The Girl From the Tea Garden

by Janet MacLeod Trotter

  ‘Of course,’ said Adela, feeling foolish and adding hastily, ‘I saw Boz in a newsreel about Kohima. He looked very calm and in charge.’

  Sophie gave a broad smile. ‘Good for Major Boz. I’m so glad to hear it. I knew his artillery company was here, but I haven’t come across him either. He could be on leave or moved further to the front.’

  They kissed goodbye. ‘You’ll find me at the divisional hospital in Dimapur,’ Sophie said. ‘Please call on your way through, won’t you?’

  ‘Promise,’ Adela said and smiled, hating to be parted so soon after being reunited.

  ‘And take good care of yourself!’

  Over the next few days Adela badgered for them to be sent on to Imphal. ‘From what I hear, the place is chock-a-block with front-line troops, as well as a major field hospital.’

  Tommy tried but failed to get them taken by plane, but a week later, in mid-August, they took the more hazardous road route among a convoy of engineers. After two days’ travel through shattered jungle, along roads on which sappers worked like Trojans in the incessant rain to lay tracks in the liquid mud, they reached the amphitheatre of Imphal, nestled in the hills.

  That afternoon The Toodle Pips performed in a makeshift overflow ward of the field hospital for bed-bound officers, a mixture of newly arrived wounded and sick from the front. There appeared to be more men dying from illness – dengue fever, malaria and an outbreak of typhus caused by ticks – than from battle wounds.

  After they finished and were leaving, a man from a corner bed called out hoarsely, ‘Miss Robson! Brava, Adela!’

  She turned in surprise. He was gaunt and sallow-faced – probably jaundiced – and his hair shorn. Something about the brown eyes was familiar.

  ‘You don’t remember me, do you?’ he said, attempting a smile, his eyes betraying disappointment. ‘Jimmy Maitland. Simla, ’37. I was on leave at Craig Dhu, the officers’ hostel.’

  ‘Jimmy!’ Adela gasped. ‘Of course I remember.’ She hid her shock at the change in him. The young Scots artillery captain who had dated her that Simla summer had been robust and athletic, with thick dark hair and a cheeky dimpled smile. She had corresponded with him for a few months and then lost interest. ‘How wonderful to see you. Not in here, of course, but good all the same. How are you?’

  He smiled. ‘All the better for seeing you. You’re as bonny as ever – and sing just as sweetly as I remember.’

  ‘And you’re as charming as I remember.’ Adela grinned. ‘So you’re one of the heroes of Imphal?’

  He shook his head. ‘I didn’t do anything more than the other boys.’ His expression tightened. She sensed the subject was too raw to talk about. Instead she asked him about his family. He’d been back home on leave in Scotland when the war broke out.

  ‘And you, Adela?’ He reached for her hand with his bony one. ‘No ring on your finger yet. Does that mean there’s still hope for a love-struck major?’

  ‘Major now, are you? Well, you never know.’ Adela laughed.

  ‘I’m sorry we lost touch,’ said Jimmy. He was too gallant to blame her for stopping writing.

  ‘I left Simla in ’38 and went to England,’ Adela explained. ‘I should have let you know.’

  ‘Not at all,’ Jimmy said. ‘I should have been more persistent.’

  ‘I better go now,’ she said, smiling, ‘but I’ll come back and see you.’

  ‘Will you?’

  ‘Of course.’

  ‘I’d like that. Just to talk to you would be a better tonic than the stuff they’re making me swallow.’

  ‘Jimmy.’ She squeezed his hand. ‘I promise I’ll not leave Imphal without seeing you again.’

  She went quickly, before he saw the tears of pity in her eyes. The number of shattered lives that they had seen on their tour was sometimes overwhelming. But to suddenly come across a man that she had known before the war – had been a little in love with – and see him reduced to a husk of his former self was heart-wrenching.

  Each morning before their hectic schedule of performances, Adela made the effort to go early and visit Jimmy. Most of the nurses on duty encouraged it, as it raised the morale of the whole ward when she sang them songs over breakfast.

  At the end of their second week in Imphal, rumours spread of the imminent arrival of a VIP.

  ‘Could be Mountbatten come to dole out medals,’ Tommy speculated.

  ‘Oh, I hope so.’ Prue grinned. ‘He’s a real dish. Do you think we’ll get to perform for him?’

  But before it could happen, Adela, Tommy, Prue and Betsie agreed to go to a casualty clearing station at Tamu sixty miles away to perform to medics and patients. The monsoon rains had eased and the roads were drying out. They crammed into a jeep without room for props or costumes and were driven south by a cheerful Gurkha. The friends were nervous at going nearer to the front – Jimmy had pleaded with Adela not to go – but the joyful surprise of the hard-pressed staff at their surprise arrival was worth it.

  The clearing station was a huddle of canvas buildings in a forest clearing by a river, with patients lying on stretchers that were kept off the ground by forked sticks. The nurses had dispensed with the starched-white uniforms of hospital and were living in tents with holes in the ground for latrines and sustained by food dropped from the air. To Adela’s amazement she came across an old school friend from Shillong, the only girl who had ever been a true friend, however briefly.

  ‘Flowers Dunlop! I don’t believe it!’

  The young woman in slacks and shirt, and her dark hair still worn in a thick plait, gaped at her. At once they were hugging and giggling as if they were thirteen again.

  ‘I’ve been sent up from an army hospital in East Bengal to help,’ Flowers explained. ‘We’ve got so many cases of fever coming in, and it’s hopeless sending them to hospital in the plains in the hot season, as it just makes them worse, so we’re treating as many as we can here and keeping them in the hills to recuperate.’

  ‘Yes, I’ve seen some of them at Imphal – including an old boyfriend,’ said Adela. ‘I sing to them over their egg and toast.’

  ‘I bet that cheers them up,’ Flowers said, winking.

  Later, after Adela had sung with her friends to patients babbling with delirium and groaning in pain, she sat on Flowers’ camp bed under a mosquito net as they drank tea by the light of a hurricane lamp. Flowers told her about training as a nurse and how she had been working in Rangoon when the Japanese invaded Burma. She had escaped on one of the last overcrowded ships to leave the port. After that she enlisted as an army nurse and was sent to the Middle East.

  ‘Since coming back, I’ve worked in Calcutta and then with a specialist neurosurgical unit in Comilla before coming here.’

  ‘Gosh, you’re adventurous,’ Adela said in admiration, ‘and brave.’

  Flowers flashed her an amused look. ‘Not what you would have expected from the timid girl you knew at St Ninian’s?’

  ‘No, not really,’ Adela admitted. ‘But we were very young then.’

  ‘But you were always brave,’ said Flowers. ‘I wish I’d had the courage to run away like you did. I hated school. And you caused such a fuss, you wouldn’t believe it. Especially when you didn’t come back.’

  ‘I hope they didn’t pick on you more because I wasn’t there,’ Adela said with a guilty pang.

  ‘They did,’ Flowers answered bluntly. ‘But it made me stronger. I kept telling myself that I was better than them and that I’d make something of myself – not just learn the social graces and make myself pretty for a husband. You did that for me, Adela. So thanks for getting yourself expelled.’ Flowers gave a wide grin.

  They laughed and drank more tea. Adela gave a brief outline of what she’d done in the intervening years, leaving out the painful details of her affair and illegitimate child.

  ‘I’m sorry to hear about the death of your father,’ said Flowers. ‘My father’s health is not good. My mother wants him to go to the convalescent home
in Simla, but he won’t desert his duties as station master, even though their house got requisitioned by the army and they are living in a leaking bungalow in Sreemangal.’

  ‘Jaflong would be closer than Simla for a spell of R&R. Doesn’t your mother come from there?’

  Flowers smiled. ‘Fancy you remembering that. Yes, it would be closer, but the railways would pay for him to go to Simla if he made a good case. But he will never ask.’ They fell into silence, each thinking about their parents. Flowers murmured, ‘It’s funny being up here, close to the tea plantations. I hope I have the chance to see Assam while I’m here.’

  ‘Why? Does it remind you of the Sylhet gardens of home?’ Adela asked.

  ‘Not because of that. It’s something Daddy said. He was born on a tea estate. I never knew that until he told me on my last visit home. All the talk of Kohima and Assam lately got him reminiscing; said his father was a Scots tea planter. Daddy grew up in Shillong, so I don’t know how that fits in, but he seemed quite proud of the connection.’

  ‘You’ll have to ask him more about it when you next see him,’ said Adela, feeling a sudden pang of homesickness for Belgooree.

  Soon after, Adela crawled into the tent she was sharing with Prue and fell into exhausted sleep. In the morning she was woken by screams. Scrambling from the tent with Prue, they saw Betsie cowering in a canvas bath behind the tent flap.

  ‘Stop them!’ she squealed.

  ‘Stop who?’ Adela looked around wildly for attackers.

  ‘Up there!’ She waved a hand.

  Adela looked up at the tree above. A crowd of monkeys were chattering loudly. Suddenly one hurled a twig at the naked Betsie. Prue picked it up and flung it back.

  ‘Don’t!’ Adela cried. ‘You won’t win.’

  A shower of sticks rained down on them. Adela grabbed Betsie’s towel and held it over her. ‘Finish off quickly,’ she ordered and ducked at the same time. Prue took refuge in the tent. A minute later Adela was following, with Betsie bundled in the towel. They collapsed, laughing, in a hysterical heap. It was minutes before they could draw breath.

  ‘Are you boozing in there?’ Tommy shouted through the canvas. ‘What’s going on, girls?’

  ‘Monkey business,’ Adela snorted, which set them all off again.

  They stayed three more days before the driver returned to collect them. On the last night one of the orderlies chucked a grenade in the river, which brought fish to the surface and a smile to the nurses’ faces when they dined on fish that evening.

  Early the next morning Flowers and Adela hugged and wished each other good luck, promising to stay in touch. The ENSA troupe bumped their way back in the Jeep, their bodies jarred and bruised by the rutted road. The driver kept the hood down to allow the breeze to cool them, so that by the time they arrived back in Imphal they were all covered in a thick brown dust.

  CHAPTER 29

  Wavell, India’s new Viceroy and former Commander-in-Chief, was flown into Imphal on a Douglas Dakota transport plane, along with other dignitaries: Lieutenant-General Stopford, of the Indian Army’s 33rd Corps; Air Commodore Vincent; and Bodhchandra Singh, the Maharajah of Manipur, in whose state they had landed.

  For once Sam was not piloting the plane. He had been detailed to make a film of the prestigious event for the SEAC film unit. It was to be a much-needed morale booster for the Indian army. There had been plenty of bitter talk, among officers as well as lower ranks, about their forgotten war on the Burma front. Sam, who had spent the past dangerous months flying supplies to beleaguered troops behind the Japanese lines and had witnessed the Herculean efforts of infantry, gunners and engineers to keep Kohima and Imphal from falling into enemy hands, knew more than most how deserving of their medals were the surviving soldiers.

  His own fellow airmen had been no less heroic – the men of 194 Squadron whom he had joined near Rawalpindi in ’42. They had become his family – navigator ‘Chubs’ MacRae, his wireless operators and the ground crew of experienced older men who did twenty-hour shifts to keep the planes maintained. The camaraderie of the squadron had earned it the nickname ‘The Friendly Firm’. For weeks on end they had flown in supplies, transported troops, evacuated the wounded under cover of darkness and navigated the treacherous mountainous terrain without proper maps or radar systems. Using the stars and rivers on clear nights and memorising the lie of hills and valleys, Sam had got to know North Burma like the back of his hand.

  He had landed on precarious strips of cleared jungle for Wingate’s Chindits, avoided Japanese night fighters to drop ammunition and water by parachute, and coaxed skittish mules on to his aircraft for use in the Burma mountains. The operations had been endless and punishing, but the worst risk to their transport drops so far was not enemy attack or the terrain, but the order to continue flying through the monsoon – and in daytime.

  There was nothing as terrifying as flying into giant cauldrons of cumulonimbus clouds and being hurled around while deafening hail clattered like bullets on the metal aircraft. Sam’s jaw continually ached from being clenched. His heart would race, until he found the all-important hole in the cloud into which he could dive, hoping to find their drop zone and not a mountain wall. Chubs, clutching his homemade pinpoint map, stayed as calm as if they were scouting a picnic spot.

  ‘Anytime now would do nicely, Padre,’ he would encourage. Chubs had nicknamed Sam ‘The Padre’ after they discovered he’d once been a missionary.

  Back at their Assam base at Agartala, in the humid officers’ mess they would toast their survival in gin and throw treats to their mascot in the compound, a pet Himalayan black bear. After a few snatched hours of exhausted sleep, their bearer would shake them awake, and the relentless round of flights would begin all over again.

  But today Sam had a welcome diversion and respite as documentary maker. He relished being behind the camera observing once more.

  He took close-up footage of the Viceroy inspecting troops of the 15th Punjab Regiment, Durham Light Infantry, Royal Berkshires, Royal Welsh Fusiliers and 1st Gurkha Rifles. Wavell presented medals. Sam filmed the men showing captured military hardware: mountain guns with wooden spoked wheels. Three prisoners of war were spoken to through a Japanese-American interpreter. Sam knew the significance of this: to show the world that the Allies treated their captured POWs with humanity – at least with food, shelter and medicines.

  Next Wavell visited the hospital. Sam took some shots. The censors at the War Office could decide if the pictures of men shrunken by fever or bandaged beyond recognition were to be shown more widely. To him, these men should not be hidden away from a squeamish public; they deserved to receive just as much recognition as the medal wearers. But he doubted that they would.

  As the VIPs took refreshment with the doctors, Sam stepped outside, enjoying the warm sunshine on his back. He never minded the heat in the hills; it was the humid, claustrophobic cities, like Calcutta, that sapped his energy and spirit.

  As he finished a cigarette and waited for the Viceroy, a dusty Jeep drove into the compound and was stopped by guards. Sam was surprised to see three women clamber out of the back, their topees tipped back jauntily, laughing and shoving their male colleague playfully at some remark he must have made. They were blatantly flirting with the guards, trying to wheedle their way into getting a closer view of the VIP visit. Sam snorted in amusement. On a whim he raised his camera, which was strung around his neck, and focused it on the group. Through the lens he could just pick out the ENSA badges on their shirts. Nice, shapely figures. The dark-haired one pulled off her filthy hat and shook out her hair. A double for Vivien Leigh.

  Sam’s heart thudded in his chest. It couldn’t possibly be. Without hesitating, he started to stride towards the noisy party. As he got close, the young woman looked over. Her eyes widened. Then she smiled and his stomach flipped over. Her face was streaked with dust and sweat, but she was even more beautiful than he’d remembered.

  ‘Adela.’

  ‘Sam.’


  She came up to him and held out her hand. He shook it, feeling ridiculously formal. What he really wanted to do was crush her to his chest and not let go. They stood grinning at each other. She didn’t seem so shocked to see him. Sam was almost speechless.

  ‘I’d heard you were in the RAF,’ she said, ‘and making films for them. Are you travelling with Wavell?’

  ‘Yes.’ His voice sounded embarrassingly husky in his ears. ‘When did you join ENSA? Have you been back in India long?’ He was still gripping her hand. ‘I want to hear everything.’

  She laughed. It made his chest constrict. How had he forgotten how much he loved the way she tilted her head to one side and half closed her eyes in amusement?

  ‘Since February,’ Adela said. ‘We all have. Do you remember Prue and Tommy from The Simla Songsters?’ She dropped his hand as she turned to the others. ‘And this is Betsie, who hasn’t quite recovered from being attacked by monkeys in the bath.’

  Sam exchanged greetings with them all.

  ‘Can we meet the Viceroy?’ Prue asked with a wink.

  ‘We don’t want to get on film looking like this,’ Betsie said in horror.

  ‘Perhaps on our return,’ Sam suggested, ‘you could perform something for the camera. I could suggest it to the ADC.’

  ‘Return from where?’ Adela asked.

  ‘We’re off to Bishenpur this afternoon and then on to Kohima.’

  Her face fell. ‘So soon? But you’re coming back?’

  ‘Tomorrow night, before returning Wavell to Calcutta.’

  ‘Good.’ She smiled. ‘Then we’ll put on our glad rags for the Viceroy.’

  There was no time for further conversation, as one of Wavell’s aides summoned Sam back. He gave a regretful shrug and a lingering look, before striding away.

  The rest of Sam’s day passed in a blur. They descended through clouds to the camp at Bishenpur, the mountains hidden from view. Sam’s nerves jangled, as they always did when he was a passenger rather than pilot. As the ceremony of medal giving began again – he focused in on a gunner from the Gordon Highlanders who was being honoured – his mind was only half on the task. He had thought of Adela often over the intervening years, yet imagined her in Britain. She would be doing something for the war effort or working as an actress or married to some lucky man in the tea business and raising his children.