The Long Journey Home

by Cecily Blench

  The afternoon wore on and she found her concentration slipping. The Secretariat was quieter than usual, and the occasional sound of hurrying footsteps or a slammed door in the distance made her jump. Many of the most experienced staff had left to join the army and others had departed altogether for the safety of their families.

  ‘It’s chaos out there,’ said Edwin, and she looked up to see him standing at the window, peering down at the traffic. From their high office at the Secretariat, it was possible to see right along Dalhousie Street, where a mass of cars, bicycles and rickshaws fought for road space with stallholders and slow-moving bullocks.

  The other window looked out over Fraser Street, where a row of houses had been hit by the Japanese. Kate knew that Edwin walked to work the long way round to avoid the bombed-out houses. He had seen enough destruction.

  ‘The streets are rammed,’ he said, shaking his head. ‘Hundreds of people with luggage piled on carts.’

  ‘I don’t blame them for wanting to leave.’

  ‘Half of the typing pool downstairs seems to have disappeared,’ said Edwin, sitting down and staring at the dusty typewriter in the corner, which he had tried and failed to get to grips with. ‘Do you think anyone’s getting any work done?’

  ‘I’m certainly not.’ Her abandoned pen had begun to leak dark ink across the report. She watched the stain grow bigger and thought vaguely about looking for blotting paper, but it hardly seemed worth it. The work had already been made irrelevant by history and she felt rather cross at having spent so much time on it. ‘Are you going somewhere?’ she asked, seeing a suitcase under the table.

  ‘What? Oh, that. The Strand is closing in a couple of days. They’ve booked me in at Minto Mansions.’

  ‘You could have stayed with me.’

  He laughed. ‘Don’t you think people would talk?’

  ‘I’m sure they do already,’ said Kate with a shrug. ‘I don’t let it bother me.’

  ‘I didn’t think of it.’

  ‘I suppose you’ll be more comfortable at Minto’s,’ she said. ‘I can’t offer much more than a wooden floor and a couple of rugs.’

  ‘I don’t suppose we’ll be here for much longer anyway,’ said Edwin. ‘Thanks for the offer, though.’ He frowned. ‘Do you ever think that we ought to just leave?’

  ‘What – get on a plane?’

  ‘Something like that.’

  ‘I think it’s a bit late for that. At this stage we may as well see what the government tells us to do.’

  ‘They still seem to think we’ll drive the Japs out before long.’

  ‘Drive them out with what? Where are the armies that ought to be coming to protect Burma?’ said Kate, scrunching her report into a heavy ball and throwing it into the bin. ‘That’s what I don’t understand.’

  Edwin did not reply. She saw that he had tensed and at the same time heard the distant, familiar sounds of bombing once again. In the last few weeks he had been forced to live with the noise, but she knew that it haunted him. He would never be free.

  11

  Rangoon, February 1942

  In mid-February they sat in the office amid a sea of crates, hunched over the wireless, no longer pretending to do any work.

  ‘I wonder what will happen to it all,’ said Edwin, gesturing to the trunks on the floor. The day before, a government missive had decreed that all schools were to be closed. They had spent the morning packing up files so that the Japanese would not gain any advantage when they took the city. Some had already been carted away to a mysterious destination.

  ‘It’s supposedly all being flown out to India,’ said Kate. ‘But I expect there are more important cargoes to be taken. It’ll probably just get thrown on a bonfire.’

  ‘All your work.’

  She shrugged. ‘The safety of the children is what matters – and there isn’t much I can do about that either.’

  There was a knock on the door and Miss Soe peered around it. ‘Ah, Miss Kate, Mr Edwin.’

  ‘Come in,’ said Kate, pulling out a chair. ‘Join us. We were just discussing the futility of trying to save all of this.’

  ‘I cannot stay,’ said Miss Soe apologetically, holding out an envelope. ‘I have been asked to hand these out.’

  Kate ripped the envelope open and breathed in sharply.

  ‘What is it?’ said Edwin.

  ‘We’re leaving. It says that all European staff must go north to Mandalay as soon as possible. What about everyone else?’ asked Kate, looking up at Miss Soe. ‘Aren’t you coming with us?’

  Miss Soe smiled wryly and spread her hands, the flowers quivering in her hair. ‘Who knows? Perhaps we go later. You should leave without delay. I will miss you, Kate.’

  ‘I wish there was something I could do,’ said Kate, grasping her hands. ‘It’s not safe here. I could write to someone—’

  Miss Soe shook her head. ‘My parents live a long way out of the city. I will go to them soon, I think. Do not worry for me.’

  She kissed Kate on the cheek. ‘I must go. I wish you luck. Good luck as well, Mr Edwin – I hope you will both be safe.’

  ‘And you, Miss Soe. Be careful.’

  *

  In her small flat, Kate gazed around at the piles of her belongings. She saw the books and the basket of laundry, the wicker chair her landlord had given her, the little carved table she had carried home from the Scott Market, the silver jewellery box that Christina had sent from Delhi. All her life was laid out on the floor and suddenly it seemed no more than baggage, insignificant in the shadow of the crisis that was unfolding.

  Moving through the stacks of belongings, she sifted through them, making new piles for ‘staying’ and much smaller ones for ‘going’. It would all be lost and in a few weeks a Japanese officer might be sitting in her chair and sipping her gin. She decided to take the gin, decanting it into the old leather-bound hip flask of her father’s that had accompanied her all the way from the farm.

  She stuffed clothes into her knapsack – a couple of shirts and dresses, shorts, plimsolls, a jumper, a shawl. There was also a small pile of underwear, socks, her toothbrush, a penknife, a sewing kit, a hairbrush, a little drawstring bag with a few cosmetics and what her mother termed ‘female essentials’. She had already withdrawn her modest savings from the bank, asking for silver coins instead of notes, and they were packed tightly at the bottom of her knapsack.

  Her heart ached at the thought of leaving. In the years since her arrival, Rangoon had become home. She thought back to the first difficult months, when the heat and the loneliness had threatened to overwhelm her. It had been slow progress to acceptance and familiarity. The only bright thought was that now Edwin would be coming with her – Edwin, who was just as lonely and regretful as she was, but who had a spark of humour that matched hers, and whose company she enjoyed more than anyone else’s. He listened to her and she felt no judgement from him.

  Kate stood still in the middle of the sitting room. The sun was going down and the room was filled with a warm light. Not far away, over the rooftops, she could see the stupa of the Sule Pagoda, burning orange and as beautiful as it had ever been.

  Everything seemed quiet. Then, through the still night came the chiming of the clock tower on the High Court. The bells had chimed for decades, comforting to the ears of homesick colonists, planters and diplomats. Now they rang out over a city almost emptied of those who had made Rangoon their home. The Empire couldn’t last forever, she had always known that at some level. But the bells seemed to say more clearly than ever before that it was doomed.

  Shouldering her knapsack, she closed the door and went down the stairs. In the warm night the street was strangely empty. Occasionally someone would rush past, looking preoccupied, and in the distance she could hear vehicles, but the normal hubbub had been replaced by a tense quiet.

  Kate started on hearing a rustle in the shrubs to her left, then relaxed as she saw it was just a mangy-looking cat. It darted across the road and disappeared d
own an alley. The houses she passed mostly appeared empty but, in one or two, candles flickered.

  She reached the crossroads and paused for a moment, looking back along Pagoda Road. I have been almost happy here, she thought. Then she slipped her arms through the straps of the knapsack and started walking, heading for the railway station.

  12

  Worcestershire, March 1929

  ‘How’s your chest?’ asked Kate, placing the tea on the bedside table and sitting down with her book.

  ‘Cough’s still rough,’ said her father. ‘I think it’s these new pills. I told Dr Thwaites that they were only making things worse but he insisted I carry on.’

  ‘What about the nightmares?’

  ‘Worse,’ he said briefly. ‘Didn’t get much sleep last night. Now, what about that book?’

  They were halfway through Three Men in a Boat, which Kate had read to him before, and when she got to the bit about the tin of pineapple, they were both laughing so hard that she had to put the book down.

  ‘Gets me . . . every time,’ wheezed her father, his laugh turning into a spluttering cough.

  She watched him chuckling intermittently as he coughed into his handkerchief, his forehead gleaming with the effort. He looked old, she realised suddenly, although he was not yet fifty. Since coming back from the war his face had grown lined, and the brief moments of levity could not make up for the fact that he was dying.

  He looked up at her, as though sensing her thoughts. ‘I do appreciate you reading to me, Kate,’ he said, his voice hoarse. ‘It’s the high point of my day.’

  He sat back against the pillows, pale in his striped pyjamas, and looked weary.

  ‘Shall we leave it there?’ said Kate. ‘Mother says not to tire you.’

  ‘No, no,’ he said, waving at the book. ‘Carry on. It’ll do me far more good than resting.’

  She picked up the thread of the story, but her mind was not fully on J and his adventures on the river. She wanted to ask her father what his nightmares were about, but in the past all he would say was, ‘Tunnels.’

  He fell into a doze as she read to him, and jerked suddenly awake, staring with wide eyes at the window.

  ‘What is it?’ she asked. ‘What do you see?’

  ‘The dead,’ he croaked, gesturing at the window. ‘They’re all out there.’ His breathing slowed and he focused on her again. ‘I’m sorry. Go on with the book.’

  ‘But—’

  ‘Please. Where were we? The bit about the pie?’

  She lifted the book again and then paused. ‘I’ll be able to keep reading to you next week.’

  ‘What about school?’

  ‘I’m not going back after the holiday.’

  He shook his head. ‘I thought we’d talked about this . . .’

  ‘We have. And my mind’s made up. Mother says that it will be hard to afford a nurse and to pay the school fees, so this is the best solution. There’ll be more money for the doctor and for the farm.’

  ‘I don’t want to keep you here.’

  ‘It’s not a very good school, you know,’ said Kate firmly. ‘They don’t teach anything useful. The most highly valued class is deportment. Does that sound like something I’d be any good at?’

  Her father laughed, as she hoped he would, and she turned to the book. ‘Here we are, Chapter Thirteen. The strange disappearance of Harris and a pie.’

  13

  Lower Burma, February 1942

  Kate awoke shortly after dawn, her neck uncomfortably stiff after a night spent on a hard wooden bench, hearing the train wheels rattling below her. Edwin was nowhere to be seen.

  After many hours spent at Rangoon central station, surrounded by crowds of people all frantically trying to leave the city, they had found seats on the only direct train going to Mandalay that night, and had wedged themselves into a corner opposite a party of three exhausted children travelling with a schoolmistress.

  The train had not been due to leave for hours and soon Kate was surrounded by slumbering passengers, including Edwin, the feet of the little boy next to him resting on his knees. When the train had at last begun to move, sometime in the middle of the night, she had shifted and tried to get comfortable, but her heart was racing from the anxiety of the last few weeks and she felt wide awake.

  At last she had slept, an uneasy sleep. At one point she saw a herd of bullocks being chased by a tiger, their eyes rolling in panic, steam rising from their gasping mouths. Then she jerked awake and realised it had been a dream, before falling back into a fractured slumber.

  When she woke again, she watched the countryside roll slowly past the glassless window. The train was only travelling at a few miles an hour and every so often it would stop briefly and then move off again. In every direction she could see billowing spires of white smoke, evidence of the night’s bombing raids; it seemed that the whole country must be ablaze.

  Edwin reappeared, carrying a big thermos flask and smiling broadly.

  ‘You look pleased with yourself,’ said Kate. ‘What have you brought?’

  ‘Tea,’ said Edwin, setting it down gently. ‘I took the flask to find water but there was an old fellow outside the window up there selling tea, so I got him to fill it up. No sugar but it’ll do.’

  He passed a cup around to the children who sat nearby.

  ‘That’s very kind,’ said Miss Woodford, the schoolmistress, and in return offered biscuits from a box in her basket.

  ‘What else were you doing?’ asked Kate, as they watched the children drinking. ‘Any news?’

  ‘I talked to some soldiers further up the train,’ said Edwin. ‘Apparently the rumour is that in a week or so the army will leave Rangoon too and go north. We’re just in time.’

  ‘You mean they’ll abandon the city?’ asked Miss Woodford incredulously. ‘And just let the Japs overrun it? Why not stay and fight?’

  Edwin shook his head. ‘I think we’re beyond that stage. The idea is to regroup in the north and then march back to take the city.’

  Kate sat back in her seat, trying to absorb this. The idea that Rangoon would fall had been abstract; now it seemed a certainty.

  The day passed slowly. The train would travel for a few miles and then stop and stand for an hour with no explanation. There was nothing to do except talk to the other passengers, read, try to amuse the children, and take occasional expeditions up the train to the filthy toilet compartment, where the track could be seen through the hole in the floor.

  ‘My colleagues are waiting for us in Mandalay,’ said Miss Woodford to Kate, watching as Edwin played noughts and crosses with the children. ‘We’re supposed to fly to India in three days. Suppose we don’t get there in time?’

  ‘We’ll get there.’

  It was late on the second night when they finally came to a station. As they pulled in, Kate saw electric lights and a sign saying Pyinmana. They were not even close to Mandalay.

  At dawn the train was still stationary. She left the carriage and stepped out onto the platform, stretching her aching limbs. The air was cool but the sun was already rising and she knew it would be hot soon. Kate made her way through the station, passing large groups of people who seemed to be camping there, perhaps also waiting for transport north. They all looked tired and anxious.

  ‘Good morning, madam,’ said the Pyinmana stationmaster, looking up when she knocked gently on his door. He was a young Indian man with round glasses that emphasised the dark circles under his eyes. He had clearly been working through the night.

  ‘Can I offer you a cup of tea?’ he said, starting to pour from a flask on his desk.

  ‘Thank you,’ said Kate, reaching for the cup he offered. She drank deeply and felt a little better. ‘I was hoping you had some information about what’s going on, and also if you know of any transport we might take on to Mandalay. We came on the train last night.’

  He smiled. ‘As to the first, I had a telephone call to say the line north of here was buckled, perhaps du
e to the unusual number of trains passing by. I don’t think it’s anything to be concerned about.’

  ‘I thought it might have been bombed.’

  ‘I wondered the same, but apparently not. Just the usual wear and tear. That is life in Burma, I’m afraid, madam.’

  ‘I know,’ said Kate wryly. ‘I’ve never been on a train here that got to its destination on time.’

  ‘My recommendation is that you try to hire a truck of some sort to take you to Mandalay. This train might move on, or it could be here for days. You could be in Mandalay by tomorrow evening if you find a decent vehicle.’

  ‘All right,’ said Kate, ‘I’ll do that.’

  ‘If you go outside the station you’ll find several chaps on this street who may be willing to take you. I would recommend that you choose one of the older drivers. And don’t pay more than ten annas per person. They will try to take advantage of the circumstances.’

  *

  The truck that Kate eventually found was driven by a kind old man named Mr Maung. As the three children scrambled up onto the truck he made animal noises to make them laugh and fussed about tucking them in with old rugs.

  It was a truck with an open back, which he had bought third or fourth hand, but he claimed it had once belonged to Lord Mountbatten. There was a padded front seat, only slightly torn, which Kate insisted Miss Woodford should have, while she and Edwin climbed into the back with the children.

  ‘Are you sure you wouldn’t like a turn?’ Miss Woodford said when they stopped for lunch after several hours.

  ‘I’m fine in the back,’ said Kate. ‘The children are teaching me travelling games.’

  ‘We’re playing “Count the elephants” at the moment!’ said Bobby, clambering down out of the truck to sit on the grass.

  ‘How many is that now?’ said Edwin.

  ‘Seven,’ said Louise, holding up six chubby fingers.

  ‘Eight!’ called Bobby, pointing to a track running parallel with the road where a female elephant was ambling along carrying a large load of timber on her back, and another smaller bundle in her trunk.