“Jamie, look out…” Mischievously, Peggy pushed me through the doorway. I stumbled onto the gravel, but Sergeant Nagata had more pressing matters on his mind than a head count of the war children. Slapping his roster board, he led his entourage back to the guardhouse. I was sorry to see him go—I enjoyed squaring up to Sergeant Nagata. There was something about the Japanese, their seriousness and stoicism, that I admired. One day I might join the Japanese air force, just as my other heroes, the American Flying Tigers, had flown for Chiang Kai-shek.

“Why isn’t he coming?” Disappointed, Peggy shivered in her patched cardigan. “You could have escaped—think what Mrs. Dwight would say. She’d have you banished.”

“I am banished.” Not sure what this meant, I added: “There might be an escape tonight.”

“Who said? Are you going with them?”

“Basie and Demarest told me.” The American merchant seamen were a fund of inaccurate information, much of it deliberately propagated. As it happened, escape could not have been further from my mind. My parents were interned at Soochow, far too dangerous a distance to walk, and the British in charge might not let me in. They were terrified of being infected with typhus or cholera by prisoners transferred from other camps.

“I would have gone with them, but Basie’s wrong.” I pointed to the guardhouse, where Private Kimura was saluting the sergeant with unnecessary zeal. “They always close the gates when Sergeant Nagata thinks there’s going to be an escape.”

“Well…” Peggy hid her pale cheeks behind her arms and shrewdly studied the Japanese. “Perhaps they want us to escape.”

“What?” This struck me with the force of revelation. I knew from the secret camp radio that by now, November 1943, the war had begun to turn against the Japanese. After the attack on Pearl Harbor and their rapid advance across the Pacific, they had suffered huge defeats at the battles of Midway and the Coral Sea. American reconnaissance planes had appeared over Shanghai, and the first bombing raids would soon follow. Along the Whangpoo River, Japanese military activity had increased, and antiaircraft batteries were dug in around the airfield to the north of the camp. Lunghua pagoda was now a heavily armed flak tower equipped with powerful searchlights and rapid-fire cannon. The Korean and Japanese guards at Lunghua were more aggressive towards the prisoners, and even Private Kimura was irritable when I showed him my drawings of the sinking of the Repulse and the Prince of Wales, the British battleships sent to the bottom of the South China Sea by Japanese dive bombers.

Far more worrying, the food ration had been cut. The sweet potatoes and cracked wheat—a coarse cattle feed—were warehouse scrapings, filled with dead weevils and rusty nails. Peggy and I were hungry all the time.