China to Me (50 page)

They glared at each other. Even in my egotistical weariness I could see that. A moment later a plump, darkish man with a mustache showed up and was introduced as a relative. Then we all filed out to a small car that was parked in the driveway, and drove about half a mile down the road, and climbed a hill past potted flowers, and came to a halt before a white house. Mother Weill drove the car, with that calm ruthlessness which characterizes elderly ladies at the wheel. On the way we passed among rows and rows of trucks under the trees, and a lot of dirty-faced soldiers who waved at us and saluted.

“These are Canadians,” explained Vera-Veronica. “Such nice boys. They drop in sometimes for coffee.”

I was staggered by the amount of room Veronica seemed to have in her house near Mamma's. Shades were down and everything looked deserted, but still it was nice.

“Do you like it?” she asked, pleased. “Of course when my husband is home, and the two children, it isn't so empty. I know you, but you don't know me. My husband is Leo Weill. He's fighting with the Volunteers out near Stanley; he talked to me on the phone last night. And the children … Oh dear. The children are at school in Tsingtao.”

“With Nina Valentine's?”

“Yes.”

“My baby's on the Peak,” I said, “being looked after by Vera Armstrong. I wish — ”

“You must get her down here,” said Veronica Weill. “We'd love to have her. Do bring her down.”

“How can I bring her down?”

“My mother's at the War Memorial, on Food Control. We'll call her tonight. There must be some way. I remember your gibbons: my baby loved them. I thought if you didn't mind we could sleep on mattresses downstairs in the drawing room. It seems a little further away from the sky. We'll have something to eat and then drop down to the other house. Wait until I've changed my shoes. I'm so tired. We had a lot of casualties today.”

At the other house we found a bewildering lot of people. Evidently the Weills just sat there, quietly letting people come and live with them. I met there Lena Glover, one of the two glamorous Russian sisters who had been a thorn in the flesh of the British spinsters of the Colony for years and years. Lena, the younger of the two, had recently capped her irritatingly successful career by marrying a most eligible young Briton. Being rather a lone wolf myself, I had always liked the Glovers and we knew each other well.

“Where's Mitzi?” I asked Lena. “All right?”

“Oh yes, I guess so. She's nursing at St. Stephen's School near the university,” said Lena. “We can't seem to find Desmond, my husband, but he'll turn up.”

Behind her, Mother Weill gave me a slumbrous, meaning look and I felt uneasy about Desmond. Everyone looked uncomfortable. But it was all a little bewildering, because I kept meeting people I knew. Ritchie Raymond, a handsome lady whose husband had once been an associate of Sassoon's, was there in navy slacks and a bandanna. “We've lost Albert,” she said. Albert was her husband. “The last I heard of him he was at Repulse Bay, and now we are cut off from the hotel. Our house is gone, finished. … ”

“Now, Ritchie,” said Mother Weill, “we'll find him.”

I also met an incredibly old lady whose name was Auntie. “I'm a very old lady,” she said. “And I've seen trouble before.”

“Now, Auntie,” said Mother Weill. “Oh dear.” She sighed. There were many other people around, but I couldn't get them straight. Susie told me gleefully that her big sister Sophie would be home tomorrow, having resigned from A.N.S. duty across town because her husband was now lying in the Queen Mary with a bullet wound in his foot. Sophie, said Susie, was neurotic and the doctor had agreed that she must come home. I was beginning to sort the Weills out, at least. Susie's only son Peter was at school in Tsingtao. Sophie's son David was in Tsingtao too. That was the chief reason why Mother Weill's face was so long. The older son of Sophie, Albert, was in Hong Kong on some duty or other — he was seventeen — and he was accounted for. The eldest son of all, Jackie, was safe in Free China. My head was spinning when Veronica and I again climbed the hill to our quiet house, and I remembered with some surprise that I, even I, had a child. A very little one, but still a real child. It was time to try for news of her, up there on the chilly Peak.

Veronica put a call through and got her mother on the phone, and asked for news of Carola. She looked worried when she reported to me. “There's no evidence that Mrs. Armstrong ever called and got your baby,” she said. “At noon Mother was playing with Carola herself, and she says that old amah was getting nervous because they'd been packed and waiting for hours to be called for. Hadn't you better phone Mrs. Armstrong?”

Telephoning at that date wasn't easy, but I did get Vera, and heard her explanation. She hadn't been able to get through the bombardment, she explained; she had been forced to turn back. But she assured me that Carola would be safe at the War Memorial. “She's got Ah Cheung, and a hospital, after all. … I'll try again tomorrow, my dear. How's Charles? We had a shell today on the edge of the roof. A spiky one.”

It's a story that has been in the newspaper and in several other places, how I lost Carola and how Bill Hunt, the American shipping man and dashing buccaneer, brought her back when I was just about ready to tear my hair out by the roots. I hadn't dared tell Charles about losing her. I was following a pattern by that time, laid down by the Weills' domestic arrangements: every morning we all drove over in one of the family cars to hospital and dispersed to our various jobs. The Weills, augmented now by Sophie, all did A.N.S. work.

I sat with Charles and made little pads for his paralyzed arm to rest on, or wandered downstairs to help make bandages. His roommate, Captain Wiseman, was a jolly young sprig when his leg stopped hurting, and things were getting comparatively gay in our ward, as Charles felt better. Now and then I would go into the other wards to see what I could do. The hospital was badly understaffed and sometimes nobody came in all day to dress Charles's wound. The paralysis was due to the bullet's shaving too close to the nerve of the left arm, and Digby, the surgeon, was hopeful that after the first shock voluntary movement might come back. In the meantime be waited for the slight infection that had developed in the wound near the spine to subside. He based his hopes on Tony's report that during the first-aid dressing Charles's hand had kept opening and closing spasmodically. But Digby and the nurses were too busy to spend much time on the case.

In the next-door ward Major Neave, who had been wounded with Charles in the same engagement, lay battling for his life against the odds of countless shrapnel wounds all up and down his left side. Whenever I brought Charles anything extra to eat he sent the best part of it to Major Neave, and for a while it looked as if Neave would win the battle for life. He smiled and talked sensibly when I went in, and he kept an enormous photograph of his wife and child where he could look at it, and I never had the feeling there, as I did in some of the other wards, that his spirit was nagging. He lost the battle, though.

Mrs. Martin, the American wife of the British consul to Chungking, was another tough nut. Her husband lay dying of stomach ulcer, complicated, I think, by cancer. Mrs. Martin kept him eating the things he should have in defiance of the hospital's growing miserliness with regard to food. She stormed the kitchen, she insisted, she raised hell. She kept her husband alive for a long time in spite of everything. That battle was lost too, in the end.

There was a ward down the hall with two Volunteer men in it, one big cockney fellow who felt miserable but who did finally recover, and a poor little chap who had been shot through the groin and was delirious. Every time I came in he asked me for chocolate. I managed to get some and give it to him, day after day, time after time. He could never remember having had any before. The other man just wanted tobacco, and I got some for him too, but sometimes he didn't even want that.

Through all of this, for three days, I didn't know where my baby was. I should have trusted Ah King, but one doesn't think of that. Vera Armstrong couldn't insist on bringing the baby into the Edmonston house against her host's refusal, and she couldn't very well tell me that, either. She believed sincerely that Carola was all right at the hospital, and of course she was, but I had no way of knowing. Actually, Ah King kept Ah Cheung at her job. When the poor old amah tried to run away, to find her own twelve-year-old daughter in the town, Ah King threatened and stormed and scared her into remaining. Whenever he could, he brought food down to the pair, concealed as they were in a room on the cellar floor. All the other Chinese servants had long since deserted, and the hospital had reason to be grateful to Ah King for remaining at his post — until the morning that Carola was taken away. Then without a qualm he deserted.

Bill Hunt did it. I had reached him on the phone when I was insane with worry, what with lying every day to Charles and then trying to get some news of Carola after I got home. Bill first suggested taking her into his own hotel suite in the Grips, but he was hastily dissuaded by Judge Allman, who with six other refugees was sharing the rooms. There was no water in the hotel, Allman reminded him, and anyway, if Bill was going to the trouble of bringing a baby all the way from the Peak, why not just give her back to her mamma, where she belonged? Bill saw the force of that argument, and so on the morning of the twenty-fourth, after wrecking one car in the attempt, he brought a howling Carola, a quaking Ah Cheung, and a grinning Ah King out to Veronica's house, to me.

He did more than that. He stamped into the house, talking loudly and cheerfully, and he brought me a lot of supplies: tinned stuff of all sorts, a whole caseful of chocolate, biscuits, and fruit, and coffee. I needed it all too. I sat there with my face all tear-streaked, beaming, clutching the baby to me while she made up for lost time at nursing, and asked him about the war.

“Well,” said Bill, “the little buggers are being pretty busy. They're all over the place. They're making headway in the Philippines, and they're swarming down the Malay Peninsula, and they're heading for Burma. … Christ, they're all over the bloody place! How's Charles? I'll try to come out and see him later on. Say, that's some cook boy of yours. I told him he couldn't come in this car, because we were overloaded. And between you and me, it's Selwyn's own private car; I didn't have any right to use it. But when we started to unload here he popped up. … You should have been halfway up the Peak when that shell missed us by an inch. I thought the old lady would shed her skin.”

He left, and I mopped up and showed the Chinese where to sleep, and then I went out to see Charles, with a clear conscience at last. He talked a lot about Carola.

Somehow or other everyone I knew seemed to be working with Selwyn now. Bill had been picked up in the Gloucester lobby. He was caught between planes in this trap, this Hong Kong where he didn't belong. Selwyn, who didn't know him, had come across him on the second or third morning, sitting disconsolate on a staircase with his unshaved chin propped on his hands.

“Would you like to help move an orphanage in from the New Territories?” asked Selwyn, on a venture. He was always in need of men, always looking. Bill stood up, stretched, and said:

“Where do I get the bus?”

Joe Alsop was another. He had phoned me the second day; he said he was sitting in Hal Sweet's bungalow in Kowloon, rapidly giving up hope that he could ever get out to his duty on a plane. I asked him if he would work for Selwyn in the meantime and he was enthusiastic. The last time I saw him he was carrying stretchers of human fragments at the Queen Mary, clad in a blood-soaked waterproof coat and looking grim. He did good work.

Charlotte too. I told her where to find Selwyn because she wanted to volunteer, and God knows what she didn't do before the war was over. She started rearranging an old school building for a hospital, one of her early duties. “There was a telephone in every room,” she told me later, “and Selwyn told me to take them out. The sheer joy of pulling telephones up cannot be expressed. Wait until you try it for yourself.” Losing Charlotte during the war — we were not to meet again for two years — distressed me almost more than anything.

So there Carola and I were, reunited and among friends. It was wonderful. Susie taught the amah how to give the baby a sun bath out on the lawn. In Pokfulam that sort of activity was still possible; only an occasional plane flew over our house. Little by little I began to sort out all the people who were living there. We ate carefully but adequately. Bill Hunt's load of supplies was a great help. I would eat breakfast, go to the hospital, and when lunchtime came around either I nibbled a piece of Bill's chocolate or went without. Charles couldn't eat most of his lunch — a heap of rice and a spoonful of stew — and sometimes I fell on it and cleaned it up after him, but as young Bill Wiseman got better he became ravenous and even Charles's ration wasn't enough for him. Ah King, now that he had no more cooking to do, took to walking in to town and foraging around. He used his own money. He bought grapes for Charles, and they came in handy for Wiseman and Neave, if not for Charles himself. He bought chocolate and whatever cans he could find. One day I brought a parcel to the hospital; there were cigarettes for Wiseman and a tin of sausages (the little Vienna kind) and another tin of Brussels sprouts for Charles, and I was pretty proud of myself. But Charles looked at the sausages and the sprouts doubtfully.

“You shouldn't do this,” he said. “You should keep these things for the baby.”

My subsequent lecture was all too successful. For the rest of the time we were in Hong Kong, Charles was convinced that Carola ate nothing but milk and sugar. He was still worrying about sugar and milk for her when we left Hong Kong two years later.