Hazel Gaynor - The Bird in the Bamboo Cage

Published by HarperCollins Publishers Ltd

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London SE1 9GF

www.harpercollins.co.uk

First published in Great Britain by HarperCollins Publishers 2020

Copyright © Hazel Gaynor 2020

Cover design by Caroline Young © HarperCollins Publishers Ltd 2018

Cover photographs © Jelena Simic Petrovic / Arcangel Images (woman), Seb Oliver/GettyImage (girl), Shuttershock.com(all other images)

Hazel Gaynor asserts the moral right to be identified as the author of this work.

Excerpt from ‘Caged Bird’ taken from Shaker Why Don’t You Sing by Maya Angelou © 1983. Reprinted with permission from Little, Brown Book Group.

Girl Guide Laws taken from Girl Guiding by Robert Baden-Powell © 1918.

A catalogue copy of this book is available from the British Library.

This novel is entirely a work of fiction. The names, characters and incidents portrayed in it are the work of the author’s imagination. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events or localities is entirely coincidental.

All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. By payment of the required fees, you have been granted the non-exclusive, non-transferable right to access and read the text of this e-book on screen. No part of this text may be reproduced, transmitted, down-loaded, decompiled, reverse engineered, or stored in or introduced into any information storage and retrieval system, in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereinafter invented, without the express written permission of HarperCollins.

Source ISBN: 9780008393632

Ebook Edition © September 2018 ISBN: 9780008393656

Version: 2021-04-29

For Damien, Max, and Sam –

my favourite story of all.

‘Girls! Imagine that a battle has taken place in and around your town or village … What are you going to do? Are you going to sit down, and wring your hands and cry, or are you going to be plucky, and go out and do something to help?’

Agnes Baden-Powell, co-founder of the Girl Guides

‘The caged bird sings

with a fearful trill

of things unknown

but longed for still

and his tune is heard

on the distant hill

for the caged bird

sings of freedom.’

Maya Angelou, ‘Caged Bird’ from Shaker Why Don’t You Sing?

Cover

Title Page THE BIRD IN THE BAMBOO CAGE Hazel Gaynor

Copyright

Dedication

Epigraph

PROLOGUE

OCCUPATION: 1941–1943

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INTERNMENT: 1943–1945

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LIBERATION: 1945

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REMEMBRANCE: 1975

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EPILOGUE

Author Note

Further Reading

Reading Group Questions

A Brief History of the Girl Guides

Keep Reading …

About the Author

Also by Hazel Gaynor

About the Publisher

We didn’t talk about it afterwards. Not to loved ones, or to neighbours who stared at us from across the street, or to the newspaper men who were curious to know more about these lost children, returned from the war in China like ghosts come back from the dead. We quietly packed it all away in our battered suitcases and stepped awkwardly back into the lives we’d once known. Eventually, everyone stopped asking; stopped staring and wondering. Like our suitcases gathering dust in the attic, we were forgotten.

But we didn’t forget.

Those years clung to us like a midday shadow, waiting to trip us up when we least expected it: a remembered song, a familiar scent, a name overheard in a shop, and there we were in an instant, wilting in the stifling heat during roll-call, kept awake at night by the ache of unimaginable hunger. I suppose it was inevitable that we would talk about it in the end; that we would tell the story of our war.

I’m still surprised by how much I have to say; how much I remember. I’d assumed I would only recall odd scraps and incoherent fragments, but it has all become clearer despite being ignored; the memories sharpened by distance and time. Now, when I talk about my school years in China, people only want to hear the parts about occupation and internment. That’s the story everyone wants me to tell; how terrible it was and how frightened we were. But I also remember the smaller, simpler moments of a young girl’s school days: smudged ink on fingertips, disinfectant in the corridors, hopscotch squares and skipping games, the iridescent wings of a butterfly that danced through the classroom window one autumn morning and settled on the back of my hand. I want to tell that side of my story, too.