SPOILERS!!!
This is such a heartbreaking story.
The teachers and children spend some months in a new location, Temple Hill. Things are not easy because they lack some basic things, but Elspeth and the other teachers try to keep the children’s morale up. There is a guard who calls himself Trouble and is horrible. He leers at Elspeth and is cruel.
Then they are moved to an internment camp where things are really difficult. The food is scarce and tasteless, sanitation is simply horrible, and as time goes by, hope to be liberated dwindles. Sprout has been sick for a long time. She has tuberculosis and becomes weaker and weaker. Elspeth fears the worst, and Sprout eventually dies with Nancy and her sister singing to her. That was a heartbreaking moment.
Elspeth and Charlie Harris, the boys’ master, become closer, and there is attraction between them. Charlie is locked in isolation for weeks when he is caught with things from the black market. He hears that he is to be transferred to another camp, but as luck will have it, he proves to be skilful with technology and repairs the commandant’s radio, so he is allowed to stay and has access to the radios he now fixes in the camp. He manages to hear some news, and he tells Elspeth that the Japanese are not doing good in the war, and Elspeth takes the news with apprehension. She fears that the guards will take it on them in revenge if they find themselves in a vulnerable position in the war.
In this camp there are other people. One woman, Edwina Trevellyan, has collected all the books in the camp and is running a library, and Nancy and Mouse help her run it. Edwina is good to the girls and is a good friend to Elspeth. She is frank and outspoken, and Elspeth often comes to her for advice.
The local Chinese women are in charge of cleaning the latrines, and one of them is the school servant, Shu Lan. She is pregnant and when Elspeth approaches her, she says that the baby is not her husband, who was the school cook, but one of the guards, hinting that she has been raped. Then one day when Nancy and Mouse try to help the women, Shu Lan presses a note in Nancy’s hand and tells her to give it to Elspeth. When Elspeth opens the note, Shu Lan asks her to keep her baby. Elspeth doesn’t think she can help her. Then months later Shu Lan appears in the middle of the night and leaves the baby with the teacher. I wonder how Elspeth is going to look after the baby when there is so little food.
This is a moving account of a terrible episode in history. I can’t understand how children could be used in war in such a shameless way.
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