The men as usual sat attentive, making their notes on the only paper we possessed – the lavatory paper with which the Japanese daily supplied us with a strange generosity, so unlike their meanness in other and far more vital issues. This paper was so precious that it was never used for the purpose for which it was intended, but reserved for such important uses as, for instance, the writing of our own text-books (which we had to do, having no libraries) and making note-books for the thousands of men who were re-educating themselves through these classes.
On this particular day my Japanese class was an oddly happy occasion because, apart from a conventional study of Japanese grammar and syntax, it ended with a general discussion of Japanese literature and in particular of an aspect of it which had many happy associations for me. It was an account of the sustained rivalry between Murasaki-San, the lady of the Imperial Court who wrote the great Tale of Genji – the Genji-Momotari – and Shei Shonogun, the author of the witty and malicious Pillow Book.
Both of them were brilliantly translated by Arthur Waley, whom I had known as a boy in London and who had been responsible for introducing me to the world of Bloomsbury when it was in full and strange flower, as rarefied almost as Shei-Shonogun’s world had been. I told them about the unreal, delicately over-aesthetic life the ladies and their lovers led in Kyoto, the exquisite parties they gave in some lacquered pavilion in one of the thousand and one gardens of the beautiful old capital of Japan, which contained, each in its own unique fashion, as in a jewelled miniature, all that the Japanese thought was of beauty and proportion in the wider world.
I told them above all of the paradox implicit in the behaviour of these inspired ladies and their elegantly effete friends who could make one of the highest priorities of their spirit just watching the moon rise and throw its own yellow Chinese script on the precious little streams which always figured at the centre of these secluded scenes. The ruthlessness of all aesthetes has always impressed me more than their sensitivity and these hyper-sensitive lovers of selective arts were no exception. They sat in these still, microcosmic gardens, the moonlight a kimono of silk about them, impervious and unheeding of the grim realities of the civil wars of their day, not only making appreciation of the sort of special beauty in which they were taking delight impossible, but also creating an ugly waste in the physical scene as well as in the mind of the larger world without. It was most strange how even in this class the moon had insisted on intruding.
But one of the strangest events of the day came after the class, as I was walking back to my own part of the camp. I had to pass near the Japanese lieutenant’s office and the window which Donaldson had so expertly forced some three nights before. As I did so I was startled suddenly to hear the gramophone record which was being broadcast on the camp radio. It shook my senses almost as the moment which shook T. S. Eliot’s memory, as he put it in one of his greatest poems, ‘Like a madman shakes a dead geranium’.
To this day I believe that if Hollywood were to make a film of our imprisonment under the Japanese and were to include this moment and this record in it, it would be condemned universally for what old-fashioned critics used to call ‘laying it on with a trowel’. The gramophone was playing a record of Yvonne Printemps singing ‘I’ll follow my secret heart’. I had heard other tunes on the Japanese camp radio broadcast from time to time, full of personal associations for me, but none quite so evocative as this nor so relevant and pertinent a comment on my own life in camp. The pertinence was obvious, only the evocation needs explanation. Briefly it was of London in the ’thirties and in particular of the occasion when I took a great friend of mine, Lilian Bowes-Lyon the poet, to the first night of a musical play by Noël Coward called Conversation Piece, to see and hear Yvonne Printemps herself in the lead, singing this very song.
Finally, at the end of this longest of long days there was a magnificent sunset of the kind I had always as a boy in Africa described to myself as a twilight-of-the-Gods prelude. The nightly fall of rain somehow had been retarded and towards the west there was a deep valley of the bluest skies between two Himalayan ranges of thunder cloud, heavy and solemn with snow on their remote summits, turning yellow in the last light of evening, and both the ranges resounding with thunder as with reverberations of high mountain avalanches. At the western end of this valley in the sky, I followed the sun on its way down beyond the great mountain of Malabar. In my memory I saw it vividly retracing the route which I had been forced to follow into imprisonment – a route marked at all its critical phases for me by milestones of mountains, like the Goenoeng and Rajah Gedeh which stood over the Soekaboemi (the desired earth) where I had been thrown into my first ‘regular’ prison with Nichols and his men; then on over the jungles of Bantam to another mountain, Djaja-Sempoer (the mountain of the arrow) which rose high over Lebaksembada (the valley that was well made), where I had my headquarters and below which I had walked into a Japanese trap; and finally on to Java Head and the Sunda Strait, out of whose coral waters rose the volcano of Krakatau.
I thought of all the times I had watched from the tip of the mountain-of-the-arrow, assailed by an immense feeling of doom, the great volcano’s shattered rim wrapped in red-ragged sunsets and the dying light of day outlined beyond like a shadow of foreboding in a magic mirror of scarlet water, the tangled world of the vast island of Sumatra where I had begun my war in South-East Asia. The feeling of doom was all the more disturbing then because it was not personal so much as cosmic almost, for I remembered clearly how the end of the day then was always in my mind the end forever of an age of Empire, and the night that came down swift as a bat, the fall of shadow implicit between end and re-beginning in the brief and brittle life of man.
It was odd, even to me, in spite of my own profound preoccupations, how that sunset evening seemed bent on a visual summing-up of my own journey towards and through imprisonment, almost as if it were some kind of end-of-term report. It was then that I saw in a crimson foot-print of the sun a Bethlehem-bright star and the hair at the back of my shaven head suddenly went all a-tingle.
The hours that followed were even longer because, as the moment of lights-out approached that would give us darkness and quiet in which to try out the radio, my anxiety as to whether it would work grew with an almost unbearable intensity. In our overcrowded conditions, I could not take part in the listening operation myself, as I longed to do. Only one man at a time could do it and on this occasion in particular only an expert like the New Zealand officer who had made the radio could be that person.
I could picture him lying under his mosquito net with his ears pressed to the wooden clogs because at the best of times the sound which came out was as faint and difficult to follow as the sounds of radio I had first heard on a crystal set, as a boy in Africa some thirty years before. I could not possibly attempt to double-up with him under the net without giving the show away. I just had to compose myself as well as I could in the darkness under my net. I did not even have a watch with me to tell me what the time was or for that matter that time had not stopped altogether as it felt to me.
I kept on wondering not only whether the set was working at all, but also, if it were working, which of the three stations we had contacted in the past was coming through. The listening officer had made three tiny coils which he slipped somewhere into his set to enable him to have a choice of three stations: if I remember rightly, Delhi in India, Perth in Australia, and San Francisco in America. On a good night, owing to the time differences of stations so far apart, we had managed in the past to get all three, but on this night I knew I would be profoundly grateful if he got only one.