When they were through asking questions, they made Smalldane sign the form. Then they handed me the pen, but Smalldane took it away from me, shook his head sadly at the Japanese officers, and tapped his forehead in the universal gesture that means not quite bright. The Japanese nodded, almost in sympathy, I thought, and let Smalldane sign the form for me. They did, however, insist on fingerprinting us both.
We were turned over to a couple of Japanese guards who escorted us through a door that led to the ground floor of the former Bridge House Apartments. The ground floor was designed originally to house small shops, but it had been converted into cells whose thick doors were bolted with chains and locks and bars. The guards directed us to a Japanese sergeant who seemed to be the chief jailer. He sat behind a plain wooden desk. On the wall back of him were lists of what I guessed were names, written in Chinese and several other languages, or so Smalldane later told me.
“By God,” he said to me, “they’ve had it planned for months. All that time I spent digging and nobody even had a smell of this place.” He was, forever, the reporter. The jailer told him to shut up.
It was cold and the light was dim in Bridge House. The jailer looked at us carefully and then selected some keys from a bunch that must have weighed six pounds. He motioned for the guards to follow him and they prodded us down the hall to one of the cells. The jailer twisted keys in the two locks, slid back the bolt, undid some chains, and motioned us in. Then he clanged the door behind us. We weren’t alone. There were almost three-dozen other persons in the cell, which was eighteen feet long and twelve feet wide. Smalldane grabbed my hand and we managed to find a place near enough to a wall so that we could lean against it.
I counted the persons in the room. There were thirty-three of them, including eleven women. It was a cosmopolitan bunch: English, Americans, Chinese, one Korean, four Canadians, and a redheaded man who claimed to be a Mexican national, but remembering Tante Katerine’s admonition, I didn’t believe him. The Japanese didn’t either.
“Will somebody please tell me just what the hell happened at Pearl Harbor?” Smalldane said.
They told him, those who’d listened to the radio that morning of December 8, 1941, in Shanghai. It was December 7 at Pearl Harbor because of the international dateline. Others had heard that the Japanese had landed on the east coast of Malaya, which both depressed and elated Smalldane. “By God,” he said, “if I’d just filed last week I’d’ve had fifteen job offers today and I could’ve named the price.”
“Would it not present a formidable problem to report a war from the inside of a jail?” I said in my most logical French.
“Why don’t you take a nap?” Smalldane said. “A long one.”
The meals came twice a day, shoved through a twelve-inch aperture in the cell door. The first meal was a bowl of rice which contained the heads of three dried herrings. It was warm. The second meal was the same, except that it was cold. There was no third meal. Having been reared on much superior fare, I refused to eat the first day. Smalldane shrugged, reached for my bowl, and polished it off, fish heads and all. On the second day and thereafter I ate everything edible and some that was not.
The Japanese started coming for Smalldane after we had been in Bridge House a week. They led him away and when he came back, he came with bruises, and once with a black eye, and once with a tooth missing. A lower one on the left side.
“They think I’m the goddamned Scarlet Pimpernel of Shanghai,” he told me and when I said I didn’t know who the Scarlet Pimpernel was, he spent the next three or four days reciting the tale and improving on its dialogue. The other prisoners listened intently. They had nothing else to do.
Bridge House prison had either fifteen or sixteen cells which were solid, windowless walls on three sides. At the front of the cell large wooden bars, about six inches in diameter, were set a couple of inches apart. The door was wood, at least four inches thick, and there was a great deal of clanging and banging of chains and bars whenever it was opened. The sound haunted me for years.
A wooden box in the corner served as a toilet. Whenever the women used it, the men turned their backs or looked the other way. It was emptied by the Chinese prisoners at night. They often argued for the privilege since it at least got them out of the cell.
Because the Hongkew section of Shanghai had been under Japanese military control since 1937, they had had no trouble in keeping Bridge House prison a secret. Before Pearl Harbor, I learned that it had been used to jail those Chinese who disappeared suddenly from either the French Concession or the International Settlement. Two of the Chinese in our cell told Smalldane that they had been there so long that they had forgotten what they were originally charged with.
Smalldane was the only foreigner that I ever knew the Japanese to beat, although the guards smacked the Chinese around regularly, often with one-by-four-inch planks that they liked to break over Chinese heads. Any Chinese head. It seemed to be a favorite form of exercise. We were treated casually enough for the first month, except for Smalldane, and then the word apparently came down and the Japanese got tough. There was absolutely no heat in the Bridge House cells and our only warmth came from huddling close together under thin, lice-infested blankets. Smalldane taught me how to kill lice by cracking them between my fingernails. You couldn’t just mash them to death. The Japanese guards laughed about the lice. When they weren’t laughing about that, they cackled over a Chinese prisoner whose right leg one of them had jabbed with a bayonet. The wound developed gangrene and the Chinese moaned and screamed a lot before he died.
The new crackdown ruled that prisoners couldn’t talk to each other, something that the Japanese didn’t enforce too stringently except when they had nothing better to do. But because more prisoners were daily being jammed into the cells, they forced us to sit in rows. That made it easier for them to conduct their head count every four hours. We sat, our knees drawn up to our chests, our heads bowed, facing in the general direction of Tokyo and, I suppose, Hirohito. As punishment, they made us sit Japanese fashion, which didn’t bother me too much, but which played hell with the circulation of the older prisoners. After six or seven hours of it, some couldn’t walk for days.
They searched each prisoner every two days or so. All but me. For some reason the guards didn’t think that a child would conceal anything. It wasn’t until we’d been in jail for a month that I told Smalldane about the money belt.
“You have what?” he said, and he must have said it in an incredulous whisper although I no longer remember.
“My money belt.”
“How much?” he said.
“What’s the British pound worth now?” said the rotten little money changer.
“Damn it, I don’t know, make it five dollars a pound.”
“Then I have twelve hundred and seventy-five dollars U.S.”
“Jesus,” Smalldane muttered and then slumped into a halfway comfortable position so that he could think about what use to make of the windfall.
On Christmas, 1941, Tante Katerine sent us a basket of food containing three roast chickens, cigarettes, brandy, tinned goods, including a plum pudding that she had scrounged somewhere, candy, nuts, and about four-dozen dainty sandwiches filled with pâté de foie gras. One of the Japanese guards pounded on the small opening of the cell door and yelled for the Smardane. When the Smardane made his way to the door, the guard displayed each item in the basket. Then he ripped off a chicken leg and chewed it noisily. Next he tried some of the candy. He liked that, too. Finally, he bit into one of the sandwiches, didn’t like the pâté, and spat it out. “Here,” he said and shoved the sandwiches at Smalldane, who brought them back to our row.