ELEPHANT MOON (6 page)

‘Damn!’ She snapped at one girl who had smuggled the school’s umbrella stand on the bus – ‘no, we’re not taking that, you clot!’ – and ran off to the chapel. Grace opened the thick wooden door, dipped her hand in the water stoop out of habit and crossed herself, quickly. Sunlight poured through the stained-glass windows, bathing the headmistress in blood and gold. As Grace walked up the aisle, the deep bass of artillery rattled the windows. That was the loudest she’d heard, ever. The war was getting closer. She knelt down, beside the headmistress, two pews down from the altar. Another series of booms from the big guns, disturbing the motes of dust spiralling in the sunlight.  Grace said a prayer for a safe journey for the children, then spoke, her voice harsh in the quiet of the chapel: ‘Miss Furroughs, we must leave. We need to secure places on the ship. It’s our last chance.’

‘Go without me.’

The young teacher shook her head. ‘I can’t do that. I can’t look after sixty children on my own. For their sake, you’ve got to come, Miss Furroughs.’

‘I’m sorry, Miss Collins, I’m so sorry,’ the headmistress wept and unsteadily rose to her feet. Grace felt an overwhelming sense of pity for the older woman. She had lived a good life, taught and educated two, three generations of children at Bishop Strachan’s, but now her entire world was collapsing. All the simple certainties of the British Empire, of everyday life
in Rangoon, of everything that Bishop Strachan’s stood for were dying. Grace placed her arms around the headmistress’s shoulders and led her towards the bus.

Allu revved the engine, put it into gear, let slip the clutch and ‘Hants & Dorset’ slouched through the school gates.

As they drove towards the docks, the headmistress leaned close to Grace, gesturing at Allu. ‘You don’t think he’s one of those Jiffs, do you?’

Grace said no, she did not, and stared out of the window at a city emptying of people.

Half a mile from the port gates, the smell of disaster lay everywhere. Dock cranes hung like gibbets against a darkening sky. Blankets of smoke, thick, coal-black, billowed from a dozen burning oil tanks. The bus drew on towards the docks, the children silent. Allu pulled Hants & Dorset to a halt and the children poured out, adding to a vast, swirling crowd. The atmosphere was vile, people punching wildly so that they could get a yard nearer the dock gates.

A black Rolls Royce edged through the crowd, turned and reversed down a wooden jetty a few feet from its end. The Rolls stopped and a uniformed chauffeur emerged and opened the passenger door. A fat white man in a claret suit, white-bearded, ruddy-faced, an out-of-season Santa Claus, got out and walked back towards land as the chauffeur pushed the Rolls over the edge of the jetty into the muddy brown slop of the Rangoon river.

The fat man didn’t look back but placed himself in the middle of a small army of servants carrying suitcases on their heads. As they barged through the crowd, splitting the party from Bishop Strachan’s into two, he shouted: ‘Get these black bitches out of my way.’

Pushing through the mob, Miss Furroughs caught up with him and slapped him hard on the cheek.

 ‘How dare you insult my children. We are not savages, sir, and I’ll ask you to remember that.’ He touched his face, glared at her, and then pushed on towards the ship. The girls, for the first time since they’d left the school, smiled amongst themselves.

Grace ran to a ticket booth, its grille closed, and darted round the back. Sitting on a chair, smoking a cheroot, was a Burman. She told her story – ten-a-penny on that day – but the shipping clerk took pity on Grace and promised to see what he could do. While they
waited, Grace overheard Ruby entertaining the other children with a sotto voce impression of Miss Furroughs: ‘You horrible little man. We are not savages, sir.’ In the ordinary way, she might have given detention to Ruby for mocking the headmistress. Not that day.

Grace had always tried hard not to show it, but she adored Ruby. She should have been ugly with her beaky nose and heavy features, but Ruby’s brown-black eyes danced with mischief and character. Ruby was as thick as thieves with Emily, the great classical beauty of the orphanage, and there were times when Grace envied the friendship between the two girls who were only a few years younger than her.

 Half an hour later, the clerk returned.

‘Yes?’ said Grace, desperate for good news.

He would not look her in the eye.

‘No booking for Bishop Strachan’s.’

‘Is there any chance?’

‘No chance of booking. No spare places on the ship for two European ladies, never mind sixty-two half-Burmese children. The ship is too, too crowded. No room to sit. Japs maybe bomb ship. No good, lady, no good.’

‘Is there nothing you can do?’

‘My brother-in-law, he is engineer on the ship. Maybe, for a thousand rupees, he can help you lady, and the other lady. But the children?’ He stared at the ground, and shrugged.

‘Why?’ asked Grace, pushing him.

 ‘They are half-castes.’

 They clambered back on the bus and Allu drove to the railway station. Humanity as far as the eye could see blocked the main street approaching the station. Grace got out of the bus, climbed up and stood on the engine cowling – not very lady-like – and saw hundreds of people pressing against a thin line of Indian policeman threshing the crowd with staves,
beating them back. Beyond them, a locomotive puffing steam, a train overflowing with faces  – people on the roof, legs hanging off the sides – but motionless. No one going anywhere.

Hants & Dorset wheezed in reverse, away from the station, and then took the road north, heading three hundred and something miles to Mandalay. Grace thought that the engine must give up the ghost in the next few miles or so.

At a crossroads the traffic was controlled by a European man who did a perfect impression of a policeman’s hand signals – blocking a line of traffic with an imperious flat palm, waving vehicles through with extravagant, scimitar sweeps of his other arm – the impression of authority enhanced by a white solar topee on his head. Other than the topee, he was stark naked. One of the lunatics Mr Peach had spoken of was relishing a taste of freedom. Many of the girls had been weeping but at the sight of the man in the topee, they stood up in their seats and stared and giggled. Grace frowned at them, feebly, dutifully. That made him all the funnier. The bus moved on and the girls settled down and Ruby stood up and silently re-enacted the naked traffic policeman’s hand gestures – one palm flat, blocking, one arm waving on – and a fresh wave of hilarity swept over the bus. It was a lovely moment, and, better, they were on the road.

‘Discipline is going out of the window. We cannot allow standards to drop,’ said Miss Furroughs.

‘It’s not just standards that are dropping, Miss Furroughs,’ said Grace, trying to turn her laughter into a hiccoughing fit.

At the edge of Rangoon, paddy-fields quilted the landscape. The traffic slowed to sludge, the beginning of a monstrous traffic jam that threatened to last all the way to Mandalay. Stuck in the jam, the school bus was a target for hawkers and beggars of every description.

Molly saw them first.

‘Miss,’ she said urgently. ‘Miss, look! Look!’

Five lepers clawed up at the windows of the bus. Faces without form, stumps fingerless. Allu was  uncertain, hesitant. Miss Furroughs barked at him: ‘Drive on! Damn you sir, drive on.’

The children gazed at the lepers, aghast. Joseph, the Mongol boy, started to grind his teeth and cry out. Grace ran down the length of the bus to comfort him and as she did so, there was a sudden lurch as Allu found a break in the traffic, and Hants & Dorset accelerated away.

The lepers were by no means the most distressing thing they encountered on the road north to Mandalay. By mid-afternoon, they had joined an enormous queue of lorries, ox-carts, and a sea of people, Indians, Chinese, Anglo-Burmese half-castes and a sprinkling of the Heaven Born, travelling in limousines and sedans. Grace got down and walked up the queue, north, towards Mandalay for a spell, simply to get some exercise. Two planes screamed past. Red, white and blue roundels – the RAF – but, to her astonishment, they opened fire, machine-guns stuttering into the traffic jam, blowing up a petrol lorry in a great cascade of orange half a mile ahead.

Grace remembered what Mr Peach had told her, that they’d sent back the radar kit to India. The poor airmen had no clear idea where the Japanese might be, had no way of telling who were enemy and who were refugees, so they were fighting blind. And that, back on the road, meant breathing in the stink of burnt flesh from half a mile distant.

‘The Japanese?’ asked Miss Furroughs. Grace hesitated, then shook her head.

‘Oh, sweet Lord, what a terrible time,’ said the headmistress.

‘No one knows where the Japs are,’ Grace mumbled.

They swept past broken bodies lying in blood-treacle, survivors stone-faced, the injured mewing in pain. In the back of one wreck – a lorry, once – she saw a tail of chalky
rubble leading to an off-white football, lying on a mat of charred black goo. With utter horror, Grace realised what exactly she was looking at: the chalky stuff had been someone’s backbone and the football a skull, the black the remains of skin, blood, vitals. And of all this had been a horrible own goal. The invisibility of the enemy made them all the more terrible.

At the end of the first day they planned to pass the night in a house owned by a planter, a friend of Miss Furroughs. The shadows were lengthening as the bus turned off the main road into a kind of heaven: peacocks strutting across a lawn, gorgeous flowers, blue delphiniums, scarlet poinsettia, snowy bauhinia, purple wisteria and yellow laburnum tumbling out of a rockery, a fishpond set in crazy paving. Hants & Dorset pulled up under the deep coolness of a cedar tree. Allu switched off the engine, slipped on the hand-brake and the girls piled out, to stretch and yawn and run on the grass. Grace turned to Miss Furroughs: ‘Heavens, we could be in Surrey.’

Of the planter, of anyone, no sign. The headmistress tapped on the door knocker. No one stirred. Allu tooted the horn once, lightly. No response. He leant on it, and the horn blasted across the lawn, igniting the peacocks in a paroxysm of squawks. Still, nothing. The children dozed on the grass. At length, Grace walked around the back and pushed open the door to the kitchen. Empty rooms decorated with oil paintings of stags at bay in the Highlands and stuffed pheasants in glass cases led to a large open space, lined with books and paintings, with a view of the plantation beyond. It would have been one of the most beautiful rooms she had ever been in, were it not for the white-haired planter, his face a violent green-black, his feet turning a fraction, to and fro, to and fro, as he swayed from the upstairs balcony, dangling from a rope.

On hearing the explanation for the silence, the headmistress plunged her head in her hands. Nothing was said to the children, but they seemed to sense the gloom of the adults. They got back on the bus, Allu intending to drive through the night. Later, Grace realised that it would have been wiser to stay at the suicide’s house, grim as it was, but the proprieties of peace-time still ruled their minds. They tortured themselves by trying to sleep on the bus.

Allu zig-zagged on the unlit road once too often and ended up in a ditch, on the edge of paddy-fields.

They might be able to sort it out in the morning but it seemed as good a place as any to stop, they thought, until the mosquitoes found them.

While the bus struggled to sleep, Grace sought out Allu and smelt his breath. It stank of moonshine. ‘Allu, you cannot drive the bus and drink. You are our only hope.’ She found his knapsack and rummaged through it, pulling out a bottle, half-full, of  hooch.

‘Miss, I am so very sorry. But without the drink I have no courage to drive.’

‘Oh, Allu…’

He grabbed hold of the bottle – he was a strong, wiry little man, despite his age – and lobbed it into the dark, setting off the frogs in the ditch to a new riot of belching.

In the morning, Grace had to beg for petrol from the retreating army. She had none of the right chits or signatures but it turned out that it was simple enough. All she had to do was stand by the side of a road, a blonde Englishwoman holding an empty fuel can upside down. Once the driver of an army lorry saw her, he would stop. The soldiers would clamber out, cracking jokes, offering petrol, making a quick brew of tea, playing bang-bang with the boys and flirting with the older girls, while Miss Furroughs clucked around like a perturbed mother hen.

By noon, molten heat fell from the sky. The bus clattered on, sending up a cloud of dust, creamy particles that plumed everywhere, up noses, into eyes, past lips pressed tight
shut. Impossible to drive a yard without every single window on Hants & Dorset that could open being open; impossible to breathe in a bus cloaked in its own fog of dust.

The things they saw: the face of a buffalo, brutal, staring out of the dust, missed by Allu by a chance few inches; waving puddles of mirages, of water promised but never produced; saffron-robed monks, staring at the bus; an old mad man, gibbering to himself, half-way up a pipal tree.

To keep fear at bay, they sang hymns until throats grew sore and mouths dry, ‘Now Thank We All Our God’ and ‘The Day Thou Gavest, Lord, Is Ended’. When the bus overtook an army convoy, they belted out ‘Onward Christian Soldiers’. The Fourteenth Army was a hodge-podge of all the nations of the Empire – Mussulmans, Sikhs, askari from the East Coast of Africa, West Africans, Hindus, Parsees, Buddhists, the soldiers, blue-black, brown, yellow and only occasionally pinkish-white – but they would wave at the singing bus as it stuttered past, savouring a moment of surreal innocence, before returning to their real world of retreat without end, of killing, and being killed.

Once a day, but every day, as dusk approached, Miss Furroughs let the girls have one song that wouldn’t improve their souls. Their favourite, much to her feigned annoyance, was ‘Somewhere Over The Rainbow’.

Just Hollywood trickiness, exploiting homesickness yet bottled up in that song, was something real too – their longing for a true home, for any place where they could feel safe – and Grace was never able to listen to ‘Hants & Dorset’ croaking out ‘Over the Rainbow’ without her eyes brimming.

They drove further and further from Rangoon, becoming more and more exhausted and crabby with each other as the journey seemed without end, past Gyobingank and Prome, Magwe and Taungdwingyi, into the Yenangyaung oilfield. The sun was falling and the ghostly nodding donkeys, the oil drills silhouetted by fading light, were a symbol of Burma’s
curse – because without the oil, the Japanese might have thought the country not worth the candle.  As they drove on, the road became more clogged up with the walking refugees. They were nearly all Indians, only a few Chinese and Anglo-Burmans. The Burmese proper, of course, had little cause to run as they saw the invading army as liberators. Time was when the Indians, especially the money-lenders, had lorded it over the Burmese. These days the boot was on the other foot, and, at night especially, Burmese thugs robbed and killed the Indian refugees, hacking off the hands and feet of stragglers, showing no pity.

For those who could walk, the road was the least dangerous place for the refugees, and on they trudged.

The luckiest refugees sat on top of carts, pulled by ponies or by their menfolk, wielding an umbrella from the sun. A few travelled in hand-pulled rickshaws,  like lords of creation, but most walked, clutching prize possessions – buckets, pots, blankets – under their arms or yoked on a stick across  their shoulders. One man pushed a bicycle with only one wheel. The condition of the walking refugees grew worse, the shade of almost every other tree sheltering an emaciated form, the green verges by the road littered with yellow pats of diarrhoea.

Cholera.

Nothing they could do to help but gaze at lives draining away, as they drove on and on.