"THAT REMARKABLE WOMAN..."

New Zealand Listener, Volume 15, Issue 375, 30 August 1946, Page 20

"THAT REMARKABLE WOMAN..."

A.MLER. interviews Miss Annie James. M.B.E.. of Dunedin and of the N.Z. Presbyterian Mission Hospital, Kaai Hau

HALF-RUINED five-storey pagoda topped the last ridge across the valley. Reaching it I slipped off my ruksak and lay in the long grass surveying the basin that opened out ahead. Immediately below, the river-highway wound opalescent among Golden sandbanks and green bamboo {froves, a toilsome procession of hand-poled junks In circle above, swam the mountains, fairy blue, peaked and jagged in reality as in Chinese painting, and diffusing the same &entle blue "‘pearly’’ clarity. The basin floor itself was brown with dry ricefields. That walled city on the left would be Tsung Fa. Those two square pawnshop strongroom towers on the central flat with grey-brick houses clustering round would be my destination, Kaai Hau.-1933 Diary. cc HE same.time as they attacked Canton the Japanese came over the mountains unexpectedly and occupied Kaai Hau," explained Miss James when I met her again the afternoon she landed back in New Zealand, 13 years after the date of that entry in my diary. "But our area was too populous for them to stay in safety. So they fortified the gorge between us and Canton and every now and then burst in and tried to clean up the Tsung Fa pocket of resistance. After Ku Kong, the headquarters of the Kwangtung Provincial Government, was captured, there were ‘Japanese*all round us till the end of the

war. I felt very queer when I was told that at first, But one got used to it quickly." "and carried on the hospital?". "Yes, Except, of course, when the Japanese were actually occupying it. Then you just had to get out before you were caught, grabbing everything you could lay hands on. Usually it wasn’t much, because you couldn’t hire anyone to help. Everybody else as well was too busy taking his own things. Sometimes I carried our main drugs and things a little way out of the village and then had to leave them hidden. After that I would come back at nights with a coolie and we would dig some up and carry them further away. We’d start walking in in the late afternoon and get back about dawn." "But wasn’t that dangerous?" "Not so very. You see the Japanese always retreated into Kaai Hau itself at nightfall. But a 20-mile walk in the dark, fording rivers up to your armpits or sometimes walking up to your knees in slush and carrying a heavy load, got very wearying. I’m sure I’d walk chain

after chain in my sleep until I’d stumble awake over a stone. All the same, being kept out of the hospital was a chance to get the books up-to-date-though you really couldn’t properly because prices. kept going up and up. When I left, a Chinese egg-say half the size of ours-cost 150 dollars and a hundred catti of rice cost 500,000 dol-lars-that is a million dollars for about two hundredweight. The smallest note circulating was 50 dollars." A Battle on the Way Home The figures were staggering. But the implication in Miss James’s statement that such flights as she described, leaving the hospital in Japanese hands, were frequent, was even harder to take in. How many times had she had to leave, I asked. "About 20, I'd guess. Sometimes I’d go out to a case and find that I was running into a battle on the way home with the earth pounding up. towards me. The worst time was when a battle raged right around us and bullets and things kept whistling over the open courtyard.

We wondered then if keeping out of Japanese hands really was worth it. The destruction was horrible. Once, I remember, some* Chinese who had been told to hold a gorge to the last-man sent for me to come at dark to attend to their wounded, But before I arrived the hillside was set on fire and they all perished." 4 ; "But where did you get medical supplies during these five years?" "Well, we always had some, but not always those we wanted. The worst thing was doing without quinine, as quite often we had to. It was hard to keep things going when both myself and the two Chinese nurses — there was no trained help to be had-were all shivering with malaria together. I got double malaria, two sorts at once, and the bouts went on for months on end until I was away down below six stone in weight. So long as Britain was not at war our mission people inside the occupied area could smuggle drugs out to me, by paths away off the beaten track." "So I’ve been told. And how you were once captured as you passed through

the lines and had a most extraordinary unpremeditated escape." "Why, yes, that’s so. I’d forgotten it, But I’ve seldom been more frightened than that day — especially when, after we had got away among the trees, shells started bursting around us. I felt sure at the time that they were intended for us-although, looking back, I can’t see how the Japanese could possibly have known in what direction we were. The Guerrillas Helped "But it’s supplies that you are interested in,’ continued Miss James. "Well, after our own mission in Japanese-occu-pied territory was interned, the International Red Cross in Chungking offered all mission hospitals which could still operate, drugs at cost price and free transport as far as the Quaker convoys could carry them. So fair quantities were sent to Ku Kong and the local government saw that they reached me. But after our Tsung Fa area became completely cut off I had to rely on the guerrillas." "But how did they get them?" "Oh, they just went into Canton as peasants or coolies and bought what they could as chemists and so on and then cut their way out through the barbed wire at night time. I had to keep contact through them with Canton in any case, because one of my adopted Chinese children was at boarding-school there and I needed news of her from time to time and to make sure that the Synod offices could keep borrowing money on my behalf for her fees." "And how did you yourself get money to carry on?" "I couldn’t get any-not from New Zealand, though I’ve heard since that all sorts of attempts were made to get my salary through to me. But the hospital fees brought in something. And; anyhow, there was so little one could buy. I should have told you, too, that the parachutists got a radio message through to Chungking to send me drugs. They did reach Kwungtung but they never got across to our ‘island.’ I only learned about them, and got them, when I went into Canton after the war was over." The Four Indians "These parachutists you mentioried‘who were they?" "There were several lots of teeus at different times. They were mostly Americans who bailed out of planes that got shot down over Canton. If they landed on White Cloud Mountain along-

side the city the guerrillas there would | try to find them and bring them up to. our local Tsung Fa government. Then I would be sent for to interpret. And weren’t they grateful. Until I arrived they usually didn’t know whether they were in enemy hands or not. "It was the four Indians who got the : worst time. Their petrol tank was hit so that they had to land and burn their plane in the mountains. The Chinese peasants, I think, were scared when these black men with bushy beards and big white turbans appeared-some, I’m sure, thinking they were a new and more terrible kind of Japanese. Anyhow these : poor Indians were just about dead from being scarcely fed for a fortnight when I heard of them and was able to talk to them and explain to the local government who they were." Salvaging Discarded Babies "So you did talk some English during : the war? A message from Sydney said you had nearly forgotten it." "English got very rusty. But then I had been 30 years in China before the war began, a good deal of it living alone 25 miles or so away from any Europeans, so I was quite used to living and thinking Chinese. And, except for the interruptions, work at the Hospital was just the same as ever, except that the need of the people was even greater than usual. There was just no milk to be had, for example-the water buffaloes were driven away or killed and many mothers were too poorly fed to produce any. They just began throwing out the babies they couldn’t feed. I picked up a dozen at various times like that. But I saved only three. There was nothing to feed them on except rice water-no vitamins in that, no minerals, One of the three had gone into a coma (she was 6%421b., and eight months old) when I had the idea of injecting glucose. She regained consciousness after four days. And then I had the extraordinary fortune to find a wet nurse. The baby didn’t like milk at/first-she’d never had it. But now she’s two-and-a-half, quite normal and clever." "| Must be Back" "After ten years away from New Zealand, I presume that you are back for a long furlough. Or are ‘you retiring here?" "Oh, I’m not as old as the newspapers say. And I must be back at Kaai Hau next July for my kiddies’ school holidays. With their schools shifting again and again to get away from the Japanese it’s not much home life they’ve had in the last six or seven years." Leaving, I thought back to Kaai Hau Hospital as I had seen it functioning before the war. Life since the Japanese attack had been more diverse and spectacular. But, turning again to my diary, I realised that there was never a time in her life when heroism was not the daily portion of "that remarkable woman" (as Miss James was described by Lord Inverchapel, formerly Sir Archibald Clark Kerr, British Ambassador to China). I quote again: The hospital appears to be several houses knocked into one, A well-like yard gives light and a certain amount of ventilation to one side; a walled-in garden to the other. But all these high walls, necessary to keep out bandits, keep out air also and shut in heat. Constant battle must be fought with the flies and smells that breed all around in the village. Battle also with the unhygienic ideas of the patients’ families who. insist on camping in the yard. Battle also, sometimes, with bad ideas. ("I had to stay up all night beside last night’s case," said Nurse James. "The father kept sneaking up to remove the baby whenever I dozed. ‘It’s no use,’ he would say, ‘only a girl") Battle always with weariness and_ isolation.1933 Diary. 2 pe agen ee ee