Adela’s heart thudded at the unexpected news. So Sam was an airman and working in films. She felt light-headed. For so long she had known nothing, had invented a dozen stories of what might have become of him, but never guessed that he’d joined the RAF. The relief of finally knowing made her euphoric. He would be in his element behind a camera, even if it was just propaganda newsreels and photographs. But her joy turned quickly to dread to think he might be on the embattled Burmese border. Was he still flying for the RAF too? Or was he part of the ground crew? All the rest of the day she see-sawed between exhilaration at knowing what had become of Sam and anxiety to think of him in constant danger.
A week later, in early April, they were packing up and heading back to the plain.
‘Typical disorganised ENSA,’ Mavis grumbled. ‘Just as everyone else is heading for the hills in the hot weather, we’re being sent back to fry in the sun.’
To Adela and Prue’s disappointment, the planned tour to Jubbulpore was cancelled and instead they were sent to Bihar to perform to camps of field companies: engineers, gunners, transport and supplies men and medics. The heat became fierce and the dust blew into everything.
‘Now you know what it means to sing through gritted teeth,’ Tommy joked.
Adela found herself endlessly trying to soothe tempers among her fellow dancers and keep Mavis and Prue apart, except on stage. Prue fretted that she wouldn’t get to see Stuey before he was deployed to Burma. His training in southern India was over. They picked up an anxious rumour from loose talk in the officers’ mess that Imphal was besieged and that there was fierce fighting around Kohima. The supply basis at Dimapur was under threat. If the Japanese broke through at Kohima, then Dimapur and the rest of Assam would be theirs for the taking. Adela wore herself out worrying about Sophie in the front line and James and his fellow tea planters at imminent risk. Belgooree was a few days’ march from there. But there was no official news of any conflict; the authorities had brought down a safety curtain of ominous silence. She tried to keep her fears to herself and put on a brave face, but Tommy understood.
‘Singing and dancing are your weapons,’ he said, giving her a hug, ‘so go out and use them. With a voice like yours, we’re not going to lose India.’
By May they were on their way to Calcutta, a journey that should have taken three days. Five days of slow trains, stopping at endless chaotic stations and Mavis complaining about everything from kerosene-tasting tea to the stench of dung fires pushed Prue to breaking point.
‘If you don’t shut up, I’m going to ram this tiffin tin into your miserable mouth and push you off the train!’
‘There’s no need talk like that,’ Mavis said, quite taken aback.
‘There’s every need. You’re driving us all mad.’
‘I’m just saying what everyone else is thinking,’ panted Mavis, fanning herself with an old newspaper. ‘India is stinky and sweaty and we all want to go home.’
‘No,’ Prue cried, ‘the only stinky and sweaty person here is you! I knew you should never have come. You can’t sing and you’re only a half-decent dancer. Call yourself a Bluebell? The nearest you ever got to a bluebell was in a wood.’
‘Well, I’ve never been so offended!’ Mavis spluttered. ‘And if we’re talking about dancing, you dance like you’ve got two left feet.’
Adela tried to intervene. ‘That’s enough, both of you. Let’s all just calm down and try to get some sleep. It’s just the heat talking.’
‘I’m not going to dance with her again,’ declared Mavis, ‘not till she apologises.’
‘Apologise?’ Prue exclaimed. ‘You’re the one who should be apologising to the whole show for being the worst performer. We’d be better off with two Toodle Pips rather than two plus a panting elephant.’
‘That’s it!’ shouted Mavis, puce-faced. ‘I’m not dancing with you ever again.’ She turned to Adela, her eyes welling with tears. ‘You’ll have to decide.’
‘Decide what?’
‘Which of us you want as your other Pip. My Pip suits your Pip better than her Pip.’
At that moment Adela caught Tommy’s look. He always kept out of the arguments, but she could see him trying to suppress a snort of laughter at Mavis’s plea about pips. Adela felt a laugh bubble up inside. She clapped a hand over her mouth, but couldn’t stop it. In seconds both she and Tommy were doubled up and clutching their stomachs from spasms of laughter, filling the fetid carriage with their hoots of amusement. Mavis burst into tears. Prue looked at them as if they had lost their senses. But it was infectious, and soon the whole carriage was in giggles, even Mavis, relieving the frayed nerves from months on the road and the ever-present fear of being invaded.
Calcutta was a shock. Adela had not seen it for six years, but she was appalled at the scenes of destitution along the railway tracks. She had heard from her mother about a terrible famine in Bengal the previous year – there had been almost no news of it back in Britain – but nothing had prepared her for the grim sights that still lingered. Skeletal naked people with shrivelled limbs and huge staring eyes in skull-like heads lay by the rails or under bushes. It was impossible to tell if they were men or women; they were just husks of their former selves. Adela was nauseated. How could it possibly have got this bad? Surely the authorities could have done something for them.
Outside the station was also crowded with the moribund. The ENSA group looked about them in disbelief. Adela saw some of them recoil as sticklike arms gestured towards them for food. Their army escort instructed them firmly not to give away their rations.
‘Sorry, but those are the rules. You’ll get used to it I’m afraid.’
Adela knew about Indian poverty and beggars who lived by alms, but this was wretchedness on a sickening scale. She wondered what the effect must be on Indian troops to see their fellow citizens reduced to skin and bone, dying in front of their eyes. What would Rafi think, and had he seen the effects of the famine on his travels? For a moment she thought of Rafi’s brother Ghulam, so passionate and angry about the treatment of Indians under the British. Adela had no idea what had become of him.
They hurried from the sound of empty tin bowls being tapped on the hard ground and the sour smell of rotting humanity, guilty at their healthy flesh and the knowledge that they would be fed that night.
Central Calcutta, around Chowringhee Street, where the city teemed with troops and airmen on R&R from the China-Burma theatre of war, was a different world. Here, the bars, hotels, cinemas, clubs and ice-cream parlours were busy with trade and awash with money as British and Americans spent their pay.
Adela and her fellow players were taken to the Grand Hotel. It advertised seven-course meals and the downstairs dining room was packed with young officers entertaining Anglo-Indian secretaries and servicewomen. Jazz played in the crowded bar while the drinkers knocked back gins and lime and talked about sport and home. But the bedrooms were airless and cramped. That night Adela lay sweating and sleepless as a single fan turned the hot soupy air and she listened to someone throwing up in the room next door.
Two days later they were sent off to Panegar, SEAC’s vast camp for the Burma front, situated on the baking plain. Huts and tents sprawled across the wasteland, broiling in the pre-monsoon heat and infested with insects. They performed four times a day in a shed on a makeshift stage. Despite the unbearable temperature, they kept their coats on in the dressing room to keep the mosquitoes at bay. The walls were crawling with them. Tommy, usually so mild-natured, started throwing props at the walls to kill them and shouting incoherently, till Adela pushed him back on stage to accompany her on the piano.
It was almost a relief to return to the vast, overcrowded Grand Hotel, even if it meant sharing a room with an unhappy Mavis, who was suffering from mosquito bites and thought one of the staff was stealing her make-up.
‘Aye, it’s that sweeper going around with purple eyeshadow and red lipstick – that’s the giveaway,’ Mack teased.
Prue, thoug
h, was deliriously happy to find a note from Stuey saying he was due three days’ leave in Calcutta before operations. While Adela and Tommy went to play and sing at a hospital, Prue slipped off to join Stuey at the Tollygunge Club. She returned two days later with an engagement ring on her finger – her father had written giving reluctant consent – yet heartbroken that Stuey was off on some dangerous mission into Burma.
News was filtering out of Assam that the Indian Army had broken the siege at Imphal and gone to the relief of Kohima. This was the first time that the authorities had even admitted that Kohima had been at risk of being overrun. There had been a breakthrough further south in the Arakan too. Adela and Tommy rushed off to the cinema for the latest news, but it was full of the courageous landings by the Allies in Northern France in early June and the opening of the second front in Europe, so long awaited. To the south, in Italy, Rome had been liberated by troops that numbered among them the Indian Army’s 4th Infantry Division.
Heartened by the news, the ENSA group joined in celebrations with other servicemen and women, yet they all wanted news of Burma. A week later Adela, Tommy and Prue were back at the cinema, and this time there was footage of Assam.
The battle that had been raging for six months in the Arakan had finally been won by British and Indian troops. Reinforcements had then rushed north to relieve Imphal and Kohima, where heroic fighting had saved India from invasion.
News footage of the Battle of Church Knoll, Kohima, came next: a mortar trench in the foreground, thick vegetation and a dark ridge beyond. Adela watched in astonishment as she recognised an artillery officer looking through binoculars and pointing out a target on the hillside.
She grabbed Tommy’s arm. ‘That’s Boz! I’m sure it is. Uncle Rafi’s old forestry friend. He was in Simla. Don’t you recognise him?’
‘Keep your voice down,’ Tommy said in amusement.
The jaunty clipped voice of the commentary was already on to the next scene, describing the soldiers crouching behind a wall – men of the 15th Punjab Regiment – waiting for the order to rush forward and take the hill. The film cut to a wounded major lying on a stretcher and smoking while having his abdomen dressed by a nurse.
‘I wonder if Sophie is anywhere near there,’ Adela whispered, hardly daring to blink in case she missed any details.
The camera panned to Hawker Hurricane fighter-bombers flying low overhead and dropping bombs on the far side of the ridge. Soundless plumes of smoke rose up, obscuring the view. The final footage was of a mule train returning to base and the muleteers struggling to offload heavy panniers of equipment before rubbing down their animals. In the foreground a group of officers was drinking tea, as if they had just come back from a fishing expedition.
There was a cheer in the cinema at this. Adela’s eyes smarted.
‘I hope they’re drinking Assam tea.’ She smiled.
‘Of course they will be,’ Tommy assured her with a pat on the arm. ‘Belgooree’s best.’
As they left the cinema, Adela wondered if Sam had been the one to film the action at Church Knoll. Or had he been flying overhead in a Hurricane? Seeing Boz on the screen in the hills of Assam made her all the more determined to get to the front. She knew it must be a sanitised view of what was really going on up there, but she felt reassured by the stoical troops on screen.
Over the next few days she could think of nothing else. She knew that a few members of ENSA had gone to Chittagong in June; Vera Lynn had flown in for a short hectic tour of Chittagong and the Arakan. There was talk of sending some to Imphal when it became less hazardous. But most troupes were too large and unwieldy to travel to these forward positions on the front line. Adela kept pressing their entertainments officer in Calcutta for a smaller group of them to go.
Finally, in July ENSA agreed to send a group up the Brahmaputra River to Assam. By this time the monsoon had come, bringing relief from the intense heat, but also swampy pools rife with mosquitoes and roads turned to churning mud. Insects crawled out of the walls, and Mavis’s wig was eaten by white ants. Half the show had come down with malaria or jaundice and was being packed off to Darjeeling in the mountains to recuperate. To Prue’s relief, Mavis, dispirited at losing her wig, went with them.
But nothing would keep Adela from volunteering for Assam. Together with Tommy, Prue, Mack, Betsie and a couple of dancers from another troupe, they took the train out of Calcutta. Two days later they were transferring to a boat on the swollen Brahmaputra. She thought of Sam and his steamship and knew he would rail at the conditions on board, with workers in steerage crammed in and enduring the suffocating heat while the ENSA members and a handful of British officers enjoyed the relative comfort of crowded cabins on the prom deck. It would have been far easier to go by aeroplane, but all available space on planes was taken up by priority troops and their supplies.
It was sweet agony to Adela to sail past Gowhatty and know how close she was to her mother and brother at Belgooree, and yet not be able to see them.
‘Write her a letter,’ said Tommy, ‘and maybe you can meet her on the way back.’
‘She’ll only worry if she knows I’m anywhere near the war front,’ Adela replied. ‘If I get the chance on the way back, I’ll surprise her.’
The views of the towns they passed were depressing: ghats and streets filthy and crowded with the poor – perhaps refugees from Burma who had struggled back to India two years previously and got no further. Then, after days on the overcrowded boat, they transferred to a train again to get up to Dimapur. Adela’s heart raced at the sight of emerald-green hillsides of tea bushes rippling away in to the sparkling heat. They weren’t the Oxford’s, but it made her feel pangs of homesickness for the tea gardens she knew so well.
Dimapur, a mass of grey dripping roofs, was squalid from its swollen population: injured and battle-fatigued sepoys; coolies and porters who were helping with the back-breaking building of roads; suppliers, cooks, camp followers, medics, railway workers, undertakers and refugee families. Asking around at the army divisional hospital for Sophie Khan and the Red Cross, Adela was told she was most likely helping up at Kohima.
They performed at the hospital and nearby barracks. At one show a group of Gurkha children crept in and giggled at the front. Afterwards, Adela and Tommy went to chat to them. It hadn’t occurred to Adela that the men might have their wives and families with them. Suddenly the little dark-eyed boy she had been talking to caught sight of his mother and ran off, throwing himself at her legs and laughing. Adela was winded by the sight of his simple adoration of his young mother. For a moment she was paralysed by a fresh wave of grief for having given up her own son. She had hoped that the vast distance she had put between herself and Newcastle would have helped dull the ache for her baby. Instead the sight of the Indian children just made her long for him more keenly.
Within days they were being jostled in a truck up to Kohima Ridge among the Naga Hills. The former village of the Naga tribe and the bungalows of the British officials had been obliterated. It was now one large military camp, surrounded by glittering rain-filled craters, burnt-down buildings and a landscape shattered by intense bombardment. The Toodle Pips – with Betsie drafted in to take Mavis’s place – did their first performance on an open patch of ground, their audience a straggle of tired soldiers standing around, grinning in amazement to see the women and whistling loudly through their fingers.
Over the next days they went about the camps, performing up to six times a day, their reward being the gratitude of battle-weary men, some of whom had been away from home for years. Everything was soaked daily by the monsoon: tents and trees dripped, their costumes stank of sweat and mould, and they all turned a yellowish hue from the amount of Flit sprayed on them to keep mosquitoes at bay. Adela took up smoking cigarettes to burn off the purple leeches that sucked at her ankles, thighs and arms.
Yet all the discomfort was forgotten when, to Adela’s joy, she encountered Sophie at a field hospital. She recognised her bob of
fair hair and her trim figure in jodhpurs and uniform shirt as soon as she climbed down from the cab of a Red Cross truck.
‘Sophie!’ Adela screeched and ran at her mother’s friend. They hugged in delight.
‘Adela, my darling.’ Sophie grinned, her eyes glinting with tears. ‘I can’t believe it! You’re so grown up. Are you well? You look wonderful.’ She hugged her again.
‘I’m fine. So glad to see you. I’ve missed you and Rafi so much. And mother. You saw her recently?’
‘Yes, and she’s as amazing as ever. Running everything without a fuss. Missing you, of course.’
Adela gave a rueful smile. ‘Maybe.’
‘Not maybe. Yes!’ Sophie insisted, swinging her arm around Adela’s damp shoulders.
They hardly had time to gabble out their news before Sophie was due to make the arduous drive back to Dimapur with two wounded sappers.
‘Poor boys. Got burnt in a mess-tent accident. One will need an amputation unless we can save his arm at the main hospital. Besides, the field hospital is packing up and moving down beyond Imphal.’
‘Haven’t things stopped for the monsoon?’ Adela asked.
‘Apparently not. Looks like the orders are to push on into Burma after the Japanese, despite the monsoon.’
‘Sam Jackman’s flying planes,’ Adela blurted out. ‘And making films for the forces. Have you come across him?’
‘No,’ said Sophie with a sympathetic smile, ‘but that doesn’t mean he’s not here. There are thousands of us.’
The Girl From the Tea Garden Page 40