Chappy the Legend

By Oriwia Star

I bundled my daughter off to Wellington where she would stay with her Aunt Ti and do her studies. I muttered my unhappiness to Mother Dorothea, who, witnessing the crashing of saucepans, thought she’d better stay a while with me. My marriage was over, thumping down dough, slapping pastry, my daughter was stupid, salting and peppering mince for making pies.

‘You’re no good here,’ Dorothea said. ‘Go to Auckland and see your sister.’

‘Sister.’ Thump and bang.

‘All that temper mixing in your buns and pies. Customers’ll get the stomach ache.’

‘Stomach ache.’ Knuckle knuckle.

‘How long since you saw Moana-Rose?’

‘Moana-Rose.’ Sigh.

‘I enjoy running the bakery for you.’

‘Ten years.’

On my way to Auckland by train I thought about Chappy’s journey along this same route in 1941, nearly twenty years earlier. After many hours, when the train stopped at the station where Chappy had left the guard’s van and cycled away, I wanted to get off and somehow find him. I put that thought out of my mind as Moana-Rose was expecting me in Auckland, but decided I would return within the next few days. Chappy had not only arrived in this place, but had later been hospitalised and apprehended there, before being taken under guard on a return journey. What could the town tell me?

As the train moved out into the countryside, spread out on either side of the railway line and stretched to the horizon were the market gardens, an enormous patchwork of tilled soil, cabbages and carrots, but at this time of the year it was mostly acres of onions, already harvested, laid out to harden before packing. These were places where my husband had found work, the kind of work not unfamiliar to him. The scattered homesteads were places where he’d been given food or had dogs sooled on to him.

Three days later my sister and I arrived back at that same station. Though I had no plan, I’d brought a notebook and pencil with me. There was a sky of hectic blue, like medicine bottles, as we headed towards the main shopping area.

To do what?

I was dressed in a wool suit – charcoal grey, with a lighter grey hat and gloves – and black shoes with small heels. My sister had on a cream suit, also wool, the jacket trimmed with brown piping. It was the outfit she’d worn to my wedding, but now without hat and gloves. She’d had nothing new since my wedding day from what I could tell. She never went out anywhere as far as I knew.

My brother-in-law, now a watersider in Auckland, provided well for his family. They had a good house to live in and the cupboards were always full. What I didn’t like about Benjamin was that he kept my sister poor. The older children were away working and only the youngest was at home. Times were different now, I thought. Moana-Rose could have work of her own, modern conveniences for the house. New clothes. I noticed that her husband had several pairs of shoes and a good gabardine coat. And why were they living in Auckland? He could just as easily have been a wharfie in Wellington. I had this idea that he wanted to keep my sister away from us.

What I was starting out to say before I sidetracked on to my brother-in-law was that though summer was coming to an end and birds were already clubbing together above the fields, it was a warm day and a dusty trudge from the railway station to the shopping centre. It was a relief to arrive on to the concrete slab footpaths under the verandahs of Farmers Trading, Haberdashery and Wool, Glass and China, Newsagents, Furniture, Tobacconist, Butcher, Fishmonger, Department Store – where I could’ve gone in and bought for my sister a new hat or shoes, but we kept walking.

It was the picture theatre that stopped us. We lingered by the billboards showing advertisements for Desk Set, starring Katharine Hepburn and Spencer Tracy. Katharine Hepburn with her high round cheeks, her red hair lifted in rolls away from her face and her red mouth laughing, had her arms round the neck of Spencer Tracy, whose raised eyebrows and ‘O’ shaped mouth showed mock surprise. Behind them were little scenes of love and laughter.

‘We could see it this afternoon and get a later train home,’ I said.

My sister frowned. ‘We’ll still be back in time to get Benny’s tea …’ but she looked doubtful.

‘Yes let’s, let’s,’ I said, ‘after we’ve …’

Now that we were in ‘Chappy’s town’ I wasn’t sure what we were going to do.

‘Maybe we’ll find the police station and ask if they know the whereabouts of the Chinese man who was at the hospital when Chappy was taken there. But we’ll get a drink first,’ I said.

We crossed the road to a dairy, where the headline on the news-stand announced the disintegration of Sputnik Two. ‘A drink, and a newspaper to read on the train.’

The woman behind the counter was chatting, full of smiles, to her customers, but her expression blanked when we came in. This wasn’t a new experience for us. The woman had a floured face, orange lips and a dusty frizz of hair tied back. A large brooch studded with glass rubies assisted green buttons to tighten the stretched cloth over her cabbage breasts. At the grim sight of her, my sister dodged in behind me, pulling at my clothing as a signal that we should leave, but I knew that I was going to make this woman speak to me no matter how long it took for her to dawdle with the other three customers, no matter how long she chose to ignore us.

Eventually I ordered a lemonade and an orange squash, which were provided to me without a word, my change pushed across the counter.

‘My sister and I are in town enquiring after a Chinese gentleman who we believe lived in the district in the early 1940s,’ I said in my snottiest voice.

A customer on her way out stopped and turned, took another look at these strangers in town, overdressed and brown.

‘Mr Lee,’ she said.

This name was echoed by others who had their ears tuned from other parts of the store and who then converged towards us.

The blanked shopkeeper couldn’t help herself. ‘Is he a friend of yours?’ she asked through a slitted mouth, her eyes averted.

‘I would like to know his whereabouts, please, if you can help.’

‘Nineteen forty-two. That was when,’ someone said.

‘That was the time.’

‘In the paper.’

‘Our town.’

‘Mr Lee.’

‘Unmasked this –’

‘Jap spy.’

What my sister and I discovered was that there was a whole legend which had built up around the Japanese spy who had mysteriously appeared in their midst disguised as a China Man.

Spy.

The word cut deep into me, but I remained calm and allowed the stories to come, told by gossips who, except for one, had never set eyes on Chappy.

This Jap spy had been put ashore from a spy submarine which had entered the Hauraki Gulf undetected.

‘Town became famous.’

‘In the paper.’

‘It wasn’t until after the war was over that people found out New Zealand was a hair’s breadth away from being invaded by Japan.’

‘Could all’ve been speaking Japanese by now ha, ha. Haw, haw.’

Anyway, this Jap fellow had infiltrated the country, mixing with the migrant workers, all the time gathering information and drawing up maps and charts which he rolled up and hid in the handlebars of his bicycle. Alby and his mate were the heroes.

‘He lives just down the road these days. Alby.’

‘Wait on, we’ll ring Alby.’

Alby turned up, only too pleased to tell how he and his mate Kev had been playing round the ditches when they came across this bashed-up dead man with a bike on top. That was up in Runciman in their farming days. The boys ran off to Kev’s place and told his parents. Kev’s old man thought he’d better go and have a look.

Kev’s dad had a poke around, realised the fellow was still alive, bundled him into the back seat of his car and brought him back to the hospital, a whole hour’s drive. Kev’s dad reckoned if he knew then what he was to find out later, he would’ve left the Jap where he was. The boys could’ve had the bike.

Alby and Kevin were interested in the bike, which they said rightfully belonged to them. Finders keepers. But by then it was in the hands of the police. They went down to the police station a few days later to lay claim to it only to find that the bike was in many pieces, having been thoroughly searched in all its tubing for proof of espionage. Successfully searched, all the talkative ones in the dairy believed, otherwise why would that chap have been taken away and locked up.

Although the two boys failed in their bid to get the bicycle, they were given a cake of chocolate as a reward, and there was a story about them, with a photograph in the local paper of them holding up the chocolate. Spy-Catchers. Alby offered to nip home and get the newspaper cutting, which was in his mother’s photograph album – gone all yellow but you could still read it.

I told him we had to go.

‘Mr Lee, too. In the paper.’

‘They called him up to the hospital to be the translator but that spy fella wasn’t giving anything away. I know. I was there. I was a nurse at the hospital those days.’

‘Owns half the shops round here, including this one, Mr Lee does.’

‘Is he a friend of yours?’ Ruby Brooch wanted to know, pasting on a smile just in case.

We left there almost at a run. I was holding back anger and sorrow as we hurried along under the verandahs away from the shoppers, workers, kids running – to the dusty road where I cleaned out with tears and huffs and snorts and misery. We’d left our fizzy drinks on the window ledge.

My sister steered me off to the railway station, where she tried to calm me down with drinks of water collected in paper envelopes provided at the water dispenser. ‘We’ll go to the pictures,’ she said. ‘Come on, come on, Katharine Hepburn. Have a good look at her, won’t we? Get home and do our hair up like that.’

I had to snap out of it. Moana-Rose was already walking along the platform, almost running, giggling. ‘We used to? Hairdos like … you know … like Greta … Greta G … Garbo.’

‘Flesh and the Devil,’ I said running after her shouting with laughter, catching up to her, collapsing against her, wobbling along, hooting and crying until we neared the pavement and the verandahs. ‘Cut our hair off, to be G … Greta.’

We straightened our faces, straightened our legs, walked a straight line to the picture theatre without looking at each other. We wobbled and giggled again at the sight of Katharine Hepburn’s wide open laughing mouth, gathered ourselves and went in.

That town. That town. I’d never been in a place like that before.

We went inside to purchase tickets, asking for seats downstairs in the mid-section just as we often did in our little theatre at home.

‘Gallery only,’ the boxed ticket seller said.

I didn’t understand at first. There were patrons already making their way in through the downstairs entrance.

But Moana-Rose knew. She’d heard of this. She was standing behind me speaking our language. We only ever spoke our language at home, not in public places, but now she was whispering into my neck that this must be one of those segregated theatres where Māori were barred from downstairs seating.

There was fury going on inside me. I thought of standing my ground, allowing the queue to lengthen behind me until I got what I wanted, but I became too dispirited. We left and returned to the railway station. ‘If Chappy and I had come to the theatre together,’ I said, ‘he would have been allowed downstairs but I would not.’

I stayed with my sister for another week, but I regretted that I hadn’t spoken with Mr Lee. Now that I knew his name, I was able to look up his address in the phone book. I rang and made an appointment.

The next day I went back to the town, on my own this time. I think my brother-in-law’s patience was wearing thin with his wife spending so much time with me. I took a caraway seed cake.

Mr Lee was a man in his eighties, kindly and hospitable. I explained that I was trying to find out as much as I could about the circumstances of the man I had married, the Japanese man whom he had been asked to be interpreter for at the hospital back in 1942.

He told me of that day when he’d been asked to find out the name and details of the man in the hospital bed. ‘A very sick man. Cuts, bruises and broken bones,’ Mr Lee said. ‘I would’ve helped if I could, but the man in the bed was not Chinese. I didn’t know his language. When I told the hospital authorities this I think it made them suspicious of me. I told the sister, whose pen was poised above the information sheet, that I thought the man was Japanese. So I was very largely surprised, Mrs Star, when the good sister turned and spoke to me in a most impatient manner saying, “Mr Lee, if you don’t mind, would you please at least ask this man his name and his place of abode?”’

It was then that I witnessed something that Chappy had described to me: Mr Lee bent right-angled laughing.

At that moment all the anguish I had felt since my last visit left me and I began to laugh, too. We sat there, two strangers facing each other, laughing until tears gathered and ran and poured, and we gasped and choked and hiccupped, the two of us.

It was all to do with sorrow.

A darling girl brought us tea in fine cups, and I found myself telling Mr Lee the story of my life, about Chappy and me and our children, our lives together and apart.

‘You have suffered in your life, Mrs Star,’ he said.

‘I’ve known great happiness in my life, Mr Lee,’ I said.

It was a wonderful day. My soul was rinsed. I was looking forward to my return home, the conversion of the bakery into a tearoom, the letters I would write. One day my Chappy would join me.

End