Flight by Elephant (26 page)

On Tuesday 28 July, with his kitbag on the back seat, Mackrell now drove further west, to the ramshackle riverside town whose name he spelt Naraingunj, the Brahmaputra river port of Dacca. Here, he boarded a steamer and travelled through the evening, past the dark green outline of the intersecting valleys, through the rain. He disembarked at Goalundo, where the Brahmaputra and the Ganges meet. Here he boarded the night train to Calcutta, the
Dacca Mail
. He arrived at Howrah station in Calcutta at five in the morning.

Even then the Howrah Station tannoy was blaring, in English and Bengali. Having had to contend with the strong currents of rivers, Mackrell now had to contend with the strong currents of people. At one side of the main concourse were trestle tables loaded with documents, where sat officials already at work behind a cordon of military police. These were the reception committees and sub-committees for the refugees from Burma.

Most of the refugees ended their journeys at Howrah station, where they would also have to begin the rest of their lives. It has been recorded that on one day alone – 11 April 1942 – 15,000 people approached those tables for help. The first priority of the officials was to arrange food and clothing. There was also a customs check, which seems rather provocative in the circumstances. Then came the fraught questions of money and employment. There were separate committees for each community – Hindu, Muslim, Indian-Christian, Anglo-Indian, European, Burmese Chinese (although most Chinese had gone eastward, towards Yunnan and, in most cases, malarial death) – and the tables at Howrah represented the front offices of the camps and hostels established in the already teeming city of Calcutta.

Let’s take one community. ‘The Muslim sub-committee cared for some 113,000 evacuees and served about 460,000 meals, in addition to obtaining valuable assistance from the Islamic Hospital, until a special evacuees’ hospital was established. Over 14,000 patients were treated by the Muslim medical officers.’ That was written by Sir Reginald Dorman-Smith, who added the characteristic remark: ‘The situation was not an easy one to handle.’

But Mackrell did not trouble those harassed and sweating bureaucrats. Instead, he was met outside the station by one C. M. Macpherson, a fellow director of the firm of Octavius Steel and a former chairman of the Indian Tea Association. Macpherson drove Mackrell over the khaki-coloured Hooghly river into downtown Calcutta. He did so by the old Howrah Bridge. Alongside it, a new cantilevered bridge was being completed: two giant cranes inching towards each other, a slow courtship in the swirling rain. This new bridge would be strong enough to withstand the marching of thousands of men who would make for the Howrah trains, and head north-east to retake Burma. Mackrell stayed at Macpherson’s house for two days, making plans and arrangements.

Calcutta, July 1942 …

The hot rain falling on the peeling stucco palaces. The Hooghly flowing fast through the middle of the town, as though it has more important business elsewhere and doesn’t mind who knows it. The brown water is high at the Babu Ghat, where the ragged Hindus stand, thoughtful, half immersed. The water threatens the wharves and the dock railway that runs along the bank just there, between the river, and the Gothic High Court, which resembles the Palace of Westminster. The Houses of Parliament in the rain, then … except that the temperature is 105. The streets reek of diesel fumes; the rain drums on the roofs of the taxis, on the skeletal rickshaw wallahs, and on the bicyclists, some of whom veer about under umbrellas …

The traffic was even worse than usual that summer because the widest and straightest road, the Red Road – which skirted the maidan, or park – had been cordoned off and turned into an airstrip. Spitfires and Hurricanes stood upon it; ambulances were parked on the edges of the maidan; army tents billowed in the rainy gusts. Most of the Allied troops converging on Calcutta were quartered in Fort William, which stood on the maidan, but the fighter pilots were billeted at the white-stucco Grand Hotel on Chowringhee, which despite – or because of – the stucco that was perpetually peeling, looked as though it belonged in Brighton. The Grand was convenient for many bars and restaurants, the labyrinthine bazaars of the Hogg Market, and not too far (for those tongue-tied in the presence of Wrens, Waafs and nurses) from the brothels of Sudder Street. Of his own wartime furlough in the city, George MacDonald Fraser wrote, in
Quartered Safe Out Here
, of the pleasures of being ‘shaved by a squatting nappy-wallah, who used no lather but your own sweat and left your skin like glass … After which there was nothing for it but to rest in Ferrazini’s and linger over the Desert Sunrise, which was about a gallon of ice creams and syrups of every flavour and colour.’ He mentions that a Laurel and Hardy film was showing at the Lighthouse Cinema, a Betty Grable at the Tiger Cinema. In Calcutta – the Americans called it ‘Cal’ – a young serviceman could enjoy himself while he waited to move north-east for the fight to reclaim Burma.

Calcutta had been displaced by Delhi as capital of India in 1911, but it still housed the head office of the Indian Tea Association, and Mackrell held some meetings in its offices, located behind the white pillars of the grandly classical Royal Exchange building on Clive Street. Its chairman in 1942 was another Octavius Steel man, one C. K. Nicholl. It’s likely that Mackrell also visited the offices of Octavius Steel, on Old Court House Street. In Assam the tea was still growing, still being harvested, so there would have been some ‘civilian’ business for him to attend to, and some letters of congratulation to read.

Mackrell steps out of the Royal Exchange Building … Difficult to imagine this connoisseur of unspeakable weather going to the trouble of carrying an umbrella. A white linen suit, then, a sola topee and a Mackintosh cape. He looks at the parked aeroplanes with a feeling of … well, jealousy might have come in to it. Here were young men, performing life-threatening and life-saving missions over dangerous territory in appalling weather – just the kind of set-up he liked.

For the moment, anyway, he has time to kill. So he heads a little way north, let us say, towards Dalhousie Square, where he lights a cigarette in the doorway of one of the Calcutta gun shops. He enters the shop – a shadowy, dusty place smelling of incense, with buffalo horns around the walls. The Indian proprietor knows Mackrell, and they have a talk about the war. Difficult to avoid that subject in Calcutta, what with all the beery soldiers, and that airstrip running through the middle of town.

Japanese warships are menacing the Bay of Bengal. For some Indian nationalists, a Japanese incursion might be welcomed as presenting an opportunity, the enemy’s enemy being one’s friend. Britain had added insult to years of injury by declaring that India was at war without consulting the chief independence movement, the Congress Party, which was in danger of being outflanked by more radical nationalist forces.

In January of the previous year, Subhas Chandra Bose, a sometime mayor of Calcutta, a former President of Congress, and rival to Gandhi (in that Bose advocated the use of force to evict the British) had escaped from house arrest in Calcutta. Although an unlikely looking adventurer – bald, bespectacled and chubby – Bose had then apparently entered a John Buchan novel. Disguised as a bearded deaf mute, he fled India via Afghanistan and Russia (which was still allied to Germany at that point). From Moscow he was whisked to Berlin, from where the Nazis transferred him, by submarine, to Japanese-occupied Singapore. In 1943, he would be running the state of Azad Hind, or ‘Free India’, which, fortunately for the British, was confined to the Andaman Islands in the Bay of Bengal.

As for the Congress Party, it had terminated its role in provincial governments in protest against the ruling power’s unilateral declaration of war, so direct British rule had been imposed. But with India menaced by the Japanese advance through Burma, Britain needed the support of Congress in order to ensure the continued recruitment of Indians into the British Indian Army. Britain did not impose conscription on India, and, indeed, there had been a healthy flow of volunteers so far, because most Indians – the imperial grievance aside – were sympathetic to the Allies. In order to try and capitalize on this, Sir Stafford Cripps, who in spite of being a Marxist was a member of the War Cabinet, was deputed to negotiate with the Congress leader, Jawaharlal Nehru, and the Muslim leader, Ali Jinnah. He offered what was tantamount to full independence after the war in return for cooperation in the meantime. But it seems that Cripps was undermined by his own Prime Minister, that imperial diehard Churchill, and by the Indian Viceroy, Lord Linlithgow, and his offer was rejected by Congress as lacking in credibility, as not going far enough and carrying the taint of federalism. (The proposal envisaged secession for both the princely states, and the Muslims – two lobbies that Britain also had to appease.) Speaking for Congress, Gandhi described the Cripps offer as ‘a post-dated cheque drawn on a crashing bank’. He wanted immediate full self-government in return for war cooperation, and on 8 August, he would initiate the ‘Quit India’ movement, the most fervent of his civil disobedience campaigns.

Soon, Quit India would cripple the transport connections between Assam and Calcutta, so threatening the defence of the north-eastern border. But Gyles Mackrell would be back in the jungle by then. Even though well disposed towards Indians, it is unlikely that Mackrell was an Indian nationalist. But most people saw the writing on the wall, in that summer of 1942, and it would have been clear that the sheer ranginess of the life he had lived could not continue. On the other hand, all the important elements of that life – the physical risk, the engagement with nature and landscape, the logistical talent – might be compressed into one last jungle mission. One thing is certain: if Gyles Mackrell were to be evicted from India with immediate effect, the gunsellers of Dalhousie Square would lose a good customer.

… Cordiality in the gun shop, then.

On the afternoon of Friday 31 July, Mackrell walked through the rain to the Bengal Club on Chowringhee. Independence was coming, but for now a Union flag drooped in the rain from each of the corner turrets of the club, with a particularly big one on the central cupola. Mackrell walked through the door beneath that dome, where he gave his cape to a doubtfully grateful white-turbaned servant, and was greeted, as arranged, by a wiry, brown-skinned man – brown-skinned but not Indian. The Bengal Club did not accept Indians as members until 1959. This was the intrepid plant hunter, and loner, Frank Kingdon-Ward.

Towards the end of his Evacuation Report, Sir Reginald Dorman-Smith had written, by way of an aside: ‘Mr Kingdon-Ward, the explorer and naturalist, had been in Putao, which he left on the 15th May; avoiding the Chaukan Pass, he struck north and crossed the Diphu Pass, at 15,000 feet, and so, passing through Rima on the Tibet border, eventually reaching Sadiya in North Assam, after covering nearly four hundred miles in a period of just two months.’ It sounds simple when you put it like that. But the number of white people on earth who knew of the Diphu Pass was probably in single figures.

So here we have the two tough middle-aged bachelors and leech magnets, comparing notes over their whiskies and water (no ice in either case). They would have spoken about Millar, that original emissary of Sir John, whom they both knew; they would have talked about jungle routes on the Burma–Assam border; they would have talked elephants. Probably, Kingdon-Ward would have got on to plants and even though his mind was on other things – namely boats, as we will see – Mackrell, as a veteran of the Epsom College Natural History Society, would have listened with more than merely polite interest. They both liked a drink and a smoke, so their session might have carried on for some time.

Afterwards Mackrell walked around central Calcutta trying to buy some jars of Marmite, since he suspected he was going to have to deal with cases of beriberi. But everywhere he went it had sold out. He bought some jars of Ovaltine instead – not much use against beriberi, but he thought it would soothe people who’d been through jungle trauma.

Later that day, Mackrell fulfilled another social engagement. He went to Firpo’s on Park Street, to be congratulated and bought dinner by that faithful Catholic, soap and perfume magnate, Mr Jardine, late of the Tilung Hka and Dapha camps (at forty-five, he had been the white-bearded ‘Old Man’ of the Commandos) and Mrs Jardine. Their dinner might have been ravioli and ice cream, because Firpo’s was an Italian restaurant. It would have been a good dinner anyway, because Jardine was well off. Under the wobbling fans, and with light jazz playing, Jardine – who was quite deservedly putting on weight – filled Mackrell in on what had happened to the Commandos after they’d left the Dapha camp on 1 July.

Ritchie Gardiner, holding an umbrella as he rode on his elephant, had been continually bitten by leeches. The mahout then gave him a ‘salt stick’: a two-foot-long stick with a linen bag of rock salt on the end. If you only touched the leech with this, the astringent effect of the salt caused it to fall off, much to Gardiner’s delight. Young Bill Howe, with a rain cape wrapped around his shoulders, had also been very uncomfortable on his elephant, but he couldn’t walk any distance because of boils on his legs. At one point, Howe fell off his elephant, bursting a boil on the back of his leg, and he noted in his diary that ‘the thick green stinking pus simply poured out’, though whether Jardine recounted this detail over dinner is not known.

At Miao, the Commandos crossed by boat. They had then continued by elephant to Simon, then by boat to the golf course camp at Margherita, where they arrived on 6 July. From there Kendall was taken immediately by ambulance to hospital. All agreed that ‘he looked bloody’.

Jardine then presented to Mackrell a silver cigarette case, inscribed with the names of all the Commandos he had plucked from the jaws of death at the Dapha river. Jardine had undertaken the job of having it made up and engraved.

The Commandos had hatched the idea for the cigarette case on their long march. They were going to have one each for themselves, because at that point they didn’t know about Mackrell. They planned it as they slept in their bamboo huts, all in a row, staring up at the leaking roofs. One of them had suggested a gold sovereign be set into the case, but when they came out of the jungle, and stopped being quite so light-headed, that part of the scheme was dropped. The original plan had been for an inscription somehow commemorating their joint adventure, but the one decided upon after the advent of Mackrell read, ‘In gratitude for having saved our lives’, and Captain Wilson would also receive one. Aside from the inscribed signatures of the young Commandos, the name of Corporal Sawyer, drowned in the Tilung Hka, was engraved in capitals.