The Dangerous Years (19 page)

‘Foo-foo barge,’ Fanshawe explained. ‘Contains what’s delicately known to the British as night soil. It’s a pong you’ll come across all over China.’

He leaned on the rail and squinted at the city of Shanghai, an odd mixture of East and West with its electric signs, brash advertisements and big square hotels. There seemed to be more cars even than in London and trams groaning round every corner, dragging trailers packed with coolies, vegetables and live poultry.

‘The government in Canton,’ he went on, ‘was run until his death by a left-wing intellectual called Sun Yat-Sen, but another chap called Chiang K’Ai-Shek’s beginning to gather all the bits together now and starting to move north. He’s expected here any day.’

As the ship edged alongside next morning, blue-clad coolies swarmed over the bund and across the junks that covered the water in a heaving carpet. The din was appalling, with the honking of horns overlaid by the perpetual high-pitched yelling of the Chinese labourers and street traders. Even the coolies unloading sacks of rice from a river steamer, the bony fans of their ribs showing as they worked, sang all the time as they trotted up and down the gangways, a rising and falling song of two notes that added to the racket which came from the waterfront.

‘Don’t let it panic you,’ Fanshawe advised. ‘We’re well established here and there’s plenty of fun. Girls come out from home on every ship that arrives, to stay with relatives and find a husband. And if they don’t please, you have what’s ashore to choose from : Chinese, French and American, and Russian princesses by the dozen who came down from Vladivostock to escape the revolution.’

They moved through the crowded lounge packed with porters holding baggage, the stiff farewells of the old China hands, and the multitude of chirruping Chinese clerks and shore workers who had swarmed over the ship. The din was deafening and they had to shout to make themselves heard.

‘You’ll get used to it in time,’ Fanshawe said. ‘It’s not real, of course. Everywhere else in the world, the British male served through the war. Out here, they just enjoyed it and did their bit by making fortunes and building bloody great places for themselves in the Bubbling Well Road. To them, all Chinese are idle, thriftless, filthy and full of squeeze, and the Country Club’s like a Bournemouth hydro on a wet Sunday afternoon.’

Shanghai’s importance lay in the two foreign enclaves, the International Settlement and the French Concession, and towering buildings lifted above streets where human beings swarmed like ants, mere beasts of burden weighed down with poverty, the contrast as sharp as that between the British and American warships in the river and the swarming Chinese junks and sampans. At that moment, however, Western arrogance was tempered a little by apprehension, because of the approach of the Cantonese armies, and the extremities of the Anglo-American-French city were guarded by sailors and soldiers, and bayonets glinted above piled sandbags.

They took a taxi out to the Majestic Hotel, a luxurious establishment in the middle of vast green gardens along the Bubbling Well Road, a splendid empty palace of too much luxury.

‘Only alternative to the Astor House,’ Fanshawe explained. ‘That’s always full of newspaper correspondents and old China hands, all expounding their theory of “
Gott Strafe China
.” Besides, it’s quiet. Few too many servants and really far too expensive for ordinary sailormen, but it’s only for one night and you can’t hear the noise of the streets and what you might call the uproar of the hatred the Chinese have for us.’

That night Fanshawe showed Kelly round Shanghai. It was a Western city surrounded by an Eastern one, prosperity beset by the encroachment of poverty, a nervous city surrounded by hatred. It seemed to have nothing but its wealth and its fear of losing it, with most of its inhabitants waiting nervously behind the barricades, where slovenly Spanish sailors, who had nothing to do with the situation, helped to search the patient Chinese. In its apprehension and uncertainty, it seemed to exhibit human nature without dignity and entirely without compassion.

An assistant to the senior officer of the gunboat flotilla, Fanshawe lived aboard an old paddle boat moored opposite the Chinese town of Pootung. Near it lay two Insect class gunboats, odd-looking craft with low freeboards painted white with yellow funnels and covered almost entirely with awnings.

‘Carry two officers, six POs and leading seamen, and seventeen able seamen,’ Fanshawe explained as they made their way alongside by means of a sampan handled by a girl, whose crew consisted of a baby and a farmyard complement of chickens. ‘In addition there’s an official Chinese crew of five. But each one has his makee-learn and apprentices who keep the brightwork nice and tiddly and work simply for food and board. God knows how many there really are because they come out of the cracks like cockroaches at times. They all live in the tiller flat aft because there’s no accommodation allowance for them, yet they still think they’re well off. We maintain smartness, put down riots and try to avoid being drowned by the river or shot at by bandits, Communists or disbanded soldiery who have a nasty habit of removing beacons and buoys and waiting to loot the first ship that runs aground.’

‘What about the other nations?’

‘Don’t count the French. Never have, of course. The Americans are inclined to a devil-may-care attitude. As for us, we’re taut, with upper lips stiff as usual. Relations between us aren’t always as cordial as they might be, because the French never did like us and the American admiral’s an anglophobe.’

‘You’ve got a chap called Rumbelo in the flotilla, I believe.’

‘Petty officer?’

‘Yes.’

‘In
Spider
. At the moment she’s upriver near Kiang Yin. Know him?’

‘Very well. How’s he enjoying life?’

‘They all enjoy it. Not much to do except keep the paint blinding white and maintain the guns, which usually date back to 1898 and have never been seen outside a museum. The river’s always difficult, of course, but there are a thousand miles of marshy reaches with the best rough shooting in the world, together with the usual bawdy delights of the oldest profession, to which you might ally the wives of taipans, to whom anything fresh out from England is a godsend.’

Headquarters’ view of the situation seemed a little less ebullient than Fanshawe’s. Shanghai was surrounded by the cancerous growths of Chinese towns, all of which, with corruption and bribery rampant, were examples of how towns should not be run. The streets reeked at night with opium fumes and the pungent scents of singsong girls and Russian streetwalkers, and police officers automatically took their pistols off the safety catch when going on duty. Though it was the centre of all Christian missionary effort in the country, it was also the centre of slavery, piracy and drugs. Every kind of currency was available and the city’s constitution seemed to be founded on laissez-faire and little else.

There had been trouble in Wahnsien, followed by riots at Wuhan; and in an attempt to get it clear in his mind, Kelly took to sitting in his room in the evening with the army liaison officer and a glass of whisky, trying to find out all that was known of the situation. It was enough to confuse anybody.

‘It’s got to come soon,’ the army officer said. ‘The Chinese are beginning to realise that if it comes to the pinch we haven’t a chance, and we wouldn’t dare make a war of it, because world opinion’s too much against us.’

Tyrwhitt arrived soon afterwards and Kelly met him in Hong Kong. He’d been inclined towards retirement and wasn’t looking forward to his new job. He’d arrived at a bad time, too, because only three days before Kelly went on board SS
Moorea
to greet him a Chinese mob had attempted to enter the British Concession at Hankow and had only been kept out by a cordon of Marines and naval ratings. There had been no shooting but two days later, when the defence of the Settlement had been entrusted to Chinese troops, the mob had forced an entrance and most of the European women and children had had to be evacuated by river boat the same evening. The following day a similar crisis had occurred at Kiukiang, and though, in this case, the British women and children had already been cleared, the China Command was faced with the difficult task of trying both to follow up the British government’s new policy of conciliatory negotiation and to take the necessary steps to protect British lives and property – particularly in Shanghai, the focus of international trade and one of the world’s principal ports.

‘You’d better brief me,’ Tyrwhitt said, his heavy black eyebrows down as he glanced over his spectacles at the sheaf of signals with which Kelly had greeted him.

Kelly drew a deep breath. ‘As C-in-C, sir, you have the yacht,
Petersfield
, at your disposal and I suggest you transfer your family aboard as soon as possible. The destroyer
Despatch’
s standing by to take you to Shanghai.’

Tyrwhitt gestured angrily. ‘I don’t mean my own comforts, dammit! I mean the situation here.’

Kelly smiled. ‘It’s impossible to describe what it’s like, sir,’ he said. ‘Because it’s impossible to describe chaos. Trouble for us has been going on since 1923 on and off. The old China hands seemed to do nothing but hoot their rage and disgust, but since many of them have been here all their lives and can’t imagine being anywhere else, their attitude’s less patriotic than selfish. They’re expecting you to put things right.’

‘Go on,’ Tyrwhitt said bleakly.

‘There’s a ghost of a government in Peking clanking its chains,’ Kelly went on. ‘But no one takes any notice because another government in Canton passes bills and makes laws without reference to them. The only real source of money to either government’s the Customs, which is run by the British, and the only stable thing seems to be the Chinese peasant who goes on working his plot of soil, raising his family, celebrating his festivals and trying to avoid starvation.’

Tyrwhitt pulled a face.

‘The Yangtze’s navigable,’ Kelly continued. ‘As far as Hankow for ocean-going ships – including destroyers – during the summer months when it’s swollen by rainfall and the melting of the snow in Tibet, and for smaller craft at all times.’ He handed over lists of gunboats, destroyers and cruisers. ‘In addition to those, there’s an aircraft carrier, twelve submarines and auxiliary vessels. The cruisers are due to be reinforced, three here at Hong Kong and five at Shanghai. The International Settlement has a police force and a volunteer corps, which is equipped with armoured cars, artillery and machine guns, but it’s far too small for the situation now confronting it. This, sir, is rather an oversimplification but it puts the picture in a nutshell.’

‘Well, I’ve been primed by all the various departmental views of China already,’ Tyrwhitt growled. ‘Foreign Office. Admiralty. War Office. The lot. But I find it damned difficult to put them all in one bag. My brain’s like a badly mixed pudding. It seems to me that what we want is not more ships but more men.’

‘I think that sums it up exactly, sir.’

‘Perhaps even a movable force of Marines.’ Tyrwhitt’s heavy eyebrows jerked. ‘I’ll transfer my family to the commander-in-chief’s yacht and go to Shanghai. What’s the situation there at the moment?’

‘The Nationalists – that’s the southern government’s forces – are now advancing towards it, sir. Their policy’s “Out with the foreigners” and they’ve sworn to take the concessions back, so that European fugitives are pouring into Shanghai from the upper Yangtze.’

Tyrwhitt sighed. ‘I wish I knew what I was in for, my boy. Thank God you’ve been doing your homework.’

‘Thank you, sir. The trouble in the Yangtze gorges at Wahnsien started when a Butterfield and Swire ship was boarded by armed soldiers. There was a bit of toing and froing and Rear Admiral, Yangtze, commandeered a Jardine Mathieson ship to take up a naval party under the command of a Commander Darley. Unfortunately, Darley wasn’t experienced on the river and the affair ended up as rather a shambles. Three officers and four ratings were killed, the naval party had to retire and the Chinese ran riot through the place when they’d gone.’

‘Good God!’

‘That’s Hankow, sir. A mob attacked the settlement, but Marine and naval parties were put ashore to help the local volunteer force. They were obliged to fire into the crowd. The crowd ran away.’

‘I’m surprised
our
chaps didn’t run away. What about Hankow now?’

‘Cantonese army soldiers broke into the Hankow Race Club and picked all the flowers.’

‘They did
what
?’

Kelly grinned. ‘In any other country it would have been ridiculous but, in fact, it was a calculated defiance of the British, who regard it as their personal property. Marines were landed, barbed wire was erected and the crowd tried to rush it. Stones were thrown and a sailor was wounded and a rifle lost. Order was restored by the local police and the Chinese army. There was another riot the following day, started by students, but heavy rain damped their ardour a bit. Marines were landed again but three were wounded by missiles. It was like the Boxer Rising all over again.’

Tyrwhitt’s eyes became bleak and Kelly hurried to reassure him. ‘It’s all right at the moment, sir,’ he said. ‘The students are busy with exams just now. But these riots are becoming different and I gather there’s more trouble today at Kiukiang and they’re expecting to have to abandon the concession.’

Tyrwhitt’s great eyebrows worked again and Kelly found himself being studied beneath the corner of one of them. ‘You been upriver yet, boy?’ Tyrwhitt asked.

‘No, sir. I’ve hardly had the time.’

Tyrwhitt grunted. ‘Then you’d better pack a bag,’ he said, ‘because that’s the first thing we’re going to do.’

By the time they reached Shanghai, things had changed again. There seemed nothing now that could stop the advance of the Cantonese army, and the volunteer force in the city was clearly inadequate for its defence without reinforcement. The first thing Tyrwhitt did on arrival was to request a fully-equipped division at once before the Cantonese forces arrived.