‘Where was this adjacent to? What was the nearest city?’

‘Hiroshima,’ he replied.

Gresham looked at Stoppart and they excused themselves from the room for a moment. Sandingham could hear them muttering together in the corridor.

It must be a mental disorder, Sandingham thought. It must have turned my mind and the illness now is psychosomatic.

The doctors returned.

‘Sandingham,’ said Stoppart. ‘I’ll pull no punches for I don’t think I should. It is my opinion, and I’m ninety-nine-per-cent sure, you have severe radiation sickness.’

With an uncomprehending look on his face, Sandingham said, ‘I’m sorry, but I don’t understand what you mean.’

They told him.

P
ART
T
EN

PoW Camp near Hiroshima: 1945

A
S THE STEEL
bolts were drawn the horde of newly-hatched bluebottles and emerald-backed flies, alarmed by the echo the metal had caused in the tiny room, rose to circle and settle on the ceiling.

‘You com ow’ now!’

He was prodded with a five-foot-long bamboo stick.

‘Moof! Moof!’

Sandingham bent to pick up his chipped enamel bowl and the shredding oblong of smelly coarse material which had had to suffice as a blanket throughout the winter. His clean-shaven head itched and, as he scoured his fingers over it, flakes of the scalp clogged up the crevices under his inch-long nails. When he had scratched his head, he scratched his bandy legs, the broken scabs joining the desiccated skin. Small dried particles of shit had gathered under his nails. The bucket in the corner opposite his blanket had not been emptied for over a week. The floor was slippery with excrement.

The daylight was so intense he stumbled as he entered it. The sun was not shining – it was too early in the day and the spring mist had not yet lifted. The brilliance of the hour, however, burned into his eyes and he shoved the blanket over his head for protection. He was guided by the bamboo stick, which struck him on his right side to turn him left and his left to go right.

In the barrack that served as the camp hospital he was laid on the
tatame
farthest from the door and examined by a US Navy sick bay attendant. The doctor was himself too ill to be of any assistance and it was all the more advisable as the war ground on never to send a prisoner to the Japanese PoW hospital.

‘Lie still,’ he whispered to Sandingham, one hand soothing the Englishman’s brow while the other dabbed the muck from his legs with a damp rag. ‘You’re in a helluva state. Nothing I can’t fix for yer, though.’

Screwing up his eyes against the glare from the door and raising himself on his arms, Sandingham attempted to see the young man’s face, but it was against the light.

‘Are you sure? I feel bloody.’

‘You are, here ’n’ there. No sweat, though. We’ll get you cleaned up. Have you…?’

Sandingham knew what was going to be asked of him. The routine questions of name, number, rank, place of birth, father’s name, pet dog’s name, unit, regiment, place of capture, rough time, rough date: he had seen this done before, had done it himself and wondered whether this was the point when they’d be put to him.

‘It’s April, sometime,’ he informed the medic. ‘About eight a.m., from the sun.’ It had risen while he was being attended to. ‘I was captured in Hong Kong. Don’t worry. I’ve not lost my marbles.’ He lay back again. ‘Thank God for Yanks!’

‘Thanks, Limey,’ the American retorted. Then, ‘Some do. You seen ’em. I seen ’em. Ass over elbow after a month in the
eiso.
Solitary does things to yer. Had a guy in my last camp – up north – stuck in the slammer for two months for spitting out his snot, as you English call it – real quaint, that! – within sight of a Nip. A mere
jotohei,
at that. By the time he came out he thought he was Hirohito’s nephew.’