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G Block. It’s time for you to leave the children’s hut.”
    I emerged from one of the hunger reveries into which I often slipped. The apartment houses of the French Concession were visible along the horizon, reminding me of the old Shanghai before the war and the Christmas parties when my father hired a troupe of Chinese actors to perform a nativity play. I remembered the games of two-handed bridge on my mother’s bed, my carefree cycle rides around the International Settlement, and the Great World Amusement Park with its jugglers and acrobats and singsong girls. All of them seemed as remote as the films I had seen in the Grand Theatre, sitting beside Olga while she stared in her bored way through Snow White and Pinocchio.
    â€œWhy, Mrs. Dwight? I need to stay with Peggy until the war’s over.”
    â€œNo.” Mrs. Dwight frowned at the prospect, as if there was something improper about it. “You’ll be happier with boys of your own age.”
    â€œMrs. Dwight, I’m never happy with boys of my own age. They play games all the time.”
    â€œThat may be. You’re going to live with Mr. and Mrs. Vincent.”
    Mrs. Dwight expanded on the attractions of the Vincents’ small room, which I would share with this chilly couple and their sick son. Peggy was looking sympathetically at me, the bucket clasped to her chest, well aware of the new challenge I faced.
    But for once I was thinking in the most practical terms. I knew that I would be easily dominated by the Vincents, the morose amateur jockey and his glacial wife, who would resent my presence in their small domain. I might try to bribe Mrs. Vincent with the promise of a reward for being kind to me, which my father would pay after the war. Unhappily, this choice carrot failed to energise the Lunghua adults, so sunk were they in their torpor.
    If I was going to bribe the Vincents I needed something more down-to-earth. Ignoring Mrs. Dwight, I seized my cinder tin from beneath my bunk, shouted a goodbye to Peggy, and set off at a run for the kitchens.
    *   *   *
    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.
    â€œLook 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