Jim Thompson
AIF
3 October 1943
The Thompson Family
Drinkwater Station
via Gibber’s Creek
Dear family,
Excuse this, must write it in a rush. There may be a gap in my letters for a while, so don’t want you to worry. All is fine and will be fine, but expect mail services will be few and far between.
Wilton sends you his best wishes, and wants to know if there might be a job as a shearer’s cook after the war. I said you’d probably snap him up!
Love to all,
Jim
PULAU AYU PRISON CAMP, OCTOBER 1943
NANCY
‘Wire,’ said Sally.
Gavin looked out the door at the barbed-wire fence, rusty brown after two wet seasons. ‘Vire,’ he said.
Water from the late-afternoon storm dripped through the roof. It was impossible to keep anything dry; impossible to keep anything damp free from mould. Rope was forbidden to them, but every day when she picked the basket of hibiscus buds, Nancy managed to gather some of the long tropical grass too, then plaited it into string the way Gran had shown her.
Washing lines now stretched from hut to hut, festooned after every storm with their blankets and clothes, steaming gently in the sun.
‘W. Wire,’ repeated Sally.
‘Wire,’ said Gavin. He gave her a cheeky grin, as if he knew he’d got it right that time.
‘Very good!’ Nurse Rogers clapped as well as Sally and Moira. Nancy smiled as she twisted more string. Gavin might have no proper toys, no playmates his own age. But he had six aunties and a mother lavishing him with love and attention.
‘Green tree,’ said Sally. ‘Green bush. Blue sky. Blue dress.’ Gavin stared at Sally’s dress, vaguely puzzled. Its cloth was a long way from sky blue these days.
Nancy looked back down at her plaiting. The string was strong, but rotted as fast as cloth in the heat and the wet. Gran had shown her how to run stringybark rope through a fire to make it waterproof, but when she’d tried that with the grass string it simply frizzled and burnt. Which meant she had to make new string every few weeks.
A shadow made her look up. The translator stood there, the commandant behind him. She stood hurriedly with the other women and bowed.
The translator made the signal to rise. Nancy looked from him to the commandant. Even now they no longer had dysentery — more or less — neither she nor any of the other women had been called to the officers’ house again.
The commandant held out a small packing case. Nancy took it automatically.
‘A present from a Japanese officer to the child,’ said the translator. For the first time he looked at his superior uncertainly. ‘The commandant says that it is International Children’s Day. It is proper for children to get presents on Children’s Day.’
Nancy had never heard of International Children’s Day. Nor had there been presents or any celebration the year before. She met the commandant’s eyes. He looked at her, his mouth stretched in an emotion impossible to read. He said something briefly to the translator.
‘The commandant says to tell you he must leave the island now. He says he has left orders that the food for the child will come every day. He wishes you and the child a good life.’
‘Where is he going? Will we get another commandant?’ All at once she realised that life in the camp could have been far worse, with a crueller man in charge. They had not been beaten in camp, except the odd flick with the bamboo poles, which hurt enough but weren’t life threatening. Other than that one night there had been no demand for company. She tried to thrust away the memory of the grey bodies on the beach. That could have been all of them, with another man in charge.
We are alive, she thought, despite being nothing more than a nuisance at best, at worst an insult to honour. And if we have far too little food, our gaolers are almost as thin as us.
‘You must not ask Japanese officer questions,’ said the translator.
‘I … I apologise. Please, thank the commandant.’ Nancy nodded to the box, wondering what it contained.
The commandant spoke before the translator could say anything more. ‘Sayonara,’ he said.
It was one of the words he had tried to teach her, that night she tried to forget.
She looked at Gavin perched on Sally’s hip, this little boy who lived because this man had perhaps broken rules from headquarters to give him extra food, had perhaps broken other rules to let her pick flower buds and the grass for the string — and therefore secretly bring in the small parcels that still appeared in the bushes every few days, sometimes dried fish or a sweet potato. It was not much. But combined with the flower buds, with the meat from a rat or lizard once or twice a week, it had kept them alive.
She looked back at him. For the first time her bow was genuine. ‘Sayonara,’ she said. ‘Arigato.’ She hesitated. This man had also starved them, allowed his men to strike them, steal from them; crimes that in normal life, if there was ever normal life, would have meant years in prison. But every man should have someone farewell him when he went to battle. ‘May you travel safely, sensei,’ she added softly.
She gestured to Sally, to Moira. They bowed again. The other women did the same. They kept the bow as the commandant walked back to the officers’ house.
She thought, as she looked at him from under her eyelashes, that there were tears in his eyes. But perhaps it was just the glint of the sun.
She opened the box in the hut she shared with Moira and Gavin. For some reason she didn’t want the guards to see what was in it, though surely the commandant would not have given her or, rather, Gavin, anything the guards would object to.
She drew the objects out, one by one. A book. A book written in English. Not just in English — an Australian book, The Magic Pudding by Norman Lindsay. It had pictures too — Gavin would love the pictures, even if the book was a bit too old for him. But she could use it to teach him to read. She could read it herself, over and over, dream of an Australia where the mornings smelt like Pears soap and there was always pudding to eat, no matter how much of it you’d consumed the night before.
There was a small cloth bag too. She opened that, and stared. Small wrapped lollies, in bright paper. Her stomach cramped with longing. But these were Gavin’s. Nurse Rogers said it was important to give anyone with dysentery sweet and salty things, to keep up their strength. She must keep these for an emergency. Dysentery could kill a child far quicker than it could an adult.
A bottle. She looked at the label, which was in English, not Japanese. Quinine tablets. Enough for several cases of malaria. She was glad that the guards hadn’t seen her with those.
A can of cheese, again with an English label. Gavin needed the calcium. A can of bully beef. What soldiers’ rations, she wondered, had the beef and cheese come from? A packet of Empire Rich Teas. Also known as squished flies.
And suddenly she was crying, gazing at the biscuits made so far away at Blue and Mah McAlpine’s factory, at Gibber’s Creek. I will keep the packet, she thought, after Gavin eats the biscuits. Because that packet had come from home, had been touched by people from her land. She would tell him the story of how the circus came to Gibber’s Creek too, how its mermaid and magician’s assistant had stayed, in the country they had recognised as home.
She wiped her eyes before Gavin saw she was crying — he got upset too when anybody cried, so they all kept careful smiles on their faces when he was near. And then she saw it.
Sitting at the bottom of the box was the photograph of the girl her age, sitting facing the camera. She picked it up, and gazed at it.
Had the commandant put the photo in the box accidentally? He had held it like it was the most precious possession he had.
And that is why he left it, she thought. Whatever he was going to, he wanted that photograph to be safe. Not buried in mud, or blown up at sea. The commandant had no need to look at it; had gazed at it for a thousand hours perhaps. But he loved it too much to risk it being destroyed. Was his daughter still alive? Perhaps this was the only image of her that remained. She could never ask him now.
Was he a good man? She didn’t know whether he was good, but she did know that he was not bad. Had he fought battles to keep them alive? Or had he simply done his job, not caring much, till ordered to another battlefield, one with more honour for him than this one. But she thought, perhaps, it was the former.
Sayonara, she thought, then called Gavin over to feed him squished flies, and read the most precious book in all the world.
The car came for the commandant the next morning. Nancy assumed it had come from a ship, as they had heard no car engines until now. As far as she and the other women knew, there were no cars on the island, only bicycles, now all commandeered by the Japanese. Mrs Hughendorn had burnt their own car, just as she had ordered the burning of all machinery and the stores of rubber, before the Japanese arrived.
No new commandant came, nor did new guards.
‘You know what that means,’ said Sally, as they sat around the cooking fire one evening. There had been a small packet of spices in the bushes that afternoon. The camp smelt of mould and latrines, but their nightly sago was now fragrant, mixed with the flower buds, and the small, green kidney-shaped leaves that Nancy had thought looked like ones Gran sometimes picked and ate at home (they tasted like them too), and an ‘island rabbit’, caught by the latrine and given an extra-long boiling.
‘What does it mean?’ demanded Mrs Hughendorn. She had regained much of her strength, perhaps as much from the knowledge that the islanders she had known had not abandoned her as from the food they left. She now sat erect again on their only chair, her skin hanging in long flaps from her jaw and arms, and swaying as she sipped her stew.
‘It means the Japanese need every man they can get. They don’t have any spare soldiers to come here and watch over a bunch of women and a child.’
‘Or maybe the opposite,’ said Moira quietly. ‘Maybe they feel confident that the island has settled under Japanese occupation. Maybe they have Papua under control now too and are fighting in Australia.’
‘No!’ The cry came before she realised it came from her. Nancy bit her lip. ‘We’ll beat them off.’
‘Of course we will, dear,’ said Mrs Hughendorn quickly. ‘You Australians are splendid fighters.’
Nancy said nothing. That was what everyone had said about Malaya, about Singapore. That they could not be taken by the Japanese either. Australians had fought there as well, in a combined force that far outnumbered the Japanese. And they had lost.
She ate her stew in silence.