ELEPHANT MOON

by John Sweeney

  ‘What’s your name?’

  ‘Sorry. Sam Metcalf, formerly of the Burma Teak Corporation. Now a colonel, of sorts.’

  ‘Show me the appropriate authorities and we’ll happily go with them.’ She scoured the horizon. Saw jungle, elephants, orphans in a wreck of a bus. If the appropriate authorities were around, they were well hidden.

  ‘Hmpf.’ It was more an elephant’s snort than a word in the English language. He started to look around, searching for someone.

  ‘Havildar Singh? Havildar Singh! Ah, there you are. Bloody Sikhs, always hiding.’ An enormous Havildar – in rank the equivalent of a British sergeant – fierce in beard and turban, emerged from the trees, and the two men started to discuss something in Urdu. Lost in talk, they walked towards the elephants, now down by the river bank. The Sikh scowled, protesting forcibly.

  Sam slapped him down, and the two men started shouting at each other, trading vicious-sounding insults. They fell so deep in argument that they did not see the smallest elephant calf get closer and closer to them. He lowered his trunk, raised it and fired, soaking Sam and Havildar Singh.

  As the two men retreated from the jets of water, the children, still rooted to the bus, began to murmur. It was a sound Grace felt that she had not heard from them in a very long time: laughter.

  But she could not allow herself to join in. The anxiety written on the face of the two men as they had talked down by the river terrified her. Not speaking more than a few words of Urdu, she couldn’t hope to understand the row between Sam and the Havildar, but she was certain they were talking about the children and it did not look good.

  ‘Well? Are you going to abandon us?’ Grace’s tone was brutal. ‘We’ll slow you down, won’t we?’ Gesturing to the Havildar, she added: ‘Is that what he said?’

  Beauty she might be, thought Sam, but she had the makings of an almighty pain in the backside.

  ‘Do you speak Urdu, Miss Collins?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘No. And no, the Havildar did not say that. I said that, word for word. He said we’ve got no choice but to take you, at least to when we hook up with the main track of refugees. I was about to call him an old softie when we got soaked. So you owe him an apology.’

  She looked directly into the Havildar’s eyes and said: ‘I apologise.’

  The big Sikh nodded his head and wiped his moustache with the back of his arm. He had an air of steely gentleness about him. But – she couldn’t see clearly – there was something wrong with his hands.

  ‘We are very sorry to put you to any inconvenience’ said Grace, the words coming out more haughtily than she intended.

  ‘Look, Miss…’ Sam struggled to retain his calm.

  ‘But we would be grateful if you could put us in the true picture.’

  ‘I would be delighted to, Miss Collins.’

  One of the elephants trumpeted irritably down by the river, and Grace could have sworn that Sam nodded, as if in conversation with it.

  ‘In plain English?’

  ‘In plain English.’

  ‘Your party is a walking disaster for us. Elephants can’t carry much more than they need to eat. A big tusker may get through six hundred pounds of green fodder, mainly elephant grass and bamboo shoots, a day. That’s the weight of three big men. The harder you march them, the more you load them, the lamer, the slower you get. And you can’t jeopardise fifty-two elephants by hanging around for the fifty-third. If we were to take you, we’d have to carry the children, more often than not. Our supplies would be split between sixty-three extra mouths. It would slow us down so that the Japanese would be on our tails in a trice. Disaster.’

  Grace flinched at the word. ‘So you are going to abandon us?’

  He ignored her.

  ‘The Japanese command the air. On the ground, they are ahead of us, to the north, and behind us, to the south. They are pressing in from the east, and their main force is probably no more than thirty miles away from us, if that. One advantage is that their grand objective is due north, Imphal, and we are slightly off at a dog-leg here. But their scouts will be very much closer and are probably watching us right now. We’ve got one hundred elephant men and forty Chin guards with us, but if the Japs find us, we will be in trouble. We will cross the river, but so can they. They can build bamboo rafts in half a day and they will come after us. Elephants in this war, well, this corner of the war anyway, are worth their weight in gold, so they are going to chase us all the way to India, if we ever get there. They will try to kill us and capture the elephants alive and get them back. They now control all the metalled roads and main tracks in this part of Burma, so the only possible escape route for us is due west, over five mountain ranges, to the safety of Assam. The mountains are six, seven thousand feet high. And that’s out of the question for elephant. On the other side of the river is country I have never been in and the best map we have is a quarter inch to the mile. Remember the Little St Bernard pass that Hannibal took the Carthaginian army through over the Alps in order to give the Romans the fright of their bloody lives? That way,’ he gestured to the west, ‘is higher. No one’s taken elephants that high, ever. We have forty-five elephants and eight calves, and now, thanks to you buggers, sixty-three extra mouths to feed, but we don’t have enough food for our elephant men now, let alone for the month that it might take all of us.’

  ‘So?’

  ‘We shoot the elephants, turn back, brandish the white flag and surrender.’

  A fresh wave of mist came down from the hills, blanketing the river valley.

  ‘Are you going to do that?’ Grace asked.

  Sam scowled fiercely. ‘Not on your nelly. We are not abandoning you and your children and we’re not surrendering, nor are we handing over my elephants to the Emperor of Japan. Not while I’m alive and kicking anyway. So we’re heading west.’

  ‘You’re going to do the impossible.’

  ‘No. All of us are going to do the impossible. It’s going to be a race between them and us, and it’s a race we are going to win.’

  ‘But you said it was impossible.’

  ‘Stop arguing.’

  Eyes tight shut, she breathed out so deeply her body shuddered. ‘Thank you very much, Colonel. Thank you very much indeed.’

  ‘Don’t thank me too soon. We’ll get you across the river and take you along with us for a day or so, but the moment we meet up with the main party of refugees, we will be saying goodbye. You will be quite safe from the Japs then. Understood?’

  ‘Understood.’

  ‘And there’s one more bloody problem.’

  ‘What’s that?’

  ‘Ministry of Agriculture rules.’ He removed a scruffy piece of paper from his breast pocket, on which was typed the heading: Importation of livestock from the Crown Colony of Burma to India, May 1942 and one line below that: Elephant: 43. Underneath, he added in pencil: OL: 63.

  ‘OL: 63?’ asked Grace.

  ‘Other Livestock. You and the brats.’

  She treated him with the ghost of a smile.

  ‘Once we cross the Chindwin, we’ve effectively left Burma and we’re in a kind of no-man’s land. India is somewhere over that way,’ he nodded towards the west, ‘but if I don’t keep a tally, some damn fool sitting in an office may try and refuse us entry. Still, we’ve got a river to cross. I warn you we’re all going to get splashed a bit. Elephants do love a bath.’

  ‘The children won’t mind, I’m sure.’

  ‘I need to plan the crossing, so we don’t mislay the freight.’

  Grace was puzzled. ‘Freight?’

  ‘The bloody children. We’ll start crossing in ten minutes or so, then hike until sundown. The more miles we get between us and the Japanese, the better.’

  ‘Shouldn’t we cross the river immediately? With the Japanese so close?’

  ‘You’re on elephant time now. The elephants are not going to swim across that river until they’ve checked it out. No power on earth can change that. We’ll
move in ten minutes. Or something like that. First problem is that I need to talk to your lot about elephants. I don’t want anyone squashed. Messy.’

  Making light of a desperate situation was one thing, but she could not stop herself from grimacing.

  Sam climbed up into the bus, his dog Winston clambering after him and trotting up to Joseph, pale and sickly. The dog treated the boy to a lick. Sam glanced at Joseph, stopped in his tracks and bent down and felt his brow.

  ‘Ice cold. Malaria.’

  ‘We haven’t got any quinine.’

  ‘Havildar Singh!’ The giant Sikh clambered on to the bus, and had to crouch to make sure that his turban wasn’t knocked off by the roof.

  ‘Quinine for this lad. What’s his name?’

  The Havildar took a knapsack from his back and delved in it, taking out a bottle of pills. To her horror, she saw that the Havildar had only a couple of fingers on one hand and only half a finger on the other. Deftly, he used his most crippled hand to flick the pill bottle into the air, catch it and unscrew it.

  ‘Joseph,’ said Grace. ‘He’s ten, but he looks younger because of his condition. They call him a Mongol.’

  ‘Hmm. I’m an elephant doctor. Don’t do people. But I know what Little Joe needs. Whack him full of quinine.’

  The Havildar sat down next to Joseph and, gently, shifted him upright.

  ‘Miss,’ said Molly in a whisper that could have been heard back in Rangoon, ‘he’s missing lots of fingers. What happened to his fingers?’

  The Havildar turned to Molly and stared at her, saying nothing. She blushed bright red and looked down.

  ‘Got any chocolate, Havildar?’ asked Sam. ‘These pills are so bloody bitter he’s going to vomit them back up again straightaway, unless we give him something to take away the taste.’

  At the mention of the word chocolate the girls turned their heads from the elephants and watched the Havildar pluck out a bar of Cadbury’s, misshapen and squishy in the heat, from his knapsack. A gooey mess, but a luxury, for them, in Upper Burma in the spring of 1942, no words can convey. He scraped off a sludge of chocolate, pressed in a yellow pill, and said to Joseph, ‘Come on, eat,’ and popped it in his mouth. The boy munched quietly and the Havildar gave him a sip of water.

  Ruby whispered to Emily: ‘I’m going to pretend I’ve got malaria, too.’

  Sam addressed the bus: ‘Lucky you. You’re all going for a ride on an elephant. In fact, you are all now officially members of the Number One Elephant Company of the Royal Indian Engineers of the Fourteenth Army. That means you’re under orders, under my command. And the number one order of the Number One Elephant Company is… don’t frighten the elephants. No shouting, no running near the elephants, no going under their legs. They can kill. Any breaking of those orders and Havildar Singh will come and chop your head off.’

  A mistake. Most of Sam’s audience were around twelve years old, some even younger, and they were all wide-eyed. They had noted that some of the Havildar’s fingers were missing. Fearing that they were all going to start crying, Sam gabbled quickly.

  ‘Actually, Havildar Singh is a bit of a lambkin. He doesn’t go round chopping people’s heads off. To be honest, he hands out chocolate. If you’re good. But do obey him and the elephant men – they’re called the oozies. Now, which one do you think is the most dangerous of all these elephants?’

  Ruby’s hand shot up. ‘That big one, over there.’ She was pointing to the tusker who woke up Grace.

  ‘Rungdot. He’s killed two men when he was in musht, that’s on heat…oh, never mind, but as far you chaps are concerned he’s not the most dangerous elephant by a long chalk. Any other suggestions?’

  Molly shouted out: ‘The little one, the one that soaked you.’

  ‘Exactly right. That little one there.’

  ‘What’s his name?’ asked Molly.

  ‘Well, his oozie calls him “Oomy” which means Fat One. He’s the sweetest little calf, but here’s the problem. You’re not daft enough to play around with Rungdot. But if you get in between Oomy and his mother– the name’s pretty unpronounceable but it means Jewelled One – and he gets scared, he blows his trumpet and his mum will come charging and trample you to death without turning a hair. So, children, watch it with the little ones. Don’t get between them and their mothers. Watch it with the big ones, too. Be wary of the elephants at all times.’

  He studied them, hoping that some of his words were sinking in.

  ‘Now you’re going to ride in the baskets on top of the elephants’ backs as they swim across the river. They may squirt you with water, just as little Oomy did to me and the Havildar. They may even swim underwater for a bit. Just hold on tight and pretend you’re riding on a submarine. The wettest children on the wettest elephant will win a prize, once we get to the other side. After that, you’re going to have to walk. All day, every day, for two weeks, maybe longer. So you’re going to have to dump everything that’s silly. You must only take stuff you need and which you can carry on your back. I’m sorry about that, but that’s the way it is. We’re going to split you up into six groups of ten each – Grace can you do that presently – and you’ve got to look after each other, even the ones you don’t like. Especially the ones you don’t like. You’re going to hold on with one hand, hold hands with the next child with the other, and not let go. There are sixty-two bloody children here – and there will be sixty-two of you bloody buggers on the other side of the bank.’

  Grace imagined the consternation if Miss Furroughs had been around to hear such language.

  ‘Any questions?’

  ‘Will the elephants eat us?’ asked Molly.

  ‘No, you’re not tasty enough. Let’s go. Last bugger across is the dirty rascal.’

  The children started dumping their possessions brought with them all the way from Rangoon. Silk dresses, cheap bracelets, poetry books, Shakespeare’s plays, magazines telling the latest gossip from Hollywood, hair brushes, bangles, boxes, shoes, even a fur stole, a gift from a father, long-gone, were dumped. Grace, too, threw all her precious possessions away, apart from one change of clothes, a book of Tennyson’s poems given to her by Miss Furroughs, her copy of Moonfleet, the photograph of her mother, her bee in amber around her neck and the Masonic dagger, her one gift from the Jemadar. She crammed them all in the Jem’s satchel, next to a large buff envelope.

  Stepping down from the front step of Hants & Dorset for the last time, she remembered the naked traffic policeman on the day they fled Rangoon, Miss Furroughs snarling at the fat man as he pushed in front of the children at the docks – ‘you horrible little man’ – the Jemadar stamp-stamping the chit for petrol with such intensity that the pompous clerk gave in, and Allu, desperately trying to start the engine as the Zeroes came in over the treetops. Bowing her head, she said her farewell to the bus and all who had gone before and hurried off towards the line of elephants standing parallel to the river.

  In baskets shaped like coracles the elephant men stacked guns, ammunition, paraffin oil, food rations, medicine chests. The coracles were to be paddled across first by a platoon of the Chin, not by elephant power, lest one of the great beasts panic and fling the precious valuables into the river.

  Grace split up the children into small groups and appointed a leader for each one. Gathering together her own charges - Joseph, Michael, Emily, Ruby and Molly – she went towards the elephant with the long unpronounceable name, who was keeping an eye on her baby, Oomy, now cropping at a knot of elephant grass underfoot with her trunk. She waved at the oozie perched on top of a flattish natural seat immediately behind the elephant’s forehead, his brown legs tucked behind the ears, and he waved back, grinning shyly, pointed to himself and said ‘Po Net’. It was clear that he didn’t speak a word of English but his gentle, amused patience meant something special to them. The goal? A great cane wicker pannier sat crossways on the elephant’s back, more than ten feet above the ground, high-backed at both ends, the shape of a monster Victor
ian bath-tub.

  ‘Looks safe enough,’ said Grace.

  ‘But it’s so high up, Miss,’ said Molly.

  Aware that she would often have to look after the other children, Grace told them that she had to appoint a leader for this group too. Ruby was confident enough, but something made her call out another name.

  ‘Emily? Would you mind leading this group? That means going up top first, I’m afraid.’

  Po Net motioned for Emily to step closer to the elephant’s head. The oozie pressed his right knee firmly against the back of the elephant’s right ear and the beast rotated slowly to the left. Once they were in the correct position, he cried out, ‘Hmit!’ Immediately, the elephant bowed her head and bent her knees, withers still high in the air. ‘Hmit’ was elephant-speak for ‘sit’. The basket was now at a crazy angle, front down, end up, but the nearest edge a mere six feet or so above the ground, yet still too high for Emily to step into. The elephant coiled her trunk so that the tip provided a low step, just a foot off the ground.

  The girl hesitated. ‘Go on,’ said Ruby.

  ‘Go on, Em,’ said Molly.

  ‘It looks as tall as a house, Miss.’ Emily stepped up on to the trunk and slowly, a magician performing a trick, the elephant lifted her high up so that she was now within arm’s reach of Po Net. He held out his hand and she grasped it and she leapt across the gap between trunk and on to the elephant’s back and with her other hand grabbed the wicker basket which slipped half an inch towards her, then held – and she was in. Peeking from over the lip of the basket, she waved down at the rest of the girls: ‘Miss, that was amazing’ and Emily wore a smile that could have cut her face in two.

  The game was on and they were all desperate to go next. The Havildar sauntered up to help and picked up Michael and almost catapulted the little boy into the basket. He landed in a heap of giggles next to Emily. The Sikh passed up Joseph’s blanket first to Po Net, then stood on tiptoe and passed the boy up to the oozie who gently took him by the armpits and placed him in the basket on the other side of Emily. She started arranging Joseph’s stuff and chatting to him, as if they were on the bus. Throughout, the elephant stood absolutely still. Grace, anxious that something could have gone wrong, studied the scene. The elephant seemed to perfectly understand their anxieties about Joseph and be as calm as possible. That required an intelligence, or an empathy, that astonished her.