A loudspeaker barked from the bridge of the landing craft, and the American guards shouted at the British officers in the wheelhouse. Clearly the Arrawa had appeared at an inconvenient moment. The Japanese armies in China were being repatriated, but I wondered how this large body of men, almost a brigade in strength, would ever survive the three-day voyage to the Japanese mainland.

Then, on a cliff above the mud flats, another group of armed soldiers caught my eye. Hundreds of Kuomintang infantry, in their peaked caps and leggings, bayonets fixed to their rifles, stood on the grass-covered slopes, waiting for the Arrawa to move away.

A siren thundered over my head, almost splitting the funnel. Its echoes hunted the vast brown swells of the Yangtze. We steered ahead, the single propeller churning the water and sending its spray into my face. The forward ramp of the landing craft was being lowered from the prow, and the first Japanese soldiers were stumbling onto the mud flat.

Part II: The Craze Years

PART II

The Craze Years

The Queen of the Night

4

THE QUEEN OF THE NIGHT

Women dominated my years at Cambridge—fellow medical students, the cheerful Addenbrookes nurses I took drinking on the Cam, and the moody demonstrators in the Physiology Department, forever polishing their cracked nails behind the jars of embryos—but none more than Dr. Elizabeth Grant. During my first term at the university I saw her naked every day, and I knew her more intimately than any other woman in my life. But I never embraced her.

I remember the October morning in the Anatomy Department when I first met Dr. Grant. With the hundred freshmen joining the medical school, I took my seat in the amphitheatre for the welcoming address by Professor Harris, the head of anatomy. I sat alone in the topmost row, marking my distance from the other undergraduates. Exempt from military service, and rugby fanatics to a man, they were mostly the sons of provincial doctors who in due course would take over their fathers’ practices. Already I was depressed by the thought that in forty years’ time, when I needed their help, it would be these amiable but uninspired men who held my life in their hands. But in 1950 I knew nothing about medicine and had yet to learn that inspiration and amiability played next to no part in it.

Professor Harris entered the theatre and stood at the podium. A small, puckish Welshman, he gazed at the tiers of beefy young men like an auctioneer at a cattle market. He spotted me sitting alone under the roof, asked for my name, and told me to put out my cigarette.

“Come and join us—there’s no need to be standoffish. You’ll find we need each other.”