Chapter 7 Felicity Lawrie

;Jim waits for three days alone in the house for his mother and father to return. He passes the time by plane spotting. Jim plays on the lawn, no longer neatly trimmed, and pretends he is one of the Japanese marines who attacked the Wake. The rest of the time he spends in his mother's bedroom remembering the long hours they spent together doing his Latin homework and listening to stories from her childhood in England (a country he has not experienced). He can still see his mother's footprints in the talc Jim imagines his mother teaching a Japanese soldiers the tango or some other dance. Jim tries out the footprints himself and decides they are far too violent for a tango that he remembers. While dancing around Jim manages to fall over and cut himself on a broken mirror.
The food in the kitchen fridge has begun to smell of rotting. But Jim is able to eat from the pantry which is full of tinned meats and fruit which he loves. On the fourth morning when Jim gets up he goes into the kitchen to find that he has left the kitchen tap on all night and has managed to empty the storage tank. When he thinks about it, he realises his parents are not going to come back. So worries little about it. But to keep his spirits up he decides to visit Patrick Maxted and the Raymond twins.
Smelling of soda water, Jim goes to get his bicycle from the garden. He notices that overnight the swimming pool has drained. Jim gets into the shallow end making his way to the deeper end to fetch a silver coin, which his father has thrown in, but Jim could never reach. Jim kept the coin but found the swimming pool bieng drained quite strange and 'sinister' but still as usual it reminded him of war and the concrete bunkers in Tsingtao. Jim got his bicycle and did something he had always wanted to do and rode it all through his house knocking things over but it made him amused. Then he left of for the Raymond brothers house on columbia road.
When he arrives at the Raymond's house, he asks their Amahs where Clifford and Dereck are. The Amahs ignore Jim and so he tries get past one of them, but he is slapped in the face. Jim leaves in a rush still in shock from the hit and the anger in the amahs face. Jim then heads of to the Maxteds appartment house instead. Once he arrives he goes up to the seventh floor to find their front door is wide open. Jim enters withought knocking to find that every room in the maxted's house was in a mess with drawes of clothes thrown on the floor, like his mothers bedroom. He crept into Patricks bedroom to see his matress on the floor yet his model airplane still hung from the cieling. Jim lay on his matress and watched his aircraft and imagined spitfires and hurricanes. Jim then thought it was time to find his parents. Oposite the appartments was the shells company compound with almost all of it's houses occupied by british employees. Jim cycles his way to the shells company compund to find that it has been overtaken by the japanese. He stands by the entrance and sees Mr Guerevitch. Jim asks him if he has seen his parents but Mr Guerevitch just tells Jim to follow the trucks full of British prisoners and asks him why he is still cycling around on his bike while the war is going on. Jim leaves dissapointed and doesn't follow the convoy of trucks. Instead Jim decides to just head home back to amhurst avenue. Jim decides to give himself up to the Japanese soldiers guarding the Avenue foch but they just waved him off as he tried to speak to them. When Jim arrives back at the house he notices a chrysler limousine parked outside the front door. Aswell as two Japanese officers surveying his house. Just asJim is about to pedal up to them to explain that this is his house and ready to surrender a Japanese soldier from behind him took hold of his bike and threw his through the air where Jim landed in a heap on the dusty road.