Читать книгу A Tall History of Sugar - Curdella Forbes - Страница 21

ii

The narrative of Flight Lieutenant George Horatio Hannibal St. Aloysius Christie, being the father of the princess Arrienne, in which he was captured by the Japanese when his plane crash-landed at a place called Changi, near the sea at Singapore.

There, in Changi, George was tortured and starved until he and two comrades, both white men, doctors, were able to escape by bribing one of the Japanese guards with fake pills to cure gonorrhea, but the pills were only aspirin rolled in rice paste. At some point in their long trek through the countryside he got separated from his comrades, whom he never saw or heard from again. A woman of the villages took him in and hid him for three hundred days, during which she fed and nursed him back to health. And to pass the time in the long, dark winter evenings alone on a moor where the house they lived in was the only one for miles around, in a place of perpetual twilight where the sky, grass, earth, and stones were shades of Prussian blue, she taught him this martial art, tae kwon do, which Tumela people had never heard of, so they called it karate, one of the martial arts names they were familiar with from Hollywood films shown on reel-to-reel discs in the district piazzas on celebration nights—Independence Eve, Christmas Eve, or any day the traveling cinema passed through.

This woman, according to George's story, had been taught this form of self-defense by her father, a widower from Korea. He had taught her this in a country where it was forbidden to teach women such things, but he was afraid that one day when he was not there soldiers would break in, and this was the only way she could defend herself. One day the woman's father mysteriously disappeared from their village, leaving her alone to fend for herself. It was thought that the soldiers took him. This tae kwon do that George learned from the woman who had been taught by her father was what he began teaching his daughter from the time she was three years old.

Arrienne's father also told another story of how he was rescued, almost by accident, when the woman—he called her Chanioon—went into the village to buy supplies and heard that the war was over. She saw prisoners of war being evacuated, and came and told him. She was crying bitterly, because she did not want him to leave, but he kissed and calmed her by promising to return, though he knew he would not.

When he got to the village he found everything as she had said. He gave himself up to the British officers who had come to release the POWs and take them to England, where, he said, he could have stayed, but he was not treated all that much better there than he had been treated in Japan, only in England it was because of his color, not his enemy status, that he was not treated well, and this was something he could not wrap his mind around, after he had fought for the mother country in the war and been taken prisoner in her service, so he chose to come home, but only after he had stayed enough years in London to accumulate a tidy enough sum of money to take more disgrace out of his eye than his mere war medals could. To return home without money was self-incriminating—it proved beyond a shadow of doubt that you had not really been to the war but had hidden out somewhere for the whole duration and come back trying to lampse people you hoped were naive enough to believe that you had fought and won medals.

The story in the district was that George's veteran's pension was sent to him on a regular basis, and it was this that kept the Christies a cut above their neighbors, who did much of their buying and selling by barter, for in those days, the 1940s (which was when George came home, not when his princess daughter was born—that came much later), money was a scarce-scarce commodity among the rural folk. The Christies were only the least poor among the poor, but they were considered rich because of this so-called pension, which came in pounds, not shillings or pence, and the family was happy to keep up the image and to make sure that no illegitimate (person of wrongful paternity, jacket-child) was able to slip crabways into their ranks.

In truth, the much-vaunted pension promised by the British War Office was a pipe dream for George as it was for the majority of his black comrades. Most of them who survived were given twenty-eight pounds for the voyage home. If they opted to stay in England, as George did for a while, they didn't receive anything except bus fare, and not even that if they could foot it to their destination. But George's skills acquired in the Air Force and his demobilization rank as a flight pilot opened postwar job opportunities for him in the great project of rebuilding the cities of the mother country that even then was devolving into Little England for its sins—though England did not know it, Rachel said, predicting how England would become a small island in a book of that name—and then of course it became Little London after the Brexit vote.

The pay he got was fairly decent, though it was less than two-thirds of the earnings of a white engineer with the same qualifications and workload. Careful husbandry and shrewd investment earned him enough to retire in four years and, once back in Jamaica, purchase cane-land and tractors, as well as a fleet of market trucks (two at the outset, but he soon acquired more) in which he or his foreman transported market women on Fridays and Saturdays for a satisfactory fee.

This was all the "pension" he ever had, but George could not convince the district otherwise, even if he had tried, which he didn't. The mother country stood by its own; this was what Tumela people learned in school; it was written in the books, and since the books never lied, George was getting an RAF pension and was quite filthily rich, but blasted mean.