Flight by Elephant (31 page)

Bill and Nan Howe had three children, and adopted two others. He died aged ninety-three in 2005, the cause emphysema triggered by a lifetime of smoking. If the inscribed silver cigarette case that sits on the kitchen table in Nan Howe’s eighteenth-century house in rural Hertfordshire has gained an unfortunate association as a result of this, you wouldn’t know it. She is extremely engaging, and possessed of great vivacity … which the present author managed to check for a moment by saying, ‘It sounds as though you and Bill had a very happy fifty-six years together.’ ‘He was everything,’ she said after a while, ‘everything …’ and tears were in her eyes. She has seven grandchildren and four great grandchildren. Age permitting, they know about Gyles Mackrell. Asked whether these children might have reflected that they wouldn’t be around but for him, Nan Howe says, ‘I don’t know but I certainly have.’

The five-stone Gurkha Mackrell lifted down from an elephant on Wednesday 10 June died on his way back to Miao, and was buried near the Debang river. It is thought that a dozen of the Gurkhas he’d brought across the Dapha died soon after as a result of their ordeal.

… And then there is Captain John ‘Reg’ Wilson, who had caused Mackrell to become uncharacteristically testy when he turned up at the Dapha river on 17 June 1942.

In 1943, Wilson returned to the jungle as a lieutenant colonel, later a colonel, in ‘V’ Force, which operated behind the lines in the vicinity of the Assamese border. Wilson was deep into the blue nonetheless, and went six months without seeing a wheel. He was mentioned in dispatches, and actually received a second cigarette case inscribed in gratitude with the names of some other men he’d helped out – this time American soldiers. In 1945, Reg went back to tea planting, managing a garden of 600 acres. In 1947, he was Secretary of the Assam Branch of the ITA, and holder of the OBE ‘for services to India’. He returned to England in 1955, and fulfilled an ambition he’d long harboured: he became the secretary of a golf club, in fact two of them. This suited his sociable nature and his love of sport.

In 1945, Reg had married a childhood sweetheart, Nancy. There are pictures of them dining in what may be Firpo’s restaurant in Calcutta: Nancy looks delighted to have landed such a handsome catch, and she never minded that Reg played golf more or less every day after his return from India. They had no children, but Reg’s nephew, Brian Wilson, a retired solicitor who lives in Cornwall, remembers him as ‘a lovely man, the perfect uncle’. Wilson eventually returned to Yorkshire, buying a house just off the front in Scarborough.

It was the cigarettes that did for Wilson as they had Bill Howe, and he died of emphysema in 1967.

We know that Edward Wrixon Rossiter was given vegetable marrow jam after being rescued by Mackrell because of a three-page letter he wrote to his mother in Dublin on his arrival in Calcutta. The letter is dated 30 October 1942, and begins ‘My dear mother’. It provides a brisk, lucid account of his trek, which he regards as having been an unnecessary penance. ‘It had been, as I think I wrote to you, my intention in case of need to go to China and not India. The road to China was comparatively easy, and from various places in China I could have flown to India.’ But he had been ‘ordered by Govt’ to proceed to India, and by a route he obviously thought ridiculous. He agreed to go that way only because he’d been given to understand that a rescue party was already on its way to meet any Chaukan evacuees. Of the three-week period of near starvation before the first food drop, he informs his mother (a fitting person to receive such a confidence) ‘my bowels never moved once’.

His companion in the jungle, Sir John Rowland, is not mentioned, and the nearest he comes to talking about Mackrell is ‘we were extremely fortunate to meet a relief party with elephants’. Rowland ate the marrow jam ‘made just as you made it’. Of his arrival at Margherita, he says, ‘I stayed a very comfortable night, had an excellent meal, fish and a bread pudding, the latter so good that I still remember it, also had a warm bath – the first for four months.’ To read the letter brings a mounting sense of unease at what is not being said. Then, in the penultimate paragraph, ‘I don’t think there is anything else of interest that I can record. We were just over 4 months on the journey … no Burmans accompanied us …’

No Burmans, that is, except his pregnant wife and their half-Burmese son, neither of whom is mentioned in the letter. Well, perhaps this is not an outright fib because Rossiter’s wife, Nang Hmat, was a Shan. The news that he had lately married a woman, let us say
from
Burma, might have been all too interesting to his mother, because it was not the first time.

The story of Edward Rossiter’s first marriage is told in a book published in 1998 called
A World Overturned
by Maureen Baird-Murray, who was the second daughter of that marriage, the first being a girl called Patricia, who
is
mentioned in the closing salutation of Rossiter’s letter to his mother: ‘best love to yourself and Patricia’.

A World Overturned
reads like a sub-tropical
Jane Eyre
, and begins with Maureen’s description of how Rossiter met her Burmese mother, Khin Nyun. It was 1930, before the time of Rossiter’s appearance in the above-mentioned book by Maurice Collis,
Lords of the Sunset
. (Whatever Edward Rossiter’s flaws, he has twice appeared in fine books.) In 1930, Rossiter was a probationary Assistant Superintendent of the Burma Frontier Service, and moving between various locations. Maureen Baird-Murray writes, ‘It was while my father was on tour and passing through Taundwingyi that he stopped at a cheroot factory and caught sight of my mother. Struck by her beauty, he made several attempts to engage her in conversation, but it was to no avail as she kept running away to her mother, for she spoke no English and stood in some awe of the foreigner.’

But Edward was ‘not to be deflected’. He negotiated a meeting through the headman of Khin Nyun’s village, and they were married in April 1930. On the marriage certificate, Rossiter’s age was given as ‘Full’ and Khin Nyun’s as ‘Minor’. Maureen was born in Mongyai in the Northern Shan States in April 1933. The first daughter, Patricia, had been born in 1931, and Maureen recounts a fleeting family life in Loilem, in the Southern Shan States, where Edward Rossiter was now based. She recalls him as a tall, stern looking man in khaki shorts, with green eyes, and her mother as

The shadowy playmate was Patricia. For a while, the two girls were known as Big Baby and Little Baby, because Rossiter hadn’t got around to naming them. His sister sent two hairbrushes for the girls from Ireland, and the hairbrushes were marked ‘Patricia’ and ‘Maureen’, so that’s what the girls were called.

In late 1934, Edward took his wife to Dublin; she was ill, possibly with uterine cancer, and the intention was to find medical treatment. Khin Nyun was disturbed to be turned away from some hospitals because of the colour of her skin – and yet she had been known as Ma Phyu, or ‘Miss White’, in her home village, where a relatively pale skin was prized.

Maureen remained in Burma, cared for by servants. She recalls looking out from the veranda of the house, seeing a hard-baked track covered in snakes: ‘Short and white, rather like giant maggots, they hold me mesmerised, unable to move, until someone scoops me up and carries me away.’

Patricia stayed in Dublin with Rossiter’s mother. He himself struck Maureen as still more stern after their return, and her mother was frequently tearful. The marriage was failing, probably over disagreement about Patricia being left in Ireland. The couple drove Maureen to a convent school at Kalaw in the Southern Shan States, where she was entrusted to the Mother Superior: ‘The impression was that of a crow, a very old black crow …’ Here she remained until the end of the war. Her mother and father would visit, but separately, and then both faded away. Khin Nyun died in 1943, after a long illness. Before then, as we know – and Maureen didn’t – Edward Rossiter married again, and went through the Chaukan Pass with his new, pregnant, wife and their baby son.

In the convent, Maureen was to some extent protected because the nuns were Italian, and Italy was – at first – on the same side as the Japanese, but still she had many frightening times. She had recurring nightmares about her parents. Those concerning her mother featured the nats, the potentially evil jungle spirits that lived in the giant, gnarled banyan trees. In the ones about her father, he was always in a hospital in Calcutta, and in fact Edward Wrixon Rossiter died on 4 November 1944 at the Presidency General Hospital in Calcutta. Having survived his jungle trek, he had returned to government work as the District Magistrate and Collector in Noakhali District of Bengal. He had then developed peritonitis – a condition unrelated to the vicissitudes of his trek from Burma – and he may have been too far away from good medical care in the early stages of the affliction. His wife, Nang Hmat, had given birth to the baby she’d been pregnant with in the jungle on 12 December 1942. The baby was a girl: Eileen.

The first that Maureen heard of all this was when, aged eleven, she was called into the Mother Superior’s room at the convent to hear the reading of her father’s will: ‘Suddenly my ears caught the words “… my wife Nang Mat and her two children …” which made me leap up shouting, “That’s a mistake. That’s not true. My mother was Khin Nyun.”’

The will stipulated that Maureen was to remain in the convent until she was twenty-one, and an amount of money was bequeathed for this. It was not enough, and so Maureen was dependent on the charity of the nuns, some of whom were more charitable towards her than others. Maureen began to find out about her family. Late in the war, a man who had been a friend of her father’s showed her a photograph inscribed on the back in her father’s hand, ‘John Rossiter, aged 2’. ‘He was a beautiful little round-faced boy with rather slanted eyes, like a Shan’s, and quite irresistible …’ It was the boy who’d been carried through the jungle by Nang Hmat, and rescued by Gyles Mackrell.

Maureen was finally rescued from the convent by another friend of her father’s, a Mr Ogden, a saintly, avuncular official of the Burmese Civil Service, who had himself escaped the Japanese in 1942 via China. When he came to the convent, he put his arm around Maureen and, his eyes brimming with tears, said over and over again, ‘So this is poor Eddie’s little girl.’ Mr Ogden’s wife escorted Maureen to Dublin, where she joined her sister in the care of her grandmother, and her story, or at least her book, ends. Maureen Baird-Murray died in 2005.

In the summer of 2012, seventy-year-old John Rossiter had a dream of his mother, Nang Hmat, who had died aged eighty-three in 2003. In the dream, she was a young woman, and she was dancing with two elephants. The next morning, John Rossiter received an email from the present author and a telephone conversation ensued. John Rossiter speaks as you would expect: intelligently, a light Burmese accent overlain by more gravelly, British-patrician tones. Of course, he has no memory of being taken through the jungle, but his mother would speak about the trek. She told how she would catch small fish with her hands, fry them and mash them up with rice to feed her son. She was grateful to the man with elephants who’d come to the rescue but couldn’t recall his name, it being an unfamiliar Western one. She told John that, before climbing onto the elephant that took her over the Noa Dehing, she knelt down and made obeisance to it, elephants being sacred to Buddhists.

After her husband’s death, Nang Hmat stayed in India for a few years with her children, John and Eileen. She received a fairly generous pension from the British government. She then moved back to Burma, where, in 1951, she married for a second time – to a junior officer in the Burmese army. She had a further five children with him. Her daughter with Edward Rossiter, Eileen, lives in Burma and has four sons and a daughter. John Rossiter left Burma for Australia in the late sixties after attending Mandalay University. He is now retired after a varied career. He and his Burmese wife have four daughters.

Asked whether he thought his father had been a difficult man, John Rossiter paused for a moment. ‘I heard this story,’ he said. ‘In Burma, he’d shot two ducks, and he gave them to members of his staff. They then gave the ducks to two Buddhist monks, and my father was not at all happy about that. He said, “I shot them for you. Why did you give them away?” But the monks are important in Burma. It was natural that the servants would have given them the ducks. Perhaps my father didn’t understand.’ Another pause. ‘But he was a very clever man. When he came to Burma, he could speak six or seven languages, and that was not normal.’ John believes that his father made the best provision he could for his children in his will. ‘But it was Maureen who suffered most.’

There is something provocative about the life of Edward Wrixon Rossiter. It forces any chronicler to become a moral judge. In her book, Maureen Baird-Murray wrote, ‘My father is long dead now and past all criticism …’ But she comes down on him pretty hard: ‘Rightly or wrongly, I have always felt that my mother was deprived of her two children and finally abandoned.’

It is tempting to write him off as a cad. But he was perhaps a bohemian in the unlikely guise of a colonial administrator; or just an unconventional man who lived by his own rules. He did marry Khin Nyun and Nang Hmat whereas, as Maureen Baird-Murray writes, ‘many Europeans did not always legitimise their Burmese or Shan offspring’. Maureen’s impression was of remoteness rather than cruelty, and there were spasms of kindness. He would give her generous presents, and once caused a sensation in the convent by sending her a near-life-size Shirley Temple doll. It also turned out that he had left her a hundred acres of beautiful countryside in the Shan States.