Without thinking I stood up, my shadow leaping across the wall of the annex. Fifty feet from me four figures were caught by the intense light, their orange faces like lanterns in the darkness. Two of the men had already climbed through the wire, and a third knelt with one leg through the sagging strands. They shouted to each other above the spitting flare, and the man caught in the wire tore off his shirt and stumbled through the grass towards the paddy field. His shirt hung on the wire like a ragged flag.

Torches veered across the ground on both sides of the fence. Armed Japanese soldiers stood in the deep grass between the perimeter fence and the airfield. Already the would-be escapers had stopped and were waiting for the Japanese to approach them. The fourth figure stood by the wire and began to disentangle the tattered shirt. When he looked up I recognised the blond hair and pinched face of David Hunter.

The signal flare fell into the paddy field and was swallowed by its black surface. Taking my chance, I scrambled from the ash tip and darted past the rear door of the kitchens. I tripped over my cinder tin, scattering the precious coke, and stumbled into a torch beam that filled my face. Rifle raised, Private Kimura blocked the path leading to the children’s hut, the night mist rising from his nostrils. Beside him stood Sergeant Nagata, the beam of his torch tapping my head as he watched his men round up the escaping prisoners. When they had been knocked to the ground, Sergeant Nagata beckoned me to him. I waited for him to slap me, but he stared into my face as if he had difficulty in recognising me and found it scarcely conceivable that I, of all the internees in Lunghua, should want to escape.

*   *   *

Later we sat on one side of the wooden table in the guardhouse. The Japanese soldiers stood against the wall, their boots covered with wet grass. The camp commandant, Mr. Hyashi, roused from his quarters in the staff bungalows, paced up and down, doing his best to control himself. A former diplomat at the Japanese Embassy in London, he was a small and precise man of painstaking nervousness, the only Japanese civilian in the camp and as frightened of Sergeant Nagata as any of the prisoners. Long pauses interrupted his interrogation, as he formulated the necessary phrases in his stilted English.

Bored by this time-wasting, Sergeant Nagata strolled behind us, slapping our heads at random. My ears rang, as they had done after the bomb in the Avenue Edward VII. I was sure we would soon be too deaf to understand Mr. Hyashi’s halting questions.