For a long time Dicken was silent. He remembered all the hurts Diplock had done to him, all the mean tricks that had damaged his career. But now, somehow, he couldn’t hold them against him. Diplock was just another casualty in what was proving a very impersonal war.
‘Poor sod,’ was all he said, and Hatto returned with ‘Amen to that.’
It seemed important to see Annys again. She’d suffered two blows in a very short time and, whatever Diplock had done, Annys had never done Dicken any harm.
It was difficult getting down to Sussex from East Anglia because, in retaliation for the heavy raids on Germany, the Luftwaffe had started sneak raids on Southern England and the night before one on Canterbury had blocked the roads.
Annys showed no emotion when he appeared and even seemed to prefer to talk about her dead sister, Dicken’s wife. ‘I think we both picked the wrong partners, Dick,’ she said. ‘Zoë was never easy to keep up with.’
Dicken shrugged. ‘It wasn’t that I couldn’t keep up with her,’ he said. ‘I just never knew where she was going.’
Annys’ voice shook. ‘Neither did
she
,’ she said. ‘She was always confused. She wanted to be your wife but she also wanted to be a famous airwoman.’ Her face twisted. ‘I don’t feel much for Arthur, but I can’t dismiss him completely because after all we lived with each other from 1917 until last year and you can’t forget that. But he was a very selfish man.’
He was also a bloody coward, Dicken thought, as well as spiteful as a ferret.
‘I just feel–’ suddenly he sensed she wasn’t so much in control of herself as she had appeared ‘–I just feel the load is suddenly too heavy. First my son. Now my daughter.’
‘Has something happened to her?’
‘She’s married to a solicitor in Canterbury. The raid last night destroyed their home. She’s in hospital. She was such a pretty girl but she’s been burned.’ Tears were streaming down Annys’ face and, as she put out her hands blindly and clutched at him, his arms went round her.
For a long time he held her in silence before he could trust himself to speak. ‘Are you going to see her?’
‘I must.’
‘It’ll be a hell of a journey from here. Let me take you.’
Canterbury was still smoking but Dicken’s official car got them through all the barriers that had been thrown up. It appeared that Annys’ daughter was not badly hurt and her husband and his parents were taking care of the children. Annys was more cheerful on the return journey, and even managed to smile.
‘They never came to see us,’ she admitted. ‘Arthur didn’t like children much.’ She paused and gave a little laugh. ‘Still, I don’t think they liked Arthur much.’
It was late when they reached Sussex. They ate at a small hotel where the food, like all wartime food, was adequate but hardly exciting, but they had a couple of drinks beforehand and split a bottle of wine. On the last stretch of the journey, Annys fell asleep against Dicken’s shoulder as he drove and it seemed strange to have a woman alongside him again, warm-feeling, perfumed, and dependent on him.
She stood in front of him in the blacked-out hall of the house as he left. It was there that Dicken had kissed her more than once years before, when they’d both been young and Europe still hadn’t been torn apart by the German wars. She stood for a long time staring at him then, without a change of expression, she stepped forward and, putting her hands on his arms, kissed him on the mouth.
‘Thank you, Dicken.’
She saw him to the door. ‘Come again, Dicken,’ she said quietly.
He nodded, not speaking, and drove away deep in thought. It was obvious she was throwing out hints and he wasn’t objecting to them. Was he mad? Surely, after living twenty years with Diplock, some of his character must have rubbed off on her. But it was far from unpleasant to hold an attractive woman in his arms again, and his life had been lonely for a long time. In the end, he decided just to let things slide and see what happened. It was a coward’s way out but he could think of no other.
It seemed a very easy way to deal with it but when he returned to his headquarters he found that the matter had been taken out of his hands. Hatto had telephoned and left a message that he was to turn over his command to his deputy and report to the Air Ministry in London.
It didn’t take much imagination to guess that he was due for another spell overseas.
He found Hatto occupied with a huge file marked ‘China’. As he saw Dicken he stood up and reached for his hat. ‘I think this needs a stiff drink,’ he said.
As they knocked back pink gins, Hatto explained. ‘Diplock,’ he said. ‘They found them. The whole lot. Crew. Diplock. Tom Howarth and a few others. They’ve got to be replaced.’
There was a long suspicious silence then Hatto went on. ‘I’d better put you in the picture. The frock-coats believe that if Chiang Kai-shek were defeated in China, Japan would be free to exploit the place without harassment, and that – if and when we’ve finally assaulted the Japanese home islands – they could continue the war from the centre of China. It doesn’t bear thinking about.’
‘So?’
‘So we’re putting tremendous resources into Burma. By the end of the year we expect to go over to the offensive there. There’s a new command set-up and a big propaganda campaign to indicate that the Japanese aren’t the supermen we thought they were. The aim’s to re-establish land communications with China. You’ll remember they cut the Burma Road in 1942. We’re hoping to reopen it. The Yanks have a general out there called Stilwell, and a fighter group called the Flying Tigers run by a chap called Claire Chennault gave us a lot of support. There was even a Chinese division helping. We’re now going to try to pay them back.’
Dicken studied Hatto, puzzled. ‘What’s your interest in all this, Willie? Are they sending out a British Mission or something?’
Hatto smiled. ‘In fact, the Americans are running the show but you know Winston. He’s not going to be nudged out of what were British spheres of influence and he’s insisted that we’re represented with the Chinese government, even if all we do is hold the Americans’ coat-tails.’
‘So?’
Hatto smiled. ‘So it’s become a major preoccupation to keep China in the war. To do so, the Americans have organised their airlift over the Himalayas and, with a little assistance from us, have provided a loan of over five hundred million dollars. Unfortunately, Chiang Kai-shek, for whom I imagine, after your stay in China in 1927, you have no great love, seems to have cast a spell over Washington. Roosevelt seems to show a strange partiality for him – it’s almost become a cult in Washington, it seems – but Winston’s a bit more sceptical. Chiang keeps sticking his nose into our affairs in India and Winnie thinks Washington’s a bit like Titania captivated by Bottom. He feels that, considering the amount of money and aid that’s been sent to them, the Chinese are being remarkably unwarlike and he wants somebody to find out just what’s going on. So he’s sending a little mission of his own.’
Hatto swallowed his drink and ordered another. ‘Some of the Americans,’ he went on, ‘have also started to grow a bit suspicious of Chiang and begun to think he’s just leading us all on, so, unknown to Roosevelt, there’s a new American mission going too. Walt Foote’s running it. After three years’ legal experience in the East he’s considered as much of an expert on China as you can get. They’ve upped him to brigadier.’
Dicken frowned. ‘Who’s leading our lot?’ he asked. ‘You?’
Hatto grinned at him. ‘No,’ he said. ‘You! They’ve decided that a man who managed to get himself captured by a warlord called Lee Tse-liu probably knows more about the place than anyone else they can find. They’ve also heard that you speak some Chinese.’
‘
Some
’s the operative word. Do they realise how many dialects there are?’
Hatto smiled. ‘I don’t suppose it’s occurred to ’em,’ he admitted. ‘It usually doesn’t to the clever types who think up these things. You’ll be flying in from Assam.’
‘It sounds hard work just getting there.’
Hatto smiled again. ‘You pick your own staff.’
‘I’ll have Babington,’ Dicken said at once.
‘What’s he got that’s so special?’
‘He picks me up when I’m drunk.’
‘Right. He’s yours and he’ll carry the right rank. You’ve also been nudged up another notch, same as Diplock. To give you some elbow.’
Dicken was silent and Hatto looked puzzled. ‘Aren’t you pleased?’ he asked.
Dicken smiled. ‘Oh, yes,’ he said. ‘I’m pleased. I was just thinking that, after twenty-five years of sitting across my career, for the first time Diplock’s finally done me a favour. And the only way he could manage to do it was by dying.’
Hatto nodded. ‘Anyway, congratulations. It’s not before time. If we weren’t now elderly gentlemen we could do a gloat dance.’
Dicken smiled back. ‘Perhaps we should save it until I come back. Will you be seeing me off?’
Hatto pulled a face. ‘Not this time, old son,’ he said. ‘They need somebody in India to watch things from there. I’m coming too.’
China hadn’t changed much. It was still the land of the empty gut.
When they left Assam the rain was falling in solid depressing sheets and the atmosphere was that of a steam bath. Foote’s mission still hadn’t moved on and he explained the joys of flying unsuitable aircraft in an area of storms, unmapped mountain peaks, icing, overloading, accidents and unpredictable high altitude winds. It was always a toss-up whether a machine would arrive or not and their deputies were not to accompany them just in case.
The weather was kind as they flew into Yunnan, from where they headed by road and river to Chungking, Chiang Kai-shek’s new capital in Szechwan. They were met by a cynical young American Army Air Force major called Johnson, who had once been part of Chennault’s Flying Tigers and was now part of Foote’s mission. He wore a battered cap and a leather flying jacket with a Chinese flag and a message in Chinese characters painted on the back so that if he were shot down the Chinese peasants who found him would know who he was and what to do with him.
‘You’ll find things a bit crazy here,’ he advised. ‘Our guys are paid in American dollars, which makes them almost millionaires, but there are also a lot of other guys, European, American and Chinese, who’re making a lot of money out of profiteering. And this place has grown so fast nobody knows where anything is. New buildings have spread like fungus. There was no steel to spare so they used bamboo corner poles, no nails so they lashed it together with bamboo strips, and no wood so they split bamboo and made wattles. And we’ve got every dialect in China here so that if you ask the way in Mandarin like I do, you get answered by a Cantonese who speaks it even worse. Everything’s written down, because messengers can’t understand what’s said to them, and the government’s given the streets high-sounding names like the Road of the People’s Heritage and the Road of the National Republic, but the rickshaw boys still call them by their old names.’
‘Leads to confusion,’ Foote said dryly.
‘Some,’ Johnson agreed.
Despite the war, the city seemed to have lapsed into a state of indifference. It stood on a tongue of land at the junction of the Yangtze and Chialing Rivers, its boundary wall almost intact after five centuries of wear and tear. Once it had been remote and self-sufficient because Szechwan had always been considered backward by the rest of China and for six months of the year a curtain of fog and rain overhung it and coated its alleys with slime. When the Sino-Japanese War had started in 1937, refugees had poured in and government offices had migrated en masse. Pedlars, shopkeepers and politicians had followed and the population had doubled in a few months to 400,000. After the fall of Hankow it had neared a million and it was still rising.
It had first been bombed in 1938 and, with the Chinese anti-aircraft guns ineffectual, incendiaries had started fires which had gnawed out the ancient slums, and in the back alleys men, women and children had roasted to death. But since then a lot had been rebuilt, though the scars still showed in smashed shop fronts, blackened acres of devastation and the bamboo-and-mud squalor of new housing.
Accommodation had been provided for the two missions on the top floor of a block of offices, the bottom floors of which were filled with Chinese government departments. The entrance was swarming with children and outside women were hanging out their washing.
‘Wives of the Chinese junior officials,’ Johnson explained. ‘Everything’s kinda overcrowded and mostly they live in dormitories. A family that has a room’s very lucky. Most of the clerks sleep in their offices and their families live in the basement. In some ways it’s a good idea because it’s cold in winter and they keep each other warm.’
Part of the accommodation had been made into a mess but food was difficult to obtain and the British were dependent on the Americans for rations, all of which had to be flown over the Hump. To flush them, the lavatories were provided with a tub of muddy water, which was carried by coolies from the river, and a bath in a few inches of water was a luxury.
Johnson let them know the position. ‘The one thing you’ll notice is the sound of dynamos,’ he said. ‘They’re always going. They never stop working. One shift takes over as the other leaves. Twenty-four hours a day.’
There were no restrictions and no blackout and you could buy anything – fur coats, champagne, electric razors, silk stockings, army boots, guns, high octane petrol, diamonds, ever permanent waves. Provided you had the money, because stockings were 300 dollars a pair, matches 20 dollars a box. You could buy
Life
magazine for 500 but
Esquire
cost you 2000. When it wasn’t raining, the goddam place was always covered with a grey-blue mist, and when there was neither the sun came out hot enough to shrivel you. There was typhus about, too, because of the rats. An enormous number of them lay dead in the streets, so that the dark alleys were noisome with the smell of them, but nobody bothered to collect them.