ELEPHANT MOON (19 page)

‘And then in Mandalay I saw your headmistress walk down the hill and into the flames. Mad, but also extraordinarily brave. To be honest with you, Grace, helping Bishop Strachan’s, leading the children out of Burma, was perfect cover. No one would suspect a Jiff spy escorting a busload of orphans. But about this, I became more and more ashamed – ashamed too, when I saw how the ordinary soldiers, British and African and Indian too, did their best to help the children. Were the men who held up the demolition of the last great bridge in Burma, saluting a bus full of half-castes, our racial masters? Your lover, the tall, silly one, Mr Daddy-long-legs.’

She shook her head, denying it.

‘Is he an oppressor? Or just a man, trying to be decent in the worst of times? I watched how the soldiers at the bridge saluted the children. I remembered what the Japanese had done to that poor wretch of a British officer on his cross…’

Passing his satchel to her, he said: ‘This needs safekeeping. Guard it with your life. When you get to India, give it to someone in British Intelligence. But, first, tell them this.’ He whispered the secret of where Bose had gone to.

‘But Jem, the Netaji’s men, if they find out you have betrayed them…’

‘…they will kill me. So. If they do, it’s just one life. But knowing this changes everything,’ he said. ‘It changes the balance of the argument between the British who want to keep India at all costs and those who know that if they give up India, they might just be able to win the war. Tell them I told you, but tell them I was an Indian patriot, that I would like it very much if the British would please leave India as soon as the war is over.’

‘Why are you telling me this? Why risk your life?’

‘I have already made my decision, Grace. I made it when I rode back to the bus. It should have been easy for me to forget you all, you, the girls, the two boys. I could have slipped in to India – to hide in the chaos of war - but there is something about this bloody singing bus that never quite dies, that keeps on bringing me back. The children, too. And, then, to cap it all, you. I fell in love with you. And you call me a traitor? Yes, Grace, I am a traitor, twice over, once to the British, once to the Netaji and his men. But I will not betray the children. And I will not betray you. I have had enough of betrayal.’

Gregory listened with intense pleasure. The Jemadar, all holier-than-thou, had been a sodding Jiff. Surrendered at Singapore and the bloody Japs had recruited him, hadn’t they?

‘Em, what was this big secret that the Jem knew, about the big important Jiff geezer, about knowing where
he
is, whoever
he
is?’

‘I couldn’t hear everything. I don’t know…’

 Pleased as punch, was old Eddie-boy. He’d never get strung up for killing a sodding Jiff. There’d be witnesses, too, other Indians who’d seen the Jemadar go over to the Nips back in Singapore.

‘So he was a traitor, the Jem.’

‘No, that’s not like it was,’ said Emily. ‘He’d gone over to the Japanese, but the way they treated the British prisoner repulsed him.’

‘Once a Jiff, always a Jiff.’

 ‘No, that’s not right. That’s why he gave the letters to Grace. If he was a traitor, he wouldn’t have done that.’

‘Letters?’ Something about the edge to Gregory’s voice frightened her, made her regret what she had just said.

‘What letters?’ he repeated.

‘Nothing. I don’t know.’

He struck her hard, brutally. Stung – she’d never been beaten by a man in her entire life – she held her hand to her face, not quite believing that this was happening to her.

‘What letters?’ He made to raise his hand again.

‘I…I think…’

He hit her again. She gasped, more in astonishment than pain, and the words tumbled out.

‘It was hard to tell. They were whispering, and everything, but I think he gave her something. I think they were letters, letters to people in India who are against the British.’

‘Where are they now?’

‘I… don’t hit me. Please. In the basket, on Mother’s back, there’s a wooden box for precious stuff. She’s got something locked away in it. Every time she opens it, she puts her body in front of it, so we can’t see.’

‘Nick ’em.’

‘No, I can’t.’

‘Look kid, this isn’t a stupid game. This is for real. This is proof that could save me from swinging.’

‘What?’ She had a look on her that he didn’t like one bit.

‘Nick ’em. And bring them to me. Do it. Do it tomorrow.’

Stunned by the abrupt change that had come over Gregory, Emily drew her knees up to her chin, at a loss to fathom what was going on behind those angelic eyes.

‘You’d better go. Don’t want to get you into trouble.’

She tried to argue, but he’d had enough of her. That was always the way with women. Too clingy, they needed too much of you.

He relit his cheroot as the shadows swallowed her up.

Getting his hands on these letters, proof that the Jem had been a Jiff, would be perfect. Point is, even if he didn’t, he now knew enough to throw sand in their eyes. Sammy-boy, stuck-up elephant ponce that he was, wouldn’t do anything to him once he knew he’d shot a Jiff. But he had to watch it. Grace was the real danger.

If that poisonous bitch got out, all the way to India and started blabbing and pointing the bloody finger and saying he killed the Indian bastard in cold blood, then it wouldn’t take the Old Bill, thick as they were, too long to connect Sergeant Gregory, suspected of murdering an Indian Jemadar, Jiff or no Jiff, with Edgar Gregory, released on parole to serve in His Majesty’s armed forces. If the Military Police made the connection between the teacher’s story and his previous spot of bother…

Murder was murder, even if he got nicked at the tender age of fifteen. If he didn’t watch his back, he might even end up swinging for the Indian bastard.

So there was only one witness left, between him and the prison cell, perhaps even the rope itself.

Well, here they were, surrounded by jungle, hundreds of miles from bleeding civilisation, surrounded by tigers and snakes and crazy elephants, the Japs breathing down their necks.

All sorts of terrible things could happen to a teacher and no one would ever know different. But it wasn’t going to be easy. No bloody way. He’d have to play it careful, play it slow. Get to know the oozies better, keep thick with them, become their friend. Make himself useful, like he did with the Black Shirts. And the army. Help out where he could. And then, when he’d been accepted…

Real shame, wasn’t it. The teacher was bloody gorgeous, a real beauty with a body like a pin-up, like Bette bloody Davis. He’d have his pleasure and then a quick slice of the
old knife across the throat. He’d dump her in the jungle and no one would ever know. She’d just be one of the thousands who never made it out of Burma, missing, presumed dead. There was no other way round it. The same thing with the Yid’s tart. Had he taken his moment and sorted out the Jewess, then he would never have been in this trouble in the first place. He’d made the mistake of being soft when it came to dealing with a woman. But once bitten, twice shy.

If the schoolmarm went missing, they would have to give him the benefit of the doubt. There’d be no evidence of anything untoward. No body, see? Just a lot of weeping kids wondering where the hell she’d got to. He’d even volunteer to lead the search-party for her. Lost in the jungle – what a terrible way to die.

Ooh, Miss Goody Two-Shoes Grace wouldn’t be blabbing to any policeman all right – he’d make damn sure of that.

After he’d had his pleasure, mind. What was he going to do with her before the end? Well, that was something to think about.

And he began to whistle, ‘Oranges and Lemons…’

They rose at four, long before sunrise. The elephant men worked frantically, carrying children, still half-asleep, directly from their hammocks up into the elephant panniers. They didn’t stop until every child was either walking or being carried on an elephant’s back, and they were on the move in record time.

At the first light of day came the rain. The word does not describe the stair-rods of wetness crashing through the canopy, splattering drops as big as ha’pennies on the jungle floor, turning the ground into a stinking pancake of mud and goo. What had been relatively good going became, within minutes, a seeping swamp. Would the rain stop the insects? Fat chance. They became more obnoxious, fizzing up your nose or squatting on your ears or creeping along the edge of your eye-lashes, needling you. And the leeches, too. You’d slip underfoot, crash down into the muck, get up and ten minutes later feel something on the back of your leg. And there you’d find a big fat black slug, puffed full of your blood. The best way to get rid of them was to light up a cheroot and burn the leech off, but in the downpour it was nigh impossible to strike a match. So you would have to pull the creature off with your fingers. It would go all squishy and burst, covering your fingers with blood, but somehow its suckers would remain dug into your skin, and you’d have to rip the thing off you, taking with it a lump of skin. And the next time you fell down into the mud, the broken skin and the fresh bleeding would attract a new batch of leeches, and within minutes you’d get the same tingling feeling. Disgusting wasn’t a powerful enough word for it.

Then as if someone had pulled a switch, the rain stopped. In muffled sunlight, they walked on, the jungle dripping, a brown-green stew of wet leaves, flies, heat, leeches. Abruptly, the trees thinned out. Ahead, Grace glimpsed blue sky above, Sam standing on the
edge of a ravine and beyond him, a yawning gap, more than a hundred feet wide, and far below a furious stream tumbling through rocks.

Precious little space was to be had on the narrow mossy edge overlooking the drop as the elephant party backed up, a traffic jam with trunks. Sam hurried past Mother, moving uphill, away from the ravine, Winston, the Havildar and a dozen oozies in tow, carrying ropes and long doubled-ended saws. Grace called out to him from the basket: ‘What’s happening?’

‘Bloody map. The ravine wasn’t marked. Officially, it’s not there. Not good.’

‘What are you doing to do?’

‘Write a letter to the
Daily Telegraph
,’ and he vanished into the jungle, pursued by a posse of elephant men.

Po Net gave a command and Mother buckled underneath them. The children piled out, as accustomed to exiting the pannier as they had been to leaving the school bus, and the whole group followed the path Sam’s party had made through the jungle. At the base of an enormously tall teak tree, two teams of oozies were sawing through a top and bottom bite of the trunk furiously, their arm muscles pumping, sweat dripping off their faces. But the trunk was so fat that Grace feared it would take them all day to chop it down. After ten minutes, their places were taken by four fresh oozies, who carried on the work in a sweet rhythm. By now Grace could see a stain of sap where the saws were eating into the teak.  The bite in the trunk had become a dark grin.

Behind them, they heard chains being dragged along the jungle floor. The jungle parted and Henry VIII, ridden by one oozie, with two Burmese holding spikes on either side of his head, marched up, in harness, pulling a long ribbon of chains. The elephant grunted, bent his head and concentrated on feasting on a clump of bamboo.

The saw’s bite had become yet deeper, another two feet into the trunk. Two new teams took over, losing barely a second, the teeth of the saws hissing against the trunk, the cut almost a third of the way across.

Grace’s ears pricked. Over the hiss and clatter of the jungle, she could hear a metallic barking. The chatter of a sub-machine gun, never to be mistaken, echoed around the hills. It was hard to tell the distance, but she guessed, the noise came from less than five miles away. The elephant party only carried rifles. A machine-gun meant the Japanese, attacking someone. The rearguard? No idea. All she had to do was look at Sam’s face to realise that the shooting was far too close.

‘Havildar! Get these bloody children out of the way.’

The Sikh led Bishop Strachan’s to the far side of the teak, away from the ravine. They stumbled through the undergrowth, climbing onto a slight hillock which provided a ring-side seat of the great tree and beyond it, the fearful drop and the gap it had to bridge.

‘What are they chopping the tree down for, Miss? We’re not going to walk across on the tree, are we?’ asked Ruby, her voice hushed with awe.

Grace said nothing.

‘We’re not, are we?’

‘Sssh, Ruby. I don’t want to frighten the little ones,’ whispered Grace. ‘Or me.’

Guns pock-pocked, more sporadic, not a machine-gun, but closer, much closer.

The elephants, too, were led to the safety of the far side of the teak, Oomy squashing underneath Mother’s belly. The mother elephant raised her trunk into the air, as if tasting the wind. Having seen the elephants easy and relaxed, there was no doubting their anxiety: a communal twitching of tails, ear flaps wide, trunks swishing agitatedly, this way and that. They might not know exactly what the threat was, thought Grace, but the idea that they were just dumb beasts was ignorant indeed.

The children started eating lunch, but the sense of foreboding dimmed appetites, and Grace had to cluck at the children for offering their scanty rations to the elephant calves.

Yells in Burmese, and then Sam’s voice called out: ‘Timber!’ A slow splintering of wood built through a crescendo of ripping and snapping to a Niagara of sound, a great thundering roar as the teak shivered and fell across the ravine. Through the soles of their feet they felt a great shudder; overhead, monkeys, birds and insects screeched out against this new affront to the natural order of things.

‘Miss, look!’ cried out Molly.  From their vantage point overlooking the ravine the children watched, enthralled, as a man with a dirty bandage on his head clambered up the side of the great teak, stood on top, and then sauntered along the trunk across the ravine as if he was walking down a pavement on Oxford Street. He crossed to the far side and turned back to the watchers, bowed theatrically, and blew a kiss.

Sam called out to the children: ‘Your turn next, ladies and gentlemen.’

‘But the elephants?’ asked Grace. The thought of crossing the ravine was making her feel nauseous.

‘No. Children first.’

‘Why?’

‘Because the children are not heavy. The elephants might be too heavy, and we can’t take any chances. Getting you across is the easy bit.’

There was a mumble of unease from the children, which Grace determined to nip in the bud. She hated heights, but she hated the sergeant more, and she was damned if she was going to be out-braved by him.

‘Come along, children.’ She gathered together the school crocodile and led it towards the trunk. ‘Our turn now. Let’s sing a song. Ruby?’

‘Sam will be angry.’

‘He’s made more than enough noise already. Besides, it will be fun.’

‘London Bridge is falling down, falling down…’

‘Couldn’t you think of a more appropriate one, Ruby?’

‘No.’

They walked down to the trunk in silence. By the time they had got to the edge of the ravine, the elephant men had got a rope across, a handrail. Sam walked across the tree-bridge, Winston pattering along behind him, followed by the Havildar, carrying Joseph on his shoulders and holding Michael’s hand. Most of the girls, all of them older than the boys, didn’t want to look foolish and followed on. Grace occupied herself helping them get a leg-up the smooth side of the trunk, a good few feet taller than her. When it came to Emily’s turn, the girl managed to scrabble up on her own.

Molly refused to cross, point-blank. Grace implored her. She shook her head, her pudding bowl haircut swishing this way and that. She was such a determined child that Grace did not know what to do. The Havildar strolled back across the trunk, slipped down the side, bent down, and whispered into Molly’s ear. The little girl nodded, briefly, and soon the two of them were crossing the ravine, hand in hand.

How on earth did he do that? Grace wondered.

When the last of the girls were up and making the crossing, it was Grace’s turn. Po Net helped her up. Lunging for the rope hand-rail, she steadied herself and started walking. After all the hours in the dim green gloom under the forest canopy, the white glare of the wide open sky played harshly on her eyes. She dared not look down, but the distant sound of the stream bubbling furiously below gave her a chilling idea of just how far she would fall if she lost her balance.

Gunfire, not so far away. A racket of birds of paradise, trailing bright violet tails, lifted up from the bottom of the ravine and came barrelling up towards the tree-bridge. She made to
duck but a disembodied voice broke through: ‘Head up, chest out, back straight’. Her father’s advice. Where was he now? What was he doing? She’d last written to him a day before they fled from Rangoon, but she was pretty certain her letter would never have left the city. Had the Whitehall warrior any idea that his plan, that Burma would be safe for his daughter, might not have worked out quite as he had hoped? The absurdity of that thought, terrified as she was, gripping on to the rope hand-rail, 200 feet from a rocky death below, lost in the middle of the jungle in High Burma, with the Japanese Imperial Army within gunshot-sound, all but her made her skip across. Squinting in the sunlight, she focused on a figure in the shimmering heat helping the girls ahead of her down the side of the trunk on the far bank of the ravine: the man with the bandaged head.

Something about the elaborateness of his gallantry sickened her, made her entirely forget where she was. She all but ran the last ten yards along the trunk, and yelled at him: ‘What the bloody hell do you think you are doing?’

‘Lending a hand,’ said Gregory, affecting hurt.

‘Leave the children alone.’ Her voice bore a querulous indignation which she didn’t like but could not help.

 ‘For God’s sake, Grace, he’s only helping.’ It was Sam. ‘There’s no law against that.’

‘No, I’m not putting up with this. I’ve asked you to keep this man,’ only now did Grace become aware that almost the whole school was staring at her, unkindly, as if she was some kind of madwoman barking out at dangers no else saw, ‘under control.’

‘As I said, he was only helping. I’d ask you to keep a civil tongue in your head for everybody in this party, and that includes Sergeant Gregory.’ The rebuke was all the more telling because of the unusual gentleness, the pity in Sam’s voice, as if he was becoming concerned whether Grace was losing her grip.

She had to suffer her rebuke in silence as the men worked to prepare for the elephants crossing. It was one thing to get a party of orphans across a tree-bridge. Quite different, to get fifty-three elephants across.

Po Toke climbed onto the teak trunk and withdrew from his rucksack a length of sugar beet. Henry VIII’s trunk wafted the airwaves, picked up the scent of the sugar, stood on a side branch and was atop the trunk with all the agility of a circus elephant. Po Toke had to skip across the tree-bridge as nimbly as he could because Henry VIII almost trotted along, heedless of the drop below. Once the lord of the elephants had made the crossing, the oozies seemed more relaxed. Matthew, Mark, Luke and John trundled across, unconcerned. Ragamuffin seemed to dance, Clive crossed dully and Nebuchadnezzar took an age. Each elephant was different. Some would cross with no fuss. Others had to be cajoled, encouraged with commands or bribed with sugar beet or a handful of salt. They were working as fast as they could, but getting fifty-three across, one at a time, was going to take them the best part of an hour. The work occupied the oozies led by Po Toke. Sam and the Havildar could only watch and fret.

‘Havildar!’ squeaked Molly. ‘You promised you would tell me. If I walked across.’

‘Ah, yes.’

‘What did he promise?’ asked Grace.

‘That if I walked across the tree-trunk,’ said Molly, ‘he’d tell me the story of how he lost his fingers.’

The children, sitting in the shade on the far, western side of the ravine, listened, ears agog.

He caressed his moustache with the back of his fist, and started: ‘I was born in the Punjab – this means The Land of Five Rivers – to a family that had fought with the British
since the mutiny, back in 1857. I was a boy soldier at sixteen. In the summer of 1917 we sailed from India all the way to Italy. The ship wobbled and I was sick.’

The children laughed, enraptured.

He’d loathed every second of the voyage, staring at the rocking deep blue, fearing torpedo strike or shipwreck at the sight of white caps as the wind freshened to a breeze. The docks at Naples – not normally associated with goodliness – were, to him, nirvana. The moment he crossed the gang-plank, he fell to his knees, kissed the earth and prayed, thanking God for a safe passage. Once the floor beneath his feet didn’t rock, he became his own man again, enchanting his friends in the regiment, the 13
^th
Baluchi Rifles, with a selection of Hindi love songs, sung in a rich piping voice, as the troop train clickerty-clacked up Italy on their way to the Great War.

‘Winter was coming and I was a boy from the plains of the Punjab. I had never seen such snow, so deep, icicles hanging from the little wooden eaves of the railway halts, almost burying the houses as we pulled north. One morning the Havildar of our regiment, an ancient Baluchi, banged open the doors to our carriages and we looked up to see crags, black silhouettes against the rising sun, the Dolomites.

‘It was so cold we slept with the horses. At day break, when the silver-grey night mists still hung in the valleys beneath, we would uncap our big guns, point the muzzles at the mountain tops on the other side of the valley and blast away at the Austrians. They would fire back, sending up plumes of snow into the air, occasionally killing my friends. But this was not the worst thing for us.