The Kindness of Women Read Online Free PDF Page B

reminder of their lowly position in Shanghai’s British community.
    Bored with it all, and deciding to show off in front of Peggy, I picked up a stone from the step and hurled it high into the air over the parade ground.
    â€œJamie, you’re in trouble! Sergeant Nagata saw that…”
    I froze against the door. The sergeant was standing on the gravel path twenty feet from the children’s hut. As he stared at me he filled his lungs, his face bearing the weight of some slow but vast emotion. However complicated the British at Lunghua seemed to me, there was no doubt that Sergeant Nagata found them infinitely more mysterious, a stiff-necked people whose armies in Singapore had surrendered without a fight but nonetheless acted as if they had won the war. For some reason he kept a close watch on me, as if I were a key to this conundrum.
    Why he should have marked out one thirteen-year-old boy among the two hundred children I never discovered. Did he think I was trying to escape, or serving as a secret courier between the dormitory blocks? In fact, most of the adults in the camp shied away from me when I loomed up to them, eager to play blindfold chess or offer my views on the progress of the war and the latest Japanese aerial tactics. My nerveless energy soon tired them, and besides, I was forever looking to the future. No one knew when the war would end—perhaps in 1947 or even 1948—and the internees coped with the endless time by erasing it from their lives. The busy programme of lectures and concert parties of the first year had been abandoned. The internees rested in their cubicles, reading their last letters from England, roused briefly by the iron wheels of the food carts. Mrs. Dwight was not the only one to see the dangers of an overactive imagination.
    â€œJamie, look out…” Mischievously, Peggy pushed me through the doorway. I stumbled onto the gravel, but Sergeant Nagata had more pressing matters on his mind than a head count of the war children. Slapping his roster board, he led his entourage back to the guardhouse. I was sorry to see him go—I enjoyed squaring up to Sergeant Nagata. There was something about the Japanese, their seriousness and stoicism, that I admired. One day I might join the Japanese air force, just as my other heroes, the American Flying Tigers, had flown for Chiang Kai-shek.
    â€œWhy isn’t he coming?” Disappointed, Peggy shivered in her patched cardigan. “You could have escaped—think what Mrs. Dwight would say. She’d have you banished.”
    â€œI am banished.” Not sure what this meant, I added: “There might be an escape tonight.”
    â€œWho said? Are you going with them?”
    â€œBasie and Demarest told me.” The American merchant seamen were a fund of inaccurate information, much of it deliberately propagated. As it happened, escape could not have been further from my mind. My parents were interned at Soochow, far too dangerous a distance to walk, and the British in charge might not let me in. They were terrified of being infected with typhus or cholera by prisoners transferred from other camps.
    â€œI would have gone with them, but Basie’s wrong.” I pointed to the guardhouse, where Private Kimura was saluting the sergeant with unnecessary zeal. “They always close the gates when Sergeant Nagata thinks there’s going to be an escape.”
    â€œWell…” Peggy hid her pale cheeks behind her arms and shrewdly studied the Japanese. “Perhaps they want us to escape.”
    â€œWhat?” This struck me with the force of revelation. I knew from the secret camp radio that by now, November 1943, the war had begun to turn against the Japanese. After the attack on Pearl Harbor and their rapid advance across the Pacific, they had suffered huge defeats at the battles of Midway and the Coral Sea. American reconnaissance planes had appeared over Shanghai, and the first bombing