“I won’t let him.” This was idle talk, and my next Latin class could prove me wrong. But so far I had avoided the clergyman’s heavy hands. I had noticed that Dr. Sinclair left alone the children of the more well-to-do British parents. He never hit David Hunter, however much David tried to provoke him, and only cuffed the sons of factory foremen, Eurasian mothers, or officers in the Shanghai police. What I could never understand was why the parents failed to protest when their children returned to their rooms in G Block with ears bleeding from the clergyman’s signet ring. It was almost as if the parents accepted this reminder of their lowly position in Shanghai’s British community.

Bored with it all, and deciding to show off in front of Peggy, I picked up a stone from the step and hurled it high into the air over the parade ground.

“Jamie, you’re in trouble! Sergeant Nagata saw that…”

I froze against the door. The sergeant was standing on the gravel path twenty feet from the children’s hut. As he stared at me he filled his lungs, his face bearing the weight of some slow but vast emotion. However complicated the British at Lunghua seemed to me, there was no doubt that Sergeant Nagata found them infinitely more mysterious, a stiff-necked people whose armies in Singapore had surrendered without a fight but nonetheless acted as if they had won the war. For some reason he kept a close watch on me, as if I were a key to this conundrum.

Why he should have marked out one thirteen-year-old boy among the two hundred children I never discovered. Did he think I was trying to escape, or serving as a secret courier between the dormitory blocks? In fact, most of the adults in the camp shied away from me when I loomed up to them, eager to play blindfold chess or offer my views on the progress of the war and the latest Japanese aerial tactics. My nerveless energy soon tired them, and besides, I was forever looking to the future. No one knew when the war would end—perhaps in 1947 or even 1948—and the internees coped with the endless time by erasing it from their lives. The busy programme of lectures and concert parties of the first year had been abandoned. The internees rested in their cubicles, reading their last letters from England, roused briefly by the iron wheels of the food carts. Mrs. Dwight was not the only one to see the dangers of an overactive imagination.