Hiroshima Joe (31 page)

A lighthouse blinked from the shore of the island and the fishermen headed for a bay to the leeward of the light. The swell was less and they sailed into the calmer water, to run softly aground on a shingle beach. Sandingham was helped ashore, half-carried and half-dragged to a line of trees and bushes, then sat down against a rock protruding from the sand. It was light enough to see by, though whether moon- or starlight he knew not.

The fishermen disappeared and Sandingham fell into a deep and comatose sleep.

*   *   *

He was hot. Hot as in Hades where, for all he could know or care, he could now be roasting. He was burning. He could see his blood running in his veins. He opened his eyes. It hurt, so he closed them. Grey light came over him. He opened his eyes again. Someone or something was kneeling over him. Hands like claws were shaking his arms. Water was running down his chest. He flexed his fingers to make a fist. The pain shouted at him. Then it intensified to unbearable levels. He whimpered, not being able to find the urge or energy to scream.

Fujihara must have got him back. Somehow. He couldn’t figure out how, but that must be it. Perhaps it was Tsutada. Tokunaga, The White Pig himself, had managed to swim to land as well and get hold of him. He was even at this moment dislocating every finger joint of Sandingham’s he could grip with his pair of electrician’s pliers.

An acrid stench hit his nostrils.

An English voice made him jerk with surprise as much as the pain did.

‘Keep still! They’ve got iodine.’

Crouched by his side was an old man. He had a wispy mandarin’s beard and colourless pupils in the middle of porcelain-white eyes. His cheeks were made of yellow parchment. Sandingham drew back.

‘Don’t worry. He’s all right. He’s for us.’

The back of the old man’s hand was scarred and one of his fingernails was three inches long and horny as a toad’s lips.

As Sandingham’s sight grew accustomed to the morning light he scanned the beach. In a group around about him were seven or eight other prisoners. He did not recognise any of them. Like himself, they were all dressed in baggy black Chinese trousers and loose jackets that shone like cheap, tarred silk. He realised that, in his sleep, he had been dressed.

His hand slid quickly to his groin.

‘It’s okay. I’ve got it here for you.’

A prisoner with a pencil-thin moustache handed Sandingham his packet.

‘If there’s money in that, we’d like to give it to them.’

‘There isn’t.’

However, Sandingham opened the package, partly to ensure that the contents were dry, and handed the tobacco to the prisoner who gave it to the Chinese. The old man grimaced his thanks and took the package carefully as if it were the sacrament, wrapping it in a twist of paper he pulled from the folded-over top of his own, similar trousers.

A china bowl was placed in Sandingham’s lap. In it was a small heap of cold rice, three dried fish and a spoonful of berries.

‘Eat slowly. You’ve swallowed a lot of sea water.’

He obeyed without questioning this wisdom.

His arms and legs itched badly. All those rescued had been profusely bitten by insects during the early hours.

When he had eaten, Sandingham walked to the water’s edge, took off his newly-acquired clothes and soaked his body in the warm sea. The salt eased the aggravation of the mosquito bumps.

Sitting in the water up to his chest, Sandingham watched the Chinese who had, he presumed, saved them as any mariner might rescue another in distress. Certainly, they were sea-going fishermen and knew only too well the dangers and fickleness of the ocean.

The islanders had, Sandingham knew, suffered at the hands of the Japanese for centuries, though not as cruelly as their fellow countrymen on the Chinese mainland had in recent years. For the fishermen, a passing Japanese ship might loot some food, the crew indulging in a bit of roughing-up for sport but nothing more. On the nearby coast and inland atrocities of a greater nature were more common.

By the line of bushes at the head of the beach, where a path wound through the branches, Sandingham spied a little girl. She was wearing a loose-fitting pair of black trousers and a matching vest-like top. Her jet-black hair was woven into little pigtails on either side of her head, the ends tied with cord. She had a quizzical look on her face.

Sandingham smiled and beckoned to her. Hesitantly, she came to the water’s edge and looked at him with much the same expression as a man might view a mermaid. She tipped her head from side to side to get a better view of the man with the pinky-red skin.

‘Hello,’ Sandingham said rather pointlessly, ‘what’s your name?’

She studied him for a moment, made no reply and then, with an adult composure, turned on her heel and marched up the beach, her arms swinging jauntily and her feet kicking up a small fountain of sand with each step.

The Chinese, who were now collecting up their food bowls to wash them clean, started to jabber together in an incomprehensible dialect. Swiftly, they ran into the undergrowth. The little girl was the last to go, taking a final sidelong glance at the strange men from the sea before following her elders.

Sandingham turned to look out to sea. He had neither heard nor seen anything to cause alarm.

A Japanese launch was turning into the bay.

‘Not bloody likely!’ The words came from nearby with a quiet, unemotional assurance. ‘Not bloody twice!’

Sandingham watched as two prisoners rolled into the bushes. He heard their passage through the branches, the scuffle of leaves in the undergrowth fading to silence. He wanted to join them, to escape the rigours of re-captivity. He wanted to be rid of
fandushis
and beatings and insufficient food and the ever-present smell of his own dung and fears. Yet an utterly uncompromising resignation seemed to be in command of his soul, an all-accepting lethargy that reasoned that this was not so bad. He was alive, at least. In a manner of speaking.

*   *   *

They were not allowed to retain the clothing the Chinese from the fishing village had given to them. As soon as they boarded the destroyer they were ordered to remove the black trousers and jackets and throw them overboard. In their place, they were issued with odds and ends of Japanese uniforms and articles of clothing donated by the crew. Those prisoners who were ill or sick from ingesting too much salt water were moved below, but everyone else remained in the open air. Plentiful food was served twice that day, cigarettes were forthcoming, fresh water was in good supply and, as night fell, hot cocoa made with milk powder was given to the prisoners in rice bowls.

The sea was smooth. Sandingham slept on deck against a bulkhead, on the other side of which was some piece of machinery that kept the metal plating warm throughout the night. By morning he would have cramp in his left arm and leg but at least he had slept and not woken up time and again shivering, as some of the others had.

On 5 October they arrived in Shanghai, everyone agreeing that the Imperial Japanese Navy had treated them fairly. The dead officer with the dress cap had been right after all. No matter what the nationality or the circumstance, sailors take pity on those being claimed or seduced by their joint enemy, the deceptive and deceitful sea.

As soon as they disembarked the situation altered drastically. A Japanese Army officer, carrying a briefcase and followed by two minions, strode across the dockside, stepping carefully over the sunken railway lines and avoiding with military precision the various crates and boxes, drums and bales that littered the area. He marched up the gangway and, on seeing the prisoners sitting or standing and chatting in groups on the open deck, barked a shrill string of invective at them before rattling his boots up a companionway in the direction of the bridge.

Ten minutes later, a Japanese officer appeared on the dock. His uniform was neat and crisply laundered and his stance erect and also military.

At first, Sandingham did not recognise him: then it dawned on him. This was Lieutenant Hideo Wada, the officer in charge of the guards on the
Lisbon Maru.
He was accompanied by a merchant marine captain whom some of the prisoners thought they recognised as Kyoda Shigeru, the master of their ill-fated prison ship. He too boarded the destroyer and made his way up to the officers’ quarters.

Forty minutes later, a contingent of IJA troops were marched on to the wharf. Some formed a semi-circular cordon around the bottom of the gangway while others came aboard the warship and lined the rails, guarded the doors and, having herded the prisoners together and brought up the wounded from below, patrolled the deck with fixed bayonets.

Leaning against a warm galley bulkhead, from a porthole in which issued the tantalising scents of frying rice, Sandingham watched the sentries going past him. Beside him was a group of other prisoners. A few spoke in subdued voices.

‘Shaggin’ Koreans!’ suddenly grumbled the man next to Sandingham, who had not spoken at all so far. ‘Right little bastards they is, sir. Worse than th’ soddin’ Nippos.’

With that observation he relasped once more into morose silence.

Sandingham looked at the man through the corner of his eye. He was dressed in Japanese Army general issue pantaloons that were loose below the knee rather than tied by a cord. That was now absent. His chest was bare and his hair was a gingery stubble, matching that on his chin. On his feet he wore a pair of Japanese naval rating’s deck shoes, a cross between a slipper and a plimsoll. His skin was yellowish, as if he had suffered recently from jaundice. Sandingham thought that if he rubbed the man with his sleeve the frost on his skin would clear as from a window and he would be able to see the interior of the man, all the parts working or waiting to be used, like a factory. Nothing showed his rank.

Other men were in command of them. Not special men. Just men like themselves. Shorter, thin-eyed, small-limbed maybe, but nevertheless men. They were just as equal too, in the face of natural order. A small advantage here, a twist of fate there. Kismet. Chance. The spin of the wheel. That was the only difference.

And ‘sir’: the man had said ‘sir’. Even in odd clothes he thought he knew his place. Sandingham wanted to correct him, to point out that he was not a ‘sir’ but just another human in the same state. He opened his mouth to speak.

‘Kike!’

The officer with the briefcase was standing stiffly at the rail of the next deck up. His arms pokered out from his shoulders and his hands gripped the wooden railing top. He gabbled out a long chain of commands.

By the depth charge mountings, a prisoner spoke up loudly.

‘Motto yukkuri hanashite kudasai? Wakarimasen.’

A statement was brusquely made. This was followed by an evident question, asked by the Japanese officer, to which the interpreting prisoner did a quick mental calculation, finally replying, ‘Ha-ppyaku – and, um – yon-ju-san.’

Sandingham understood numbers: either eight hunded and forty-three of them had died, or the same number had survived. Whichever way, it was roughly half those who had set off from Sham Shui Po.

The initial commands were repeated more slowly, after which the prisoner addressed his fellows.

‘We are to go on to Japan.’ He spoke loudly and without emotion. Experience told him that to imply something by tone could lead to a thrashing.

‘First,’ he continued, ‘we are to sit down.’ Those who were standing sat as instructed. ‘Now, take off all your clothes.’ Looks were exchanged, but the order obeyed. ‘Pass all clothing to the right. You two men by the capstan, pile them up.’

When stark naked, they were made to stand and form a file of two. The Korean guards earned their reputation by rifle-butting, punching and kicking them into line, making sure the boot or the wood hit a vital place: the kidneys seemed a favoured spot. Once assembled, the prisoners were marched off down the gangway, across the dock, through an empty and echoing warehouse, out of the dockyard gates, down a mile of streets lined by silent and blankly staring Chinese, in through another gate and there, ahead of them, were congregated the remaining survivors who had been rescued by other warships.

He was surprised with himself. Walking through the streets, bare-footed and bare-arsed, his sagging balls banging against the insides of his scraggy thighs and his cock wobbling limply, Sandingham felt no shame. It came – somehow – naturally.

Now, squatting on his haunches on another quayside, he realised that he could go no lower, could be debased no further. There was nothing left he could lose, except the rolled-up photograph in its bit of rubber, lying sideways across the inside of his mouth.

He had, with a difficult sleight of hand, succeeded in transferring this when they had been ordered to undress. Now it was between his tongue and the roof of his mouth, it was uncomfortable. He could have folded it, but he’d had neither the time nor the desire to crease the picture further. He looked as if he had an abscess developing.

A prisoner who had been a medical orderly asked him if there were something he might do – look at it for him – but he mumbled a reply and turned his face away, tears of shame and embarrassment at last filling his eyes: whatever the Japs did now, he thought, it had to be on the up.

They were formed into squads of forty prisoners and chivvied towards the gangplank of another cargo vessel. The hold was better equipped than that in the
Lisbon Maru:
there they had had only a few litters, being accommodated upon Japanese-style bed platforms, but here there were hammocks and stretcher-like beds of canvas. What shelving there was had been covered with thin, kapok- and straw-filled palliasses.

It was to his good fortune that Sandingham was in one of the first drafts to board. He had the pick of a pile of clothes that were heaped in the centre of each hold. Some of the clothing was European or American.

As the hold filled up with its living cargo, he climbed to the second tier and claimed a hammock for himself. Settling into it, he noticed some faded lettering stencilled upon the canvas stays. They read ‘USN’.