by John Sweeney
‘So. The mechanic…’ Ice in her throat. ‘He recognised you. What did you do at Singapore?’
A stillness between them; his silence, an admission of guilt.
‘Traitor? Jiff?’ The words, hissed.
‘Yes.’
Fury, sudden, irresistible, rose within her, her voice a high-pitched shriek: ‘How dare you! You’re a bloody Jiff! How could I have been so stupid! You appear from nowhere, always on your own, never with any soldiers or senior officers. You never stop at any of the army bases. You didn’t speak to any of the soldiers at the bridge.’
She slapped him hard on the face. ‘You used us.’
‘Yes, I used the children.’
‘And you used me. And what are you going to do now, Jiff? Because I swear to you that the very first British soldier I meet, I will condemn you out of hand.’
‘Listen to me, Grace.’
‘Why the hell should I trust a Jiff, a traitor?’
‘Because… because I cannot be a traitor,’ the Jemadar told Grace, ‘to a foreign power, to an Empire that is occupying my country, imprisoning its leaders, holding its people captive. I am no traitor.’ The passion died from his voice. ‘But, at the same time… ’
‘But what, traitor?’ said Grace.
‘Can I trust you?’
‘How dare you!’ Grace repeated. She made to slap him, but he gripped her wrist with bewildering force, drawing her towards him.
Near them, something crackled in the undergrowth.
‘What’s that?’ he whispered. Further off, an owl hooted to its mate. Under the red moon, his eyes– on fire. He talked and talked until the moon hid behind a heft of clouds. In the near-darkness, her fingers traced the length of his jaw to just below the ear, down his neck, touching his shoulder-blade, and unbuttoned his shirt. They lay down on the grass. Bending over him, she untied her hair, and it fell down on to his naked chest, making a cave of dark gold.
The listener, unseen by the two lovers, locked in silent ecstasy, moved away.
Far, far way, almost on the edge of hearing, a wild dog howled at its own echo.
Chapter Four
The sun was dipping in the sky but there were two hours of daylight left, as SS Birkenhead nudged into the soft mud of the east bank of the Chindwin. Steam-powered, a side-wheeler, built when Queen Victoria was still in her pomp at the Laird yard on the Mersey, dismantled, shipped to Rangoon and re-built, her steam boiler an antique more than half a century ago before she first slogged up the great river, yet still her brass rivets held true. Teak deck, rebuilt in 1923 after a fire that all but did for her, a dirty canvas awning stretched over her 60-feet length, her flat bottom patched and patched again. The crewman, a Chin, with a tiny silver crucifix on a cord around his neck, went to tug the lanyard for her steam whistle out of custom, but checked himself and glanced astern towards the skipper, his foot resting on the teak tiller. The skipper pulled on his cheroot, blew out a cloud of smoke and shook his head.
These days, the less noise you made, the better.
Tumbling down from the foothills of Thibet, the young Chindwin was icy-blue and clear, but here, halfway between the Himalayas and the sea, the river thickened and slouched through jungle. The middle of the stream flowed a deep bottle-green, but by the bank the water moved, if anywhere, the wrong way – upstream – in lazy brown coils. The crewman clutched a mooring rope in one hand and slipped into the murk, waist-deep. He clambered up the bank and secured the ferry by looping the rope round a fat banyan trunk and tying it off. A gangplank of old bamboo poles, knotted together, fell across the gap between ferry and bank. And then the SS Birkenhead set down to wait.
A grumble of artillery, from not so far away, echoed off the hills that rose up from both banks of the river. The noise started a herd of water buffalo. They plunged in and began the long swim for the far bank, a thin line of dark green, shimmering in the heat three-quarters of a mile away. High above the far bank, to the west, ridge after ridge of green hills climbed so high they lost themselves in broiling thundercloud.
Three British army Bedford lorries trailing field guns jerked along the mud track towards the ferry, from the north. The skipper spat out his cheroot and grimaced, the crewman fed the boiler with a fresh shovel of coal. The lorries halted short of the ferry and a dozen soldiers clambered out.
Jaws, slack-muscled, slobbered open; eyes red-raw, grimy, vacant; tics fluttered exhaustion: the faces of these men mouthed defeat. Shirts starched salt-white on their fronts, wet-black at the armpits and down backbones, dripped rivulets of sweat. Water-bags clacked against their hips, empty.
A sergeant, his elfin face almost beautiful, his blond hair cut short, jumped down from the cab of the leading lorry. The driver of the second lorry approached him, saying ‘Christ, Sarge, are you sure about this?’ Physically much heftier, the driver – a big gunner – was somehow wary of the sergeant. His voice was appealing as he said: ‘Are you sure we shouldn’t have tried to get through?’
‘Yes, I am bloody sure, thank you very much, Fatty Arbuckle,’ shouted the sergeant. ‘The Japs are ahead of us. They’re blocking us from the north.’
‘But the captain would have pressed on. He would have stopped and fought the bastards and tried to get through, to join the others.’
‘Yes, and that’s why he’s got a bloody hole in his face, Fatty, and now he’s dead and I’m in charge.’ The sergeant’s name was Edgar Gregory – Eddie. ‘Rangoon’s gone, Mandalay’s gone and we’re bloody next. We’re leaving. We’re dumping the guns and we’re dumping the ammo. We can’t take the guns where we’re going and we can’t take them.’ He gestured to the last of the three lorries, saying, ‘If anybody agrees with Fatty, you can join them.’
In the back of that lorry, six soldiers lay nursed by a green-black cloud. Something called the flies to lift, hover and then return to their feast.
The King-Emperor’s soldiers were throwing away everything they could not carry in the retreat, the longest retreat in the long history of the Empire. And they could not carry their dead. A breath of wind lifted the air and they smelt the tell-tale stink of honey and shit. The heat was baking the corpses.
None of the soldiers demurred. The big gunner dropped his head and walked slowly back towards his lorry, climbed into the cab and slammed the door behind him.
Gregory studied a map, shaking his head, and rapped out orders.
From the back of the first lorry, they took a wooden chest carrying explosive charges, Finchy larking, saying it was ‘enough to blow up London Bridge’, and manoeuvred it along the bamboo gangplank, which sagged perilously with the weight, then heaved it on board the ferry.
They ran to the back of the second lorry and carried three wounded on stretchers down to the bank and onto the SS Birkenhead. In their frenzy, the soldiers dropped the first stretcher clumsily onto the deck with a jolt. The injured man cried out – an unbearable sound, like that of a dog whose paw has been severed in an iron trap.
‘Shut it. Stop that bloody screaming,’ ordered the sergeant viciously and, in an instant, the noise turned to a feeble whimper. The two other injured held their tongues, too far gone or too afraid of Gregory to moan.
The lorry engines started up and all three, with their gun tenders, reversed into the Chindwin, the drivers opening the doors of their cabs and dropping down into the river to doggy-paddle back to the bank and safety. The water at the river’s edge wasn’t that deep and the first two lorries and tenders came to rest, barely half-submerged. The Japs would haul the guns back out easily, they were smart enough. Good luck to them, thought Gregory. He wasn’t going to waste time hanging around in this dump. The Japs could be here in five minutes’ time. Maybe longer. He knew they weren’t that close when the captain had bought it, but it would be stupid to be caught by them now.
The third lorry – the one carrying the dead – fell into a deeper, sunken pool, the blinding glare of the afternoon sun glancing off the swirling water as it coiled in and out o
f the flatbed of the lorry. With no ceremony, corpses started to float off, downstream. One of the soldiers stopped on the bank, his arms laden with boxes containing tins of food, and nodded his head at the black shapes floating past.
‘Sarge?’
Gregory cut him off. ‘There’s nothing we can do for them.’
The soldier ran on to the ferry, put down his load and walked, downstream, to the bow, looking out over the dead, and made the sign of the cross.
The Chin crewman hurried along the gangplank to the bank, untied the mooring rope from the tree trunk, slid down into the river and, chest-high in the water, walked beyond the stern and braced the pull of the river’s current, listless close to the bank, against his shoulders. The SS Birkenhead was ready to leave.
The last few soldiers were hurrying onto the gangplank when a motorbike ridden by an Indian army Jemadar skidded to a halt. The Jem switched off the bike’s engine, banged back the motorbike on to its rest and, still sitting astride his motorbike, shouted in English: ‘You cannot leave! Women, children, are coming. You must wait.’
The Jemadar had an air about him, a natural authority. And that meant trouble for Sergeant Gregory. The other British soldiers on the ferry shuffled towards the commotion, causing the old paddle boat to tilt a little towards the bank.
Gregory, sitting on the side of the SS Birkenhead facing the bank, rifle resting in his hands, yelled up at the Jemadar: ‘Shut your mouth, you black bastard.’
The sun, now steadily falling in the west, cast the ferry’s shadow on the eastern bank. The Jemadar had to squint into the low sun to see his adversary’s rank: three stripes.
‘You must wait,’ repeated the Jemadar, an officer of the British Indian Army – the most junior rank imaginable, lower than a second lieutenant but still an officer – and both men knew the sergeant had insulted his authority and the very foundation of the great military system to which they both belonged. But these were dark times.
The bus coughed and spluttered towards the river, and halted in a depression, a few dozen yards beneath a bluff overlooking the bank. Grace bade the children wait while she scampered up to the bluff and took in the scene fifty feet below her; in the heat of their argument, the Jemadar and the sergeant were blind to the presence of the witness above, watching them.
‘You must wait.’ The Jemadar got off his motorbike and made towards the gangplank. The sergeant shouldered the rifle and lined up on the young officer. The Jemadar stopped, took his revolver out of its holster, holding it close to his body, the snout pointing not at the sergeant but upstream, parallel to the river’s flow. From the river, the crewman with the mooring rope around his shoulders looked back at the skipper, who stayed by the tiller, watching, making no move.
‘You must wait,’ said the Jemadar. ‘That is an order.’
Grace determined to go down to the ferry and sort out the problem, to explain their desperate position. At that edge in time came a cry, from the bus.
‘Miss, it’s Joseph,’ implored Emily. ‘Miss, he’s having one of his fits.’
Only Grace could handle this. Perched on the bluff, she stood stock-still. All she had to do was to return to the bus, to soothe the little boy, to kiss his forehead, and stroke his hair and at once he would begin to calm down. But there was something about the atmosphere by the ferry, the abandoned guns half-sunk in the water, the desperation of these particular British soldiers, and, worst of all, the flat tone of the blond sergeant, that chilled her being.
‘You must wait,’ said the Jemadar.
‘Miss, please come, he’s grinding his teeth!’ cried Emily. ‘We’re leaving, nigger,’ said the sergeant. ‘Goodbye.’
Torn between the need to care for the boy and the urgency of going down to the river bank, she could not move.
‘Miss, please come, please!’
The Jemadar jumped up on to the gangplank, his revolver in his hand still pointed upstream. He was three-quarters along it when a shot rang out. A flock of white egrets, pecking the river-bank mud, rose up into the sky. Red spurts arced from the Jemadar’s neck but he stayed upright on the gangplank for an ocean of time, so long that Grace began to wonder whether he was only lightly injured. High in the trees, a rage of monkeys screeched at each other.
A thick gurgle of blood and air – a terrible, haunting, disgusting sound, of life leaving him – answered her question, and his legs crumpled. He fell face-down into the river.
‘Oh no, oh no.’ The body of the only man she had ever loved was floating downstream, the muddy water staining a darker red. The gangplank was pulled back into the ferry, the crewman swung himself aboard the stern, and the SS Birkenhead surged from the bank and hiss-clanked off, towards the safety of the far bank, one hundred yards, two hundred, three hundred, going downstream.
As the ferry pulled away, across the water, Grace heard a snatch of ‘Oranges and Lemons’ being whistled.
Her eyes moved to the corpse, still floating face-down in the water, circling on itself and carried by a faster current downstream, away from her. She steeled herself to look away, up to the hills, and then she stared again. From that distance, the Jem could be mistaken for a log.
‘Miss, please.’
It was Emily, by her side.
‘Joseph’s having a terrible fit. What’s happened, Miss? You look… What’s happened?’
‘The ferry’s gone and the Jem…’
‘Miss? What’s happened to the Jem?’
‘He’s dead.’
‘Oh, no! What happened, Miss?’
Duty, loyalty to some terrible sense of responsibility, stopped her from telling the truth. That, and the confusion of grief.
‘An accident, Emily,’ she lied.
Finding Joseph on the bus, shivering and gibbering, she smothered him with kisses and the fit eased and she rocked him in her arms.
Word of the Jem’s accident spread. A dozen girls started to cry.
‘Children, children, please. It’s going to be all right. We’re all going to be all right. I promise you.’
They studied her, disbelieving.
‘Children, it’s going to be all right.’ She could not weep; everything inside her had stopped.
As the ferry moved downstream it came into view from behind the bluff. Their only means of crossing the river was departing.
An instant later, there was a rasp against the air. Flying low over the treetops came two fighters, their fuselages and wings marked with the sign of the rising sun, their aero-engines making a high-pitched whine.
Zeroes.
They darted along the river, racing upstream, machine-guns opening up, causing jets of water to spurt as they closed on the paddle-steamer. It rumbled on, still making headway across the impossibly broad river. The fighters disappeared from sight, upriver, but their engine noise remained in earshot and soon they were back. And now they swept in low and fast, for a second strafing run, and this time the twin tracks of machine-gun fire found the explosives by the boiler, midships, and she went up, hurtling steam and red-hot gas and shrapnel of brass and iron high into the sky. Screams pierced the river valley and the bowl of hills above. The ancient ferry slewed around, shuddered, and, broken-backed, began to sink midships first, giving off a cloud of vapour as the river water swirled into the shattered boiler.
The watchers on the bus saw the ferry sink. No one on board could have survived.
Panic consumed Grace. She stood up, yelling: ‘Children, run, get off the bus, the planes will come back. Run!’
Trapped with Joseph, right at the back of the bus, Grace grew frantic as girls crowded the aisle fussing over their things, reaching up to pull down bags from the rack overhead, bending down to pick up stuff from underneath the seats.
‘Don’t take anything! Run! Run! Run! The Japanese planes are coming back. Run!’
Only then did they move, running away from the bus, spreading out in a wave, heading for a stand of teak trees. The children were mostly ten, eleven, twelve years of
age, but they had seen enough of war to know that shade was the place to hide from the enemy from above.
The last few children were still dithering on the bus. Grace physically pushed them down the aisle, roaring: ‘Run! Come on – run!’
Pushing Joseph ahead of her, he tumbled awkwardly off the step, landing in a heap, squealing like a young pig. She leapt after him and picked him up, heavy as he was, and ran for the trees.
Allu was still behind the wheel. The old driver turned the starter and the bus engine coughed into life. He let in the clutch but the wheels would not bite on the soft sand. Still the wheels span, kicking up dust and sand, locked in stasis.
The sky was empty. But not for long. There was a thin, dry keening on the edge of hearing, barely discernible over the rumble of the bus engine, and then in a knife-slash of sound they came, axes hacking into wood, sods of earth and scoops of sand jumping five feet high as the machine-gun bullets found the bus and smashed windows, ripped great holes in the engine and shredded poor Allu, leaving him resting on the wheel, a muddle of bone and blood.
The sun died. To the west, the mountains, invisible in the heat of the day, took form, rising, immense, dark. A bat, silhouetted by wine-dark clouds, flittered off across the Chindwin, making no sound.
As slow and fat as dollops of treacle, a few droplets of rain spattered down. The downpour gathered force and then it really began to rain, sloshing the earth underfoot, the ground becoming a shallow, choppy ocean of mud and bog, the air thick with stair-rods of water. The children in their thin white cotton frocks and shorts and shirts were drenched. A rivulet formed underneath their feet and suddenly it was a raging stream, dividing off a small knot of the older girls sheltering under a stand of forest canopy apart from the main group. The world turned greenly dark, the force of the rain making it hard to see, to breathe. Grace hugged Joseph and Molly closer to her and felt them gibber with cold. Joseph’s teeth started to chatter. He mumbled, ‘Miss, I’m hungry.’ His skin, to the touch, was almost icy.
