The Heat of the Sun

nice Pacific cruise. Well, I hardly need tell you what happened next.
    ‘I’d be lying if I said Pearl Harbor took us by surprise. Oh, I’ve heard how they painted it over here – bolt from the blue et cetera – but if you’d had your
ear to the ground in East Asia, you wouldn’t see it that way. Things had turned sour between us and the Japs. Hardly a surprise. Let the white man storm about the world all he likes, throwing
his weight around with the natives; that’s in the natural order. Let the yellow man do the same, and the white man gets on his high horse. Ultimatums flew back and forth: the Japs must do
this, the Japs must do that. Here’s Roosevelt cutting off exports; meanwhile, here’s the Japs, desperate to expand their new empire. How could they keep the show on the road without
oil, minerals, rice fields? And how could they seize what they wanted with the American fleet so close? “Told you so,” said Wainwright, when we heard news of the attack. But we were
amazed at how quickly the Japs moved after that.
    ‘It was only a day – one day! – after Pearl Harbor when they swept into Hong Kong. Thank God one of Wainwright’s club cronies got his lordship and his loyal factotum
– that’s me – on a ship bound for Singapore. Surely we’d be safe there, back in the arms of the British? Well, maybe for a month or two. I got some of my best pictures
during the fall of Singapore, but Christ knows what happened to them; I think they ended up at the bottom of the sea, coiled inside a Leica of which, alas, I had grown inordinately fond.
    ‘We made it to Manila. In the Philippines, we thought, we’d be on American soil. Hah! Even before we docked, we could see the fires raging. Desperate days followed. We fell in with a
party of GIs, hiding out in foxholes on the outskirts of the city. Wainwright and I had stolen uniforms from a couple of dead soldiers – he was a colonel, I was a corporal. If we were
captured, he reasoned, we would be POWs and at least have some rights.
    ‘I’m not sure the GIs agreed. To be taken prisoner by the Japs, they said, was a fate worse than death. I didn’t need convincing. The GIs said that General MacArthur had
evacuated to Australia, and when a chance came for us to do the same, we seized it. A Chinese captain said he’d take us all to Darwin, if only we gave him everything we owned and then some.
Wainwright grumbled, but his ill-gotten gains from Hong Kong came in useful now.
    ‘We set out, deep in the night, from a shabby fishing village on the Luzon coast. We were jubilant. Rumour had reached us of a big battle somewhere out in the ocean – the Midway, it
must have been – where at last we’d got the Japs on the run.
    ‘So the tide had turned: but not for us. The Chinese captain made us keep belowdecks. I lost count of how many days we spent in that stinking hold, ten or twelve men squashed in like
sardines, with nothing to eat but weevily biscuits and the occasional smoked fish. I’d look at sunlight seeping through cracks in the deck above and feel like the Count of Monte Cristo.
    ‘I was worried for Wainwright. For more than twenty years, ever since the Somme, he’d not gone a day without a drink – hell, he’d not gone a waking hour. Keeping him
quiet was the hardest thing. He’d cry out in his sleep as if the devils were chasing him, and then the Chinese captain was upon us, threatening to chuck poor Wainwright overboard if we
didn’t shut him up. “Just let me take him on deck, let me get him some air,” I pleaded, but that slitty-eyed bastard was immovable.
    ‘I cursed him, but not as much as I did when we docked. Down he came, beating a baton against the hull, telling us to get up, get up, and go ashore; and though I thought I’d lost
track of time, I was surprised – Darwin, already? Had we been at sea so long?
    ‘When I staggered up to the deck, the light was so bright I was blinded; besides, I was doing my best to hold up Wainwright. But the GIs cried out, horror-struck. Then there were bayonets
all around us, the Chinese captain threw back his head and laughed, and, as the glare faded, I saw the familiar harbour with its junks and sampans, saw the coolies and rickshaws on the quay and the
Jap guards who surrounded us.
    ‘Next thing I knew, our hands were bound and all of us, tied together, had to march ashore. The last I saw of that Chinese captain, he was licking his index finger, ready to count the wad
of