Spitting in the cold wind, the glowing cinders seethed across the ash tip behind the kitchens. Naked except for their cotton shorts and wooden clogs, the stokers stepped from the steaming doorway beside the furnace, ashes flaming on their shovels. Now that the evening meal of rice congee had been prepared, Mr. Sangster and Mr. Bowles were raking the furnace and banking the fires down for the night. I waited on the summit of the ash tip, enjoying the sickly fumes in the fading light, while I watched the Japanese night fighters warming up at Lunghua airfield.

“Look out, young Jim.” Mr. Sangster, a sometime accountant with the Shanghai Power Company, sent a cascade of cinders towards my feet. The ashes covered my sneakers and stung my toes through the rotting canvas. I scampered back, wondering how many extra rations had helped to build Mr. Sangster’s burly shoulders. But Mrs. Sangster had been a friend of my mother’s, and the horseplay was a means of steering the most valuable cinders towards me. Small favours were the secret currency of Lunghua.

Two other cinder pickers joined me on the ash tip—the elderly Mrs. Tootle, who shared a cubicle with her sister in the women’s hut and brewed unpleasant herbal teas from the weeds and wild-flowers along the perimeter fence, and Mr. Hopkins, the art master at the Cathedral School, who was forever trying to warm his room in G Block for his malarial wife. He poked at the cinders with a wooden ruler, while Mrs. Tootle scraped about with an old pair of sugar tongs. Neither had the speed and flair of my bent-wire tweezers. A modest treasure of half-burnt anthracite lay in these cinder heaps, but few of the internees would stir themselves to scavenge for warmth. They preferred to huddle together in their dormitories, complaining about the cold.

Squatting on my haunches, I picked out the pieces of coke, some no larger than a peanut, that had survived the riddling. I flicked them into my biscuit tin, to be traded when it was full for an extra sweet potato or a prewar copy of The Reader’s Digest or Popular Mechanics, which the American sailors monopolised. These magazines had kept me going through the long years, feeding a desperate imagination. Mrs. Dwight was forever criticising me for dreaming too much, but my imagination was all that I had.