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pieces of coke, some no larger than a peanut, that had survived the riddling. I flicked them into my biscuit tin, to be traded when it was full for an extra sweet potato or a prewar copy of The Reader’s Digest or Popular Mechanics, which the American sailors monopolised. These magazines had kept me going through the long years, feeding a desperate imagination. Mrs. Dwight was forever criticising me for dreaming too much, but my imagination was all that I had.
    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.
    â€œJamie … I can’t take those.”
    â€œYou keep them, Mrs. Tootle. Tell your sister I gave them to you.”
    â€œI 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.
    Here was stored Lunghua camp’s food supply for the coming week—sacks of polished rice and cracked wheat, and straw bales of grey sweet potatoes. Crouching by the rear wall of the annex, I reached inside my jacket and withdrew a crude knife I had fashioned from a broken Chinese bayonet. All but two inches of the blade were missing when I found the weapon in a disused well behind the camp hospital, but I had honed it into a useful tool. During the hours I spent on the ash tip waiting for the next consignment of spent coals, I had noticed that the mortar surrounding the brickwork was little harder than dried mud. Either the Japanese engineers responsible for equipping Lunghua camp had never known that they were being cheated by the Chinese contractors or they had not expected the war to last more than a few months before America sued for peace.
    Selecting the lowest course, I scraped at the mortar, the sound of the blade lost in the rumble of engines at the airfield. Within ten minutes I had loosened the first brick. Carefully, I withdrew it from the wall, slid my fingers into the dark space, and touched the coarse straw sacking of a bale of sweet potatoes.
    The next two bricks fell into my