by Boris Hembry
Marking Time (April 1942 – July 1942)
Calcutta was a vast city, then the second largest in the Empire. There were the government, commercial and European residential quarters, but the rest was a vast sprawl of indescribably squalid, appallingly filthy, congested slum, where 8 million inhabitants eked out a meagre and degrading existence, so wretched that no words of mine can adequately convey my first impressions. But, as time went by, and like the majority of my fellow Europeans, I became inured to the sights and smells.
There seemed to be quite a few Special Forces officers billeted at the Great Eastern. One, Barney Le Seilleur, questioned me about my experiences in Malaya behind the lines and the subsequent events leading up to my escape, before taking me to Calcutta Fort where I went through the same rigmarole again, but this time for a colonel. After this interview I was passed on to a staff captain whom I realised I had met several years before in Singapore, Maurice Yates. He told me to take two weeks leave and suggested that he should telephone a Darjeeling tea planter, Colonel Treanor, retired from the Indian Army, who put up officers for short leaves. This arranged, it was agreed that I would take the train to Darjeeling a couple of days later. Meanwhile I would stay on at the Great Eastern while it was decided what to do with me.
My first night in the hotel, in a comfortable bed with clean sheets, was marred somewhat by my being woken at about midnight by something running across my face. Turning on the light I saw quite the largest cockroach I had ever seen – over two inches long. I despatched it with my plimsoll. I could not deal similarly with the rats that stood their ground when I returned to my room, looking at me, before scuttling off into the bathroom. This was definitely not the Raffles or the Des Indes!
I caught the night mail to Jalpaigury, at the foothills of the Himalayas, where I breakfasted at the station hotel, before taking the train up to Darjeeling. This railway must be unique. First surveyed and laid in the 1880s it was still using the original engines and rolling stock, all in excellent condition. The track wound its way up the mountains, sometimes so circuitously that one could look out of the carriage window and see the engine above going in the opposite direction. The views were terrific, and all the time one could see the high peaks through gaps in the cloud. I travelled this route on three occasions and much preferred the train to a bus or taxi. The hill peoples, mainly Nepalese, are magnificent, as one would expect knowing the Gurkha.
Shortly before we arrived in Darjeeling the clouds clamped down, blotting out everything, rather like an old London pea souper, and it began to rain so that when I took a rickshaw from the station to the Planters’ Club I saw very little of my surroundings. The street lights were barely visible through the mist, the passers-by were huddled in shawls. I had arranged with Colonel Treanor that I would spend the first night at the club, and he would collect me the next morning. The club was cheerful and the manager and his daughter gave me a warm welcome. After a few drinks, an excellent dinner and post-prandial conversations with one or two fellow guests, I went to bed, feeling very lonely and far from home.
Nothing could have prepared me for the next morning. The bearer brought the usual chota hazri (breakfast) and pulled back the curtains to let the sun stream in. I could only gasp and gape at the most fantastic scene imaginable. There spread out before me were mile upon mile of the snow-covered peaks of the high Himalayas, and framed in the window, towering over everything else, even though 40 miles away, was Kanchenjunga, all 28,000 feet of it. Even from that distance I had to look up at the summit. Living in Malaya and having visited so many far-off places, I suppose that I had become somewhat blasé of beautiful surroundings and vistas. But this was different; totally overpowering. I could not dress and get outside quickly enough. I wandered up to the maidan, from where I could get a better view of the nearby hills and valleys and, above all, the mountains. To this day I have never seen such overwhelming beauty.
Colonel and Mrs Treanor collected me as arranged from the club and, after tiffin at the Gymkana Club, we drove out to their tea garden. The Treanors were delightful. In his early 50s, he had fought in France during the Great War and had served on the Frontier on several occasions since then. The tea garden – they were not called estates, as in Malaya – was 25 miles out of Darjeeling, on a series of hills, with the awe-inspiring backdrop of Kanchenjunga. The bungalow was on a plateau, with tennis court and swimming pool and surrounded by every known Asian and European plant and flower in full bloom. It was school holidays so their 17-year-old daughter and 15-year-old son were there too, and made a delightful family. Mrs Treanor mothered and fussed over me, and soon had me back to the best of health. The excellent food, the quiet days going round the tea garden on a pony, quite the best way to see over the tea bushes, and the long evenings in front of a log fire made the war in general and the last hectic three months in particular seemed a very long way away. The fortnight went all too quickly.
Shortly after four thirty on the morning of the day before I was due to return to Calcutta, the Colonel and I mounted our ponies and rode steadily uphill for an hour, until we reached the peak of Tiger Hill, nearly 14,000 feet up. We dismounted and he pointed towards the northwest and told me to look. Shortly after dawn, as the sun rose behind us, we saw the twin peaks of Mount Everest bathed in sunlight and crystal clear, more than 140 miles away. A minute later they had disappeared from view behind clouds. Fifty years ago it was a sight to boast about; today the experience is commonplace.
When I got back to the Great Eastern Hotel I found that my posting still had not come through. So, having nothing better to do I spent most mornings lazing at the Calcutta Swimming Club, the afternoons, after a lie off, writing letters and reading the newspapers to catch up with the war situation around the world, and then dinner and a movie with a little gang of like-minded officers, similarly apparently unemployed, many of whom, no doubt myself included, would have been referred to by a few regular officers of my acquaintance as ‘temporary gentlemen’. I never learned whether this was because some of us wartime officers were not considered really gentlemanly enough to hold the King’s Commission, or whether they referred to the military ranks held by many in clandestine forces.
Nevertheless, even then I felt something of an outsider, for often when I returned to the hotel lounge I would find three or four of my companions deep in conversation which would be broken off when I approached. On one occasion I heard someone say ‘Good God, you can’t get rid of him. He is the only one of us who has seen action and can recognise a Jap,’ obviously referring to me. Later I came to realise that the foundations of SOE’s Force 136 were being laid (in a typically British way) over drinks, in the lounge of an hotel, and Le Sailleur and the others were discussing the administrative arrangements of the organisation. Eventually, when operations were being planned, when I would have been of use, I was away in Arakan with V Force. A lucky escape.
I met Maurice Yates quite often. One day he told me that he had advised those responsible that, because of my knowledge of the Tamil language, I should be posted to the 4/3 Madras Regiment, then stationed at Barrackpore, just outside Calcutta. Shortly afterwards my posting came through.
Barrackpore, on the Hooghly River, was where Eastern Army Headquarters was located. They had taken over the large Georgian mansion which had been the winter residence of the Governor of Bengal. The 4/3 Madras Regiment occupied the race course, and Regimental Headquarters and the officers’ mess were in the grandstand. The Madras Regiment, not to be confused with the Madras Sappers & Miners, who remained loyal and earned undying fame in the Great War, had been disbanded after the Mutiny – it was one of the first to mutiny – and only reformed in 1939. It was now a training battalion.
The colonel, who was seldom sober after tea, was a frightful bore. The many stories of Flanders and the Frontier he had to tell were amusing and interesting on the first half dozen occasions they were heard. But I do remember a certain Captain Noronha, the very finest of Indian officers. His English was perfect, his accent i
mpeccable, and he was a great one for the girls. It came as no surprise to learn that he rose to become a full general and commander-in-chief during India’s war with China.
I was very definitely a supernumerary, a general dogsbody for everyone and everything. I stood behind the company commander on parade. And I very quickly discovered that my estate Tamil was not the native tongue of the Madrassi for when I was in the process of giving orders to a sepoy in fluent Tamil he interrupted: ‘Sorry, Sahib, no speak English.’
It was here, in my tent and by the light of a hurricane lamp, that I wrote up the events of the previous four months. Unaccountably these notes have survived to this day
I was attached to a unit on Dum Dum airfield to interrogate army stragglers who had made their way out of Burma, by tracks and across rivers in the mountains that separated Burma from India. I must have been one of the very few interrogators who knew what this had involved. Poor chaps, thousands of them and all in pretty poor shape, their uniforms torn to shreds, very often without weapons or equipment, and with no idea of the whereabouts of their units, or whether their units even still existed. It was our task to sort them out and return them to their own units or into holding units. We were also instructed to sort out the genuine stragglers from deserters, but this was impossible. I reckoned that anyone who survived the hellish retreat out of Burma was a hero in his own way. It was not the soldier’s fault that the army he belonged to was ill-prepared for the impossible task it was called on to do. I have found that officers sitting on courts martial or boards of enquiry often had little or no first hand experience or knowledge of the matter over which they are sitting in judgement or enquiring into.
Shortly after this I was put in command of a platoon and sent down to Diamond Harbour, a promontory on the Hooghly some 30 miles south of Calcutta, and a possible landing place for an enemy invasion. It was a strong defensive position, and we were backed up by field and ack-ack guns. We were required to stand to at dawn and at dusk, and to do some patrolling along the river bank, but otherwise I spent my time wildfowling with Captain Noronha, and reading.
Towards the end of April I was sent as second in command of a company to escort a thousand Italian POWs being transported from Calcutta to Bhopal. This entailed an eight-day slow, dirty and hot rail journey across the widest part of India. As ours was a special train it was shunted into sidings whenever regular mail trains were due, and this meant long waits in temperatures of over 100 degrees Fahrenheit. To our annoyance the prisoners were fed by contractors at pre-arranged stops with excellent and varied meals, whilst we British guarding them made do with standard issue bully beef and biscuits. We soon altered this and instructed the contractors to feed the escort before the prisoners and with the same food.
The Italians were a cheerful crowd and very obviously glad to be out of the North and East African battles. They also kept us entertained with operatic excerpts, almost all having, it appeared, excellent tenor voices. They sang Verdi and Puccini as British troops would sing the latest Vera Lynn song or ‘Roll Out the Barrel’. However, after a while they became bored and started pulling the communication cord, bringing the train to a sudden grinding and shuddering halt, which often caused a hold-up for the express trains following. After several repetitions I lost patience. With the Maltese interpreter I went along each carriage and threatened that the next time the cord was pulled unnecessarily I would remove one man from each carriage and hang him by his thumbs in the guard’s van. We had not gone more than a few miles when, sure enough, we came to another screeching halt. It was evident that the Italians did not believe that the British would carry out their threat. I had about a dozen purple-faced, sweating, pain-ridden prisoners hanging by chains from the beams in no time at all. We went on our way without further interruptions. In fact I had released them after only about 20 minutes, but kept them in the guard’s van for another couple of hours.
I was at Eastern Army Headquarters one morning when, to my surprise, I bumped into Angus Rose, whom, it will be remembered, had been on Freddy Spencer Chapman’s first operation behind the Jap lines in Malaya. He was now with the 2nd Battalion Argyll & Sutherland Highlanders, also stationed at Barrackpore. We had a brief chat and agreed to meet up again at the cinema the following evening. After the performance Angus invited me back to his mess and over a few pegs he described a Divisional exercise that was to take place shortly, and asked whether I would like to be an umpire. I readily agreed, as it seemed interesting and would get me away from Barrackpore.
The Divisional scheme was to involve the Air Force and Navy as well as the Army and would be held in the Sundabans, a vast area of creeks and islands in the Ganges delta, and home to the Bengal tiger. I was ordered to take command of a ferryboat and to cover a certain area. The idea was for Red Force to simulate a Japanese sea- and airborne invasion, whilst Blue Force, the Division, was to repel it. I spent a marvellous week cruising around the rivers and creeks. I was able to instruct the ferryboat captain to take me wherever I wished within my allocated area. I felt as if I had my own private yacht. I noted all Red and Blue forces’ movements, which were radioed back to Exercise Headquarters. Occasionally I would be instructed to inform a formation that they were hors de combat.
At sunset we would tie up at a riverside village, and after an excellent dinner I would stroll ashore and in broken Urdu talk to the villagers about what we were doing and why. They were obviously totally unaffected by the war and continued with their lives as they had done so for the last thousand years and more. Sometimes I would be invited by the village headman to his house to meet his family.
The sunsets were particularly beautiful, and I can still recall the hundred and one smells of a Bengali village – wood fires, cow dung, human ordure and cooking curry.
On completion of the exercise the umpires gathered back at Barrackpore to report and to discuss the lessons learnt. I was interested to see that amongst the 20 or so umpires I was the most junior by far, still the lowest of the low, a second lieutenant. The rest were majors or colonels who looked at me with some disdain until Angus introduced me as one of the very few present who like himself had seen a Jap at close quarters. This ‘wash up’ by the umpires brought home to me forcibly that I held very junior rank for my age. Most men of 32 were captains or majors, some even half colonels. This was the first time that I had given any serious consideration to my lowly rank as hitherto, with 101 STS and during my escape, it had not seemed important. But I did realise that I had only held the King’s Commission for five months, so even I could see it was a bit optimistic to expect early promotion. (The commission that I had held in the FMSVF was a Governor’s Commission, similar to the Viceroy’s Commission in the Indian Army.)
During that April and May, however, I also had another worry. For me they were probably the most anxious weeks in the whole war. Jean and John had sailed on the P&O liner Strathallan from Sydney bound for England and, as the ship had a good turn of speed, she was to sail alone, unescorted, across the Pacific, through the Panama Canal, and then across the Atlantic, at a time when the Japanese, known to have a good many submarines, were in the ascendancy in the Pacific, and when the U-boat was winning the Battle of the Atlantic. Of course, I had many second thoughts as to the wisdom of my suggestion that they return home, but by then it was too late. They were on their way. The battalion officers became almost as anxious as I was, and asked for news almost daily. All I knew was that they had sailed. Then one day a cable arrived reporting their safe landfall in Glasgow. I immediately passed on the good news to the colonel and we held a special dinner night in the mess in celebration.
At the end of May I was allowed another leave as, ironically, my previous visit had been considered as sick leave, so I contacted the Treanors and arranged to spend a couple of weeks with them. I repeated my journey up to Darjeeling, only this time it was more enjoyable, as the weather was fine and the views of the Himalayas more constant and breathtaking than ever. I was met at the station and tak
en straight back to the tea garden. By now I had formed a close friendship with the Treanors and it was like coming home. Sometime during the lazy and happy first week, when we were sitting chatting over a peg and I had voiced my impatience with my present posting, the Colonel said that only the previous week he had met a Brigadier Felix-Williams at the Gymkana Club who had told him that he was responsible for some sort of intelligence-gathering organisation operating behind the enemy lines in Burma. He had been most impressed with the Brigadier’s enthusiasm, and suggested that I endeavour to contact him with a view to joining the organisation. I thanked him, said I would, and promptly forgot about it.
Midway through my second week there I began to feel ill and run a high temperature and fever, so the Treanors drove me to the British Military Hospital outside Darjeeling. The doctor took one look at me and ordered me to bed, for not only was I suffering from malaria but also, he thought, acute infectious jaundice (hepatitis), which diagnosis quickly confirmed.
The first night was hellish. The ward had previously been for Indian sepoys and the beds were still charpoys. Apart from the Scots ward sister, the nursing orderlies were convalescing British other ranks. I did not sleep for a moment. The next day I staggered away from my bed. It was alive with bed bugs. I shook the charpoy repeatedly until the floor was littered with the foul creatures. The charpoy was taken away and fumigated, but for the four weeks that I occupied it I itched.
My diet was fat free and desperately uninteresting, consisting mainly of porridge with treacle, and boiled chicken or boiled fish, twice a day, every day. Certainly no alcohol. There were six officers in the ward, one of whom was named Hornsby, whose family company manufactured the world-famous Ruston & Hornsby diesel engines that we had on most estates in Malaya. Jaundice is a very lowering disease, and after four weeks I was so depressed that I said to the doctor that I thought that if I did not get out of hospital soon I would surely die there. To my astonishment he agreed, and asked was there anywhere I could go to convalesce. I rang the Treanors, and within three hours I was asleep in the now familiar bedroom in their bungalow.
