Brother Fish (40 page)

Night came again and I suppose it must have been fairly early the next morning when they came to fetch me, because I recall a rooster crowing in the farmyard. I was carried into an adjoining room with roughly cut pole rafters and a thatched roof. Down its centre ran a narrow table made of wooden slats and above it hung a hissing pressure lamp, its bluish-white glow throwing a wide circle of light over the centre of the table and spilling onto the earthen floor. I guessed correctly that this was the operating theatre. I was placed on the table and an orderly cut away what remained of my tattered army pants and pulled my parka up to my chest so that I lay naked from the chest down. He then swabbed me from the waist halfway down my hugely swollen broken leg with what I took from the smell to be surgery alcohol, and then turned me on my side. A Chinese doctor entered the room jabbering away, seemingly at no one in particular, and gave me a spinal injection.

I couldn't believe the relief as the area below my torso became anaesthetised. It was the first time in a couple of months that I'd been relatively free of pain and I remember starting to cry from the relief. The doctor, still jabbering away, made me half sit up so that I was leaning back on my elbows. I think he was talking to me in Chinese but he made no eye contact so it was impossible to tell. He cut a six-inch incision to release the pus and blood that had caused the swelling, and this took quite a while to drain. Meanwhile, he poked and prodded, locating pieces of my shattered femur, which he removed with tweezers. I was beginning to panic as the anaesthetic was starting to wear off when he began to stitch me up. By the time it was completed I was biting down on my lip to prevent myself from crying out. As they lifted me onto a stretcher, one of the attendants lost his grip and my leg fell loose, the movement causing the stitches to unravel. I screamed out in pain – the idea of going through the process of restitching the wound without an anaesthetic filled me with dread. The doctor, still muttering and apparently unconcerned, simply sprinkled my wound with sulphanilamide from an American first-aid pack and the attendants carried me through to an adjacent room, which in retrospect I refer to as the torture room.

They placed me onto a device not unlike one of those ancient torture racks you see in cartoons, my leg strapped to the uppermost bar, composed of two facing wooden strips with a ratchet attached to the end. One of two female nurses in the room worked the ratchet, which pulled the topmost bar to which my broken leg was attached towards her until my leg could stretch no further and felt as if it was about to part from my body. Needless to say, I screamed and sobbed. Throughout this torture the expression on the faces of the two nurses remained impassive. They performed the task as if the leg was detached and not a part of my body. With the rack completed they applied plaster that made a cast that covered my entire leg from the ankle to my waist.

I was in dreadful pain, and to add to it something happened that I have never been able to explain. Completely out of the blue, without any thought on my part, I had a full-blown erection. This caused the two nurses to giggle, holding their hands up to their mouths, unable to restrain their mirth. I'd heard of dead men having an erection, and I wondered if this was a precursor to my own death. Then a diminutive Chinese cameraman appeared and began to set up a tripod onto which he placed an old-fashioned portrait camera complete with bellows. I wasn't sure that I wasn't hallucinating, what with the two nurses giggling and the dwarf camera operator fussing around, completely oblivious to my erection. It seemed more like something out of a pornographic version of a Charlie Chaplin comedy. The tiny cameraman poured flash powder into a holder, repeatedly baring his teeth in the manner of a chimpanzee, which he quite closely resembled. I think he was trying to tell me to smile. Then he held it aloft and disappeared beneath the black cloth behind the camera. He triggered the flash powder, which exploded in a great whoosh of smoke and set the roof thatch alight. Thankfully, it also caused my erection to subside.

People came running from everywhere and the fire was somehow doused, though I was too preoccupied with my pain to take note quite how this was done. I guess the photograph, originally intended for the
Daily Worker
as propaganda to show how well UN prisoners were being treated, would have become a collector's item, and there are probably faded prints of my ‘
election
' still doing the rounds among junior medical staff somewhere in China.

I was taken back to the room with the platform and left with the other wounded soldiers. The pain seemed to steady somewhat – by that, I mean it didn't increase. Pain on a consistent level is bearable: even if severe, the mind somehow accommodates it so that it becomes possible to think of other things as well. None of my fellow patients spoke English and I felt terribly alone. The cave had been gruesome, but at least I'd been with people who spoke my language. The unfortunate erection was also preoccupying my thoughts. Sex is not a factor when men are starving and sick, and I hadn't had the slightest inclination or even indication in the weeks I'd been a prisoner of war. Nor, for that matter, did I immediately after the photographic incident. But it must have triggered something because now my mind was longing for a woman's arms to be around me. I'd had a few girlfriends on the island and tried to imagine them holding me, but I couldn't quite visualise the process I so longed for. It was not a sexual thing – the arms I needed would be more a comfort and a reassurance, and they'd all been too young to meet this need. Then, ridiculously, my mind's eye settled on the strongest female image it had ever encountered – Miss Pat Brand, the torch singer who had performed at Puckapunyal. My head filled with the lyrics and the tune she'd sung to us that night when I had fallen head over heels in love. I found my harmonica in the pocket of my parka and began to play.

Fish gotta swim and birds gotta fly,
I gotta love one man till I die,
Can't help lovin' dat man of mine.

All I could manage was one verse before I started to weep, pain and loneliness overwhelming me so that I howled like a small child. I became aware of someone close by and through my ridiculous tears saw it was one of the Chinese wounded. He sat beside me as I tried to gain control, to get a hold of myself, but the tears wouldn't stop and I continued to sob. Then I felt the soldier beside me reach out and take me in his arms and cradle my head against his breast. Then in perfect English, with an American accent, he began to sing.

‘I looked over Jordan, and what did I see?
Comin' for to carry me home.
A band of angels comin' after me,
Comin' for to carry me home.

Swing low, sweet chariot,
Comin' for to carry me home.
Swing low, sweet chariot,
Comin' for to carry me home.

If you get there before I do,
Comin' for to carry me home,
Tell all my friends I'm comin' too,
Comin' for to carry me home.

Swing low, sweet chariot . . .

I'm sometimes up and sometimes down,
Comin' for to carry me home,
But still my soul feels heavenly bound,
Comin' for to carry me home.

Swing low, sweet chariot . . .

The brightest day that I can say,
Comin' for to carry me home,
When Jesus washed my sins away,
Comin' for to carry me home.

Swing low, sweet chariot . . .'

Apart from these perfectly accented lyrics he only had one other word in English – ‘
Missionary
'. He must have learned the words of the hymn by rote as a child from an American missionary. I sometimes play this beautiful Negro spiritual and it never fails to reduce me to tears as I recall the little bloke. He too had been wounded, but he'd reached out to me and held me in his arms, comforting me with the words in a song, the meaning of which he probably didn't understand, but with a sense of compassion that transcended language and culture.

Later I would reflect on the Chinese. First there had been the soldier who had slowly bled to death, who had rolled a cigarette and placed it in my mouth and then, rolling one for himself, died in front of my eyes, the half-smoked fag stuck to his bottom lip. Then this second wounded soldier, comforting me with his song. We would have our moments with the Chinese, but as far as I was concerned, these two soldiers went a long way to earning my admiration for a strangely complex and contradictory race of people.

Despite the incident with the singing soldier that first night after my operation and long-hoped-for plaster cast, I was pretty bloody miserable. I felt sure that the medical attention I'd finally received was too little, too late, and I was almost certainly going to die. But by early morning I felt a little better and managed to fall asleep, and finally woke up in the late afternoon to find Jimmy lying beside me.

‘Jesus!' was all I could manage to say.

‘No sir! Jesus, he got other eggs to fry! Dis James Pentecost Oldcorn at yo' service, Brother Fish.'

I let the ‘Brother Fish' pass, thinking Jimmy had simply made a mistake. Then he explained that the Chinese officer who'd picked me out to have my leg set had returned the following day and demanded to hear the choir sing the North Korean folksong. Jimmy had called them together and they'd duly performed it for him. In contrast to ‘Inscrutable', his North Korean cousin, he seemed delighted. The Chinese officer spoke halting but reasonable English. He explained that he knew the song, which, as it turned out, was in a dialect used by the people who lived on the Yalu River and was used by both nations, the river being the common border where the villagers on either side had mixed for countless generations.

The song, he explained, was about a fisherman who had sailed too far down the river and found himself blown into the Gulf, where he was caught in a terrible storm and became lost at sea. After many days without sighting land, when he was about to perish from thirst, he heard a fish calling his mother's name in the voice of his younger brother, who had drowned at sea as a young man. The fish drew alongside the boat and told him to hoist sail and follow it. It guided him back to the shore and up the river to his own village, where his mother lay dying of grief because she had only two sons and both had been lost to the merciless sea. The last two happy verses were about a great feast to celebrate his return and his mother's recovery.

‘Dat gook officer, he say we all gonna go to a hospital, dey gonna fix mah leg, we all gonna get good treatment. He say when we sing dat fish song in der language it like a com-plee-ment to da Chinese People's Revolution.' He shrugged, ‘So yoh see, it a e-stab-lish fact – we owe our lives to you, Brother Fish.'

‘That's complete bullshit,' I replied. ‘And what's going on? That's the second time you've called me Brother
Fish
!'

Jimmy laughed, ‘Dat yo' name now, man! You da fish man!'

Like I said before, when Jimmy got a notion into his head it would take more than a tempest at sea to remove it. ‘Dat Chinee song, it da brother who become da fish dat show him da way home – it like a re-in-carn-nation, man! It da brother fish dat done da deed and save his life.' He shook his head, obviously impressed at this remarkable juxtaposition of the word ‘brother'. ‘It simple, man, you dat brother fish.' In Jimmy's mind that was as good as a message from on high, and ever afterwards he referred to me as Brother Fish, a name I've now held for just on fifty years.

Jimmy's leg had originally been broken midway between his left ankle and knee. He'd been fortunate and there had been no complications such as the festering, swelling and high fever I'd copped, though, of course, he had to endure the torture of the rack when they straightened his leg to plaster it. Within a couple of days, with the help of a pair of Chinese crutches, which were much too small for him so that he appeared to move as if doubled up, he was hopping about. Whereas I was still much too weak to get to my feet.

I was to learn that the Chinese have very little sense of privacy and they don't feel shame over the same things as we do. There was no such thing as a bedpan in this hospital. With a plaster cast from ankle to waist, too weak to make my own way to the outside latrine, I was carried over to a four-gallon kerosene can with the top sawn off to perform my morning bowel and bladder movements. They hadn't replaced my tattered army trousers and apart from the plaster cast I was bollocky naked from the waist down. It was normally okay, as my precious Yank parka covered my private parts, but in order to do my business this was lifted high above my waist to reveal my tackle.

Latrine time became the signal for all 'n' sundry to come running. My round blue eyes and red hair had already drawn a lot of attention, and the platform for the wounded never had as many visitors. People came from far and near to gawk at me and also the huge shape of Jimmy, who, while not much darker than some of the Chinese, differed in ethnic type in every other conceivable way. To the Chinese both of us were remarkable exhibits, and visiting the platform of wounded men must have been their equivalent of seeing two newly acquired, rare species at the zoo.

But latrine time was the special show. Both men and women would jostle to get a good position beside the kerosene can, where they could reach in and pull at my bright-red pubic hair to see if it was real. They'd take a tug and everyone would let out a gasp as it stayed put. Quite why they imagined it might be fake or why I would want artificial pubic hair I can't say. Under the circumstances it was hardly surprising that I was finding it difficult to have a bowel movement. The crowd would watch as I strained and some, in an effort to encourage me, would screw up their eyes, stretch their lips into a grimace and emit straining sounds on my behalf, while all showed genuine concern for my lack of action. Finally, on the fourth day their patience was rewarded. I expelled, with surprising force, a dozen or so small dry pellets that ricocheted and pinged around the can to prolonged applause. Several onlookers were so moved that they reached out to pat me on the shoulder.