End of the Ordeal

These days, there seem to be nearly as many newsmen coming out of China as news items. Five days after the release of Reuters Correspondent Anthony Grey (TIME, Oct. 10), the doors of a Shanghai prison swung open for a freelance journalist, Norman Barrymaine, 19 months after he had entered it. Four days later, a onetime London Daily Herald feature writer (and more recently a Chinese government translator) named Eric Gordon was allowed to leave Peking with his wife and 13-year-old son after nearly two years under house arrest. The three journalists' remembrances added up to a sometimes incredible picture of the weird variety and brutal mentality of Chinese jailers.*

From a gaunt Anthony Grey, home in London, came the description of a drab solitude "much worse than anyone can imagine." Grey, the best known of the three (and last week awarded the Order of the British Empire), was confined for 26 months in his Peking home--mostly in one room--solely in retaliation for the arrest of Communist Chinese agitators in Hong Kong during the riots of 1967. Describing "the worst moment of my two years" in an interview with a Reuters colleague, Grey told of the hot August night shortly after his capture, when some 200 Red Guards swarmed into his house and dragged him downstairs to the courtyard.

"They painted me with black paint," he said, "and forced my arms behind me so that my body was bent forward. Whenever I tried to straighten up, a Red Guard punched me in the stomach. I sweated so much that a pool formed on the ground under my eyes and I could see my reflection in it." Then, after a sudden silence followed by applause, "I was told to straighten up. A few inches in front of my eyes dangled the body of my cat, Ming Ming, hanged from the roof by a washing line." When the crowd began chanting "Hang Grey," he was roughly ushered back inside the house to find posters stuck up everywhere, and all his belongings--even his sheets and toothbrush--smeared with black paint.

Throughout his imprisonment, his guards never spoke. They only stared at him or sang revolutionary songs and chanted slogans. In return, he gave them insulting nicknames--Pervert Jaw, Peking Man--composed rhymes about them and sang to himself. He was allowed a few books, including a manual of yoga, which, he says, "turned out to be my salvation." By last Christmas, he had become almost sanguine. On that day, he related, "I felt a quiet sort of joy. I put on my best suit, to the puzzlement of the guards, and I tried to make it special, though I was so alone."

Bloody Words. Norman Barrymaine, 69, was also alone last Christmas. For him, the Kafkaesque nightmare began on a cold day in February 1968, shortly after the North Korean capture of the Pueblo. Barrymaine had gone to North Korea aboard a Polish freighter to cover the Pueblo story, but was denied permission to go ashore. In Shanghai a few days later aboard the same freighter, he did get a shore permit. Once on China's soil, he made the mistake of accepting his guide's invitation to photograph at will. When he snapped torpedo boats in the Shanghai river, he was arrested.

Ten interrogation-filled days later, Barrymaine was led to a 12-ft. by 8-ft. cell furnished only with a wooden cot and a non-flush toilet. His third night he was awakened by a woman's terrified, heart-rending scream. After a couple of weeks he realized that it came from a tape recorder, placed next to the cells of new arrivals to initiate them.

To keep from "going round the bend," Barrymaine devised elaborate daily routines. He ended each day by dictating faintly remembered news stories into a make-believe telephone. "Oh, Miss Jones," the ritual began, "I've got a good lead for today." When he had finished "filing" the story, he sometimes put in another imaginary call--to his 25-year-old daughter in London. He found the perfect use for China's stiff brown toilet paper: he made himself a deck of cards out of it and played solitaire.

Unlike Grey, who on three occasions was visited by British diplomats, Barrymaine had no contact with the outside world. At a press conference in Hong Kong, he admitted to reporters that after seven months in captivity, he had signed a "whole transcript, millions of bloody words of it, and a few confessions as well. Why not? I can assure you," he added with a smile, "it's not pleasant to be in a Chinese prison. Then again, I don't suppose it's meant to be."

Capitalist Instinct. Eric Gordon, a self-styled "leftist socialist" who went to China in November 1965 to edit and translate revolutionary tracts and literature for Peking's Foreign Language Press, also made one costly error. Preparing to leave China in November 1967, he packed some notebooks in his suitcases. As a result of this "smuggling," he lived with his wife and son for two years like characters in an existential drama, locked in a single hotel room.

Two weeks ago, Gordon was called before his interrogator. "It was made clear to me," he recalls, "that the case wouldn't be settled until I made certain admissions"--namely, that he had "insulted and slandered Chairman Mao" and that he "was in possession of political information." Two days after he made his "confession," the Gordons were heading for Hong Kong.

Though all of the released Britons had lost weight, it was readily apparent that none had suffered the loss of any capitalistic instinct. After their first quick press conferences, all three clammed up with further details on their experiences, saving them for books and articles they planned to write. Grey kept a diary for just that purpose and is already in print with the first of a three-part series in this week's London Sunday sensation sheet, The People, which is being syndicated in Europe and Australia as well. The price reportedly paid was well over $25,000--a lot of money, perhaps, but earned the hard way.

* An estimated 44 other foreigners (ten Americans) remain under detention in China, including at least one journalist, Keiji Samejima, 37, an able correspondent for Tokyo's Nihon Keizai, who was arrested in June 1968.

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