ELEPHANT MOON (3 page)

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 the 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…’

‘I shall do no such thing. Mr Peach, I really must be going…’

‘How about a drink? Champagne?’ And, almost without hope: ‘Cocoa?’

Blurting out some nonsense, she made her excuses to Mr Peach, the word ‘Bertie’ never crossing her lips. The aisle leading to the exit was clogged with customers, moving absurdly slowly, as if from a well-attended funeral. A champion hurdler at school, she took off, skittering over the banks of seats, astonishingly fast. He tried to make chase, but his long giraffe-like limbs got entangled in the flip-back seats, generating ribald remarks from people in the queue, and she was out of the door and into the night before he had got to Row K. Tucking herself into a cycle rickshaw, she laughed gaily at the absurdity, but also the sweetness, of a date with Mr Peach.  The rickshaw raced to the school, where she knew Miss Furroughs would be bent over a Jane Austen or one of the Bronte sisters, endlessly re-reading, and draining yet another small bottle of dry sherry.

Instead, the headmistress was sitting in her armchair, staring through her fingers clumsily masking her face.

‘My God, what’s happened?’

No answer, only a muted sobbing.

‘Miss Furroughs, please tell me, what on earth has happened?’

‘Haven’t you heard?’ She stared at Grace, her eyes red-raw.

‘No. I was at the cinema.
The Road to Zanzibar
.’

‘The wireless… the Japanese have bombed Pearl Harbour. The BBC are reporting that the Americans and the British have no choice but to go to war against Japan. This war is spreading all over the world.’

 Head bent, her delivery broken, staccato. ‘The last war, that was supposed to be the war to end all wars. That was why they all died. I had a lover, you know. I was twenty-five, not then a spinster, when I met him. He was forty, unmarried, a chaplain, Church of England. Such a good man. We met in Dorset, fossicking, at Easter in 1917. Had to return to his regiment in Flanders. On his next leave, we were planning to get married. We even booked the church. Killed at Passchendaele. He died so all this nonsense would never happen again. And now it is happening all over again. So he died for nothing.’

Without expression, she repeated her last few words.

Grace leant down to stroke her grey hair.

‘I think Mr Gandhi is right,’ said the headmistress. At the Pegu Club, over bridge, such talk was High Treason. ‘War is wrong, it’s just stupid and wrong.’

She began to sob, unbearably. To drown her crying, Grace found herself talking, opening herself up as Miss Furroughs had.

 ‘I never knew my mother,’ said Grace. ‘She died in childbirth. Father was – is – high-up in Whitehall, something in the Treasury. He sends cheques and short letters on my birthdays, loving me coldly, from afar. I was brought up by a succession of nannies, then placed in a small boarding school on the South Downs. I hated it. The winds swept through the dorm. Icicles in the lavatory in winter. I was achingly lonely. Shortly after the war started, Father used his clout and got me on a ship bound for Canada. I had just turned eighteen. I had never been at sea before and was as sick as a pig. I just wanted to die. The only place where I could fight the sea-sickness was out on deck but it was bitterly cold so I was wrapped up,
dressed up like the Michelin Man in duffel coat and jumpers. The cold cut you to the bone but better that, than the stink of people being sick on D Deck.

‘One night, very late, I was shivering so much I was about to turn in, when, underfoot, I felt a shudder. Deep, bass notes coming up through the soles of my feet, transmitted up my legs, then my spine, drumming into my brain. I hurried inside and began climbing down to my deck but had only gone one flight when the ship’s lights flickered, on and off, then died. Blackness. It was utterly terrifying. I turned around and began to feel my way up. The ship started to list. Climbing up that stairwell must have only taken a few seconds but it felt like years. I had to put my whole weight behind opening the door and then I almost fell out on deck, the sea at a crazy angle, the whitecaps and troughs almost above me, the salt-spray whipping into my face. Star shells lit up the night, fireworks. A destroyer zig-zagging towards  us, a great white surf foaming as her bow sliced through the waves.

‘Boom! Boom!
Depth charges mushroomed ahead, sending great fountains of water into the air, soaking me. A klaxon hooted and a man’s voice, so calm, as if he was reading the football scores, came over the Tannoy: “All hands on deck. Abandon ship.”

‘More people were coming out on deck. An old man in pyjamas asked me, “Have you seen Mabel?” Ropes dangled down. A lifeboat swinging on davits, an Indian seaman grabbing me, pushing me into a boat which rose up then fell down with the rise and crash of the waves. At school, they had drummed into us all that stuff about the British stiff upper lip. Well, that turned out to be nonsense. The British, some at least, weren’t selfless, but selfish, disgracefully so.’

The old lady was still sobbing mechanically.

 ‘I had never been so cold as in that lifeboat. A lurching, freezing darkness, hour after hour of it. When the moon came out we hoped for rescue. Instead, a great explosion. A tanker, half a mile away, had been hit. Small black figures, silhouetted by orange fire, crawled over
the tanker’s rails and leapt. The sea was burning. They were boiled alive.  I will never forget the screams. Long after the tanker had gone, the oil on the surface continued to blaze, making night, day. From the lifeboat, we could hear a few survivors cry for help. We tried to row towards them. A big wave lifted the lifeboat and I could see them, bobbing up and down. The destroyer reappeared and surged past us, curving left, then swerving right. We shouted for them to stop. It did not slow down.  It did not stop. The seaman next to me explained: “If she slows down to pick up those men from the tanker, even for ten seconds, she’ll be a sitting duck for the U-boats. So they don’t stop, ever. And everyone knows that.”

‘And then a man’s voice, as clear as a bell over the slap of the waves, “Taxi! Taxi!” For a dying man, a good joke.’

The old lady spoke for the first time in what seemed like hours: ‘Yes. That was brave of him.’

‘One felt so proud,’ said Grace. ‘By the time we managed to row to the men in the sea it was dawn. We called out: “Hello! Anyone there? Anyone alive?” No answer. The sea was covered with bodies, and not one of them was alive.’

The headmistress exhaled a long, deep sigh.

‘So, Miss Furroughs, I am very sorry for your loss. But the people who died in the boiling sea? And that chap who called out, “Taxi! Taxi!” They didn’t want this war. I fear Mr Gandhi is wrong. Putting our hands up and surrendering to Mr Hitler and now the Japanese is not the proper thing to do. I’m afraid that we’re going to have to fight, and fight like tigers.’

The only sound was the tick of the clock in the headmistress’s study. Grace ran her fingers through the old lady’s hair, mothering the woman old enough to be her mother. She hummed to herself the Bing number from
The Road to Zanzibar
, ‘You Lucky People, You’.

Try as she might, she could not get it out of her head.

December 1941, Rangoon

The Saturday after Pearl Harbour was the date of the annual pre-Christmas treat, part of the fixed calendar of the school year. A party of thirty girls would go to the Rangoon Zoological Gardens to admire the tigers, laugh at the monkeys, hiss at the snakes, and then have cakes or ice cream for tea. One year before, not to have taken the girls to the zoo just before Christmas would have seemed peculiar, but the mood in Rangoon was becoming uglier by the day. The evening before the trip to the zoo, Grace tried to raise her anxiety with the headmistress.

‘Miss Furroughs, I’m just wondering about the trip to the zoo. Do you think it’s a good idea to go?’

‘The girls are looking forward to it, Miss Collins.’

‘But I’m a little worried. The city has become unstable.’

‘The girls are looking forward to it, Miss Collins.’ The old lady returned to
Wuthering Heights
, the matter closed.

The daughter of a Burmese woman and an American oilman, long gone back to Texas, led the crocodile. Seventeen, but both looking and behaving older than her age and almost but not quite European in appearance, Emily was one of the stars of the school, noted for her ability to recite Miss Furroughs’ favourite poets – Keats, Wordsworth but above all Tennyson – from memory. In the old days, just six months ago, Emily’s pale cream skin would have been held to have been an advantage, but no more. If the Japanese did invade Burma, half-caste Emily was not European enough to be evacuated to India, but not Burmese enough to submerge into the local population. And that held true for all of the children at Bishop Strachan’s. Even a
few yards out of the school gates, Grace noted, more and more young Burmese were staring at the party in a way no-one could consider friendly.

The walk between the school and the zoo was only a mile long, but at one point they had to pass the street market by the river, where Grace had bought her bee trapped in amber. Even in December, Rangoon was fantastically warm, around 80 degrees Fahrenheit. Whatever the time of year, Miss Furroughs was a stickler that the girls must wear their uniforms of maroon cardigans and white dresses at all times. Grace thought that rule ridiculous, and allowed the girls the option of leaving their cardigans behind. The girls had set off in high spirits and as they passed an enormous Indian policeman doing traffic duty at a crossroads, he tipped his white solar topee at them – they all knew it was for Miss Collins’ benefit – causing a wave of chatter and giggles.

Scrawled in fresh red paint on any available surface, fences, walls, anywhere, were slogans in the otherworldly wriggles of Burmese script, their meaning beyond Grace’s grasp. Soon the crocodile passed the same red paint, this time in plain English: ‘Free Burma’, ‘Strike for Your Independence’, ‘Down with the British’ and ‘Asia for the Asiatics’.

Casting her mind back to the Burman with his copy of
Mein Kampf
Grace shuddered at what might happen if – or was it when? – the Japanese walked through the front door of Bishop Strachan’s. They called the British rulers the ‘Heaven Born’, so high and mighty they were, so far removed from the lot of the ordinary Burmese. The Heaven Born were snobbish and cruel about mixed-race children. They did their best to ignore them. But they would not harm them. About the intentions of the Japanese towards the living consequences of British Imperial lust, she could only feel dread.

Half-way along the market, the crocodile stopped dead. Grace jogged to the front to find Emily weeping, her white dress and face spattered by gobbets of red. Grace stammered: ‘B-b-blood?’

‘Betel juice, Miss.’

‘Oh, bless.’

‘Miss, I stopped the crocodile. I don’t want the other girls to see.’

Taking out a handkerchief from her handbag, Grace dabbed Emily’s face. ‘Who did this, Emily?’

The girl motioned to a group of young Burmese men in sarongs, who were staring at them, blankly. Arching her heels, she turned towards the men: ‘Excuse me, which one of you spat at my pupil?’

The shortest of the Burmese walked up to Grace, coming within an inch or two of her face, and spat, phlegm and betel juice dripping down her left cheek, just below her eye. It was quite the most disgusting indignity Grace had ever experienced. She wiped the spit off her own face with her bare hand.

‘How dare you! How dare you spit at my pupil, who has done no harm to you?’

Three of the men stood in front of her, blocking her path. The fourth and fifth circled around her back. No figure of authority was in sight. Calves trembling, heart thumping against rib-cage, in a voice as imperious as she could muster, she said: ‘Emily, would you please run back to the police officer at the crossroads and tell him to come here immediately. Immediately, Emily, if you please.’

The girl ran off, back down the crocodile. The men shuffled closer towards Grace, encircling her.

On the far side of the street a European couple, holding hands, were walking towards a black saloon. The hard white light at noon was blinding. But she knew him from somewhere.

‘Colonel Handscombe!’

Head jerking in recognition, he ducked into the car and was behind the wheel in seconds. The woman opened the passenger door, dived in and the car was accelerating away before Grace could finish her sentence. As it passed her she saw the two of them laughing at some huge private joke, and then the saloon turned a corner, fast, and was gone. But not before she had recognised the woman. Someone had mentioned her name just the other day, saying that her husband was on the
HMS Repulse
, steaming for Singapore. Ah, yes, Mrs Peckham.

The Burmese grew closer. Standing at a distance behind the knot of men threatening her, but somehow part of them, was an onlooker. Threadbare western suit, smooth face, oiled hair, glasses, carrying a book in his hand. The man closest to her made a move to fetch something behind his back. Grace caught a glimpse of an ebony handle – a knife?

‘Now, look here, you chaps,’ said Grace, her voice squeaking, high-pitched, ‘you may hate the British Empire and all that. Good for you. If you think I go “Ra-ra” every time I see a British soldier you’d be wrong. But these girls and I are not the bull-faced, earth-swallowing British army, we have done nothing wrong and frankly for you to go round spitting at us half-castes disgraces Burma. Old King Thibaw would be ashamed of you. You may well be the future of Burma, the new rulers of this land.’

The market-goers had seemed indifferent to the confrontation but as Grace found her voice some began listening to the blonde Englishwoman berating the Burmese youths. Many would not have understood a word she said, but about the tone of her voice, about a lone woman taking a stand, there was something urgent and brave.

‘People may well be on your side for a time, and they will welcome anyone who can help them see the backs of the British. But if you take power by force you run the danger of staying in power by force – better men than you will ever be have fallen in that trap – and
eventually, in ten, twenty, fifty years’ time the people will hate you. You may well be Lords of Burma but everyone will know what you are.’

Her right hand slowly raised, the index finger pointing at them in condemnation: ‘Nothing more than thugs and crooks who stay in power by thuggery and crookedness. If that is the future, then God save Burma. But right now every single man, woman and child in this market-place is watching you, watching what you do to us. So, how are you going to begin this “Burma for the Burmans” of yours? By spitting at half-caste orphans? By knifing their school marm? Is this the new Burma? Is this the best you can do?’

She stopped, conscious only of her fear and the hammering of her heartbeat against her ribs and the hatred in the eyes of the gang fixed on her. The market’s constant hubbub fell silent. No one moved. No one spoke. From the river beyond came the sound of a tugboat hooting. Nearby, chickens squawked and a pig snorted irritably.

From nowhere, a tiny Burmese woman – the stall-holder who had sold her the bee – appeared next to her, slipping her arm in Grace’s. She snarled something in Burmese at the gang. Grace had no idea what her friend had said, but it did not sound complimentary.

The gang melted away. Just before the reader in the threadbare suit disappeared, he studied her again, spat on the ground and treated her to a smile of royal sourness.

The Indian policeman came running, followed by Emily, but by then the men had vanished. Grace offered Emily her cardigan to wear, to cover up the red stains on her blouse. Emily put it on without saying a word, out of character for a girl with near-perfect manners.

‘Emily, I…’  Grace stumbled, her mind feeble with anxiety. ‘I’m so sorry.’ In truth she could think of no words to ease the fact that the girl had been spat at because she was a half-breed, a by-product of the British Empire. From that moment on, Grace detected an aloofness on the part of Emily that she found unsettling.

Grace’s friend who had sold her the bee had vanished before she had time to thank her properly. But Grace understood her swift disappearance was not impolite. A Burmese woman who stuck up for a European in public in these times could get into trouble.

They carried on walking in the stifling heat. A sign on the front gate of the zoo announced that because of the emergency it was closed. They returned in silence, Grace regretting that she had not persevered with her objections to this foolish trip. Her weakness with Miss Furroughs meant the girls – Emily especially – had suffered pointless humiliation.

When told about the spitting gang, Miss Furroughs dropped her head onto her chest and said nothing for a time, wringing her hands together. Sitting upright, she asked:  ‘How is Emily coping with it?’

‘Not very well, Miss Furroughs. On the walk back from the zoo, she seemed withdrawn. It was very disturbing. I cannot forget the look of the man who spat at me, as if I wasn’t human. For Emily, it must have been far worse.’

The headmistress nodded and said, ‘Poor Emily’ and repeated herself.

‘We shouldn’t have…’ but Grace left the sentence unfinished. The headmistress sat in her chair, staring ahead of her, her eyes unfocused.

Retreating to the empty staff room, Grace tuned the school wireless to pick up the BBC. Whistles, mush, then the atmospheric static gave way to ‘Lilliburllero’. The announcer, back in the studio in London, she imagined, sitting in a black dinner jacket, poised to read out the bulletin.  ‘This is the BBC News from London.’

A crackle, then the plummy voice told of the loss of the
Prince of Wales
and the
Repulse
, torpedoed by Japanese bombers off Singapore, hundreds of sailors believed to have gone down with their ships, missing, presumed dead.

Kneeling, she said a prayer for the sailors and poor, cuckolded Peckham, RN: ‘Our Father, Who art in heaven.’ As the words tumbled out, she tried not to think of those other sailors in the Atlantic, screaming as they drowned in the burning oil.

A walk in the cool of the evening brought Grace down to the river towards her favourite Buddhist pagoda, the one she had mistaken for a ship’s engine. Two saffron-clad monks hissed at her. Returning to the school by another route, she saw a line of Indian policemen armed with lathis – bamboo sticks topped and tailed with brass metal blunts – facing an angry crowd of Burmese.

Doubling back, she bumped into a living tree, which apologised profusely and started gulping.

‘Mr Peach.’

‘Sorry. Awfully sorry.’

‘I should have looked where I was going.’

‘You should be careful around here, Miss Collins. The Mussulman areas are safe. Anywhere near a minaret, within earshot of the muezzin’s call, the people will look after you. But in the Burmese Buddhist parts of town, I am afraid to say’ – he gulped again – ‘it’s not safe any more.’

His mouth opened and closed and his eyes darted around a point somewhere above Grace’s head. He wanted to say something more to her, but could he get it out by sunset?

‘Yes, Mr Peach?’ Something about him brought out a streak of cruelty in her. Did she enjoy playing with him, watching him suffer? Yes, she thought, she did.

Nothing sensible came from him, just his mouth sucking in and blowing out air.

‘Well, Mr Peach. I must be on my way.’

‘Miss Collins? Why did you run away from me?’

Ah, finally, he’d managed to get it out.

‘A joke.’

‘You don’t hate me, then?’

‘Of course not. Don’t be silly.’

‘Well, I must… I ought to let you know what’s going on. The situation here is Rangoon is not good. Our chaps have yet to hold the Japanese. We keep on falling back. Everywhere. I shouldn’t tell you this,’ he lowered his voice until it was just on the edge of hearing ‘but I’m now doing intelligence stuff. Last week the only early warning radar kit in Burma was flown back to India. The RAF is next to leave, to save the planes for the battle for India. They’re making plans to evacuate the Europeans from Lower Burma, but not to tell the “useless mouths”.’

‘What?’ gasped Grace.

‘They call them the “useless mouths”. Refugees, people who can’t fight. The Indian civilians chiefly, and the mixed races. Like the girls at your school.’

‘Mr Peach!’ She cried out his name so loudly that a British police sergeant turned his head and fixed them with a stare. Lowering her voice, she tried again: ‘You’re not for one second suggesting that the British Empire is secretly planning to abandon Burma?’

Jaw firm, mouth no longer opening and closing like a goldfish, he made no sound at all, but, almost imperceptibly, nodded his head.

The next morning, over breakfast, Grace told the headmistress about the two great battleships, now lying at the bottom of the sea.

‘Mrs Peckham’s husband?’

‘I don’t know,’ said Grace. ‘Very few survived.’

Silence between them.

‘Miss Furroughs,’ Grace continued, ‘people are talking about evacuating Rangoon. They are saying that the military situation is gloomy, that the necessity of defending Britain means that there aren’t enough soldiers and tanks and planes for the Far East. I believe that, for the safety of the children, we should consider planning to evacuate the school from Rangoon and arrange to travel to the safety of India.’