by Paul Theroux
‘I liked my next job very much. This was in the kitchen of the officers’ mess in the Royal Artillery. I still have some of the certificates, with RA written on them. I helped the cook at first and later became a cook myself. The cook’s name was Stewart and he showed me how to cut vegetables in various ways and how to make salad, fruit cup, the trifle, and all the different kinds of joints. It was nineteen twelve then, and that was the best time in Burma. It will never be nice like that again. There was plenty of food, things were cheap, and even after the First World War started things were still fine. We never knew about the First World War in Burma; we heard nothing – we didn’t feel it. I knew a little bit about it because of my brother. He was fighting in Basra – I’m sure you know it – Basra, in Mesopotamia.
‘At that time I was getting twenty-five rupees a month. It doesn’t sound so much, does it? But, do you know, it only cost me ten rupees to live – I saved the rest and later I bought a farm. When I went for my pay I collected one gold sovereign and a ten-rupee bank note. A gold sovereign was worth fifteen rupees. But to show you how cheap things were, a shirt cost four annas, food was plentiful, and life was very good. I married and had four children. I was at the officers’ mess from nineteen twelve until nineteen forty-one, when the Japanese came. I loved doing the work. The officers all knew me and I believe they respected me. They only got cross if something was late. Everything had to be done on time, and of course if it wasn’t – if there was a delay – they were very angry. But not a single one was cruel to me. After all, they were officers – British officers, you know – and they had a good standard of behaviour. Throughout that time, whenever they ate, they wore full-dress uniforms, and there were sometimes guests or wives in evening dress, black ties, and the ladies wore gowns. Beautiful as moths. I had a uniform, too, white jacket, black tie, and soft shoes – you know the kind of soft shoes. They make no noise. I could come into a room and no one could hear me. They don’t make those shoes anymore, the kind that are noiseless.
‘Things went on this way for some years. I remember one night at the mess. General Slim was there. You know him. And Lady Slim. They came into the kitchen. General and Lady Slim and some others, officers and their wives.
‘I stood to attention.
‘ “You are Bernard?” Lady Slim asked me.
‘I said, “Yes, Madam.”
‘She said it was a good meal and very tasty. It was glazed chicken, vegetables, and trifle.
‘I said, “I am glad you liked it.”
‘ “That is Bernard,” General Slim said, and they went out.
‘Chiang Kai-shek and Madame Chiang came as well. He was very tall and did not speak. I served them. They stayed for two days – one night and two days. And the viceroy came – that was Lord Curzon. So many people came – the Duke of Kent, people from India, and another general – I will think of his name.
‘Then the Japanese came. Oh, I remember that very well! It was like this. I was standing in the bush near my house – outside Maymyo, where the road forks. I wore a singlet and a longyi, as the Burmese do. The car was so huge, with a flag on the bonnet – the Japanese flag, rising sun, red and white. The car stopped at the fork. I didn’t think they could see me. A man called me over. He said something to me in Burmese.
‘I said, “I speak English.”
‘ “You are Indian?” says this Japanese gentleman. I said yes. He put his hands together like this and said, “India–Japan. Friends!” I smiled at him. I had never been to India in my life.
‘There was a very high official in the car. He said nothing, but the other man said, “Is this the road to Maymyo?”
‘I said it was. They drove on, up the hill. That was how the Japanese entered Maymyo.
‘My wife was dead. In nineteen forty-one I remarried and had three more sons, John Henry, Andrew Paul, and, in nineteen forty-five, Victor. Victor, you know, because the war was over. I tried to retire. I was getting old, but the Burmese government called me back whenever there was a dinner – to Mandalay. I have not been to Rangoon since nineteen twenty-four or twenty-five, though I have been to Mandalay many times. I am coming from there now. There was a dinner two nights back, a large joint, two vegetables. Not as fancy as the Victory Dinner. I had full charge of the Victory Dinner in nineteen forty-five – for two hundred people. We started off with cream vegetable soup, then salmon mayonnaise, and roast chicken, vegetables, potatoes roast and boiled, and sauce. To finish there was sundae trifle and savory. Well, a savory might be anything, but on that occasion it was “Devils on Horseback”. You wrap bacon and cheese around a piece of toast and fix it with a toothpick. They were all happy at the Victory Dinner. I worked hard and they all enjoyed it. Ah, this is Maymyo.’
There were houses upraised on poles, splashed with red, like festival ribbons fluttering from branches – these were poinsettia bushes, some eight feet high. Then, after a temple and monastery, whose wood was so weathered it had the look of tarnished bronze, more buildings appeared, a row of shop houses, a theatre, a mosque on a wide muddy street. The station had a wide unpaved platform, and, as it was still drizzling, parts of it were under water and the rest had been trampled into a porridge of muck.
Mr Bernard said, ‘Where are you putting up?’
I said I didn’t have the slightest idea.
‘Then you should come to Candacraig,’ he said. ‘I am the manager – shall I book you in?’
‘Yes,’ I said. ‘I’ll be along later – I have to buy a ticket to Gokteik.’
Looking for the ticket office, I stumbled into the radio operator’s room where a bearded Eurasian with a yellow cravat and slicked-down hair was seated, listening to Morse code and scribbling on a pad. He looked at me and jumped up, reaching for my hand. ‘Is there anything I can do for you?’
The Morse code continued. I said perhaps he’d better listen to it.
‘It’s not very important,’ he said.
I noticed the pad, pencilled with Burmese characters.
‘Are they sending you Burmese Morse code?’
‘Why not?’ He explained that there were thirty-six letters in Burmese, but that occasionally they used English Morse code.
‘How do you know whether they’re sending Burmese or English?’
‘Say you’re getting Burmese. It goes on for a while. Then you get twelve dots. That means English is coming. Then you get English. Twelve more dots means they’re going back into Burmese. See, there’s no word for “piston-rod” and “crankshaft” in Burmese. It’s interesting.’
He spoke rapidly, with nervous gestures. He was as dark as a Burmese, but had the beaky features and lined face of an Italian peasant.
‘Your English is very good.’
‘It’s my mother tongue!’ He said his name was Tony. ‘Actually I’m going crazy in this joint. I’m up at Hsipaw, but I came here because the Maymyo chap packed it up. They didn’t have a relief, so I’ll be here until the nineteenth. My family’s at Hsipaw, and I should have been back weeks ago – I’ve got six kids and they’re wondering when I’m coming back. Where are you headed for?’
I told him I wanted to take the train to Gokteik, but I had heard it was forbidden.
‘No problem. When do you want to go? Tomorrow? There’s a train at seven. Sure, I can get you on it. I suppose you want to see the bridge – it’s a nice one. Funny, not many people come up here. About a year ago there was a chap – he was English – heading for Lashio. The soldiers stopped him and put him off the train at Hsipaw. He was in a terrible shape – all disconnected. I told him not to worry. The police came and made a little trouble, but the next day I put him on the train to Lashio and when the police came at nine o’clock I said, “He’s in Lashio,” so there wasn’t anything they could do.’
‘Is it against the law to go to Gokteik?’
‘Maybe yes, maybe no. No one knows – but I’ll get you on the train. Don’t worry.’
He walked me out to the forecourt of the station where, in th
e rain, on that muddy open space, there were about thirty stagecoaches – wooden carriages with faded paint and split shutters, and drivers in wide-brimmed hats and plastic capes flicking stiff whips at blinkered ponies. The ponies were stamping, and many were straining to pull loaded coaches out of the mud – they were overloaded, with boxes and trunks roped to the roof and six faces at the windows. With the steam engine shunting bogies just behind them, the sight of these gharries – and the rain and mud, and Burmese bandaged in scarves against the cold – completed the picture of a frontier town. A driver clomped towards me in mud-spattered boots (others wore rubber sandals, and some were barefoot, although all wore heavy overcoats), and Tony told him to take me to Candacraig.
The old man hoisted my bag on to the roof and covered it with a stiff piece of canvas before tying it down. I got into the wooden box and we were away, rocking; I was sitting bolt upright, peering through the rain at the broad streets of Maymyo lined with eucalyptus trees. The crooked wood and brick houses looked ancient and frail in the rain, and at a corner of the main street, before a two-storey wooden house with a covered verandah, a stagecoach was turning, the man whipping the pony as he cantered sideways in the broken road – not a car in sight – whinnying in the rain-darkened town, in the storm’s dull gleam on the wet street, before the Chinese shops, SHANGHAI PINMEN and CHARLIE RESTAURANT. It was like a sepia photograph of the Klondike, brown and noiseless, a century old and nothing moving except the blurred black horse wheeling in the foreground.
Candacraig was above the town, on East Ridge, nearly three miles from the station. Here the houses were huge, the bricks reddened in the rain, with slate roofs and towers, the former homes of British civil servants who came to Maymyo when the capital moved there for the summer months. We passed The Pines, Ridge House, and Forest View; Candacraig was at the top of a little hill, like a mansion in Newport or Eastbourne, with porches and gables and over the door a neatly pruned trellis arch of ivy.
I paid the driver and went inside to a central hall as high as the house. The rooms were ranged along the upper sides of this hall, in a gallery broken by a lyre-shaped double staircase that rose to the gallery’s walkway. Beyond a fireplace faced in teak was a bare counter, and the walls were bare, too, the floors gleaming with polish, the bannisters shining; in this large wooden hall there was no ornament. It was empty. It smelled of wax. I rapped on the counter.
A man appeared. I had expected Mr Bernard, but this was a man in thick glasses, neither Burmese nor Indian, with prominent teeth and large fretting hands. (I found out later he was Singhalese, but had been more or less marooned in Upper Burma for thirty years.) He said Mr Bernard had told him I was coming; I was wise to come to Candacraig – the other hotels in Maymyo had no facilities.
‘What sort of facilities don’t they have?’
‘Soap, Uncle.’
‘No soap?’
‘None, Uncle. And blankets, sheets, towels, food sometimes. They have nothing. A place to lie down but nothing else. Uncle,’ he said to Mr Bernard, who was just entering the room, ‘I am putting this gentleman in Number Ten.’
Mr Bernard brought me to the room, and then got a shovelful of hot coals and started a fire in my fireplace, talking the whole time about Candacraig. The name was Scottish, the place was really a ‘chummery’ for unmarried officers of the Bombay-Burma Trading Company, to keep the lads out of trouble in the hot season after months in remote timber estates: here they could take cold showers and play rugby, cricket, and polo. The British Empire operated on the theory that high altitudes improved morals. Mr Bernard went on talking. The rain hit the windows and I could hear it sweeping across the roof. But the fire was burning bright, and I was in an easy chair, toasting my feet, puffing on my pipe, opening my copy of Browning.
‘Would you like a hot bath?’ asked the gentle Mr Bernard. ‘Very well then, I will send my son up with some buckets. What time would you like dinner? Eight o’clock. Thank you. Would you like a drink? I will find some beer. You see how warm the room is? It is a big room but the fire is nice. What a pity it is so rainy and cold outside. But tomorrow you will take the train to Gokteik. We used to camp there – the Royal Artillery. There will be nothing to eat at Gokteik, but I will make you a good breakfast, and tea will be ready when you come back. Here it is pleasant, but it is only jungle there.’
That night I dined alone, by candlelight, at an enormous table. Mr Bernard had laid my place near the hearth. He stood some distance away, saying nothing, gliding over from time to time to fill my glass or bring another course. I think I am as intrepid as the next man, but I have a side – and it may be the same side that is partial to trains – that enjoys the journey only because of the agreeable delays en route, a lazy vulgar sybarite searching Asia for comfort, justifying my pleasure by the distance travelled. So I had come 25,000 miles to be here, loafing in Maymyo, warming my bum at the fire, losing my place in ‘Bishop Blougram’s Apology’ each time I was waited on: the only guest in the twenty-room Burmese mansion.
19. The Lashio Mail
IN an early morning corner of Maymyo, a clearing beyond a pine grove, thirty people were standing at the fragrant teak pews of the Church of the Immaculate Conception and singing the ‘Kyrie’ from the Missa di Angelis. I had crept off the road and passed under the dripping trees towards the sweet imploring chant, the Gregorian High Mass I had learned twenty years before in a summer of idleness and devotion. It was my own youthful voice I heard there, brave with unrisked innocence, aged twelve, asking mercy for some clumsy sin. Out of respect for this little boy I stayed for the Consecration, standing behind a poor Burmese supplicant kneeling on the hard tiles in his bicycle clips. When I left, the priest’s quavering ‘Pater Noster’ drifted with me all the way to the road, where novice monks, children in yellow robes, shaved and barefoot, hurried to their monastery hugging black lacquer bowls.
Travellers to Lashio were converging on the station: a rattling procession of tongas and stagecoaches down the avenue of eucalyptus trees; women running with shopping bags, clenching cigars in their teeth, and men dressed as frontiersmen, in boots and black hats, dodging the plodding oxen, who pulled wagonloads of firewood (split and bright, the colour of torn flesh) in the opposite direction. I had left my camera and passport behind; I felt the legality of the trip to Gokteik was questionable and I wanted to appear as unsuspicious a traveller as possible.
Tony, the Eurasian, was waiting for me. He took my three kyats and got me a ticket to Naung-Peng, the station after Gokteik. There was nothing but a bridge at Gokteik, he said, but there was a good canteen at Naung-Peng. We walked down the muddy platform to the last car. Three soldiers in mismatched uniforms – the poor fit indicating they might have been looted in the dark from some tiny enemies – stood outside the car, passing chopped betel nut across the barrels of the rifles they carried loosely at their shoulders. Tony spoke in Burmese to the tallest one, who nodded meaningfully at me. It struck me that their dented helmets and hand-me-down uniforms gave them the grizzled, courageous look you see in embattled legionnaires – a kind of sloppiness that seemed indistinguishable from hard-won experience.
‘You will be safe here,’ said Tony. ‘Ride in this carriage.’
Ten years of guerrilla war in the outlying states of Upper Burma, as well as the persistent depredations of dacoits who hold up trains with homemade guns, have meant that the last car on the train is traditionally reserved for a group of armed escorts. They sit in this car, their vintage Enfields thrown higgledy-piggledy on the wooden benches, their woollen earflaps swinging; they lounge, eating bananas, slicing betel nut, reddening the floor with spittle; and they hope for a shot at a rebel or a thief. I was told they seldom have any luck. The rebels are demoralized and don’t show their faces; but the thieves, wise to the escorts in the last car, have learned to raid the first few cars quickly, threatening passengers noisily with daggers, and can be safely back in the jungle before the soldiers can run up the line.
Our de
parture whistle put the crows to flight, and we were off, bowling along the single track. The early morning fog had become fine mist, the mist drizzle, but not even the considerable amount of rain that poured through the windows persuaded any of the soldiers (eating, reading, playfully fighting) to close the shutters. The windows that admitted light admitted rain: you had to choose between that and a dry darkness on upcountry trains. I sat on the edge of my bench, regretting that I hadn’t brought anything to read, wondering if it really was illegal for me to be travelling to the Gokteik Viaduct, and feeling pity for the children I saw in soaked clothes splashing through the cold puddles in their bare feet.
Then the train pulled into a siding and stopped. Up ahead was a station, a wooden shed the size of a two-car garage. Its window boxes held the orange and red blossoms the Burmese call ‘Maymyo flowers’. Some men in the forward coaches got out to piss. Two small girls ran from the jungle next to the line to sell bananas from enamel basins on their heads. Ten minutes passed, and a man appeared at the window waving a piece of paper, a leaf from the kind of pad on which Tony had scribbled his Morse code messages. This paper was passed to the tall soldier with the Sten gun, who read it out loud in an announcing voice. The other soldiers listened intently; one turned, and, with a swiftness I took to be embarrassment, glanced at me. I got up and walked to the back of the carriage, but before I reached the exit the soldier studying the message – a man who had only smiled apologetically earlier when I asked him if he could speak English – said, ‘Sit down please.’
