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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.
    â€œJamie, suppose…” Intrigued by her own logic, Peggy smiled to herself. “Suppose the Japanese want us to escape, so they won’t have to feed us? Then they’d have more to eat.”
    She waited for me to react, and reached out to reassure me, seeing that she had gone too far. She knew that any threat to the camp unsettled me more than all the petty snubs. What I feared most was not merely that the food ration would be cut again but that Lunghua camp, which had become my entire world, might degenerate into anarchy. Peggy and I would be the first casualties. If the Japanese lost interest in their prisoners we would be at the mercy of the bandit groups who roamed the countryside, renegade Kuomintang and deserters from the puppet armies. Gangs of single men from E Block would seize the food store behind the kitchens, and Mrs. Dwight would have nothing to offer the children except her prayers.
    I felt Peggy’s arm around my shoulders and listened to her heart beating through the thin wall of her chest. Often she looked unwell, but I was determined to keep her out of the camp hospital. Lunghua hospital was not a place that made its patients better. We needed extra rations to survive the coming winter, but the food store was more carefully locked than the cells in the guardhouse.
    As the all-clear sounded, the internees emerged from the doorways of their blocks, staring at the camp as if seeing it for the first time. The great tenement family of Lunghua began to rouse itself. Listless women hung their faded washing and sanitary rags on the lines behind G Block. A crowd of children raced to the parade ground, led by David Hunter, who was wearing the pair of his father’s leather shoes that I so coveted. As he moved around the camp my eyes rarely left his feet. Mrs. Hunter had offered me her golfing brogues, but I had been too proud to accept, an act of foolishness I regretted, since my rubber sneakers were now as ragged as Private Kimura’s canvas boots. The war had led to a coolness between David and myself. I envied him his parents, and all my attempts to attach myself to a sympathetic adult had been rebuffed. Only Basie and the Americans were friendly, but their friendliness depended on my running errands for them.
    Mrs. Dwight approached the children’s hut, her fussy eyes taking in everything like a busy broom. She smiled approvingly at Peggy, who was holding a crude metal bucket soldered together from a galvanized-iron roofing sheet dislodged by the monsoon storms. With the tepid water she brought back from the heating station Peggy would wash the younger children and flush the lavatory.
    â€œPeggy, are you off to Waterloo?”
    â€œYes, Mrs. Dwight.” Peggy assumed a pained stoop, and the missionary patted her affectionately.
    â€œAsk Jamie to help you. He’s doing nothing.”
    â€œHe’s busy thinking.” Artlessly, with a knowing eye in my direction, Peggy added: “Mrs. Dwight, Jamie’s planning to escape.”
    â€œReally? I thought he’d escaped long ago. I’ve got something new for him to think about. Jamie, tomorrow you’re moving to