ELEPHANT MOON Read online

  About The Book

  As the Second World War rages, the Japanese Imperial Army enters Burma and the British rulers prepare to flee. But the human legacy of the British Empire will be left behind in the shape of sixty-two Anglo-Burmese children, born to local women after affairs with foreign men. Half-castes, they are not acknowledged by either side and they are to be abandoned with no one to protect them.

  Their teacher, Grace Collins, a young Englishwoman, refuses to join the European evacuation and instead sets out to deliver the orphans to the safety of India. She faces impossible odds because between her and India lie one thousand miles of jungle, mountains, rivers and the constant, unseen threat of the Japanese.

  With Japanese soldiers chasing them down, the group’s chances of survival shrink - until they come across a herd of fifty-three elephants who, with their awesome strength and kindness, quickly become the orphans’ only hope of survival. Based on a true story, Elephant Moon is an unforgettable epic tale of courage and compassion in the midst of brutality and destruction.

  ELEPHANT MOON

  John Sweeney

  Contents

  About the Book

  Title Page

  Dedication

  Quotations

  Prologue

  Part One: Red Sun Rising

  Chapter One

  Chapter Two

  Chapter Three

  Chapter Four

  Part Two: The Number One Elephant Company

  Chapter Five

  Chapter Six

  Chapter Seven

  Chapter Eight

  Chapter Nine

  Chapter Ten

  Chapter Eleven

  Chapter Twelve

  Chapter Thirteen

  Chapter Fourteen

  Chapter Fifteen

  Chapter Sixteen

  Chapter Seventeen

  Epilogue

  Author’s Note

  About the Author

  Also by John Sweeney

  Copyright

  To the refugees who fled Burma in 1942 and the elephant men and their elephants, who did their best to save them.

  The elephant is nature’s great masterpiece…the only harmless great thing.

  John Donne

  Man and the higher animals have the same senses, intuitions, and sensations, similar passions, affections, and emotions, even the more complex ones such as jealousy, suspicion, emulation, gratitude, and magnanimity; they practise deceit and are revengeful.

  Charles Darwin

  Prologue

  1 May 1940, Rangoon

  MISTER Stripes the tiger, stuffed, mounted and plunging through the club wall, mocked Grace with his eye of green glass. Overhead, a ceiling fan shuffled the heat.

  ‘The Japanese can’t fly. They have a defect in the tube,’ Colonel Handscombe surveyed the others around the bridge table, holding on to his secret knowledge for as long as possible, ‘of the inner ear.’

  Looking away from her fan of cards out through the windows of the Pegu Club Grace glimpsed a gardener watering a green chequer-board of lawn, exquisitely cross-mown and surrounded by rose bushes, blooms, a herbaceous border. It could have been Lymington, were it not for a vulture by the cess-pit pecking out the guts of a white-bellied rat.

  ‘One heart.’

  ‘Also, they are myopic.’

  ‘Two hearts.’

  ‘And their balance is defective.’

  ‘Three clubs,’ said Grace, not rising to the bait.

  ‘So why worry about them? Eh?’

  ‘My dentist is Japanese,’ said Miss Furroughs, timid, pink-cheeked, a little white mouse of a rebel.

  Grace felt imprisoned by the walls of the room. Outside the club was an unknown city which she ached to explore, to see and hear all she could, ponies trotting by, the Rangoon Electric Trams, wheels biting rail, monkeys yelping and honking, the whole exquisitely alien world.

  Back home, the blossom would be out. It was 1 May 1940, and England was fighting for its very life. But here, in this backwater of the Empire, there was no war, only starch and protocol and sticky heat. What was so dreary to Grace was the pettiness of British life in Burma. Was it one of the Russians – Chekhov? Tolstoy? – who’d remarked ‘nothing worse than a provincial celebrity’. Whichever Ivan said that had probably met someone very much like the colonel: handsome-ish, tall, in his mid-forties, with a fine jaw, a sweep of grey hair, the pitiless grey eyes of a lounge predator and mediocre to the core. Grace had gathered he did something ‘hush-hush’ at Government House in Rangoon. Whatever it was, she found it hard to imagine a circumstance in which he could further the war effort. Yet the others appeared to think he was a catch.

  More fool them.

  Miss Furroughs sipped her sherry and said, ‘Three no trumps.’ Damn. That meant Colonel Handscombe would be dummy, so they’d be in for yet more monologues on the Japanese menace or eugenics or the price of fish.

  ‘Your dentist is almost certainly spying for Nippon,’ said the colonel. The cards fell on the table, a light patter of applause.

  ‘I speak as I find, Colonel,’ said Miss Furroughs.

  ‘You know what they’re all talking about in the bazaar now, don’t you? When the Japanese will strike.’

  ‘I have no idea about the military side of things, but Mr Magaguchi is a gentleman and quite the best dentist I have ever had. Nothing wrong with his balance,’ said the headmistress, relishing her rebellion.

  ‘The Japs can’t fly,’ repeated the colonel, his logic as circular as the sweep of the fan.

  ‘But they can fix teeth,’ the headmistress snapped back, so fast that Grace found herself gurgling out loud. She tried to hide her fit of giggles by faking a cough, but she somehow choked. Helpless, acrid-throated, she mouthed ‘water’. The colonel called out: ‘Boy!’

  No one stirred.

  ‘Boy!’ Handscombe barked, louder this time.

  An Indian servant, snow-white hair, his hands a-tremor, appeared bearing a mahogany tray and poured water from a cut-glass decanter into a tumbler filled almost to the rim with ice, decorated with a sprig of mint and a dwarf strawberry. Grace drank deeply, nodded her thanks, recovered her poise and only then did the servant bow and depart.

  ‘I rather think that gentleman hasn’t been a boy for a while,’ she said.

  ‘Boy,’ repeated the colonel.

  Pig, thought Grace.

  What about Miss Furroughs? She had trapped Grace into this dreadful game, so she was not beyond deviousness. A stern old-fashioned mouse, Grace was damn sure the way the headmistress was running the school was of no real use to the half-caste orphan girls, the human stain of Empire, who were supposed to live and flourish there. On the other hand, every now and then the eyes of the old lady would twinkle and she would say something fierce and sparky. Tiny, barely five feet, she seemed unafraid to squeak her mind. Grace sensed Miss Furroughs’ tendresse for Colonel Handscombe, yet the headmistress was more than happy to indicate when she did not agree with him, and Grace could not but admire her for that.

  The colonel began to bang on about why the three big clubs in Rangoon – the Pegu, the Gymkhana and the Boat – had to ‘maintain standards’. He sluiced back his gin and Indian tonic, dug out an ebony case from his white linen jacket, offered cigarettes around, lit up a Lucky Strike and puffed out a cirrus of smoke.

  ‘This pressure for us to give everything on a plate to the Burmese, let alone the Indians and the Chinese, has to be resisted. We can’t wear our shoes in their pagodas. Fine. They can’t wear their native costumes in our clubs. They don’t want to come to our clubs anyway. But if they do, all we ask is for them to wear a suit and tie if they’re a chap or a proper dress if they’re a girl. What could be fairer than that, eh?’

 
Play dribbled on for a few more hands until Grace sensed that someone had entered the room behind her back.

  ‘Mrs Peckham!’ The colonel clapped his hands, a sea lion at the zoo reacting to the arrival of a bucket of fresh mackerel. Miss Furroughs’s face turned vinegar-sour. The newcomer, a brunette in her mid-thirties, significantly younger than the headmistress, was the original fourth hand for bridge. Grace shot up, offering to withdraw.

  ‘No, no, no, I couldn’t possibly deprive you of the pleasure, Miss–’ returned Mrs Peckham, her voice silken, eyes weighing up Grace coolly, the youngest woman in the Pegu lounge by a decade or more.

  ‘Collins,’ said Grace. ‘Miss Collins. But I really must give way. I have enjoyed myself enormously.’

  ‘You are most welcome to stay, Miss Collins,’ said Miss Furroughs. It sounded like an order.

  ‘Yes, do stay,’ said the fourth, whose name Grace had forgotten. She added: ‘Mrs Peckham’s husband is in the Royal Navy and he’s at sea.’

  Colonel Handscombe blew his nose into his handkerchief while Mrs Peckham smiled woodenly, a medieval saint pierced by a red-hot poker.

  ‘I am most awfully sorry,’ said Grace, breaking the spell of unpleasantness, ‘but my father always used to say that too much pleasure is bad for the digestion. So, do take my seat Mrs Peckham, goodbye and thank you very much once again.’

  Backing out of the bridge room, she nodded at Mister Stripes up on the wall, whose glass eye stared on, unperturbed. She turned and picked up speed, flew down the stairs and skipped across the lawn, out of the club and onto the street, bent-double, cackling with glee. The morning mists had gone so there was still an hour or two left to walk around before the suffocating heat of the middle of the day made any exertion horrible, and Grace set out to indulge herself in the sights, sounds and smells within Rangoon from which the walls of the club sought to protect her.

  In tight white bodices and longyis, two Burmese women floated towards Grace, clouds painted on porcelain. Drifting towards the great river, she passed high walls hiding lush gardens, and was hailed by bicycle rickshaws tingling their bells. No thank you.

  A rich Chinese businessman piloting a brand new Mercedes with fusspot care slowed to offer her a lift. No thank you. A Sikh taxi-driver driving an antique Ford crawled beside her, imploring her.

  ‘Oh, leave me alone.’ Shaking her head, Grace walked on. From their entreaties, her decision to walk in the heat of the day appeared eccentric, no, peculiar, for a European lady. She didn’t give a tuppenny damn.

  A screeching cut the air. Rounding the corner came an ox-cart, the racket made by wheels spinning in wooden axles without benefit of oil, carrying a grand piano half-cloaked by a grey blanket, thick bandy mahogany legs peeping out from under the cloth. The driver, hidden by a straw hat, brushed a whip against the left-hand side of the lead ox and the cart turned down a lane towards a white-picketed house underneath a flame tree.

  One hundred yards on, to the west, the stupa of the great Shwedagon temple rose up above the city, sunlight, blisteringly bright, bouncing off its golden spire, a cathedral to an alien God.

  A pony, pitifully thin, plodded by, pulling a sweeper’s cart, trawling a host of flies and a great stink past branches sagging with blossom, air-bursts of jasmine and magnolia. For Grace, that moment fixed the smell of British Rangoon in her mind’s nose: perfumed blooms, stinking dung. Pye-dogs yapped at her from behind a ten-foot-high fortress made of cactus and bamboo. Startled, a little jumpy, she hurried on.

  Grace heard what she thought was the sound of a ship’s engine, a mechanical rhythm, rising and falling. She saw statues of half-lion, half-men, red-eyed and gilded, tongues lolling, guarding a shrine housing a Buddha, his mouth adorned with ruby-red lipstick, spirals of incense rising in the air, the prayer wheels whizzing away. The sound Grace had supposed came from a ship’s engine was really a dozen or so of the faithful, humming a chant.

  An ancient Hpoongyi – a monk, shaven-headed, clothed in saffron – leaned against a stick and bowed with ornate politeness, but a younger monk hurried by, staring at her and, as he passed, spat on the ground by her sandals. Grace was astonished and hurt.

  The old monk called after the pupil in Burmese querulously and, in perfect English, said ‘Good morning, Miss.’ He bowed again: ‘I am sorry for the rudeness of my pupil. He is young and foolish.’

  ‘Why is he so angry with me?’ Grace said. ‘Because I am a female?’

  ‘No. Because you are British. They think the British are like a house-guest who has overstayed his welcome.’

  ‘And what do you think, sir?’ she asked.

  ‘That one should not be rude to a guest.’ The old monk smiled, and bowed deeply for a third time, and shuffled slowly off.

  Beyond the Buddhist temple were wooden godowns, warehouses for rice, tea and rubber, a mosque for the Mussulmans, mostly from the Indian minority, a teak sawmill buzzing furiously, a Chinese temple, and shacks where you could buy a ball of rice and a cup of sweet green tea for a few annas, a fraction of the ten rupees for high tea at the Strand Hotel. A few yards back from the river’s edge lay a chaos of stalls, where hawkers sold monkeys gnawing at the bars of their cages, fishwives offered stinking cuts of river dolphin, mudfish and the huge-headed trevally. By sacks of saffron, turmeric and ironwood, traders stood chatting, smoking cheroots.

  The meat ponged to high heaven, dripped blood and was covered by a fizzing blanket of flies. What kind of animal carcass, Grace wondered, had these strips of flesh come from? Snake? Monkey? Elephant?

  Close to a stall noisy with squawking chickens, tethered upside down, a Burmese woman was selling a curl of amber imprisoning a tiny bee. The woman said something incomprehensible and a young Burman, passing by, stopped to translate. Earnest, fresh-faced, slight, he sported a careworn black suit in the western style, wire-frame glasses and was holding a book in his hairless right hand. His hair was slicked back and oiled. The Burman translated the amber seller’s price into beautifully enunciated but slightly old-fashioned, Victorian English. It was impossibly high – two month’s wages at the school – and Grace both wanted it very much and knew that she could not afford it.

  The Burman addressed Grace solemnly: ‘She says: “My Honoured Lady, you must buy the bee. It is fifty million years old, as old and beautiful as you are young and beautiful.”’ Blushing, Grace handed over a fistful of rupees to the amber seller, knowing that she could now barely afford to eat for months. The woman fastened the bee around her neck with a leather string. School dinners, grim as they were, would ensure she would not starve.

  Turning to thank her translator, she wondered whether he might be able to help her answer some of the questions that teemed in her mind. He bowed slightly as Grace reached out, accidentally touching him, stroking his face. Startled, he dropped his book. Grace, quicker than him, bent to pick it up, turned it over to examine the front cover. On it, a swastika.

  ‘Mein Kampf?’

  ‘Heil Hitler,’ he replied.

  ‘Are you enjoying it?’

  ‘Yes. It is the future of the world.’

  ‘Have you tried Pride and Prejudice? Same themes, but not half as tiresome. Heil bloody Hitler, indeed.’

  The Burman scuttled off pretty damn fast, almost knocking over a butcher carrying a roasted pig on a long skewer. The amber seller eyed Grace coldly, as if to say: ‘Why fall out over a book?’

  Alarmed that she might have stumbled on a Nazi Fifth Column, but also wary that she might be making too much of a trivial incident, Grace paid a visit to Government House, a fairy-tale castle in pink and white stone, the citadel of British rule. People called it St Pancras. An Indian servant in turban and silk cummerbund showed her to a waiting room, decorated by a pencil-thin lizard clamped to the wall above two black-and-white photographs, one of a fat Beefeater, the other of a thin king, Edward VIII, the last but one. To this corner of the Empire, news ambled on flat feet.

  After an ocean of time, an extraordinarily tall
Englishman entered, sporting a white shirt and knee-length white shorts, making him looking even more ridiculous than nature had intended. At the sight of the lone female, the half-baby-giraffe, half-man gulped, announced in a gravelly voice that his name was Mr Peach, and gulped again. He had a floppily cut head of very dark hair and, if you squinted in poor light, might just pass as handsome-ish. But he behaved as though she might bite him at any second, fear mixed with hopeless longing. In her driest, most matter-of-fact tone, she explained meeting the Burman in the market down by the river.

  ‘Mein Kampf, you say?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Oh dear. Would you care for a cup of tea?’

  Even as the outlying marches of the British Empire were being threatened by the Axis Powers, some things would not change.

  She would rather run away, but she was damned thirsty and a tiny bit intrigued. She nodded in a bored sort of way. He rang a bell and when a servant appeared ordered tea for two and some cake, if they had any, if it would be no trouble.

  ‘Can you describe this chap?’ asked Mr Peach.

  ‘A Burmese man, around average height, wearing a black suit, very worn, and a white shirt. Glasses. Oiled hair.’ He jotted down the details in a small navy blue notebook.

  ‘Any distinguishing features?’

  ‘None.’

  ‘Oh.’ He stared at her and gulped again and then gazed out of the window.

  ‘I’m terribly sorry. It’s not a very good description.’

  ‘Name?’

  ‘I didn’t catch his name.’

  ‘No. Your name, Miss. Your address and place of work, if any.’

  While he wrote her details down, he coiled and uncoiled his fabulously long legs and she suspected that he was trying very hard not to glance at the top of her blouse, and failing. He finished writing. Another pause, painfully long. Grace was about to get up to leave when the tall man spoke.