The Chequer Board

by Nevil Shute

  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 he came back with a steaming brew in a jug on a tray, with a cup, and set it down by Morgan.

  “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 beri-beri known to the people long before the vitamin was known to anybody.

  He had a long talk that evening with the girl and her father. From time to time other relatives 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. The meal 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 by all except for one old lady, who used chopsticks. The meal over, Morgan sat with a cheroot on the verandah, 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 dog-eared, 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 in to 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 verandah. 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 really 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 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 realise 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, like 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 of 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 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 had a nightmare of the prison and had cried out, she would have been 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 verandah 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 f
ruits. 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,” she said. “They will try to build bashas—look, there is a man building one. But there is very little bamboo or palm left within walking distance of this place. And 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 bamboo and stuff from up 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 R.A.F.

  “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 R.A.F. 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 Burma 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 R.A.F., 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 feed-water 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 were a sealed book to him then.

  “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:

  “He says these parts were taken off when the British went away, and that the District Engineer told the Japanese the British had taken them away to India with them. He says that was not true; the District Engineer took them away and hid them himself.”

  “Where’s the District Engineer?”

  She asked the man in Burmese. “He is dead. He was working in the repair shops at Insein and was killed in an air raid.”

  “Too bad.” The pilot thought for a minute. “Does he know what the parts were, or where they are now?”

  She asked, and then said, “He does not know anything more. He is only the man who cleans the carriages.”

  “Are there any drivers left in Henzada?”

  She asked again. “He says that all the drivers were sent down to Rangoon to work on the main line.”

  Morgan said again, “Too bad.” There was nothing to be done about it, and they turned and went back to the house. His legs were considerably swollen again by the time they got there, and he was glad to put them up in a long chair on the verandah. Nay Htohn said, “It is a very good chair, that. It is the Japanese Commandant’s chair.”

  He grinned. “Well, that’s an honour.”

  She brought him a cheroot, and then she settled down on the floor beside him with some needlework. He glanced at it, and saw that she was working on the faded, threadbare trousers of his jungle suit, now washed and pressed. She was repairing a small tear with delicate, fine stitches, using thread of the same material frayed from a seam.

  He thanked her, and she turned over the blouse. It had been carefully washed, and the wings and ribbons stood out almost smartly on the faded cloth. “Tell me,” she said, “what do these things mean?”

  He told her about the wings and how you got them, and about flying.

  “And—” she said, “—these are medals, are they not?”

  He showed her the 1940 star, and told her what it meant. And then she put her finger on the other one. “And this?”

  “That’s the Distinguished Flying Cross,” he said. “That doesn’t mean a thing. They send them round with the rations.”

  She looked up at him uncertainly. “Does everybody get it?”

  He was suddenly aware of the great pleasure that he was withholding from her. “Not everybody,” he said awkwardly. “You get it if you’re lucky.”

  She was puzzled. “How, lucky?”

  “Lucky enough to get away with it,” he said. “Lucky enough to come back home again.”

  She said slowly, “Is it given for something very brave?”

  He shifted uneasily. “Not quite like that. You get it for doing something rather difficult.”

  “And dangerous?”

  “And dangerous. But you don’t think much of it when you’ve got it. So many people do much more and don’t get anything.”

  “Tell me,” she said, “what was it that you did?”

  He told her, and she listened to him wide-eyed, kneeling by him, the sewing on her knee. In the end she said, “Who gave it to you? Is there a ceremony?”

  “You get it from the King,” he said. “You go to Buck House for it.”

  She breathed, “You mean, from the King Emperor? Did you see him?”

  “See him? He pinned it on, and he couldn’t get the pin in. He said, ‘Sorry to be so damn clumsy.’”

  She stared at him. “The King Emperor said that to you?”

  “Yes. I thought it was decent of him.”

  “What did you say?”

  “Oh, I said, ‘That’s okay, sir,’ or something.”

  She was silent for a minute. Then she said, “Would you mind if I tell my father?”

  “If you want to.” He hesitated. “Don’t spread it round the whole place, though. I mean, it doesn’t mean a thing, really, you know. Honestly, it doesn’t.”

  She stared at him, smiling a little. “I believe it does,” she said. “I believe it means a great deal.”

  He changed the subject. “I’d like to put on those clothes when you’ve finished them,” he said. “It’s better to be in uniform.”

  The girl said, “I will not be very long.”

  He sat thinking, watching her deft grace as she knelt beside him, sewing. “About that District Engineer,” he said. “Did he live here? I mean, before he went to Insein and got killed?”

  Nay Htohn said, “I suppose he did.”

  “Do you think his wife would be here still? I mean, the parts that he took away are probably in Henzada, if we could find them.”

  She said, “I will find out.”

  That evening found them talking to an elderly Burman woman standing in the middle of a blackened heap of ashes that had once been a house. The woman was garrulous and distressed; Nay Htohn was sharp with her, and several times cut short her long meanderings.

  “The box was buried somewhere here,” she said to Morgan, “underneath the house. That is, between these posts.”

  They marked the place, and left the woman and walked back to the house. Presently they returned with two coolies carrying a shovel and a pick. In half an hour they had found the wooden box buried a foot down; it was decayed and eaten by ants, but the six feed-water clack valves in it
were all wrapped up in sacking, and were in good condition.

  They returned to the house in high spirits, the coolies behind them, with the box. They set it down in the verandah. Nay Htohn went and fetched her father.

  “This is very good,” he said. “But now we have to find a man who knows about the railway and can drive the engines. I do not think that will be very easy.”

  Morgan said, “Well, I can put these valves in—that’s easy enough. I should think you just screw them in and put a bit of paint or something on the threads, and away you go.”

  Shway Than said, “Do you understand railway engines?”

  The pilot said, “No. But if you can’t find anyone who does, I’ll bloody soon learn. After all, it’s only a sort of kettle with a piston and a cylinder attached. It ought not to be difficult to get the hang of it.”

  The old Burman said, “Not difficult for you, perhaps. It would be very difficult for me.”

  Morgan thought for a moment. “One thing,” he said. “It’s going to be filthy dirty on those engines, and I’ve only got the one uniform. Is it possible to get an overall, or anything like that?”

  Shway Than laughed. “He will keep you busy,” he said to his daughter. “You will have to get up early every morning now to wash his clothes.” She coloured a little.

  Morgan turned to her. “Did you wash this uniform yourself?” he asked.

  Her father said, “She would not let any of the servants touch it.”

  The pilot said, “That was very kind of you. It was so dirty.”

  The girl laughed awkwardly. “I will see what I can find for an overall.”

  All the next day the pilot worked in the engine shed. He picked the one of the three locomotives that seemed to be in the best condition, and fitted the two clack valves without difficulty. Then he spent some time in tracing out the lead of the various pipes and pumps, and thinking deeply; he did not want to ruin everything by making some stupid mistake and burning out the boiler. The news got round that he was working on the engines, and a few Burmans arrived to watch the progress of the work. One lad in the Independence Army turned up. Nay Htohn talked to him for a little and then brought him to Morgan. “He says he knows all about these engines,” she said.