As I knew, criticising everyone else was a full-time British occupation. Sitting on the ash tip, while Mrs. Tootle and Mr. Hopkins scratched at the spent clinkers in their doomed way, I looked down at the camp. The British had nothing to which they looked forward, unlike the Americans, whose world was always filled with possibilities. Every American was an advertisement for confidence and success, like the vivid pages in The Saturday Evening Post, while every Englishman was a sign saying “trespassers prosecuted.” One day, my father had told me, I would go to school in England. Already I feared that the England I visited after the war would be a larger version of Lunghua camp, with all its snobberies and social divisions, its “best” families with their strangled talk of “London town” brandished about like the badges of an exclusive club, a club I would do my best to avoid joining.

*   *   *

The last heat faded from the cinders below my feet. The night air was chilled by the flooded paddy fields and the maze of creeks and canals around Lunghua. I watched the exhaust of the Japanese fighters, warming myself with the thought of their powerful engines. Mr. Hopkins had wandered away from the ash tip, carrying his few coals back to his invalid wife, but Mrs. Tootle still stabbed at the dead clinkers. There was an evening curfew at Lunghua, but the Japanese made little effort to enforce it. In the unheated huts and cement buildings of the former teacher-training college the internees went early to bed, assuming that they had ever got up in the first place. Mrs. Dwight and the missionary ladies were used to my roving the adult dormitories with my chessboard, gathering the latest rumours of war.

I slid down the slope towards Mrs. Tootle and selected three choice pieces of coke from my tin.

“Jamie … I can’t take those.”

“You keep them, Mrs. Tootle. Tell your sister I gave them to you.”

“I will…”

A cup of herbal tea already brewing in her mind, she drifted off into the darkness. I felt sorry for her, but I needed her out of the way. When I was alone on the ash tip, screened from the camp buildings by the kitchen roof, I crawled across the cinder slope to the brick wall of the annex.