ELEPHANT MOON Read online

  ‘He’s almost certainly a member of the Black Dragon Society. These chaps are Burmese nationalists who side with Nazi Germany and the Japs. They’re not proper Nazis. I don’t think they’d know the difference between the SS and the Boy Scouts. They just want to see the back of us. Many of them have sworn an oath: “I will free Burma heart and soul without flinching from my duty even if my bones are crushed and my skin flayed.”’

  ‘Fanatics?’

  ‘I’m afraid so. Usually the hard core dress in local costume, sarongs and the like. They smoke cheroots, not Lucky Strikes, their women are encouraged to boycott western clothes. In their hair they wear scarlet dak blossoms or stars of jasmine.’

  ‘That sounds beautiful.’

  ‘It is.’

  The tea arrived but no cake. ‘Shall I be mother? We’ll log your chap. He stands out in that he was wearing a western suit. One of them pretending to be one of us. That makes him interesting. He might pop up somewhere else.’

  ‘I just thought I should tell someone.’

  ‘Yes.’

  The pencil-lizard skittered a foot or two across the wall, and then froze.

  ‘Mr Peach, may I ask you a question?’

  ‘Yes, of course.’

  ‘Why is there a “western dress only” rule in the clubs?’

  ‘Back in Queen Victoria’s day, when we conquered Burma and chased away their king, our chaps sauntered around holy temples in boots. A great insult. As time has gone on, the Burmese have insisted that if we visit their temples we must take our shoes off. Tit-for-tat, they can’t come to our temples – the clubs, the Pegu and the Gymkhana and the Boat Club – without wearing western suits and frocks. Burmese nationalists have taken to wearing their native dress as a political statement. It’s war by dressing up. Some say the rule against native dress is a not very subtle way of saying “No Burmese welcome”.’

  ‘What do you think, Mr Peach?’

  ‘Personally?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘It’s a not very subtle way of saying “No Burmese welcome”.’

  ‘May I ask another question?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Can the Japanese fly?’

  ‘They don’t have wings.’

  ‘No, I mean I was told that the Japanese have a defect in their inner ear, which means they can’t fly planes.’

  ‘Balls. Who told you that?’

  ‘A gentleman in the Pegu Club.’

  ‘A moron.’

  ‘A Colonel Handscombe.’

  ‘Ah.’

  ‘Ah?’

  ‘Colonel Handscombe.’ He looked away, then turned his gaze back to her and said flatly: ‘He’s my boss.’

  Mr Peach looked so sheepish, she couldn’t stop herself bursting out laughing.

  Another long pause. ‘The Japanese can fly. They bombed Nanking, killing thousands. They’ve pretty much bombed every nationalist-held aerodrome in China.’ He paused. ‘As it happens, I’m trying to learn Japanese at the moment.’

  ‘Why?’

  ‘To pass the time.’ A reply so transparently nonsensical that she could not help being a little intrigued.

  ‘No one learns Japanese to pass the time, Mr Peach.’

  He said something in a soft lilt, strange tones rising and falling, and then translated:

  ‘One fallen flower returning to the branch?

  ‘Oh no!

  ‘A pale butterfly.’

  Grace asked, ‘Poetry?’

  ‘They call it a haiku.’

  ‘That’s beautiful.’

  ‘Colonel Handscombe is, well, he–’

  ‘Is a crashing bore on the subject of the Japanese.’

  ‘Yes,’ Mr Peach said. ‘But a bore is not necessarily wrong.’ In his earnest deliberation on the matter, she perceived a deep sense of fair play, both exasperating and quietly admirable. She raised one eyebrow a fraction, signalling mild disagreement.

  ‘He – we – should be worried about the current lot in power in Tokyo. They’re pretty ghastly, frankly, and are in bed with Hitler. But the people, the culture are quite different. And the language has a rare beauty, an economy of expression. What did you make of the Pegu?’ he asked.

  ‘The liveliest thing in it is the tiger.’

  ‘The tiger’s stuffed.’

  ‘Yes, Mr Peach, I noticed.’

  The heavy melancholy lifted, his solemn, older-than-his-years expression changed, his face breaking into a tentative grin. He made to add something, then hesitated.

  ‘Go on, Mr Peach.’

  ‘I’d rather you didn’t tell anyone this, Miss Collins, and in particular Colonel Handscombe.’

  ‘No, I absolutely won’t.’

  ‘But I rather think these Burmese chaps might have a point. Not being on the same side as the Nazis and the Japanese military, obviously, but if you’re the Burmese, you might not be very impressed with the British Empire.’

  The fan wafted the cloying air this way and that. Grace waited for an explanation.

  ‘In 1886,’ Mr Peach said, ‘we deposed King Thibaw, forcing him into exile. They have not forgotten that they used to be the masters of their own land.’

  Fishing out his notebook, he flicked through a few pages: ‘Listen to King Thibaw’s lament to his late father, King Mindon: “The golden-footed lord of the white elephant, master of a thousand gold umbrellas, owner of the Royal peacocks, lord of the sea and of the world, whose face was like the sun, always smoked the Esoof cheroot while meditating on his treatment of the bull-faced, earth-swallowing English’’.’

  The notebook snapped shut.

  ‘The poor king was reduced to advertising cheroots. These are a proud people. The Burmese didn’t ask to be ruled by us. We invaded, deposed their king. They resent our presence here very much. But it’s worse than that. I’m sorry- I hope I am not boring you?’

  ‘Not at all, Mr Peach. I was driven to distraction in the Pegu Club. You are not boring me in the slightest. Do carry on.’

  People, men in particular, told her that she was an excellent listener. There was something, they said, about her beauty – the freshness of it, the lack of artifice – that brought forth confidences. Or was it just that men liked staring at her and had to fill in the awkward silences somehow?

  ‘We say we are on a civilising mission, but there are about eight thousand Europeans in Rangoon, the lords and ladies of all Burma. With a tiny number of exceptions, the Burmese have been excluded from all our clubs, gymkhanas, social events. There is a pretence of power being handed over to the Burmese politicians, but everything that matters is still handled by the Governor, from Government House, from here. I have a friend, a professor, an Englishman, who speaks the most beautiful classical Burmese, knows more about this country than any Englishman alive, married to a Burmese lady of real charm and accomplishment, who studied at the Sorbonne. And because he is married to a Burmese who chooses to wear national dress, my professor friend and his wife are not welcome in all the grand European clubs in Rangoon. To be accepted, they have to wear our clothes in their capital. A deliberate humiliation. The point is, Miss Collins, the Burmese hate us and they want us out of their country. That’s why the chap you met was carrying Mein Kampf. To the Burmese, my enemy’s enemy is my friend.’

  ‘Oh dear.’

  ‘They don’t realise that my enemy’s enemy can also be my enemy.’

  He gulped again, a sign that he had something more on his mind.

  ‘Please do carry on, Mr Peach.’

  ‘What I have to say is in confidence.’

  ‘Trust me.’

  ‘Can I?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘It does not paint our way of doing things in a good light, I’m afraid.’

  ‘Carry on.’

  ‘Very well. You’re most kind. Last year a British officer, Lieutenant Fortescue, ginned up to his eyeballs, drove from the Gymkhana Club to hurry back to his regiment. He raced through a red light, crashing into a car carrying two Burmes
e ladies. They went flying, rolled into a ditch and were badly hurt. The older lady, a Chinese Burman, suffered a fractured skull, her niece broke her pelvis, rupturing her bladder. The case came before a young magistrate and he applied the law, finding Fortescue guilty, jailing him. There was an almighty row. People said that British officers shouldn’t be jailed because of a silly accident, and the Burmese can’t drive anyway. The officer appealed against his sentence. Everybody and his dog turned up for the appeal. The newspapers, a whole gang of officers from this chap’s regiment, their girlfriends, their aunties. The senior appeal judge for Lower Burma took about five minutes before he freed him. I’m quoting from memory, but the appeal judge said: “I see no reason why an officer, whether he happens to be a British officer or a Burman holding the King-Emperor’s Commission, for a piece of isolated negligence, however gross, ought to be deprived of a useful career in the public service by serving a term of rigorous imprisonment’’.’

  ‘I see,’ said Grace.

  ‘Really? I fail to understand why an army officer guilty of gross criminal negligence should expect to get away with it just because he’s British.’

  ‘No, sorry, that’s wrong.’

  ‘The judge made the point that he would apply his interpretation of the law equally, whether the culprit be a British or a Burman officer.’

  ‘That does seem fair.’

  ‘There is no Burman officer in any regiment of the army.’

  ‘Ah. So, in reality, that’s not fair at all.’

  ‘No. In reality, the opposite of fair. After the appeal, Fortescue was treated like a hero and the junior magistrate was transferred out of his job and shunned. When he goes to the clubs, especially the Pegu, everyone falls silent until he leaves.’

  ‘Oh.’

  ‘I am that junior magistrate.’

  ‘I am very sorry to hear that, Mr Peach.’

  He stared out of the window, lost in his own reflections. After a while, she stirred and he studied her again, and gulped.

  ‘I must be going, I’m afraid,’ said Grace.

  ‘Yes. Thank you very much for coming and thank you for the information.’

  A Sikh guard bowed to her deeply as she left the pink and white castle and walked out on to the street. Grace wondered what kind of empire it was, if its very own guardians no longer believed in it?

  The first letter inviting her to take afternoon tea with him arrived the following morning.

  Stone spelt wealth in Burma, plain bricks meant some money and the poor made do with wood. The old schoolhouse at Bishop Strachan’s was brick, the rest – classrooms, offices, a three-storey dormitory for the girls and the little chapel – were made of teak on low wooden stilts, the buildings forming three sides of a square. The orphanage had been set up by a pious Victorian, a good man in a crowd of hypocrites, to give girls abandoned by their Burmese or Indian mothers and, of course, their adulterous British or American fathers, something of an education.

  To Grace the school was a dead end, not remotely useful to the girls, not seriously of benefit for the war effort, badly paid – for the first time in her life money was becoming an issue because her father had lost ‘rather a lot on bonds and shares’ invested in Europe – and irrelevant for the future of these unwanted children.

  After the school day was over, she set out for the headmistress’s office and tapped on her door.

  ‘Come! Miss Collins? What a pleasant surprise? How can I help?’

  ‘Miss Furroughs, I just wanted to have a word with you about…’ Grace’s courage started to sink, bow first. ‘…I just thought that… well…’

  ‘Go on, Miss Collins.’

  ‘…the syllabus, Miss Furroughs. It seems a little…’

  ‘…a little what?’

  ‘Old-fashioned. We are teaching the girls the correct way to curtsey, how to address a bishop, how to write a sonnet, how to memorise the six wives of Henry VIII: “divorced, beheaded, died…”’

  ‘Are you suggesting we change the curriculum, Miss Collins?’

  ‘Well, I thought that it might be useful to teach the girls something, perhaps, a little more modern, a little more practical, a little more about, say, Burma.’

  ‘Burma?’

  ‘Burma.

  The old woman’s face turned to flint.

  ‘How long have you been at Bishop Strachan’s, Miss Collins?’

  ‘Two months.’

  ‘Well, Miss Collins, I have been here two decades, since 1920, to be exact. And I would not dream of changing the syllabus. We teach the girls how to behave in polite society, as if they were in Regent Street. That is how we have struggled along in the past. And this is how we will continue in the future. Thank you, for your observations, Miss Collins, but if you forgive me I have some administrative work to attend to.’

  Cast down, Grace retreated to her room, little more than a closet, housing a single bed, a chair and a side-table, a wash-basin and a long shelf, on it a few novels, a silver hairbrush and a black and white photograph of her mother in an ebony frame, a woman of rare beauty whom Grace had never known. On the side-table beside her chair was a stack of the girls’ exercise books.

  Running a hand through her hair, limp in the suffocating air, she began going through their homework, here and there tut-tutting at bad spelling or ticking a sweetly-written sentence. Marking the books seemed to Grace, in the great scheme of things, pointless. By her side was a copy of the Rangoon Times. Yet more news of the Nazis rolling up the map of Europe, of ships sunk, of battles for places she’d never heard of, lost. Time oozed by, but suddenly it was pitch black outside.

  Kneeling in front of her bed, she prayed for victory, for her father, for the children she was teaching – God Help Them. She switched off the light, stepped out of her clothes and, naked, clambered underneath her mosquito net into bed.

  The slow wet heat of Burma lay on her, as thick and prickly as a woollen blanket. She lay sleepless, writhing this way and that, guilty that she was playing no part in the great battle being fought and lost in Europe. Grace wanted desperately to do her bit yet her absent father had managed to place her out of harm’s way in this over-baked, stinking backwater. Good people were dying and she was doing nothing of consequence to help them, to defeat the evil that was swallowing up the world.

  Nearby a pye-dog yelped and, much further off, a train sloughed through the night. The slow rhythm of teaching helped soothe Grace. Geography had always been her best subject and she had a knack for making it interesting. She shunned the map of Europe, it being full of traps. But she explained, as best as she could, how the earth formed and the seas rose and fell and the ice came and went and why volcanoes boiled up and rain fell down. They listened and absorbed. In other lessons, Romeo and Juliet still had a power to move young hearts, and her classes lapped up the Tudors and Stuarts, grew fascinated by the chopping off of heads, wooed by Keats, dulled by geometry – eeyuck – laughed out loud at Voltaire, and listened, rapt, to the stories of the giants of medicine, astronomy and exploration. Occasionally – or, especially during maths - the girls tempted her off the syllabus and asked questions of affecting simplicity: what is England like? Can you eat snow? Have you met the King?

  ‘It rains all the time’, ‘yes’ and ‘not yet’ were by no means good enough, and she lost herself utterly, talking about the colours of an English autumn, or recounting a snowball fight in Sussex or the mild affection the British had for a King who, the complete opposite of Mr Hitler, could barely speak a sentence without the most dreadful stammer but, unlike Mr Hitler, sought to talk politely about other people. The school bell clanged, breaking her reverie. Thirty young faces, smiling to themselves. They had tricked her away from the hypotenuse and the cosine, yet again, and she burst out laughing: ‘you naughty terrors!’ It became the catchphrase they used against her, to be sung out by the girls whenever they suspected they had the edge on her, which was more often than not.

  Kneeling by her bed one morning, during th
e daily ritual of washing herself with a jug of water, a moment of realisation – she’d fallen in love with this hopeless school teaching dead lessons to black-balled children in the back end of beyond. Teaching her forgotten orphans, abandoned and denied by their parents, was part of it, part of the war against ignorance and hate. Marking essays, ticking the correct use of the apostrophe, taking off marks for poor punctuation, was her part in the fight against the men who marched in step; semi-colons and sonnets against tanks and Stukas.

  True, Grace disliked how ‘the cream’ – pretty rancid cream, in her book - of European society in Rangoon treated the children at close hand: sly looks as the school crocodile of half-castes passed by, the dearth of invitations for the children to meet with other Christian schools, how the girls from Bishop Strachan’s were placed at the back of the side aisle for services at the Anglican cathedral. But the children were a blessing, sometimes troubled but more often smart, loving and lively, and she relished the delicious irony of implanting in them everything she herself had been taught by the hand-maidens of British rule: every grace, every nuance of fine breeding, the superstructure, she had begun to suspect, of a cardboard empire.

  The more Grace loved teaching, the more she had in common with Miss Furroughs, the less starchy her headmistress became towards her. The flint began to soften.

  On a glorious Friday evening in 1941, after Easter but before the monsoon broke, Miss Furroughs popped her head around Grace’s door after school and invited her around to the headmistress’s study for just a small glass of sherry. They drank till two in the morning, emptying two and a half bottles, hooting with glee at the folly and foibles of British rule in Burma, of teaching, of men. From that time on, Grace woke up every morning with something she had never had before – a purpose in life – to give ‘her children’ the very best possible education they could enjoy as the world hurtled to hell in a dung-cart.

  Time-tables, earthquakes, Macbeth, igneous, metamorphic and she never could remember, French irregular verbs, A Midsummer Night’s Dream, amo, amas, amat. School life treacled by.

  One evening, as the grim year of 1941 was drawing to a close, Grace was taken to see The Road to Zanzibar at the New Excelsior Cinema in Rangoon by Mr Peach. Grace had no idea why she had said yes to Mr Peach’s pleading: boredom at refusing him for the thousandth time, she supposed. Or a failure to come up with ever more incredible excuses as to why she couldn’t spare the time. Bing Crosby’s tunes were catchy, Bob Hopes’s jokes – ‘I’m so nervous my bed is still shaking… It’s a snake’ – dire but somehow annoyingly cheering, Mr Peach’s palm on her bare knee soft, wet and not so terrible that she had to remove it. The moment the film was over and the credits started to roll, he grasped her hand, blustering: ‘Don’t call me Mr Peach. Herbert… Bertie…’