When We Were Orphans Read online

  “It’s too bad! I’m not Philip. I’m not made that way. It’s too bad, it’s just too bad!”

  There was something in his voice as he shouted this, a kind of terrible resignation, and I suddenly became furious at Mei Li for having abandoned me in such a situation. And it was perhaps then, as I was standing by those doors, my ruler in my hand, caught between the urge to continue listening and the desire to flee to the sanctuary of my playroom and my toy soldiers, that I heard my mother utter those words:

  “Are you not ashamed to be in the service of such a company? How can your conscience rest while you owe your existence to such ungodly wealth?”

  I DO NOT REMEMBER what occurred after that: whether Mei Li came back; if I was still there in the library when my parents emerged. I do recall, though, that the episode heralded one of the longer periods of silence between my parents—that is to say, one that was maintained for weeks, rather than days. I do not mean, of course, that my parents did not communicate at all during this time, just that all exchanges were kept to the strictly functional.

  I was well used to such periods and never concerned myself unduly with them. In any case, it was only in the smallest ways that they ever impinged upon my life. For instance, my father might appear at breakfast with a cheerful: “Good morning, everyone!” and slap his hands together, only to be met by my mother’s frosty glare. On such occasions, my father might try to cover his embarrassment by turning to me and, still in the same cheery tone, asking:

  “And what about you, Puffin? Any interesting dreams last night?”

  To which I knew from experience I should respond by giving a vague sound and continuing to eat. Otherwise, as I say, I was able to go about my business more or less as usual. But I suppose I must, at least sometimes, have given thought to these matters, for I do have a memory of a particular conversation I had with Akira once when we were playing in his house.

  MY MEMORY of Akira’s house is that, from an architectural standpoint, it was very similar to ours; in fact, I remember my father telling me both houses had been built by the same British firm some twenty years earlier. But the inside of my friend’s house was a quite different affair, and the source of some fascination for me. It was not so much the preponderance of Oriental pictures and ornaments—in Shanghai, at that stage in my life, I would have seen nothing unusual in this—but rather his family’s eccentric notions regarding the usage of many items of Western furniture. Rugs I would have expected to see on floors were hung on walls; chairs would be at odd heights to tables; lamps would totter under overly large shades. Most remarkable were the pair of “replica” Japanese rooms Akira’s parents had created at the top of the house. These were small but uncluttered rooms with Japanese tatami mats fitted over the floors, and paper panels fixed to the walls, so that once inside—at least according to Akira—one could not tell one was not in an authentic Japanese house made of wood and paper. I can remember the doors to these rooms being especially curious; on the outer, “Western” side, they were oak-panelled with shining brass knobs; on the inner, “Japanese” side, delicate paper with lacquer inlays.

  In any case, one sweltering day, Akira and I had been playing in one of these Japanese rooms. He had been trying to teach me a game involving piles of cards with Japanese characters on them. I had managed to pick up the rudiments and we had been playing for several minutes when I suddenly asked him:

  “Does your mother sometimes stop talking to your father?”

  He looked at me blankly, probably because he had failed to understand me; his English often let him down if I spoke out of context like this. Then, when I repeated my question, he shrugged and said:

  “Mother not talk to Father when he at office. Mother not talk to Father when he in toilet!”

  With that, he roared with theatrical laughter, rolled on to his back and began kicking his feet in the air. I was thus obliged for the moment to drop the matter. But having raised it, I was determined to get his view, and a few minutes later, brought it up again.

  This time he seemed to sense my earnestness, and leaving aside the card game, asked me a number of questions until I had more or less told him the nature of my worries. He then rolled on to his back again, but this time gazed thoughtfully up at the ceiling fan rotating above us. After a few moments he said:

  “I know why they stop. I know why.” Then turning to me, he said: “Christopher. You not enough Englishman.”

  When I asked him to explain this, he once more looked at the ceiling and went quiet. I too rolled on to my back and followed his example of staring at the fan. He was lying a little way across the room from me, and when he spoke again, I remember his voice sounded oddly disembodied.

  “It same for me,” he said. “Mother and Father, they stop talk. Because I not enough Japanese.”

  As I may have said already, I tended to regard Akira as a worldly authority on many aspects of life, and so I listened to him that day with great care. My parents stopped talking to one another, he told me, whenever they became deeply unhappy with my behaviour—and in my case, this was on account of my not behaving sufficiently like an Englishman. If I thought about it, he said, I would be able to link each of my parents’ silences to some instance of my failing in this way. For his part, he always knew when he had let down his Japanese blood, and it never came as a surprise to him to discover that his parents had ceased talking to one another. When I asked him why they did not scold us in the usual manner when we misbehaved in this way, Akira explained to me that it was not like that; he was talking of offences quite different from the usual misdemeanours for which we might be punished. He was referring to moments that disappointed our parents so deeply they were unable even to scold us.

  “Mother and Father so very very disappoint,” he said quietly. “So they stop talk.”

  Then he sat up and pointed to one of the slatted sun-blinds at that moment hanging partially down over a window. We children, he said, were like the twine that kept the slats held together. A Japanese monk had once told him this. We often failed to realise it, but it was we children who bound not only a family, but the whole world together. If we did not do our part, the slats would fall and scatter over the floor.

  I do not remember anything more of our conversation that day, and besides, as I say, I did not spend much time dwelling on such matters. All the same, I remember more than once being tempted to ask my mother about what my friend had said. In the end, I never did so, though I did broach the subject once with Uncle Philip.

  UNCLE PHILIP WAS NOT a real uncle. He had stayed with my parents as a “house guest” upon his arrival in Shanghai sometime before my birth, in the days when he was still in the employ of Morganbrook and Byatt. Then, while I was still very young, he had resigned from the company owing to what my mother always described as “a profound disagreement with his employers over how China should mature.” By the time I was old enough to be aware of him, he was running a philanthropic organisation called The Sacred Tree dedicated to improving conditions in the Chinese areas of the city. He had always been a family friend, but as I have said, became a particularly frequent visitor during the years of my mother’s anti-opium campaigns.

  I can remember often going with my mother to Philip’s office. This was located within the grounds of one of the churches in the city centre—my guess now is that it was the Union Church in Soochow Road. Our carriage would drive right into the grounds and stop beside a large lawn shaded by fruit trees. Here, despite the noises from the city around us, the atmosphere was tranquil, and my mother, stepping out of the carriage, would pause, raise her head and remark: “The air. It’s so much purer here.” Her mood would lighten visibly, and sometimes—if we were a little early—my mother and I would while away some minutes playing games on the grass. If we played tag, chasing one another all around the fruit trees, my mother would often laugh and squeal as excitedly as I did. I remember once, in the middle of one such game, she stopped suddenly on seeing a clergyman emerge from the
church. We had then stood quietly on the edge of the lawn and exchanged greetings with him as he had passed. But no sooner had he gone out of our sight than my mother had turned, and stooping right down to me, given a conspiratorial giggle. It is even possible this kind of thing occurred more than once. In any case, I remember being fascinated by the notion of my mother participating in something for which, just like me, she could be “told off.” And it was perhaps this dimension to these moments of careless play around the churchyard that made them seem always a little special for me.

  My memory of Uncle Philip’s office is that it was very ramshackle. There were everywhere boxes of all sizes, heaps of papers, even loose drawers, still with their contents, stacked precariously one on another. I would have expected my mother to disapprove of such untidiness, but she only ever talked of Uncle Philip’s office being “cosy” or “busy.”

  He never failed to make a fuss of me on these visits, shaking my hand heartily, sitting me down then engaging me in conversation for several minutes while my mother looked on smiling. Often he would give me a gift, something he would pretend he had had ready and waiting—though I soon came to realise he was presenting me with whatever caught his eye at the time. “Guess what I’ve got for you, Puffin!” he would declare, while his gaze travelled the room in search of something suitable. In this way I acquired an extensive collection of office items, which I kept in an old chest in my playroom: an ashtray, an ivory pen stand, a lead weight. There was one occasion when, after announcing he had a present for me, his eye failed to alight on anything at all. There followed an awkward pause, before he sprang up and began wandering about his office, muttering: “And where did I put it? What on earth have I done with it?”—until finally, perhaps in desperation, he went over to the wall, pulled down a map of the Yangtze region, tearing a corner as he did so, rolled it up and presented it to me.

  That time I confided in him, Uncle Philip and I were sitting together in his office, waiting for my mother to come back from somewhere. He had persuaded me to take his own chair behind his desk, while he himself roamed aimlessly around the place. He was making his usual amusing small-talk, and normally he would have had me laughing in no time, but on that occasion—only days after my discussion with Akira—I was not in that sort of mood. Uncle Philip soon saw this and said:

  “So, Puffin. We’re rather glum today.”

  I saw my chance and said: “Uncle Philip, I was just wondering. How do you suppose one might become more English?”

  “More English?” He stopped whatever it was he was doing and looked at me. Then, with a thoughtful expression, he came nearer, pulled a chair up to the desk and sat down.

  “Now why would you want to be more English than you are, Puffin?”

  “I just thought . . . well, I just thought I might.”

  “Who says you’re not sufficiently English already?”

  “No one really.” Then after a second I added: “But I think perhaps my parents think so.”

  “And what do you think, Puffin? Do you think you ought to be more English?”

  “I can’t tell really, sir.”

  “No, I suppose you can’t. Well, it’s true, out here, you’re growing up with a lot of different sorts around you. Chinese, French, Germans, Americans, what have you. It’d be no wonder if you grew up a bit of a mongrel.” He gave a short laugh. Then he went on: “But that’s no bad thing. You know what I think, Puffin? I think it would be no bad thing if boys like you all grew up with a bit of everything. We might all treat each other a good deal better then. Be less of these wars for one thing. Oh yes. Perhaps one day, all these conflicts will end, and it won’t be because of great statesmen or churches or organisations like this one. It’ll be because people have changed. They’ll be like you, Puffin. More a mixture. So why not become a mongrel? It’s healthy.”

  “But if I did, everything might . . .” I stopped.

  “Everything might what, Puffin?”

  “Like that blind there”—I pointed—“if the twine broke. Everything might scatter.”

  Uncle Philip stared at the blind I had indicated. Then he rose, went to the window and touched it gently.

  “Everything might scatter. You might be right. I suppose it’s something we can’t easily get away from. People need to feel they belong. To a nation, to a race. Otherwise, who knows what might happen? This civilisation of ours, perhaps it’ll just collapse. And everything scatter, as you put it.” He sighed, as though I had just defeated him in an argument. “So you want to be more English. Well, well, Puffin. So what are we to do about it?”

  “I wondered, if it’s all right, sir, if you didn’t awfully mind. I wondered if I might copy you sometimes.”

  “Copy me?”

  “Yes, sir. Just sometimes. Just so that I learn to do things the English way.”

  “That’s very flattering, old fellow. But don’t you think your father’s the one to have this great privilege? About as English as they come, I’d say.”

  I looked away, and Uncle Philip must immediately have sensed he had said the wrong thing. He came back to his chair and sat down again in front of me.

  “Look,” he said quietly. “I’ll tell you what we’ll do. If you’re ever worried how you should go about things, anything, if you’re worried about the proper way to go about it, then just you come to me and we’ll have a good talk about it. We’ll talk it all through until you know exactly what’s what. Now. Feel better?”

  “Yes, sir. I think I do.” I managed a smile. “Thank you, sir.”

  “Look here, Puffin. You’re a right little horror. You know that, of course. But as little horrors go, you’re a pretty decent specimen. I’m sure your mother and father are very, very proud of you.”

  “Do you really think so, sir?”

  “I do. I really do. So, you feel better?”

  With that, he sprang to his feet to resume his wanderings around his office. Reverting to his light-hearted tone, he began some nonsensical story about the lady in the office next door, which soon had me in stitches.

  How fond I was of Uncle Philip! And is there any real reason to suppose he was not genuinely fond of me? It is perfectly possible that at that stage, he wished nothing but good for me, that he had no more inkling than I did of the course things would take.

  CHAPTER 6

  IT WAS AROUND that same time—that same summer—when certain aspects of Akira’s behaviour began seriously to irk me. In particular, there was his endless harping on the achievements of the Japanese. He had always tended to do this, but that summer things seemed to reach obsessive levels. Time and again my friend would bring to a stop some game we were playing just to lecture me on the latest Japanese building being erected in the business district, or the imminent arrival of another Japanese gunboat in the harbour. He would then oblige me to listen to the most minute details and, every few minutes, his claim that Japan had become a “great, great country just like England.” Most irritating of all were those occasions on which he would try to start arguments about who cried the easiest, the Japanese or the English. If I spoke up at all on behalf of the English, my friend would immediately demand we put things to the test, which meant in practice his putting me in one of his dreadful arm-locks until I either capitulated or gave in to tears.

  At the time, I put Akira’s obsession with the prowess of his race down to the fact that he was due to start school in Japan that coming autumn. His parents had arranged for him to stay with relatives in Nagasaki, and although he would return to Shanghai during school holidays, we realised we would see a lot less of each other and initially the news had made us both despondent. But as the summer drew on, Akira appeared to convince himself about the superiority of every aspect of life in Japan and became increasingly excited about the prospect of his new school. I in turn grew so weary of his persistent boasting about all things Japanese that by the late summer I was actually looking forward to being rid of him. Indeed, when the day eventually came, and I stood outside
his house waving off the motor car taking him to the harbour, I believe I was not at all sorrowful.

  VERY SOON, HOWEVER, I began to miss him. It was not that I did not have other friends. There were for instance the two English brothers living nearby with whom I played regularly, and of whom I saw much more after Akira’s departure. I got on well with them, especially when it was just the three of us. But sometimes we would be joined by their schoolfriends—other boys from Shanghai Public School—and then their behaviour towards me would change, and I would sometimes become the target of certain pranks. I did not mind this at all, of course, since I could see they were all essentially decent sorts intending no real malice. Even at the time, I could see that if within a group of five or six boys, all but one attended the same school, the outsider was bound now and then to become the butt of some harmless banter. What I mean is that I did not think badly of my English friends; but then, all the same, such things did prevent me developing with them the same level of intimacy I had had with Akira, and as the months went on, I suppose I began to miss his company more and more.

  But that autumn of Akira’s absence was not a particularly unhappy one by any means. I remember it rather as a period when I was often at a loose end, of empty afternoons following one another, much of which has now faded from my mind. Nevertheless, a few small events did occur during that period which I have subsequently come to regard as being of particular significance.

  THERE WAS, FOR EXAMPLE, the incident surrounding our trip to the racecourse with Uncle Philip, which I am reasonably sure occurred after one of my mother’s Saturday morning meetings. As I may have said already, for all my mother’s encouraging me to mingle with her fellow campaigners in the drawing room where they first gathered, I was not permitted into the dining room for the meetings themselves. I remember once asking her if I could attend a meeting, and to my surprise she had given it long consideration. Finally she had said: