ELEPHANT MOON Read online

  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, setti
ng 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.

  A road sign, to Mandalay: thirty miles. Eyes locking on to the sign, staring down the length of the bus and out of the back windows, Grace saw, advancing on them, from behind, fast, a superior cloud of dust. Soon she could pick out four motor-cycle outriders and behind them a gleaming black Rolls Royce, its radiator so highly polished it mirrored the sun.

  An Indian refugee, gaunt, stick-limbed, saw the motorcade coming towards them too, and stepped out into the middle of the road, carrying a bundle containing a dirty white object in his coal-black hands, aloft.

  The motorcade kept pace but angled towards the far side of the road, kicking up dust, sweeping past the refugee with his bundle high in the air. The object, Grace realised, was a baby, long dead.

  The Rolls overtook the school bus and Grace recognised the wife of the Governor of Burma cupping her hands, her attention taken by a uniformed aide-de-camp sitting by her side lighting her cigarette. The far side wheels of the Rolls left the asphalt and bit into the rough ground at the edge of the road, and the grand party experienced a gentle bump, delaying the lighting of the cigarette for a second or two, and they turned a corner and were gone.

  How many dying refugees had Grace seen on the road? Thousands. She stood up in her seat to look back at the refugee with the bundle, but the bend in the road shut off her view. Collapsing in her seat with a jolt, she wondered, could a God of mercy order man’s affairs in this way? No, He could not.

  For her, at that precise moment, her faith in God and her belief, long drummed into her, that the British had an especial right to rule over other people, died.

  Mandalay, when Hants & Dorset lumbered through the city gates, was a paradise, the old citadel of the Burmese kings still full of colour and life and market-sellers, unscarred by war. They were billeted in the eerie grandeur – stained-glass windows, mysterious compass and arch designs – of a Masonic Hall high up on a conical hill, overlooking the roofs of the city.

  One evening, just before lights out, Grace discovered the two boys in the cellar of the hall, trying on strange hats and aprons. Half-laughing, she scolded the boys for their cheek and told them not to play with the Masonic stuff again. They left good-humouredly, but Grace suspected that they were hiding something from her.

  They grew too comfortable in the Masonic hall.

  On Good Friday, 1942, the school held a simple service, Grace going through the motions of prayer, her mind elsewhere. When the service was over, she caught up with Miss Furroughs in the garden overlooking the gilded palace of Mandalay.

  ‘We need to leave here, Miss.’

  ‘Oh, no, not that again. Can’t you…’

  ‘We need to leave Mandalay. The Japanese are on the march, again.’

  ‘No. It’s not necessary. We’ll stay…we’ll leave when there is an order. But…so…there’s nothing we can…’ Half-finished thoughts, barked out, the headmistress aggressively indecisive.

  ‘The monsoon will be here in May, then getting to India will be all but impossible. We’ve got to leave now,’ Grace insisted.

  ‘How do you suggest?’

  ‘The bus as far as it can go. Then walk…’

  ‘The bus is old, it won’t get very far. And the children cannot walk.’

  ‘I know the bus is old. But it hasn’t let us down so far.’

  ‘We could fly. People are heading for Myitkyina.’ She was referring to the last aerodrome in British hands in Burma, to the east, close to the border with China.

  ‘Miss, have you forgotten what happened at Rangoon docks? No room for half-castes. Will sixty-two half-caste orphans really get seats on an aeroplane? I don’t think so. It’s better that we drive as far as we can, west, and walk out of Burma.’

  ‘Miss Collins, these matters are not, are not…–’ The maddening half-sentence, ending in thin air.

  The Japanese suffered no such indecision.

  At noon on Good Friday, without warning, without benefit of air-raid sirens, the bombs started to fall on Mandalay, a city built of wood, of shacks and glorious gilt pagodas and royal palaces. The hall stood half-way up a hill, several hun
dred yards out of the city, giving them a hawk’s eye view of the destruction.

  They saw too much.

  A steady breeze from the west, from the Irrawaddy, cascaded sparks, then fires, igniting market stalls, knots of trees, houses, temples, churches, schools. First whole streets – and every living thing in them – and acre after acre of Mandalay were roaring an angry, raging orange. People washing their pots stood up, heard a whoosh of moving heat, and their lungs caught fire. Shopkeepers dithered, not knowing down which corridor of fire they had to run, and, in seconds, turned to ash and fat. Eucalyptus trees exploded before the rip-tide of heat, spitting out leaping tongues of flaming sap. Fur on fire, monkeys leapt from tree to tree, spreading the heat above the roof tops. At street level buffalo bellowed, stampeding, crushing a confusion of people running the wrong way, towards the flames. Survivors manhandled victims with fried skin to the hospital, only to discover that it was an inferno. A stick of bombs fell on the railway station goods yard, igniting the wagons of a fuel train, and the fire storm consumed the city.

  The children watched the city burn, listless, mute. There was nothing they could do. Grace fussed over the two boys, cuddling Joseph, who at the first sound of the bombs began grinding his teeth. Soon, even he stopped and stared at the horrors unfolding below them.

  It was around three o’clock when the alarm was sounded. One of the girls had seen a tiny figure making her way down the last of the steps carved into the hillside, which led from the Masonic Hall to the heart of Mandalay. Most of the path was hidden from them, zigzagging down the far side of the hill, but the last stretch was in plain view of the whole school. Grace called out to her, as loud as her lungs would allow: ‘Miss Furroughs, Miss Furroughs come back!’

  Her shouting was lost in the cacophony of a city burning.

  The headmistress moved slowly, deliberately, taking one step at a time. She did not turn back. She paid no heed as the sky grew dark, a pre-natural sunset. Miss Furroughs was three hundred, maybe four hundred yards down the hill. All Grace had to do was to get to her feet and run down and stop her. She was a much fitter woman and she could well have caught up with her. But for some reason Grace found it impossible to move. She stared and stared, immobile, mouthing: ‘no, Miss, no,’ again and again. The old lady was still in view, now five hundred yards from the hall, her path less steep, beginning to level out on to the plain where the city lay when the saw-teeth of engines sounded high in the sky, bombers coming in low for a fresh attack. The children ran for the safety of the Hall’s basement, half buried into the side of the hill. Grace shooed them in, and looked back, once. The last Grace saw of the headmistress was her white blouse and black skirt being swallowed up by the smoke.