ELEPHANT MOON

by John Sweeney

  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.’

  There, at last, she’d said it. The headmistress, pouring out jasmine tea, jerked the teapot spout against her cup, spilling its contents over the tablecloth. She wiped up the mess with a napkin.

  ‘This nonsense is just because of that silly spitting incident, isn’t it? You just can’t stand Rangoon any more. Not fashionable enough, I suppose?’

  ‘No, Miss Furroughs, that’s not it. I have heard certain information from someone close to the Government, that there is a plan – that the Government is planning to abandon Burma.’

  ‘Nonsense. Abandon Burma? Poppycock. I won’t hear a word more on this subject. Good day, Miss Collins,’ and she scurried out.

  Two days before Christmas, Grace was kneeling in the school gardens, picking some fresh flowers for the dinner table, when the corner of her eye caught a sparkle far above. Thin silver arrows glinted in the late morning sun and from them tiny flashes of light began falling towards earth. The ground bounced up and smacked her hard in the face. Soil plugged her mouth and throat and nose, her eyes, burning, jammed shut. A thing scissored by close to her right ear, spinning fast, hissing.

  Flowers, sunlight, normality, gone; in their place dust and snot and screams. A screech of tyres, a dull thump, a horn blaring; half-human voices, crying out, bawling, gibbering with terror.

  Blinded by the dirt in her eyes, retching, clearing out the muck from her throat, Grace needed water, desperately, and began to crawl forward, her fingers prospecting the earth in front of her. Her left index finger snagged against something. Feeling its shape with her fingers, a crazily twisting curl of metal, razor sharp, an inch long, still hot to the touch, as if from an oven. With wonder, she realised that they – the airmen high above in their silver machines – had intended this, that there could be no other explanation for the riot of noise and dust and this horrible piece of ragged-edged shrapnel.

  They mean to kill us.

  The dust began to settle, her eyes to open, to see some fuzzy dirt-brown fog instead of a hot darkness. Coughing up snot and dirt, the back of her throat unbearably sore, Grace staggered upright and started to limp towards the school buildings. As she did so, she reflected that at least she would not have to put up with any more claptrap from Colonel Handscombe. The Japs could fly, that had been proven.

  Racing to the cellar of the old school-house, she swung the door open. The space was dank, empty of life. She backed out, astonished, and over the buzzing in her ears she heard them. The sound grew, defining itself, clear and loud:

  ‘Yea, though I walk in death’s dark vale,

  Yet will I fear no ill;

  For Thou art with me; and Thy rod

  And staff me comfort…’

  The ground juddered as a fresh stick of bombs fell, maybe two hundred yards away. Running up the steps, she found the whole school kneeling at their pews inside the wooden chapel.

  ‘Miss Furroughs!’ Grace screamed over the psalm. ‘Miss Furroughs, the chapel is not safe. The children must go to the cellar of the old schoolhouse. One bomb will kill us all.’

  The singing faltered.

  ‘For Christ’s sake, Miss Furroughs, the chapel isn’t safe!’

  ‘Miss Collins, how dare you swear in the House of the Lord!’

  ‘And how dare you risk their lives? The children must go to the cellar, Miss Furroughs. Now. The chapel is made of wood. It’s not safe.’

  The headmistress’s face came alive and she spoke: ‘Hurry to the cellar, children.’

  Emily found Grace.

  ‘Miss, the two boys. I don’t know where they are.’

  ‘Oh, Lord.’ Two boys, little Michael, aged five, and Joseph, ten, twice Michael’s size but with half the wits, had somehow been adopted by a school for girls. They called Joseph a Mongol but she hated the word. Michael and Joseph were also half-caste orphans – no one knew who the parents were – and helpless. At five, Michael was street-smart but Joseph had the body of a ten-year-old boy and the mind of a toddler. Yet he would never do anyone any harm, ever, and he had a strange gift of sensing moods: most often happiness but also fear. When scared, he ground his teeth, the prelude to a kind of shivering fit
that the girls found deeply upsetting.

  And both had vanished.

  ‘Where did you look?’

  ‘Everywhere.’

  ‘Did you check the boys’ lavatory on the third floor?’

  ‘No, Miss. I’m not allowed…’ but Grace was already running out into the yard and up the flights of the dorm. She pushed open the heavy door to the boys’ lavatory. Not so far away, someone started screaming, a piercing, animal noise. She pushed open the door to one cubicle. No-one there. She pushed opened the second door, and there they were, lying on the floor, hands over their ears, Joseph grinding his teeth. Grace clapped her hands around both of them, said, ‘Come on you two, let’s pop down to the cellar,’ and the three of them pelted downstairs.

  A third stick of bombs clattered down, blasting every window in the school, but by then the two boys and the teacher were safe in the cellar.

  Re-emerging from the inner gloom with a lit kerosene lamp, Miss Furroughs hissed: ‘You should not have blasphemed in the chapel, Miss Collins. I fear that you are setting an entirely wrong example to the children.’

  ‘Miss Furroughs–’

  ‘Swearing in chapel is the very worst example to set to the students.’

  ‘But the chapel is not safe during an air raid. They could have all been killed.’

  ‘That is entirely beside the point.’

  This was not just unfair, but maddening. ‘I have no wish to work at a school with dead students because of the folly of the headmistress.’

  ‘Then you should look for a new post somewhere else.’

  ‘Thank you very much for saving the boys, Miss,’ interrupted Emily.

  ‘What? Where were they?’ snapped Miss Furroughs.

  ‘Hiding in the boys’ lavatory on the third floor,’ Emily carried on, coolly. ‘Miss Collins found them and rescued them, Miss. While you were looking for the lamp, Miss.’

  ‘Did you?’ she asked Grace.

  ‘Yes, Miss Furroughs, I did.’

  The headmistress shivered and turned away, her lip trembling. The faces of the children stared up at them, at a world of adults gone mad.

  Four thousand people were killed in Rangoon that day but, somehow, the school and everyone in it stayed safe.

  On Christmas Eve morning Grace hand-delivered her letter of resignation. Miss Furroughs opened up the envelope in her presence, read the note, and tore it up.

  ‘Ruby seems to be getting more obstreperous by the day. Have a word with her, Miss Collins, or I am afraid that I will set her detention.’

  Grace made to speak to defend the good name of Ruby Goldberg, half-Burmese, half-Bronx grifter, but thought better of it, and closed the door behind her.

  On Christmas morning, the children pounced on their presents. It seemed pitiful stuff to Grace – cheap bangles, hand-me-down frocks, a few books for the passionate readers – but the girls were genuinely grateful. The boys got hand-carved wooden rifles. When the bombers returned, just as Christmas lunch was about to be served, they ran out into the playground and started firing their toy guns at the Japanese airmen. Grace shooed them, and everybody else, Miss Furroughs too, into the cellar.

  Cold and dank, it felt like a tomb. They shuddered as a fresh stick of bombs thump-thumped down on the defenceless city. From the crack between door and cellar floor a dagger’s blade of sunlight sliced through the dark, lighting up socks and shoes fidgeting in the dark. The thump-thumps grew nearer, showering dust over the little feet. Grace found herself singing the opening line of ‘Once in David’s Royal City’ but stumbled over the words as the explosions thudded closer to home, her voice quavering, drying up.

  In the prickly silence, a child started to sob.

  But then came: ‘stood a lowly cattle shed…’ Ruby sang like a night-club artiste down on her luck, haunting, sexual and brimful of soul. Soon the whole school was belting out the carol, drowning out the hateful clatter of war.

  When they finished, the cellar clapped and cheered and whistled, Ruby’s voice powering through a fresh and terrifyingly close bomb-burst: ‘Silent Night, Holy Night…’ Her audience gasped at the cheek of it, some laughing out loud, then the children took courage and sang their ironic taunt at the bombers above:

  ‘All is calm, all is bright,

  Round yon virgin mother,

  Holy Infant so tender and mild,

  Sleep in heavenly peace,

  Sleep in heavenly peace.’

  And still the school survived, untouched.

  The Christmas Day air raid pricked the headmistress’s inertia. That night, Miss Furroughs mumbled to Grace that it might be a good idea, on mature reflection, for the school to plan to leave Rangoon and travel by ship to Calcutta for a while. But the half-caste orphans were not a high priority in the colonial scheme of things – on the contrary, the children were an awkwardness, an embarrassment, somehow never quite worthy of active consideration – and no orders were made for their embarkation. Had Miss Furroughs pressed the matter, something might have happened. But she did not. In the past, the headmistress had been quick, sometimes unpleasantly so, to express her anger or irritation at the most trivial failing of Grace or the children, let alone any shortcoming by the colonial Government, the diocesan officers or even the Lord Bishop of Burma. In her prime, Miss Furroughs had been afraid of no one and nothing. But in these days she seemed overwrought. Money might have solved the problem. Bishop Strachan’s school had precious little, and the better-heeled Anglicans were steadily disappearing by ship or plane.

  New Year came and went. Day after day passed without word from the Government for the arrangement of their safe passage to India. One morning, Grace came down to breakfast to find the front page of the Rangoon Times folded on her place, proclaiming the official message, that everyone should ‘Stay put’ – keep on working and let the British soldiers do their job, stop the Japanese and all things would be well. Miss Furroughs entered and nodded at the paper.

  ‘Stay put?’ asked Grace, incredulous. ‘No one will fall for that.’

  ‘Nonsense. Colonel Handscombe told me at the Club that he is going to stay and fight, at the last ditch.’

  ‘Bully for the colonel. Was he on his own?’

  ‘What do you mean by that?’

  ‘Nothing, Miss Furroughs.’ Grace hadn’t told her that she’d seen the colonel and Mrs Peckham holding hands. It would not have been proper. And given that Commander Peckham of HMS Repulse had since officially been listed as missing, presumed dead, Mrs Peckham was now a widow, free to be courted by whoever she chose. That was how it was in war.

  ‘Whatever Colonel Handscombe does in his ditch,’ Grace continued, ‘does not mean the school should be there with him. The children are no longer safe in Rangoon.’

  ‘No, Miss Collins, that conflicts…’ The headmistress stopped mid-sentence, as if she doubted her own mind.

  ‘We must leave for India,’ countered Grace.

  ‘But that’s not the official advice! We shall stay until the order,’ again, Miss Furroughs halted abruptly, her pattern of speech maddening, indecisive, ‘for evacuation.’ Her voice tailed off, her last words uttered so meekly that Grace had to strain to hear them ‘But not before.’

  Locking herself in her study, Mrs Furroughs read and sipped dry sherry, distracted, unsure, inert.

  The news was always grim, grimmer than before. The Japanese made their way up the Malayan peninsula towards Rangoon methodically, village after village, river after river. Not just the richer Indians but the poor ones too started to leave Burma. Grace’s anxiety grew but Miss Furroughs had a way of sensing when she was about to raise the subject of the school leaving for India, or booking tickets on one of the ships, and blocking her.

  Singapore fell, the Empire disgraced. In the days that followed, the part-time staff at the school - Burmese, Indian and Chinese teachers, cleaners, cooks – said their goodbyes and left, with the exception of the ancient school caretaker, Allu, a Mohammedan, originally from Bengal. One eveni
ng, before dinner, Grace had to run to the night market to buy some fresh vegetables and fruit for the children, because the last cook had gone.

  While there, the electricity was cut – no one knew why – and the market was plunged into almost total darkness, people whistling and laughing nervously as they struggled to feel their way along. A feeble glow-worm of light came from the flickering candles at a small Buddhist shrine at one end of the market; here and there starlight penetrated through gaps in the canvas awnings above the stalls. When an unseen chicken squawked in its cage by Grace’s feet it sounded so freakishly loud she jumped in her skin, called out and her voice was recognised by Mary, an Anglo-Burmese nurse at the hospital and an old friend. In the murk, Mary told Grace the gossip gathered from the wounded soldiers in her ward. Her latest patients included a tiny handful of the troops who had escaped from the great defeat at Singapore by sailing to Indonesia and then being flown up to Rangoon. On the way their transport plane had been shot up by the Japanese and three of them had ended up badly burnt, with little chance of survival. Medical supplies were fast running out, and all the boys’ talk was of defeat.

  ‘They’re so bitter about their general, Percival – he’s the one with the awful buck teeth,’ said Mary, her face three-quarters invisible in the darkness. ‘They say he was just petrified, that, in the face of the Japanese attack, he turned to stone. They should have been digging trenches and securing supplies and fighting. Instead the officers insisted on endless roll-calls, parades up and down the streets and the troops painting the stones in the barracks white. One sergeant who came back from the front line filthy – he’d had to hide in a storm drain from Zeroes – was put on a charge for being improperly dressed.’