The Devil's Garden Read Online Free PDF

than might be imagined. The actual occupancy of any particular cell was in constant rearrangement as overcrowding and boredom bred feuds, fights or the furtive physical affections that could be even worse. At night, inmates stretched out on the steel mesh that denied the use of the central well to would-be suicides or crept out into the courtyards and offered themselves a living sacrifice to the mosquitoes rather than the heat. Apart from the tormented dentist called Churchill—that even the Japanese found funny—the most luckless prisoner was a pale and peaceful Czech embezzler, known inappropriately as ‘the bouncing Czech’, who had seen his rapist, murderous and bestial companions liberated by victorious General Yamashita and sent back slavering into the community while he was retained as a dangerous enemy alien. At least, as sitting tenant, he had been able to take the best cell in the house.
    Endless discord had been brilliantly sown by the Japanese when, at the last moment, they drove in two hundred mixed Jews and Armenians, mostly money-changers from what the Europeans called Change Alley and everyone else knew as Chincharlie. The Jews were persecuted by Germans, therefore clearly not Allies, therefore enemies of the Japanese, but the British were horrified that the Japanese viewed them as white without further qualification. They had been anyway none too happy about the olive complexions of some of the Mediterranean French and a disquietingly dusky Spaniard in the wine trade. A petition had been sent to the nonplussed commandant suggesting they be reclassified as ‘Eurasian’ and removed at once to the Sime Road camp. Then the Jews further hardened the hearts of oak against them by not knowing their place. It was discovered that they even referred to the lavatories not by some patriotic and affectionate term of whimsy, derived from the Motherland, but openly called them ‘The Wailing Wall’. The other internees, shocked, had fussed and fumed like an outraged residents’ association. Now they sent another petition to Colonel Saito who puzzled wearily over the alien classifications involved. Finally, the interpreter threw up his hands. ‘British say Jews are Korean,’ he extemporised, and the British case was won. The Jews were accorded separate quarters in the old rice store—immediately dubbed ‘Aldgate’—and their womenfolk designated as cleaners and washerwomen in the women’s section.
    Even within the British themselves, the rubbing along of different classes caused constant friction. The public school men fared best. After all, they had been raised in a system of arbitrary authority and violence with only scant food and distant dreams of ultimate liberation to sustain them. They knew from experience the dangers of such hothouse environments and the importance of battening down the hatches in order to retain their sanity and just face life day by day. Outrageous behaviour was dismissed with a sighed ‘It takes all sorts …’, Japanese-imposed indignities accepted with ‘We mustn’t make a fuss for the sake of the women …’ And women. They could live without them as they could do without tablecloths and napkins. Pilchard was an old Malvern College man. He had survived there by collecting beetles. Here, he had his Cocos-Keeling fieldwork to remember, to revise, to reinvent. He panted into the cell.
    â€˜Good Lord, old man, what happened to you? Was it the Nips? The INA?’ O’Toole was a craggy rugger player in his fifties with a well-macerated face, his nose spread sideways to make a physiognomy that could have modelled for Picasso. Beside him was a housewifely stack of threadbare shorts and vests. He had been killing time, as he sewed, by trying to recreate games played in the past, attacking holes in his clothes with great swooping stitches such as a fisherman might use to mend his nets. It was hopeless. Like his