by Nevil Shute
The other stopped and stared, then broke into a beaming smile and came and shook him by the hand. In the babel of Burmese that followed the interrogating officer melted and became genial. “Everything has been explained,” he said. “I have heard of you from Colonel Utt Nee, and from Moung Thet Shay. The colonel is away up the river; we expect him back here tomorrow.”
The pilot said: “Can I stay here till he comes? I want to see him before I go back to England.”
The Burmese talked together for a time. Then the interrogating officer turned to him again. “It is very uncomfortable here,” he said. “Moung Thet Shay will take you to the father of Utt Nee, who is here in Henzada and has a good house. He will be glad to put you up. His name is Moung Shway Than.”
Morgan nodded. “I want to see him, too. I have a message for him from a business friend in Rangoon.”
Thet Shay took him through the ruined town, a place of miserable desolation and burnt posts, to a residential district out beyond what had been the railway station to the west of the town. Here they came to a large Burmese house surrounded by a fairly well tended garden. Thet Shay escorted him up the steps on to the veranda, and paused at the entrance to the main living-room, furnished in European style with cane chairs and tables. There was an old man with grey hair sitting there smoking a cheroot, a brown old man clad in nothing but a longyi. There was a very young man, or boy, reading a book.
Thet Shay said something in Burmese; Morgan stood hesitant at the entrance, feeling rather a fool. The grey-haired old Burman got to his feet, listened to Thet Shay for a minute, and then turned to Morgan. “I am very pleased to meet you,” he said in good English. “I remember my eldest son spoke of you.”
The pilot said: “I’m afraid this is a bit of an intrusion. But I didn’t want to leave Burma without seeing your son again. He was very kind to me when I forced landed last November, and he did his best to get me back across our lines. It wasn’t his fault that I got taken by the Japs. It was just one of those things.”
Shway Than said: “Are you free to leave Burma now? Is the port of Rangoon taken by the British?”
Morgan told him what the situation had been in Rangoon when he left. The old man said: “So you have been in Rangoon jail. I am very sorry. You must need rest now, and good food. Come in and sit down.”
Thet Shay slipped away. Morgan dropped his haversack into a corner, and sank down into one of the cane chairs. He was already tired. “I’m very sorry to turn up like this,” he said, glancing down at his soiled, threadbare jungle suit, and feeling the stubble on his chin. “I’ve been travelling since Monday.”
The old man said: “You will want clean clothes, and a bath. I can provide what you need.” He spoke a few words in Burmese to the boy, who went out to the back of the house. The old man turned to Morgan. “I am beginning to understand this now,” he said. “You are the Englishman who surrendered to the Japanese at Bassein after the English major had been killed, are you not?”
The pilot said: “That’s right.”
The old man said: “You saved my daughter and Thet Shay from a bad situation.”
“It was the only thing to do. I didn’t want them to get into a mess with the Japs on account of me.”
The old man wagged his head. “Some men would not have seen it in that light. In this house we are very grateful to you.” He struggled to his feet. “I do not show great gratitude by keeping you talking when you are tired and dirty. Come with me.”
He took the pilot into a cool bedroom with a bathroom opening out of it, with water in a great red chatty. On the string bed a Burman servant was laying out clothes, fine drill trousers and a shirt, and a longyi. Shway Than said: “There are both English and Burmese clothes for you to choose from. Here are towels and soap, only Japanese soap, very bad, I am sorry. But we have English tea; it will be ready when you are.”
He went out, and the pilot stepped gratefully out of his clothes and sluiced himself with water. He thanked his stars he was not verminous. After the jail and the sampan the bedroom with the huge chatty of cool water was utter luxury; he stood about wet with the water drying on him as he shaved, and sluiced himself again. It was nearly an hour before he could tear himself away from it, till he appeared in the living-room in the shirt and trousers. He had not dared experiment with the longyi; he did not know the knot that keeps it up around the waist.
There was no sign of the old man or the boy when he looked round, but the table was laid as if for afternoon tea in England. In the entrance leading out to the veranda, with her back to him, Nay Htohn was standing. She was dressed in a green longyi and a little short cream coloured jacket over a white shirt; she had a dark red flower in her hair. He stood silent, watching her for a moment; he had not known before quite how badly he had wanted to see her again.
He made a movement, and she turned at the slight sound, and saw him. She smiled, and moved towards him quickly, and took his hand. “My father said that you were here.” And then she stooped before him in a sort of curtsy, and kissed his hand.
He touched her on the shoulder, half blinded with a sudden watering of the eyes. “I say, you don’t have to do that,” he muttered. Then they had separated, and were staring at each other in wonder, and laughing.
She said: “Were they cruel to you?”
He grinned at her. “They had me in the bloody prison up till now. Not crueller than that. Nothing like — like they are sometimes. Nothing like that.”
She said: “We had them here — they only went away last week. They lived like pigs.”
He said quickly: “Did they trouble you?”
She shook her head. “They were quite correct — actually, we saw very little of them. But in their officers’ mess, when first they came, they were short of plates and crockery. They used to mix up all their rations, tea and flour and sugar and meat and jam and vegetables and salt and biscuit — they used to mix this all together into a sort of swill, and they served it on to the table in a bedpan.”
He laughed. “No?”
She laughed with him. “It is absolutely true, for weeks they ate out of the bedpan. They saw nothing wrong with it. But that was the Army; the civilians were more civilized. Still, we were very glad to see them go.”
He said: “You got back from Bassein all right?”
She said: “Thanks to you we did. We walked back in twos and threes, as local villagers. I carried a basket of mangoes on my head until we were past the Japanese patrols, with the revolver and all the rifle ammunition underneath the mangoes. It was terribly heavy. We had to bury the rifles, but we got them all back later on.” She glanced at him. “You will stay with us for some days?”
“If it won’t be too much nuisance, I should like to,” he replied. “I’m a bit groggy still. My ankles keep on swelling up.”
She made him sit down in a chair, and knelt at his feet, and pressed the swollen flesh with her slim fingers. Her touch was infinitely soothing. She said: “They gave you very bad food in the jail.”
It was a plain statement of fact, competent and comforting in its efficiency. He nodded. “Beriberi, isn’t it?”
She said: “It is in an early stage; it will get well soon, with better food and rest. Our people get this sometimes when the crops are bad and they have to eat the old rice. But you must stay with us till you are well.”
He said: “I don’t want to be a nuisance.”
She said gravely: “How could you be that?”
She called out in Burmese, and a manservant came in from the back quarters; he exclaimed when he saw Morgan’s feet. The girl spoke to him for a time in Burmese and he went away; later on he came back with a steaming brew in a jug on a tray, with a cup, and set it down by Morgan, steaming hot. “You must drink a great deal of that,” the girl said. “It will do you good.” He discovered later that it was an infusion of fresh limes and rice husks, the vitamin-bearing portion of the rice. It was a country remedy for beriberi, known to the people long before the vitamin was known to any
body.
He had a long talk that evening with the girl and her father; from time to time other relations drifted in and out. He learned that there were still roving parties of Japanese about the countryside, up to three hundred strong; they were avoiding the towns and roads, which were patrolled by the Independence Army. These roving bands were short of food and cut off from their retreat towards the east by the advance of the Fourteenth Army down the middle of the country to Rangoon; a number of them were escaping down river every night in power landing craft, in an attempt to gain the sea and make a sea crossing eastwards to Tavoy. Others were trying to make their way across country, usually by night, to break through the Fourteenth Army’s narrow salient in sorties to the east.
The evening meal came and they sat down seven in number to the table, a meal that consisted of a great platter of boiled rice with little bowls of curry in the middle of the table; Nay Htohn arranged special dishes for Morgan. These foods were eaten with a spoon, except for one old lady who used chopsticks. The meal over, Morgan sat with a cheroot on the veranda in the dim light, utterly peaceful and at rest in a long chair. Nay Htohn came and knelt down on the floor by his feet; it was more natural for her to squat down on the floor than to sit up on a chair.
She had something in her hand. She said: “I have a paper of yours here. I think perhaps you want it back.”
He said: “A paper of mine?” It was a very dogeared, grubby piece of paper that she gave him. He held it up to the light that streamed from the room behind. It read, in his handwriting:
Ma Nay Htohn.
Water — YE
Boiled rice — HTAMIN
Man —
He smiled, and turned it sideways to read again what was written across the paper:
I have gone into Bassein to surrender to the Japs; don’t try to follow me. I shall try and hide for two days before surrendering, so that you can get away. The English will send another officer to replace Major Williams, tell him about me. I will try and see you when the war is over if I get away with it. Don’t think too badly of us. We may be stupid, but we do our best.
He smiled gently, thinking back to the tenseness of that bad time, from the ease and friendship of his chair on the veranda. He was touched that she should have thought it worth while to keep so trivial a scrap as a memento. He said: “You must teach me some more words while I’m here.”
She hesitated, and then said: “Have you looked inside?”
He turned the paper over, and saw that it was an old air letter, addressed to him; the sprawling, unformed handwriting gave him a great shock. He opened the tattered folds in silence, and read:
Phillip Darling,
This is going to be a dreadful letter to write and I don’t know how to begin but it’s not as if we ever had been married really is it I mean had a home and all that. I know when Jack was killed you were too sweet in looking after me and everything and of course he wanted it and so we simply had to and it’s been marvellous and I’ll never regret one minute of it will you?
He read on in silence, in a wave of sudden misery.
. . . and it’s horrible being sort of neither one thing nor the other in spite of it having been all a mistake to start with hasn’t it? I do hope we’ll be frightfully good friends for dear old Jack’s sake.
Ever your loving,
Bobby
“My Christ,” he said quietly. “I thought the Japs had got this one.”
He glanced down at the girl beside him; she was gazing up at him, and there were tears in her eyes. “This is an old letter from my wife,” he said. “Did you read it?”
She said: “I read it, but I did not let anybody else read it. It seemed so private. I thought you would not like people to see it.”
He said: “That’s terribly nice of you. I wouldn’t like other people to see this. I didn’t realize what it was when I wrote that message on the back of it.”
She gazed up at him. “It meant so little to you?”
“Yes.” He thought for a moment, and then said: “We didn’t match up very well, my wife and I. And then other things happened that were more — more sort of real, crash landing the Spit, and getting taken by your people, and all that. I just didn’t think about it. The Japs took all the papers in my wallet when they searched me at Bassein, and I thought they’d got this one, too.”
She took the letter, and turned it over curiously, holding it between the very tips of her fingers. “Did she really write this filthy thing to you in India — when you were so far from home, and fighting in the war?”
“I got it a few days before I crash-landed the Spit,” he said. “She wouldn’t have thought of it like that, of course.”
She looked up at him, and met his eyes. “It is a vile letter,” she said. “I should like to see it burnt.”
“Burn it, if you like, Nay Htohn,” he said gravely. “I’m through with all that now. My wife and I — we’re all washed up.”
She smiled suddenly. “I have taken a copy of the message that you wrote for me. I am not going to lose that.” They laughed together, and she went and fetched a hurricane lamp from the table in the living-room, and they watched the letter shrivel and turn black and burn till there was nothing left of it.
She came and knelt beside him up against his knee, and they talked about Henzada and the Irrawaddy, and her life in Rangoon and the shorthand typing she had done for Mr Stevens in the office. And presently his hand dropped to her shoulder and caressed her; she looked up at him quickly, and smiled.
He went to bed presently, and slept for the first time in six months upon a yielding bed; to him the string charpoy was the acme of luxurious ease. He slept well, and woke in the cool of the morning infinitely refreshed. From where he lay he could see out of the open window the trees in the garden, and beyond them the glorious deep orange masses of a Flame of the Forest tree, over sixty feet in height. The bright flowers, the blue sky, the first shafts of the sunlight and the jungle rats running up and down the trunks enchanted him; he felt that he was in a lovely place, a feeling not diminished by the thought that Nay Htohn was sleeping in the same house, probably not very far away. He was suddenly convinced that if he had a nightmare of the prison and cried out, she would be with him in an instant. On that thought he drifted off to sleep again, and slept another hour.
Breakfast consisted of a repetition of supper, being rice and various curries, with a pot of tea for Morgan. He sat for an hour on the veranda afterwards smoking another cheroot and then, feeling comparatively full of beans, he walked out into the road to look at the town.
Nay Htohn came running after him, and he turned to meet her. She said: “You ought not to walk; you should rest your legs.”
“I’ve got to rest my behind, too,” he pointed out. “Besides, I want to see things.”
She said: “May I come with you?” She hesitated. “Some of our people are doubtful about what the British will do when they come back. You should have someone with you who can speak our language, just for a day or two.”
He said: “Come on. What’s the Burmese for a road — this road that we’re on now?”
They walked through the desolate, burnt out middle of the town. Men, women, and children were living and sleeping in the charred ruins; some of them had set up little stalls to sell a few vegetables or fruits. The pilot was distressed at the sight; nothing was being done to help these people, for there was nobody to do anything. It was no hardship for them to sleep out while the fine weather lasted, but the monsoon was due to break in a fortnight. He spoke about this to Nay Htohn. “What will they do?” he asked. “Is there any shelter for them?”
The girl shrugged her shoulders. “None. They will try to build bashas — look, there is a man building one. But there is very little bamboo or palm leaf in walking distance of this place — it is too crowded here. There will be a great deal of fever when the rains come and the people have no shelter.”
“That’s bad. Can’t they get bamboos and stuff from u
p the river?”
The girl said: “There are no boats left.” That, Morgan knew, was very true. The river banks had been lined all the way up from Yandoon with holed and sunk sampans, some sunk by the Japanese and others by the RAF.
“There are over thirty tons of corrugated iron sheets at Taunsaw, but there is no means of bringing them here,” she observed. “There are no lorries left, and the Japanese took most of the bullock carts.”
“Where’s Taunsaw?”
“Forty miles from here, down the railway to Bassein. There is a wide chaung there, with a bridge which was blown up by the RAF in January.”
“What is the matter with the railway?” the pilot asked.
“I do not know. It has not run for three years, since the British went away.”
The pilot asked: “Is the track still all right? I mean, surely to God there must be just one truck left that will roll. If there are corrugated iron sheets at this place Taunsaw, couldn’t we get a gang of coolies and let them push a truck down there or something, and get a load?”
She glanced at him curiously. “There may be Japanese down the line.”
He grinned at her. “There may not — or there may be the Burman Independence Army to look after them. Let’s have a look at the railway.”
There were trucks standing on the weedy, grass grown rails of the metre gauge line, mostly riddled with cannon fire by the RAF, mostly still capable of use. In the engine shed there were three tank locomotives rusty and forlorn, sad looking little engines. Each showed two gaping holes on the sides of the boiler with a loose pipe leading to it, where the feedwater clacks once had been. It was obvious that parts were missing, but the pilot did not know what the parts were, or what their function was. Steam locomotives, at that time, were a sealed book to him.
“Someone’s had a nibble at them there,” he said.
A Burman in a longyi and a vest had followed them into the shed, and said something. Nay Htohn asked a question, and commenced a little conversation with the man while Morgan waited. Presently she turned to him and said:
