Free The Good Father by Marion Husband Page B

I’ve been caged, although when I actually was imprisoned I would long – pray, in fact – for such routine, such small comforts. At times in the camps, I would organise lectures to help pass the dark evenings. The lecturers were only fellow prisoners, of course, men who’d had interesting professions in their former lives and felt up to entertaining us. More often than not we were all too exhausted, too ill and listless either to talk or to listen, but sometimes the effort was made. I look back on those few times with a kind of wonder that we could behave so normally.
    This afternoon I drove home and went straight to bed, thinking I could block out the anger I felt with myself – and with Hope if I am scrupulously honest – if I slept. I wanted to sleep the whole of the wretched evening away, sleep right through until morning when I’d have the will to work. But of course, I had to go and collect Hope, risking her scorn again. I found myself staring at the ceiling, going over and over that journey with her in the car and the way she had looked at me on the street with such contempt. I am a grown man and yet I was made to feel like a schoolboy with that look of hers. Of course, my feelings are my own responsibility and she was anxious about that party – this is the excuse I give her to comfort myself with – only to remember that she looked at me as though I was despicable.
    But shouldn’t I be used to being despised? I have been despised and humiliated by masters of the craft, by true sadists. Humiliation is standing naked before a fellow officer while he slaps you across the face, knowing you have to slap his face in return – a bizarre ritual punishment we all too often had to perform. Humiliation is being kicked up the backside by a tiny Korean guard, and being kicked again when you stumble. It is not merely being dismissed by a young girl in a tantrum. Her eyes were so angry, bright and blazing, her pale cheeks flushed. Even feeling as pathetic as I did, I couldn’t help thinking that she was beautiful.
    But I am despicable, in reality, and possibly she senses just how despicable I am.
    Perhaps I should write my story down so that she might read it and imagine I’m ordinary. Once upon a time . . .
    Once upon a time, a young man of twenty knelt at the feet of a Japanese soldier, the point of a bayonet scratching at his throat. This Japanese soldier – an officer –spoke remarkably good English with the slightest trace of an American accent. Odd what one notices even when one thinks death is imminent. I believed truly that I would be killed right there and then. I trembled. I had been ordered to place my hands on my head so that my elbows stuck out at sharp angles and I trembled so badly I could feel my fearful vibrations through my skull. I wasn’t a very edifying sight for my men. They knelt too, behind me and to one side; I could hear Johnson praying softly until one of the Japanese soldiers used his rifle butt to silence him. I spoke then, and I tried to sound reasonable, although my voice quavered and faltered and the bayonet seemed about to slice through my vocal cords. I said, ‘We have surrendered. We are prisoners of war and should be treated accordingly.’ I waffled, woolly-headed with fear, although some sharp, defiant part of me wanted to say that if they killed us, they would be murderers. Some men would have said that, I think. Some men would have been beheaded right there and then.
    The officer withdrew his bayonet. He gazed over my head, a distant look on his face as though wrestling with his conscience. He looked weary, almost as dishevelled and sweat-stained as we were, and for a moment of absurd naivety I thought he might empathise with us and thus take pity because he had been through the same bloody experience. But then he looked at me, and it seemed he saw for the first time what a pathetic creature I was – an excuse for a