[excerpts] ...

Assigned to the job of stoker at Kitchen Two (the kitchen that catered to some nine hundred internees from the Tientsin area), I was quick to catch the uplifting spirit that prevailed on the shift.

No grousing, no scrimshanking. The shift boss, Major Evenden, and his assistant, Major Sowton, both of the Salvation Army, led by example, never balking at the dirtiest task. It was they who sifted through the half-rotting sinews and entrails of the day’s meat supply, slicing off whatever edible pieces they could find for the communal pot. At clean-up time it was they who rolled up their sleeves and reached for the scrubbing brushes to tackle the guos, the giant cauldrons in which all the food was boiled. They seldom found fault, but neither did they lavish praise. Therefore it took only a smile, a single word of approval after a hard day’s work, and we were off to the washhouse glowing. Everyone on shift vied for that approval. When feeding fires, I put on quite a show, clanging my shovel against the cast-iron doors. I smashed clinkers with a foundryman’s ferocity. But then I had an additional motive for gaining Major Evenden’s attention - his daughter, the radiant Eleanor, was in camp.

As it so happened, I did indeed gain the Major’s attention, but not in the way I had intended. I did it with a breach of conduct that even after fifty years has me squirming whenever it comes to mind.

Because all of our water - drinking water, toilet water, laundry water - had to be pumped by hand from a well, a bucket was an inmate’s most prized possession. On my second day in Weihsien I found that Tai-tai of all people had no bucket. For two years she’d managed with an enamel washbasin, but managed awkwardly, slopping half the contents before getting it back to her hut. And the situation so easily remedied. I reported for work at 3:30 a.m. when the kitchen was bathed in morgue-like silence (the cooks didn’t arrive on shift till 6:00), and where in a neat row stood four buckets of gleaming zinc, all for the taking. As far as I was concerned, it was perks, fair and square. At 4:00 a.m. I deposited a bucket outside Tai-tai’s door. At 8:00 a.m., after the sour bread-porridge had been served up and Number One Guo was ready to be cleaned and refilled for the day’s soup, Major Evenden asked: “Desmond, did you happen to see anyone come in to borrow one of our buckets?” At 8:15 Major Sowton asked the same question. And the same again a little later from cook’s helper, Gavin Chapman.

[further reading]
http://www.weihsien-paintings.org/books/ForeignDevil/Power-143-pages.pdf

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