The Kindness of Women Read Online Free PDF

appreciate serving as my practice target. I leaned against Peggy, glad to feel her strong wrists and smell the cold, reassuring scent of her body. She was always trying to wrestle with me, for reasons I was not yet ready to explore.
    â€œWhy, Jamie? You’ve shot everyone in Lunghua by now. Is it because you want to be alone here?”
    â€œI haven’t shot Mrs. Dwight.” This busybodying missionary was one of the English widows who supervised the eight boys and girls in the children’s hut, all war orphans separated from parents interned in the other camps near Shanghai and Nanking. Rather than make sure that we had our fair share of the falling food ration, Mrs. Dwight was concerned for our spiritual welfare, as I heard her explain to the mystified camp commandant, Mr. Hyashi. For Mrs. Dwight this chiefly involved my sitting silently in the freezing hut over my Latin homework—anything rather than the restless errand running and food scavenging that occupied every moment of my day. To Mrs. Dwight I was a “free soul,” a term that contained not a hint of approval. Spiritual well-being seemed to be inversely proportional to the amount of food one received, which perhaps explained why Mrs. Dwight and the other missionaries considered their prewar activities in the famine-ridden provinces of northern China such a marked success.
    â€œWhen the war’s over,” I said darkly, “I’ll ask my father to shoot Mrs. Dwight with a real gun. He dislikes missionaries, you know.”
    â€œJamie…!” Peggy tried to box my ears. A doctor’s daughter from Tsingtao, she was a year older than me and pretended to be easily shocked. As I knew, she was far more protective than Mrs. Dwight. When I was ill it was Peggy who had looked after me, giving me some of the younger children’s food. One day I would repay her. She ruled the children’s hut in a firm but high-minded way, and I was her greatest challenge. I liked to keep up a steady flow of small outrages, but recently I had noticed Peggy’s depressing tendency to imitate Mrs. Dwight, modelling herself on this starchy widow as if she needed the approval of an older woman. I preferred the strong-willed girl who stood up to the boys in her class, rescued the younger children from bullies, and had a certain thin-hipped stylishness with which I had still to come to terms.
    â€œIf your father’s going to shoot anyone,” Peggy remarked, “he should start with Dr. Sinclair.” This vile-tempered clergyman was the headmaster of the camp school. “He’s worse than Sergeant Nagata.”
    â€œPeggy…?” I felt a rush of concern for her. “Did he hit you?”
    â€œHe nearly tried. He always looks at me in that smiley way. As if I was his daughter and he needed to punish me.”
    Only that afternoon one of the ten-year-olds had come back to the hut with a stinging red forehead. Our real education at the Lunghua school came from learning to read Dr. Sinclair’s moods.
    â€œDid you tell Mrs. Dwight?”
    â€œShe wouldn’t listen. Just because they’re kind to us, they think they can do anything. She’s more frightened of him than I am.”
    â€œHe doesn’t hit everybody.”
    â€œHe’ll hit you one day.”
    â€œI won’t let him.” This was idle talk, and my next Latin class could prove me wrong. But so far I had avoided the clergyman’s heavy hands. I had noticed that Dr. Sinclair left alone the children of the more well-to-do British parents. He never hit David Hunter, however much David tried to provoke him, and only cuffed the sons of factory foremen, Eurasian mothers, or officers in the Shanghai police. What I could never understand was why the parents failed to protest when their children returned to their rooms in G Block with ears bleeding from the clergyman’s signet ring. It was almost as if the parents accepted this