Complete Works of Nevil Shute

by Nevil Shute

  In a couple of days he was taken by river in a landing craft to Rangoon, and put in the jail there with the other prisoners, mostly RAF.

  In Rangoon jail there was no torture, but a great deal of indignity. Minor infractions of the regulations were disciplined by the Japanese kicking the shins or slapping the face, the same treatment as was meted out by Japanese officers to privates in their own army. The food was a revolting mess of boiled rice with a few vegetables occasionally as flavouring; it was deficient in every sort of vitamin because the bulk rice supply from which it came had been more than two years in store. Old rice eaten in this way causes beriberi, and the prisoners in Rangoon jail suffered a lot from this progressive disease.

  The cells were not unpleasant in that tropical climate, if prisoners had to be kept in cells at all. The jail was a fairly modern building. Morgan was put into an empty cell on the first floor of a long building that radiated with six others from a central hexagonal building which contained a well. His cell was thirteen feet long and nine feet wide, with a grating door and a grating window which permitted the cool air to blow straight through it, in itself a comfort in that climate. The walls were whitewashed, and the only furniture was a plank bed.

  The cell had housed a succession of previous occupants, some of whom had been moved down to the communal prison on the ground floor after an initial period of solitary confinement, and some had died. There were calendars and messages written on the wall, half rubbed out by the Japanese guards — F/O J. D. Scott, RAF, 698443 shot down near Prome in a Hurricane 7.2.43. I shall stay in this bloody hole until the bugs carry me out they are big enough. Behind the door where it was not easily seen from the corridor there was written on the wall a little dictionary of a dozen elementary words necessary for prisoners, with their Japanese equivalent — Water, Food, Doctor, Cold, Hot, Latrine, Good, Bad. Below this there was a verse:

  Only one life,

  ‘Twill soon be past,

  Only what’s done for Christ

  Will last.

  Attached to it was the signature of F/O J. K. Davidson, of Kilburn. Morgan wondered grimly what had happened to F/O Davidson.

  Morgan had a pencil and he immediately made a calendar upon the wall to cross the days off, the first act of the prisoner in solitary confinement. Later on he added a little to the Japanese dictionary, and for a mental exercise wrote down all the counties in the United Kingdom. He also wrote down all the Burmese words that Nay Htohn had told him, with their English equivalents, in case he should forget them.

  He stayed in that cell from November 23rd, 1944, until the Japanese left Rangoon before our advance on April 29th, 1945.

  His life was monotonous, and his health gradually deteriorated with deficiency of vitamins, but he was not very unhappy. He used to lie for long hours on the plank bed, thinking, and what he thought about was principally Nay Htohn. His idea of women was focused about Nay Htohn. Bitterly hurt by the treatment he had received from his wife, he clung to the idea of the Burmese girl, so much more intelligent and so much wiser than any woman he had come into contact with in his short life. He wanted to see her again when he got out of prison, wanted to find out what had happened to her after he had left them, wanted her assurance that she had escaped the Japanese. He never had much doubt about it, but he wanted to see her again to make quite sure. He wanted to talk to her again, to be with her, to see her move and hear her lilting voice. It came to him, queerly, that he had been happy on that day that he had spent mostly in the bamboo lockup in that nameless village in the jungle.

  As the months passed, the Royal Air Force gradually faded from his mind. He was still desperately interested in air operations, and when the massed flights of Mitchells and Thunderbolts, Liberators and Spitfires, came raiding military objectives in Rangoon he used to stand glued to the grating of his window, his heart with the aircrews, well aware from his own briefings that they would be particularly careful not to hit the jail. But as the time went by, he gradually became accustomed to the thought that he would never fly again, that by the time he was released new aircrews would have superseded him, that the very war might be over. The tropical and Burman scene became more real to him than his life in the Royal Air Force; England itself seemed very far away, a place of bitter hurt that he did not particularly want to go back to. He wanted to get back and see Nay Htohn, and listen to her talking, and watch her smile.

  April 29th, 1945, was a Sunday. In the few weeks before, with the Fourteenth Army driving down past Mandalay towards Rangoon and with the Fifteenth Corps advancing down the coast of Arakan, the Japanese had grown much less severe in Rangoon jail; food had improved, and the surveillance was relaxed. A large proportion of the prisoners were suffering from dysentery, and for this reason the Japanese at night had fallen into the way of leaving the cell doors unlocked in order that the prisoners might visit the latrine, keeping guard only on the block compound. In the middle of the night an RAF officer, thin and wasted and trembling hurried from his cell to the latrine outside. There was a paper pinned to the door, unusual. He could not wait, but presently when he came out he raised his hurricane lamp to look at it. It read:

  English and American prisoners, you are now free. By order of the Emperor the Japanese Army has withdrawn from Rangoon, and so we have left you to regain your liberty. We shall hope to meet you again honourably on the field of battle.

  The keys are on the table in the guardroom.

  He stared at it amazed, and hurried back to the cells and woke the others in his building. Two senior officers ventured out of the block compound into the walled lane outside that led down from the central well towards the guardroom, half expecting to be met by a sharp squirt of submachine gun fire. But there were no Japanese; they walked down to the guardroom, and there the keys were lying on the table, three great bunches of them. It was all quite true.

  For half an hour there had been a growing clamour from the town. They unlocked the main gates and walked out into the street. From the centre of the town there was a roar of crowds rioting, and shots were going off continually. Over the houses they could see the glow of fires. It was all rather alarming to weakened, totally unarmed men isolated in a tropical city; the prisoners went back into the jail and locked themselves in. It could only be a matter of a very few days now before the Fourteenth Army marched in to relieve them.

  At dawn they set about communicating with the RAF aircraft on patrol above the city. Morgan and others got a long ladder and got on to the roof of their block, and with limewash painted in huge letters — JAPS GONE. They were rewarded by a Mosquito which came down to a thousand feet and circled round, photographing what they had done. Later in the morning they became apprehensive that the High Command might think their sign a Jap ruse. They searched their minds for a code message which would carry conviction, and in their impatience for release they had no hesitation in framing a rude one. They got up on the other side of the pitched roof and painted in large letters, EXTRACT DIGIT. A Thunderbolt came by and waggled its wings at them.

  Firing was easier in the afternoon, and there was less noise from the city. The prisoners were urgently in need of better food; fresh meat and vegetables and fruit were probably available in the city. Under the command of a young major in the Indian Army, Morgan and three others left the jail as a compact little group and walked into the town; they were quite unarmed and went very warily. They went slowly for they were all suffering from swollen legs due to incipient beriberi. They came first to the Chinese quarter and were welcomed heartily; they found that the Chinese had erected barricades across the streets to protect their shops and go-downs from the looters who were ravaging the remainder of Rangoon. They got everything they wanted in the Chinese quarter in a couple of hours without the slightest difficulty, including a few automatic pistols stolen from the Japanese. They made arrangements for the delivery of two lorry loads of fruit and vegetables to the jail; curiously, there was plenty of petrol left behind in the town, which was only da
maged by our own bombardment and by looters.

  When the question of payment arose they offered chits drawn against the paymaster for the Fourteenth Army, which were accepted gladly by the Chinese banker that they dealt with. In the office he beamed at the tattered scarecrows of men in stained jungle suits facing him across the table. “I am very glad to assist English prisoners,” he said. “But also, this is better money than the Japanese paper money we have now. In helping you I help myself, gentlemen. Do not thank me.”

  The major asked: “Is the currency position very bad?”

  The Chinaman laughed. “I cannot describe it. During the occupation the inflation was twenty times — not less than that — twenty times at least. But last night when the Japanese left the mob broke open the banks down in the English quarter and stole all the notes. A friend of mine who has been there this morning says that notes of fifty and a hundred rupees are lying piled like dead leaves in the gutter. If that is true, then this Japanese money is completely worthless. I would rather have your chits.”

  He made them drink tea with him from fine cups without handles, and showed them out with every courtesy. In the street outside, surrounded by the crowd, the major said: “Like to take a walk up town and see if what he said about the banks is true?”

  They went, walking in the middle of the street, the automatics ready to their hands. The streets were indescribably filthy; great heaps of rotting garbage lay on all the pavements. They went slowly, stopping many times to receive the greetings of various brown men in native costume who spoke excellent English. Before them rioting and crowd activity died down and the crowds melted away; behind them a long tail of interested citizens followed. They went carefully and steadily down the middle of the street, ready for anything.

  They reached the banking district; it was as the Chinaman had said. Every bank had been broken open and the looting was still going on; the crowds melted away before them and resumed their reprehensible activities when they passed. Five and ten rupee notes were everywhere in the gutters and lying on the pavements; these were chicken feed, not worth the trouble of picking up. They went into several of the wrecked banks, pistols in hand, flushing the crowd before them. Great stacks of unissued paper money in bundles were standing ripped open and scattered, heaved from a burst strong room. They stood and stared in wonder at this curious sight.

  “Better take a little of this back with us for current expenses,” the major said. They filled their pockets and the blouses of their jungle suits; then they commandeered a tonga and drove back to jail to rest their swollen legs. When Morgan got back to the jail he found that he had twelve thousand eight hundred and sixty rupees, about nine hundred and fifty pounds at par, in his possession. He gave a good deal of it away that evening.

  Morgan lay awake for a short time that night before sleep, thinking deeply. The better food that he had eaten during the day, and the rice wine that he had drunk, had revived him, had increased his clarity of thought. Within a day or two now the British and Indian troops would reach Rangoon; messages of encouragement had been dropped into the jail by aircraft flying low that evening. When that happened the prisoners would be evacuated by air at once to India, and from there they would be sent back to England probably to be demobilized. The last thing that Morgan wanted to do was to go back to England, into the sordid mess that was his marriage. What he wanted to do was to get up into the Irrawaddy delta and find out what had become of Nay Htohn, and to meet her again. To hell, he thought, with going back to England, at any rate for a bit. He wanted to stay in Burma.

  In the circumstances, discipline was very lax in Rangoon jail; parties of prisoners walked in and out of the town freely next morning. Morgan took stock of his possessions. He had his one worn jungle suit, his haversack with a few small articles of kit, his boots, his scarf, a blanket, about five thousand six hundred Japanese rupees, and a good automatic pistol with fifty-three rounds of ammunition. He felt footloose and free. He went down to see the Chinese banker who had helped them the day before, and asked him the best way to get to Henzada. He said that he had to get in touch with a man called Utt Nee.

  The Chinaman knew all about Utt Nee. “He is colonel in the Independence Army,” he said. “You will be able to find somebody at Henzada who can direct you to him, if you can get there. His father is very well known in Rangoon, Maung Shway Than. He is at Henzada, or he was last month. If you find Maung Shway Than, give him my very kind regards.”

  The pilot asked: “You know him, do you?”

  “Oh yes. Maung Shway Than had many important business interests in Rangoon. He has several children; Utt Nee is the eldest son. He was at Rangoon University.”

  They turned to the consideration of the journey. “You will have to go by river,” said the Chinaman. “I do not know the situation with regard to the Japanese, but I think there are very many up by Henzada still. You can go to Yandoon in a sampan fairly easily from here; I can arrange that for you. At Yandoon you should ask for Mr Liu Sen, who is a banker we have dealings with. I will give you a letter to him, and he will help you if he can. I do not know what conditions are from Yandoon up to Henzada.”

  Morgan did not go back to the jail. The Chinaman was as good as his word; he bustled around and produced a letter in Chinese for Mr Liu Sen at Yandoon. He left his office and they walked down to the waterfront; from the hundreds of sampans he picked one and they made their way from boat to boat to reach it. It was manned by a family of Chinese-Karens, a man, his wife, and two small children. They could not speak one word of English, of course.

  The banker talked to them for some time, then turned to Morgan. “These are people of my Kong,” he said. “You can trust them. They will take you to Yandoon for two hundred Japanese rupees; it will take two days, or a little longer. I have arranged that you will pay one hundred rupees at Yandoon, but give them a hundred and twenty. The other hundred I will pay them when I get a letter from Liu Sen that you arrived there safely. Now we must buy food for the journey.”

  He bought rice and vegetables and fruit for Morgan and had it taken down to the waterfront by the woman. For payment for his services the banker wanted a letter to the Officer Commanding the Fourteenth Army, saying that he had given the prisoners great help; Morgan guessed that he had had many dealings with the Japanese during the occupation and was uncertain of his own position, and anxious to establish credit. The pilot gave him a note of gratitude willingly, and left Rangoon by water at about three o’clock that afternoon.

  By all civilized standards the discomfort of the sampan was extreme; to the prisoner just out of Rangoon jail it was delightful; so much do standards change. The Chinese-Karens took little notice of him, treating him mainly as a piece of cargo, as they laboured at their sweeps to bring the sampan up the river in the slack water by the river banks. Morgan sat playing with the children and watching the unaccustomed scene; he kept his money out of sight and his pistol very much in sight, and he had no trouble. The river was thronged with sampans, but when they left the main stream and entered the narrow chaungs to reach the Irrawaddy the natives motioned him to stay inside the bamboo mat shelter, in case a roving band of Japanese seeking to escape towards the east should notice him, and take a shot at him.

  He slept two nights in the sampan, lying on the bare boards and eating with his hands out of a common bowl with the family. They got to Yandoon on the third day without incident; he found Mr Liu Sen, and paid off the Chinese-Karens. Mr Sen introduced him to a young man called Moung Boh Galay who held an indeterminate rank in the Independence Army and who spoke a little English; he sent him on by sampan up to Henzada with two armed Burmans as a bodyguard, with instructions to deliver him to Utt Nee. Morgan arrived in Henzada six days after leaving Rangoon, having experienced no special difficulty on the journey.

  On the way up river he had learned from various people that Henzada had been bombed, but he was distressed and saddened by what he found there. It had been a Japanese headquarters; sometime in April
we had turned the Royal Air Force on to it, and in two or three sharp raids they had practically obliterated the town. Once it had been a thriving place of close on twenty thousand people; now fire had swept across it, more devastating than in Europe since so much was built of wood and bamboo mat. A native town destroyed is sadder than a British city, for there is so little help for the people. These people were stricken by a clash of greater nations than they in their land, and little could be done to help them in their trouble. Here were no Army doctors and nurses to help them; here were no gifts of clothes and food from other prosperous communities. A native town blitzed means an end to civilization in that district for the time; the survivors must disperse to live as best they can from the wild fruits of the jungle, or if fortunate to work as labourers in the paddy fields.

  His bodyguard made inquiries from the local people, and hearing that no Japanese were in the town, took Morgan to the headquarters of the Independence Army, a native house that stood undamaged in a palm grove on the outskirts. A young officer received him here with sullen suspicion; amongst considerable coming and going in the little house, Morgan was put through a sharp interrogation. The Independence Army at that time was worried and not a little frightened; they had been fighting for the British after fighting against them, and now that the British were back in the country the Burmans were by no means sure if they would think in terms of 1945 or 1942. Morgan was the first Englishman to reach them in the district with the exception of transient guerrilla officers, and they were distrustful of him till the policy of the British became known. They were by no means sure in Henzada that they would not have to turn and fight the British all over again, and if so, here was Flying-Officer Morgan for them to make a start on.

  In the middle of all this a young Burman passed by them; Morgan glanced at him, and he at Morgan. The pilot said: “Thet Shay?”