by Maggie Ford
Beside him Bob’s voice came hollow. ‘You mean we’re trapped?’
The sound of that voice returned Matthew’s sanity to him in a rush.
‘We’re going to get out okay,’ he said, more to still his own fears than to reassure Bob. His mouth sour, he lifted a hand to his eyes and with finger and thumb grubbed out the caked dust that had collected at the inner corners. To ease the ache between his shoulder-blades he straightened his back. It was a gesture Weatherill immediately took as determination.
‘Good man,’ he grunted and left them to find a hole by the road to creep into and rest for a while.
Beside him Bob was fast asleep. Other men also were sleeping, but his own rest was fitful. For something to keep his imagination at bay he took a sip of the warm metallic water from his canteen, rinsed it around his mouth and spat it out, thick and evil, then took another sip and swallowed it. In the canteen the water slapped hollowly. How grand to have been able to wash, if only his face. To think of millions of gallons of fresh water flowing by just half a mile away. He listened to the spasmodic firing and wondered how much longer the two sides would continue taking pot shots at each other. He thought of Susan, the child she bore. He thought drowsily that if he were to get up now before it got light and go towards the firing, the river, there might be a chance …
A hand on his shoulder brought him awake, grabbing for his rifle. The grip tightened.
‘Easy, lad.’ Weatherill stood over him. ‘Be light in a few minutes. Get your men together.’
Firing could still be heard from the bridge, a little more energetic in the fast-brightening tropical morning. The driver of the staff car, a cheeky Cockney, was handing out cubes of corned beef, the tin opened with his bayonet. ‘We’re orf, mate,’ he said to Matthew. ‘’Ad a dekko darn the road. It ain’t so bad furver along. A few obstructions but we can all git fru. Once we’re over that bleedin’ bridge we’ll all ’ave a nice cuppa tea at HQ.’
Matthew grinned at his Cockney optimism and was on the point of helping himself to a greasy cube of the corned beef when a terrific triple explosion rocked the already pink dawn.
For a second or two the firing from both sides stopped as though paralysed by the tremendous paroxysm, and in the lull its echoes rumbled away into the distance with slowly diminishing reverberations.
‘Mother of Jesus! What the hell was that?’ one of the junior officers called out, running over.
Weatherill’s answer was one of incredulity. ‘They’ve blown the bridge.’ A pall of smoke was spiralling slowly above the tree-tops.
The other man’s voice shook. ‘Bloody HQ. Couldn’t wait for us. Left us in the lurch, thousands of us. They panicked.’
Weatherill didn’t dispute him. Headquarters had probably had no alternative if the Japanese had been threatening to swarm across. It had been the plan, to delay the enemy’s advance on Rangoon enough to allow Allied reinforcements to arrive.
After the first shock of the explosion, hostilities resumed with even greater ferocity, each man now desperately fighting for his own life, gone all thoughts of saving transport and artillery.
Weatherill lost no time. ‘We’ll try the river further upstream. Thank God this isn’t the monsoon. The river should be low.’
‘What about the wounded?’ Matthew asked. The enemy, it was rumoured, had its own methods with casualties. Weatherill didn’t even look at him.
‘If they can walk and if they can be quiet, they come too.’
His words were met by silence, the men around him knowing there was no other suggestion to be made. He waited a moment or two for any there might be, then turned and without a word moved towards the trees. The others followed mutely, the green world closing in barely thirty feet into the trees, hiding the abandoned wounded quickly from guilt-ridden sight.
Here even any continuing rifle fire was muffled, the canopy a hundred feet or more above them cutting out all sunlight in a tangle of vines and parasitic growth, echoing only to the whirring of insects and the bell-like early-morning calls of forest birds. Grey wreathing mists of morning lay in motionless flat layers, but as the sun rose they turned delicate pink and lifted steadily through the ceiling of miniature jungle above to disappear. Within minutes that ceiling was pressing the heat down on the men, saturating them with sweat, the soft and spongy earth under their feet smelling dank.
Progress remained snail-like. In some areas the great mottled tree-trunks stood like dead-straight pillars of some vast cathedral, lianas draped from one to the other with curtains of green moss hanging from them. Sometimes the forest thinned enough to allow shafts of sunlight through and vegetation to become rampant, scrambling for light with vivid colouring, thick clumps of bamboo around which the men must time after time make diversions. In half an hour they had covered just half a mile, bearing northeast as much as those diversions allowed.
Breathing heavily from the now steamy heat which by midday would reach ninety degrees or more, arms aching from pushing aside the tough, woody creepers, legs aching from negotiating a surprisingly undulating terrain, from somewhere to their left came the gurgle of water.
‘Should see some open space soon,’ Weatherill predicted in a whisper. ‘Paddy fields probably. We could be easily spotted. Keep your heads down.’
After ten more minutes pushing through undergrowth, they came upon a proper path, the forest beginning to thin.
In the sudden brilliant sunlight, Weatherill crouched just off the path, beckoning to his men to follow suit. ‘I think there’s a village ahead. Could be sitting ducks if we blunder in there. We’d best skirt it, find the river and somewhere to swim across. Come on, but quietly.’
He stood up, the rest taking their cue from him. A sudden movement of foliage, the metallic sound of hands on rifles, froze the group. In a strange language, a guttural voice grated out a command.
From nowhere there appeared small men in drab tunics with double belts, short legs bound in puttees to the knee, and split canvas boots that divided the big toes from the rest. Black shoe-button eyes trained on the group from behind levelled rifles with incredibly long bayonets; for all their size each man looked strong, immensely capable and very much a fighting man, utterly at home in this hostile environment.
One by one the surprised men let their rifles fall and lifted their arms in the time-honoured abject signal of surrender as their captors moved closer. There were some twenty-five of them plus their officer – that many moving so silently no one had heard them at all.
With a sickness pounding in his chest, Matthew lifted his arms with the rest, submitted himself to be searched by a soldier reaching only to his shoulder in height. His pockets and ration pack were emptied of all he possessed: silver cigarette case, lighter, a little Burmese money, a photo of Susan. It was the photo that hurt most, seeing it scrutinised then torn into four pieces and flung away. The silver cigarette case and lighter were handed to the Japanese officer who immediately pocketed them with a satisfied smile.
Chapter 16
‘We’ll get another letter from him very soon. You really must stop fretting, Susan. It isn’t good for the baby.’
Susan eyed her mother-in-law, just managing to hold back the tears that threatened and which always annoyed the woman. But every time she thought of Matthew’s last letter she couldn’t help them rising to the surface.
The one prior to that had said he had been over the moon about her news of the baby, and she’d been so happy that he was happy. It had said they were leaving Bombay though where for, as usual, hush-hush.
His last letter had come two days ago, a single page written in pencil in such an obvious hurry she could hardly read it, the soiled notepaper in an even more soiled envelope telling her not to worry, he was all right, that in itself worrying her more although she wasn’t sure why. It bore a military Rangoon postmark. Rangoon was in Burma, Mr Ward had told her, and she had heard fear echoing in his tone.
Her geography never good, she’d quickly consulted a
n atlas, alarmed how near the fighting Matthew had been sent. News from that part of the world had all been of disaster: the sinking of two large Royal Navy ships, the Prince of Wales, and the Repulse, the fall of Hong Kong on Christmas Day, then Singapore on the fifteenth of February four weeks ago. Now it was March. There was fighting in Burma and Matthew’s last letter, grubby and stained, made her shiver with imaginings she daren’t voice; none of them dared, though the look on their faces said they were thinking the same as she was.
Why was it, Jenny thought, that when she was with Ronald she could talk without a pause about all sorts of things, completely at ease in his company, yet the very anticipation of going to meet him never failed to fill her with strange reluctance, wishing she didn’t have to?
‘Have a quick drink in the pub tonight?’ he’d whisper as they passed in a corridor, if their off-duty hours coincided. ‘Wait for you outside.’
She would nod, smile, aware of a sinking feeling, a wish to be doing anything other than meeting him, even preferring to go home to spend a dull evening with Mumsy. There was none of that excited palpitation a girl in love was supposed to experience – the way she used to feel all those years ago when Matthew Ward came into sight or inadvertently touched her. The touch of Ronald’s hand on hers did nothing, though if he kissed her, her body would stir, responding of its own accord. Then her head would start to send messages that this wasn’t love, but a natural response to the touch of any man halfway handsome. Yet it made no sense to shy away from the knowledge that marriage to Ronald could be the best thing to happen to her; she would become the wife of a general practitioner.
‘It’s still early days,’ she’d hedged. ‘Too many people are rushing into marriage because it seems the right thing to do.’
‘Don’t you want to marry me?’ he had asked only last week, towards the end of February. What could she say?
‘Of course I do.’
But was she lying, to him and herself? They had had their very first row, as far as it was possible to row with Ronald, who was always even-tempered.
‘Then for God’s sake why delay it? It’s not as if I’ve nothing to offer you. My family’s pretty well off. My father’s a GP. Soon I’ll be one as well.’
She knew that. He was taking his finals in a couple of weeks and was more than certain that he’d pass. He had talked often of the day when he too would be a GP expected to go in with his father as a junior partner. Perhaps it was that which made her so reluctant about marriage and the assumption that she would accompany him to Bristol. It meant leaving her mother, who still deemed herself lonely after all this time with Jenny not getting home regularly each night. Her mother was destined to become even more isolated if Jenny went off to live on the other side of the country – the other side of the world as far as she was concerned.
‘If you go into your father’s practice I shall end up in Bristol,’ she argued obstinately and saw his lips tighten a fraction. ‘There’s my mother to think of. I can’t leave her all on her own.’
She could have suggested he find some other practice around here, but some quiet little voice said it would be tempting fate – he might agree and she would then have no option but to say yes to his expectations of their marrying.
He had fallen quiet, had sat away from her, his brow furrowed. She too had sat silent over her mild ale and the evening during which they would normally have chattered away like a couple of monkeys had become long and tense until it was she who said she ought to be going to catch the last bus home. He had nodded, got up, got her coat for her and helped her on with it and had said, ‘See you tomorrow then. I’ll see you to the bus stop.’
This week, during another quick drink in the pub opposite the hospital, the row that had been simmering, exploded. Quietly, but it exploded just the same.
‘I’ve had enough of this, Jenny.’ Ronald’s voice was harsher than she had ever heard it. ‘What the hell do I have to do to show you how much I love you?’
She had to say it now. ‘I don’t want to go to live in Bristol all that way away.’
‘I can’t go without you.’
And now she must add: ‘Then can’t you try for a practice somewhere local, around here?’ There, she had said it, had burned her last bridge.
Ronald looked at her, his brows meeting in anger at her selfishness. ‘You want me to scratch around here looking for some half-baked practice that’ll take me years to get anywhere with when I’ve an already made place with my father? You must be mad, Jenny. Don’t you want to see me get on?’
‘Of course I do.’ She felt lame.
‘Don’t you love me?’
‘Yes, Ronald.’ She wished he wouldn’t keep pushing that question.
‘Well, it doesn’t sound like it to me.’
A group of American servicemen with smooth smart uniforms and girls on their arms, bustling past, filling the pub with their loud easy twang and high spirits, put paid to the couple’s quiet argument. Ronald threw them a frown, and repeated his statement a little more audibly. ‘It doesn’t sound like it to me.’
‘Because I don’t want to go traipsing all the way to Bristol, leaving my mother? What is this, Ronald – a demand for self-sacrifice?’
‘In a way, yes.’
‘But you’re not prepared to sacrifice yourself when it comes to you.’
‘Look, I shall be the breadwinner. I’ve got to consider what’s best for our future. Can’t you see that? If you really loved me, Jenny, it wouldn’t seem to you like self-sacrifice – as you call it.’
There came screams of laughter from the GIs’ girls. Jenny felt tears come into her eyes. ‘If that’s what you think of me, Ronald, the little lamb ready to follow its shepherd up hill and down dale, I’ve got a career too. I’ve studied hard, and I’ve still got a lot of studying to do, and I want to get somewhere, not just be a GP’s wife, sitting at home, joining nice little ladies’ clubs and doing your book work. Eventually I’d have liked to go into the QAs.’
This was the Queen Alexandra’s Imperial Military Nursing Service Reserve. She hadn’t really thought about going into the QAs before, but she thought of it now, more out of anger than ambition.
Ronald was staring at her. The ruckus from the GIs and their girls was getting worse, but they had good money to spend and the landlord would suffer them. The look on Ronald’s face tore at Jenny’s whole being.
‘I had no idea that was all you cared for me, Jenny. You’d sooner join up than marry me.’
‘No, darling, that’s not what I meant. I want to marry you.’ Now, suddenly, she did, seeing herself throwing away the chance of a lifetime. Did she really think she wanted to go on nursing for the rest of her life, to go off and be a Queen Alexandra’s nurse, to take orders when she could live in comfort with a man who loved her? ‘Ronald, I really do love you.’
He sat looking at her for a long while, as she watched him, visualising what was going on in his mind, her protestations fallen short. Then he stood up, and got her coat, as always helping her on with it, for he was a caring man even when hurt and angry. Wordlessly, she let him guide her from the now noisy pub. Outside, he took her in his arms and kissed her.
‘Perhaps I have been rushing things,’ he said in the quiet night, the sounds from inside muffled by the closure of the pub door. ‘What I wanted to tell you, darling, is that I got my results today. I’ve passed.’
She leaned back from his embrace. ‘Why didn’t you tell me?’
‘I don’t know. I was going to, but somehow we ended up discussing something else instead.’ He wouldn’t say row. Easier to call it discussing. But he wasn’t finished yet.
‘Jenny, darling, I know now that you’re not yet ready to commit yourself – not to me or to anyone. But I love you. And I think, deep down, you love me, but there’s something in the way. Maybe it’s your mother. But you must break away from the hole you’re stuck in. So I think it best I let you consider things before you make up your mind what you want to do. In a
week or two I’ll be leaving to go home to start up in my father’s practice. I’ll write to you and if you do change your mind about coming to Bristol, I’ll be waiting. I’ll keep on loving you, Jenny. I won’t give up hope. I just want you to think about everything and what we are throwing away.’
Tears were streaming down Jenny’s cheeks. Now was the time to burst out that she did love him, that she wanted to go with him. But she didn’t. For the most futile of reasons. And the moment vanished.
A bleak spring had followed a bleak new year, that first elation at the United States coming into the war dissipating; everywhere Jenny saw set faces that spoke of grim determination to believe things must only get better.
In the Middle East, Rommel, seemingly invincible, had struck back and recaptured Benghazi. At sea the German battleships Scharnhorst and Gneisenau slipped their hide-out at Brest under the very noses of the British Navy and in attempting to sink them the RAF lost forty planes. Ceylon was raided by the Japanese, the British Eastern Fleet withdrew to Kenya; Britain had abandoned the Far East.
The London Hospital’s outpatient department seemed to be full of women showing the strain of trying not to dwell on loved ones away. Women with drawn faces, complaining of backache, neuralgia, stomach pains, stiff necks, strange agitation, trembling hands, ‘I c’n ’ardly keep meself still in the mornin’, doctor’; ‘I’m fair sick of this bloody back of mine’; ‘I’ve got these legs, doctor, wot keeps on swellin’’; and usually as he examined whatever complaint presented itself, came the inevitable self-diagnosis: ‘Wiv’art me ole man at ’ome I feel lorst.’
Jenny, helping in outpatients, knew how they felt thinking of those absent faces. Too often she thought of one absent face in particular. Since the fall of Rangoon in Burma, Susan Ward said she’d not had any letters from her husband and the Wards were growing anxious. Lots of wives and mothers were going through that strain, added to which was the constant worry of eking out the rations for those still at home. Shoppers needed to be ever more watchful for opportunities to present themselves in the food line.
