The Burma Legacy

by Geoffrey Archer

‘Forget it.’ She could see the state he was in.

  ‘We’ll celebrate tomorrow. I’ll be better company when I’ve got my time zones sorted.’

  She forced a smile and began to put some clothes on. ‘It doesn’t matter. Sorry I made such a fuss.’ She stuffed her feet into slippers and began shuffling towards the kitchen. ‘I’ve got some supermarket curry in the fridge.’

  Sam massaged his temples, racking his brains for a way to make amends. Time was his biggest problem. In a very few days the operation to find Peregrine Harrison would take him away from her again.

  Then he had an idea. A way of combining business with pleasure. He got dressed and made his way to the kitchen.

  ‘Tomorrow’s Friday,’ he announced.

  ‘Ten out of ten.’

  ‘Followed by the weekend.’

  ‘Now you’re heading for a double first.’

  ‘What I meant was, why don’t we go away somewhere? Oak-beamed hotel in the country. Crisp walks and log fires. Three rosette cuisine.’

  Softening instantly, Julie looked up from the worktop. ‘I’d have to see if mum can cope with Liam.’

  ‘I’m sure she can.’

  ‘Did you have anywhere in mind?’

  Sam rubbed his chin.

  ‘Well, yes, actually. Cambridgeshire.’

  Five

  Friday, 7 January

  The next day Sam was wide awake at five, his body clock still out of kilter. He got up quietly without disturbing Julie, made himself some tea, then got stuck into Harrison’s book again.

  The descriptions of the Chindit operations in Burma were gruelling. Jungle marches with massive packs on their backs. Perilous crossings of swollen rivers. Unreliable radios putting airdrops of fresh supplies in jeopardy. Then brief, bloody skirmishes with a foe best known for its willingness to die.

  The name for Wingate’s 3,000-strong guerrilla force was a corruption of chinthe, he learned from the preface – a Burmese word for the mythical stone creatures that guard Buddhist temples. Half lion, half dragon. One of the beasts featured in a chapter entitled ‘Capture’. In it Harrison described how, after weeks of no contact with the enemy, his platoon had come under machine-gun fire from an undetected Japanese position.

  We were at our lowest ebb and desperately short of water. The last two supply drops had failed. We were having to buy food from villages, which put us at great risk, since many of the local people were informers for the Japs. But, despite the poor state we were in, the men reacted well to the attack, despite several of them being immediate casualties. I called for volunteers to go with me in a flanking manoeuvre to try to flush the gunners out. We set off under covering fire from the rest of the platoon, but my section did not get far before we were spotted and attacked with grenades. Four of my men were mortally wounded and I sustained a nasty shrapnel wound in my side. Despite that, those of us who survived managed to withdraw to safe ground and regroup.

  The following day they’d been ordered south to meet up with another battalion. Harrison had lost a lot of blood and was too weak to march, so his commanding officer had been forced to leave him behind.

  I fully accepted the decision. The injury had sapped me of my strength. I hoped that if I could rest up for a few days I might have the energy to follow. Fortunately for me, Burrif Kyaw Zaw (Burma Rifles) volunteered to stay with me. He knew the area well and believed he could find us shelter in a friendly village. He hid me as effectively as he could in the ruins of an old Buddhist temple, guarded appropriately by a weather-beaten chinthe. Then he set off, promising to return within six hours. A full day passed however, and I began to fear he had been taken prisoner, a fear that was confirmed when a Japanese search party pulled back the stones concealing my hiding place and captured me too.

  His treatment by the first Japanese soldiers hadn’t been too bad. A medic had dressed his wound and apart from a few face slappings he wasn’t harmed. But after being transported up the line to a field headquarters, things had taken a sharp turn for the worse.

  My captors were determined to make me reveal where my unit had moved on to, but I said I would tell them nothing other than my name, rank and service number in accordance with the Geneva Convention. This made them very angry. At first they set about me with bamboo poles, beating me all over my head and body, including the area of the unhealed shrapnel wound. It was appalling and the attacks only ceased when I blacked out from the pain. Worse was to come, however. The Japanese Lieutenant in charge ordered me to be stripped and strapped to a bench. Then a hose was turned on my face. I could not breathe. Water filled my mouth and nose. I had a particular horror of being submersed. The origins of this fear were no mystery to me. At the age of six my well-meaning but ill-advised father had thrown me into a river in the hope that nature would teach me to swim. I had very nearly drowned.

  As my chest and stomach filled with water I felt total panic and I am not ashamed to admit that. There came a point when I would have told them anything to end the torture. The irony was that because of the water in my lungs I was unable to speak. I remember beginning to hallucinate. I saw my mother walking towards me with her arms outstretched, walking on water like Jesus Christ. Then, when I was on the verge of unconsciousness, they turned the hose off, untied my bonds and rolled me over so I could cough and vomit everything from my insides. I was in a very bad state by then, so much so that the Japs decided there was no point in interrogating me again that day.

  My lasting memory of that awful experience was the expression on the face of the Lieutenant in charge. It was not pleasure I saw there as the hose was directed at me. I do not even know for sure that the man was a sadist. What I saw was total disregard for my suffering. To him I was a creature with no more significance than an ant. And as a defeated enemy he felt he was entitled to do with me what he wanted. Long after that period of my captivity was over, his face would come back to me in my dreams. It does to this day. At the end of the war when I was finally freed from Rangoon Central Gaol I made myself a promise. That if I could ever identify and find that man, I would make him understand what he had done to me, whatever it took.

  Sam read the last sentence again. This was the threat from a quarter of a century ago which his masters believed was finally to be carried out. He still wasn’t entirely convinced, however. Tens of thousands of POWs must have made the same promise to themselves at the end of the war.

  He heard the shower pump running. Julie was awake. The sky was brightening outside and the bracket clock said seven. He picked up his empty mug, then padded to the kitchen.

  Deciding it would be a tactful gesture to make breakfast for Julie, he opened the fridge. The almost bare shelves reminded him she wasn’t the most domesticated of women. He tried in vain to remember what she ate in the mornings, then began looking in cupboards for clues. Inside one was an unopened pack of muesli which he placed on the section of the worktop used as a breakfast bar. A carton of milk from the fridge, a bowl and a spoon completed his preparations. After an extended search he located some sliced brown bread for himself.

  ‘Making yourself at home,’ Julie remarked, coming into the kitchen in a towelling robe and wet hair. She went straight for the kettle. ‘Oh good. Just boiled.’

  ‘I’ve laid your breakfast,’ he told her, feeling slightly smug.

  She craned her neck from stirring an instant coffee and stared at the worktop. Her brow wrinkled. ‘I don’t,’ she told him. ‘You know that. Just a coffee in the mornings.’

  ‘But the packet of Alpen …’

  ‘I bought it for you.’

  Sam swallowed. ‘I never touch the stuff. You know that.’

  They looked uncomfortably at one another, realising that the catching up they had to do wasn’t merely in bed.

  ‘This evening …’ he began.

  ‘I’ll try to get off early, but don’t expect me before five.’

  ‘No problem. We can still be there for dinner.’

  She looked at him scepticall
y. ‘You do realise I won’t believe any of this until it happens?’

  ‘Oh ye of little faith …’

  She picked up her mug and headed out of the kitchen, trilling, ‘going to be late again …’

  Sam ate his toast, then made a mug of coffee for himself. As he returned with it to the living room, he could hear the hairdryer going.

  He picked up Harrison’s book.

  The Japs moved their headquarters soon after capturing me and took me with them. At first they tried to make me walk but I was in a bad way. In order not to hold things up they tied me onto the back of a mule. I kept looking out for Kyaw Zaw, the brave soldier who had remained behind with me when the Chindits moved on. His own capture had almost certainly led to mine, but there was no sign of him and I feared he must have been killed soon after revealing the whereabouts of my hiding place. I knew what terrible tortures he would have gone through and felt no bitterness towards him for giving me away.

  Julie bustled into the sitting room with her coat on. ‘What’s the book?’

  ‘An autobiography.’

  ‘Of whom?’

  ‘Peregrine Harrison.’

  She screwed up her face. ‘With a name like that I s’pose I should know who he is.’

  ‘Not really. The book came out twenty-five years ago, and he’s not made many ripples since.’

  ‘I take it you aren’t reading this entirely for pleasure.’

  ‘Not entirely.’

  She knew it was pointless pressing for details. The book was business. And Sam’s work was a closed book to her. She turned for the door.

  ‘Hang on a second.’ Sam put the volume down and stood up. ‘Is this goodbye?’

  ‘Sorry.’ She turned and kissed him perfunctorily, mumbling about being very late.

  ‘We’ll have a great weekend,’ he told her. ‘I promise.’

  She gave a tight-lipped smile. ‘See you tonight.’

  He watched from the window as she half walked, half ran down the street towards the tube.

  He got dressed and shaved, then returned to the book, keen to know how Harrison had spent the rest of the war. The man’s detention in the Central Jail in Rangoon had been gruelling. The prison was overcrowded and disease-ridden, with men dying almost daily from sickness and malnutrition. But although there were frequent beatings, often for the ‘offence’ of failing to salute a guard, the systematic torture he’d experienced at the hands of the unidentified Lieutenant was not repeated.

  Sam skipped through to the post-war period. Harrison described his repatriation to England as a time of trauma and despair. With his own parents dead and his only sibling, a brother, in the colonial service in India, ‘family’ in England had consisted of elderly grandparents and a few aunts and uncles whom he hardly knew. On arrival at Liverpool docks aged twenty-three, he’d had no idea where to go or what to do next. Given his discharge papers, back pay and a rail warrant to wherever he wanted, he’d picked Gloucester because his maternal grandparents lived there.

  The first few months in England were a desperate time for me. I felt stateless. Not belonging. Nobody wanted to know what I had been through. Nobody seemed to care. The war in the Far East had been too far away for them. Everybody I met had had their own bad experiences closer to home, with family members lost in France, or missing in POW camps in Germany. They simply did not understand that what we had been through at the hands of the Japanese was far, far worse. Our minds had been damaged, permanently in many cases. I myself became ill. My grandparents could not cope with my waking at night, screaming and shouting from the nightmares that would not leave me alone. They persuaded me to see their local doctor, but all the man suggested was more exercise and fresh air. I considered trying to get in touch with the men I had shared imprisonment with, for mutual support, but they had dispersed throughout the country and I did not have their addresses. It occurred to me too that contacting them might make it even harder to shake off the memories plaguing me. Throughout all of that time, I kept seeing the face of the Lieutenant who had tortured me, knowing that if he were still alive he would be feeling no remorse for the condition he had reduced me to.

  ‘Until now,’ Sam murmured.

  He closed the book and stared at the cover. Bedraggled soldiers in bush hats standing in a jungle clearing, the image washed over with the rising sun of the Japanese flag. On the back was a photo of Harrison. Teutonic eyes set on some distant horizon, with a Buddhist temple behind. Handsome, chiselled features and a thick shock of fair hair. Not hard to see why the man had been worshipped by his women.

  It occurred to him it might be through one of them he’d get to Harrison – if he could discover who they were.

  The file Waddell had given him was on the dining table. Inside was a note from a Special Branch inspector, saying the Bordhill Community had proved as tight-lipped as a convent.

  Outside it had grown darker again. Rain beat against the window panes. He powered up his laptop and plugged the modem cable into the phone socket. On the Internet Google quickly found him a site for Bordhill. There were photos of a rambling eighteenth-century manor house, a potted history, a brief personality page on Peregrine Harrison and outlines of the Buddhist-centred courses held there. It all looked appealing enough, with fresh-faced twenty-and-thirty-somethings extolling the virtues of meditation.

  Then he clicked onto the Telegraph archive and fed in Kamata’s name. Half a dozen stories came up about the car factory deal. He browsed them quickly and copied them to a file on the hard-drive. Then he searched for sites run for former PoWs. Plenty of stuff about regimental histories and torture methods, but no reference to Harrison or Kamata.

  Finally he checked his email. There was one from Beth.

  Sorry to walk out on you without a goodbye on Jan 1. Just seemed to make sense at the time.

  They’re putting me through the grinder here in Sydney but I’ll survive.

  Thanks for being so nice on NYE. And for the generous suggestion of how to best use that historic millennium moment! Don’t think I wasn’t tempted. Ah well. Another time, another place …

  Be nice to stay in touch.

  Beth

  Sam smiled, savouring the bitter-sweetness of the missed opportunity. He hit the reply key and typed.

  Told you you’d regret it …

  Steve

  As soon as he disconnected, the phone rang.

  ‘Hope I didn’t wake you.’

  Sam recognised his controller’s voice.

  ‘No chance. Been up for hours.’

  ‘Brain still ahead of us?’

  ‘Always is, Duncan. Always is.’

  Waddell cleared his throat.

  ‘Tetsuo Kamata’s in town.’

  ‘Didn’t mention this yesterday.’

  ‘Didn’t know. It’s a private visit. They’re signing the Memorandum of Understanding today, for the transfer of the factory. Complete bloody surprise to us. The two companies had kept it to themselves.’

  ‘I thought the sale was months away.’

  ‘It is. But the MoU sets out the terms. Gives the Japs the right to look at the books. Make sure they’re not buying more of a pig in a poke than they think they are.’

  ‘We’re providing protection?’

  ‘As discreetly as possible. He doesn’t know about it. The company’s giving a press conference at noon at Brown’s Hotel. First time Kamata’s been seen in the flesh in this country. The media’ll go mad. And I think you ought to be there. Get a feel for the man.’

  ‘Fine, but I’ll need a press card.’

  ‘That’ll be ready at eleven-thirty. I’ll have someone meet you with it.’

  They fixed a time and place, then Waddell rang off.

  Sam stared out of the window, unhappy with the way the Harrison affair was developing a momentum of its own. He wanted it to die so he could get back to doing something about Jimmy Squires.

  He remembered the call he was going to make. Checking his address book on the computer
, he found the number and dialled it.

  The desk where it rang was deep inside the Ministry of Defence.

  Sam took the tube to Piccadilly, then dropped into Waterstone’s. He browsed the travel shelves for a guide to country hotels, buying the one with the greatest number of sites in East Anglia. Then he sat in the café and read it over a double espresso. To his dismay the area within twenty miles of Bordhill seemed to be a culinary desert. In the end he plumped for a coaching inn half-an-hour’s drive away, near the cathedral city of Ely. It promised an inglenook in the bar, a bedroom with a whirlpool bath, and a menu ‘drawing its inspiration from the four corners of the world’. He phoned from his mobile and found to his relief they had a room free.

  It was twenty past eleven. His appointment with Waddell’s messenger was outside Green Park tube. A five-minute walk.

  Stopping at a stationers to buy a small notebook, he reached Brown’s Hotel at ten minutes to twelve. A board in the reception area directed him to a suite on the first floor where a burly security guard checked his newly minted press card. The suite was already crowded, with half a dozen TV cameras facing the platform. He found a seat to the side, squeezing in between two tensely expectant Japanese reporters.

  At precisely twelve o’clock a flustered PR girl walked onto the podium to announce a delay. Mr Kamata’s party was stuck in traffic but would be here shortly. When she stepped down again, the reporters each side of Sam spoke across him in Japanese.

  At the back of the room TV producers paced, phones clamped between head and shoulder, reporting the bad news to their lunchtime bulletins. Time slots allocated to this story would need filling with something else if Kamata didn’t show in time. Sam studied faces, fearing that by some dreadful coincidence he might stumble across the press man who’d ambushed him fifteen months ago.

  At twenty past the hour the PR girl reappeared to announce the imminent arrival of Mr Kamata. The TV people switched on their cameras and the elderly saviour of the Walsall motor factory was ushered through the throng by a quartet of aides. He was tall for a Japanese, and for an octogenarian remarkably straight-backed. Sam watched him take his seat, studying this face that had haunted Peregrine Harrison’s dreams, while trying to picture him fifty-six years ago in drab jungle fatigues. Kamata displayed signs of nervousness. Sam guessed he’d been warned of the viciousness of the British media.