China to Me (33 page)

Ed was missing his wife and four children more and more acutely as time went on and his duties kept him away from his home in California. He is charmingly uxorious. And so one day Bill, flying through America, stopped off to see his sister-in-law and on a characteristic impulse scooped up the family, put them into a Clipper and brought them to Hong Kong. Ida, Ed's wife, came on up to Chungking as a pleasant surprise. The Pawley ensemble happily took a wing of the hostel and made it vastly more comfortable than were the other cubicles, with a remarkable addition of a pair of V-spring mattresses.

When the hostel was bombed the first time the mattresses were deserted by Ed and Ida. They went over to the APC House on the South Bank, where they decided to stay until things quieted down a little. Ed foresaw that there would be a rush for that South Bank safety zone soon, and he made his arrangements accordingly. The man in charge of APC in Chungking was Teddy Gammell, an Englishman, and with permission from the head office in Hong Kong he agreed to divide up with the Pawleys on the house and expenses. During her short stay at the hostel I learned to like Ida very much. People always like Ida. She is a gentlewoman and exceedingly nice to look at, with a lovely face, prematurely gray hair, and pleasing clothes. Visiting their wing was a refreshing relief from the grim facts of existence as we wrestled with them in the rest of the hostel. There was actually extra furniture in their living room, and there were flowers in vases, and pictures of the children in silver stand-up frames, and all the little amenities that depend so much on transportation. That was how the Pawleys had come to know the APC personnel so well; the European young men of the town trooped to their rooms for bridge games of an evening, even all the way from the South Bank. Though I don't play bridge I would be there too, drinking real whisky and luxuriating in civilized comfort. I missed them now.

Living in Chialing House was just like living in the hostel except that there were no Pawleys and I had a longer walk to the Havas office every day. The dugout was further away, and you always had to run for it. Many a time did I toil up the face of the rock cliff where that Chialing House dugout was located, puffing and blowing and sobbing for breath before I fell into the cave's mouth, just as the Urgent went off. Life was more complicated now, however; one of my suitcases had been lost over at the abandoned hostel and this was a serious loss. My manuscript was in that bag, my photographs, cuttings, and practically all the impedimenta of the book except the current chapter. I was awfully worried. Every day between raids I went over and pestered the people who were sorting out the rubble. It took time. At last I was permitted down in the condemned dugout and allowed to root for myself. I quickly found the suitcase in a small cache there, covered with green mold but undisturbed.

We had been told that we could probably move back in a couple of weeks, when the indefatigable Chinese had rebuilt the place. I was much relieved because my claim on Chialing House was soon to expire: there were dozens of people on their waiting list. One day there was a real humdinger of a raid. When it was over I looked at my watch and discovered that I would still have time to keep a date I had made with Mme. Chiang at her house, if I hurried. I duly hurried, along the road from Chialing House, noting with interest as I passed the Press Hostel that a whole lot of the front structure of the place was now down in the road, mingled with blocks of stone from the built-up bluff next door. Just as I started to cross a particularly muddy street, in a spot I knew well, the Generalissimo came along in his car going the other way. I turned around to look at him as he sped past, and at the same time I went on walking across the street with vague intent to dive through a shallow mud puddle which I had navigated only that morning in safety.

Alas! Since I had crossed that street a bomb had fallen on the same place and the puddle which had been shallow was now a deep crater. I couldn't have known. It still looked the same from the top. I walked bang into it. The passers-by were much edified.

No Chungking pig could have been filthier or thicker with muck than was I when I climbed out of that hole. What was more serious was that I had skinned my knee badly. There was no time to go back. I had to finish my journey and present myself to Mme. Chiang all dripping and stinking as I was. I did it too. Madame didn't care very much, for she was having her own troubles that afternoon. The Japs had got the range of her house at last and knocked a piece off the corner, and her husband had given orders to move outright to their country house across the river. Everything was in a confusion of packing. I had my interview, washed my knee, and went back to Chungking Hostel just to see what was up. It was on the way home, anyway. As I had expected, nothing was left at all, this time. The hostel was gone.

There was Ed Pawley, with the office car, loading it up with his handsome luggage and the now sodden V-spring mattresses. Helping him was the APC assistant to Gammell, a cheerful young giant named Gidley Baird, famous in European circles for his size and in Chinese circles for his habit of taking on a chair coolie's job whenever he felt facetious. Gidley was an enthusiastic bridge player and an old acquaintance of mine from the Pawley parties. Both men set up a cheerful shout when they saw me.

“Get your traps,” said Gidley, “you're going home with us.”

“Just the girl we want,” said Ed. “I promised Ida I'd bring you.”

“What is this?”

“We think you had better come on over to the South Bank,” they explained. “This bombing is going to get worse and worse, and you'd better beat it while the beating's good. You'll be very happy at the APC House.”

It was a wonderful invitation. There were people who were rushing around offering their eyeteeth for a similar chance, but nobody wanted eyeteeth. They wanted houses.

“Why?” I asked suspiciously. “You don't love me that much, surely?”‘

They side-stepped the question, telling me to hurry up and get ready. It took a little more work to discover their reasons for such a sudden burst of hospitality, but I dug it out of them at last. They wanted me purely and simply to help push out another guest who was quartered on them and who was unwelcome. To get rid of that person they told him that I had arranged before his arrival to come over and live in the last available APC room. “And so,” said Ed, “you've got to do it, to back us up. Besides, we'll be awfully glad to have you, of course.”

“But I can't come over here every day to my job and go back every night,” I objected. “What with the ferry and everything it takes two hours each way.”

“Quit your job,” said Ed.

“I did,” I admitted. “I've only three days to go. …”

“Well, then! And Ida needs another woman in the house.”

“Your Madame's moving to the other side,” urged Gidley. “I heard about that today from the bank.”

“Yes, that's true. … Well, okay, and thanks a lot.”

“You can come over and go back with me for the three days,” Ed assured me. “I've got a private boat.”

“You would!”

“No sense being niggardly,” said Ed. It was a saying he often used, and an attitude which was extremely irritating to people more inclined to be economical. Ed never knew how peeved he made Englishmen with that habit he had of paying high for what he wanted. But then lots of Englishmen peeved Ed too. Terribly.

Joyfully I hurried back to Chialing House, a place I hadn't learned to love, and gathered up my belongings. They weren't much of a bother already. I had lost about half of what I brought to Chungking. I still wonder what coolie picked up my opal brooch from the hostel rubble, but it served me right for having left it out in an air raid. We drove the car over to one of the ferry stops and started down to the river. It seemed a long time since I had first climbed that cliff so as not to be cruel to the chair coolies. Now I knew every step of the way. Parts of the path were chopped out of the rock and parts were built up of planks, zigzagging down across the face of the bluff; some of the stairs were protected by railings and some were really dangerous to navigate. Here and there we passed a temporary house built of wood, perched crazily on the steep slope. In spring, when the water was high, this house would be swept away. After the subsidence its owners would come back and build it all over again.

We walked past the public ferry, a crazy little river steamer already sagging with the weight of blue-clad country people on their way home for the night. Down on the muddy beach Ed's boat was waiting, a super-large rowboat with a specially picked crew. Now that the raid was over for the day most of the traffic was going in the other direction. Every bright morning nowadays a lot of the Chinese got up early and crossed the river and went out into the country, to squat there in the open until the planes had visited the town and gone away again. Now they were coming back to see if they still had houses.

The beach on the other side was equally crowded with chairs, with the picturesque addition of a line of tethered ponies for anyone who preferred riding a real beast of burden over the hills to his house. Chungking ponies are a special breed. They are small and bad-tempered like the little Mongol ponies we race and ride in Shanghai, but their lives on these hillsides, going up and down the stone staircases that have been constructed everywhere, have made them as sure-footed and deliberate as mules. Often when I was riding one I felt as if I were going down into the Grand Canyon.

We piled our luggage into a chair and climbed the hill on foot. It's a long, steep climb and it leads through the courtyard of the Chungking Club, where most people stop to rest and drink. Not that there was much there to drink, but sometimes the head boy managed to stock a few bottles of locally made “gin” or “vodka.”

From the moment I set foot on the South Bank I knew I was in a different atmosphere. I had left the new China and stepped back into the old. I was in the safety zone, the magic circle drawn by the once omnipotent Europeans. All this ground was leased by some foreign firm or other: all these big houses had been there from the old days, the days when gunboats traveled unhampered up and down the Yangtze, through the rapids, from Shanghai to Chungking and back again. And even I, nowadays, was an old China hand and could think back to the dull peaceful times when all the foreign population turned out to greet the boys from the boat as they traveled, bringing news from downriver, having drinks at the club, going to parties at the BAT House and the APC House and all the other houses.

Gammell was charmingly hospitable. I had a real bath in a real bathtub, and changed my dress, and bandaged my knee, and came down for dinner. We sat in cushioned chairs and drank cocktails, waiting for dinner to be announced. It grew dark and over on the other side a few lights blinked and wavered from oil lamps, for the power station had been damaged and the electricity had gone off. Here, with our own dynamo, we had our electric light. We were still privileged foreigners, living in a safety zone.

I sipped my gimlet and looked over at new China, waiting there in the night to be bombed again, a hopeless, battered mass of darker shadows in the dark. Here I sat on a screened veranda, clean and comfortable and waiting for dinner, two miles off. I was out of it. How much longer would I be safe? I looked around at my hosts. They were laughing and talking together, and they didn't look at all worried. They looked like people who had been sitting on that veranda for years. But we knew it would not be much longer.

Chapter 27

Still with me, ghost? Then for another hour

We'll stand beneath the sky, the iron shower.

One puff of smoke follows the insect flight,

One latest crash comes echoing from high —

The Germans took another town last night.

The Germans stand again on Flanders mud,

And I am sick, captive and sick, and I

Am powerless to choose my place to die.

I wander through the streets: torn bodies lie

Sprawling: the gutters run with alien blood.

O ghost, stay with me yet awhile; I must

Suffer before I join this Chinese dust:

Once more with face uplifted to the sky

Must call for bombs and fire to cool my blood.

I scared Morgan Crofton to death by starting to write poetry in Chungking. He was a proper, upper-class Englishman and he knew it was not the thing to do, but I couldn't help it; the insecurity of life had joggled me up and I was back in the adolescent phase of bewilderment and lightning changes of mood that with me always results in poetry. It was the first poem I had written in years and it weighed heavy on me. I wanted to get rid of it. I typed it out and sent it to Max Oxford in Hong Kong, because he was interested in air raids, as an RAF officer.

Max showed it to Charles Boxer, who began to worry gravely about my state of mind. He thought it sounded as if I were cracking under the strain, which in his guilty frame of mind (because he felt like a slacker) he imagined to be terrific for all of us. He sent a message, through Max, that a trip was being scheduled for both of them and that they might be descending upon the British embassy any time now. I was delighted with the news, and promptly went into a reverie wherein I showed Chungking to the two men as it ought to be shown, and not as the embassy would do it, with luncheon at all the embassies and legations in turn, and expensive drinks at the club or the consuls' mess. I would take them for walks, I resolved. I would round up the few moth-eaten ponies available and take them out along the road to the secret mint in the valley beyond the Second Range. Perhaps we might even get a car to go to the temple at the hot springs, and smell the pine forest there. All of these visions left out the air raids and the probable fact that the young men would be coming on official business, without leisure for such jaunts. Besides, there was a peculiarity about my reverie. Max as an unmarried man should have been the central figure of these dreams, but he wasn't. I kept wondering what Charles would have to say about Chungking. For a woman my age I was certainly going through a phase remarkably like adolescence.