Golden Earth

by Norman Lewis

  The Rangoon gaol was at first sight less forbidding and dolorous than the average prison. During the recent war, I was unfortunately brought into contact with the repressive arrangements of several countries. At the bottom of the scale were the French in North Africa, where colonial dissidents were put in black holes in the ground – living tombs. Above these were the Italians and Germans with their heartless efficiency. There were no gyves or pinions; but solitary confinement, soundproof cells, rows of steel doors which opened slowly at the throwing of a switch. In these all-electrically operated hells, food was a dosage with calories; a medical measure against death by starvation. A doctor stood by with a stethoscope while punishment was administered, and in the constant blue light bodies turned as white as if they had been drained by vampires.

  Rangoon gaol, perhaps because there had been a merciful shortage of funds, had never been able to run to such refinements. It was no more than a great cage; a collection of barrack-like buildings, where no attempt had been made, as in most prisons, to prevent inmates from seeing even the sky. In these barrack-rooms the prisoners lived communally; each occupying an allotted amount of floor space. When U Ba Thein told me that each building was called a ‘house’ and that the head-warders were ‘housemasters’ I admit to a suspicion that this might be no more than another of those sinister euphemisms for which the Burmese have such a genius. Occupants of the various houses wore different coloured longyis, and while, I felt, this grim echo of the public-school system might have been wasted on them, it was at least something that they did not wear prison clothes.

  They rose at dawn, U Ba Thein informed me, said prayers and then did PT for half an hour. I could have been sure of it. PT has become an oriental panacea for all the ills, both of body and mind. It would have been extraordinary not to have found it figuring largely in the reformative processes of an up-to-date prison. For up-to-date Rangoon was. The bars were made of wood, and, as the Director General cheerfully admitted, very easy to cut through. However they would not be replaced. Such grants of money as they received would be spent in a more positive way. He was aiming, eventually, at a prison without walls. ‘That edifice over there,’ he pointed to a blackened building, ‘was accidentally devastated by fire. A fortuitous circumstance. We can do without same. Now there will be no excuse for the non-existence of a football pitch.’ There was no problem here about making the prison too comfortable. He had heard of some place – Mexico, he thought – where this had been done. ‘Why, do you know those fellows actually asked to come back when they were discharged!’ It was enough to stop a Burman from gambling and dressing-up. Liberty was a precious thing.

  The influx of prisoners – eighteen thousand passed through their hands in one year – was attributable to the unsettled times and the breakdown of monastic education, with nothing to fill the gap. The present custom, said U Ba Thein, of entering a monastery for a week was useless. In the old days a boy spent at least a year there. Now he got no schooling until he was ten years of age, if at all. Parents wouldn’t send their children to boarding school, far from home. ‘There but for the Grace of God …’ he quoted. U Ba Thein had been a village boy himself, he told me; and had first gone to school when he was ten. ‘For several years they caned me daily, because like uneducated Burmese people I pronounced f as p.’ It had been the pons asinorum of the Director General’s youth. Having in the end surmounted this obstacle he had taken to learning with a zest, and found what remained comparatively easy. He had gone about noting down all the new words he heard, committing them to memory and practising in conversation as soon as he could. Usually he got the meaning wrong. But no matter, it impressed most people. U Ba Thein said it was a habit he had never grown out of. ‘You may have noticed that I still use long words in the wrong place? It is a habit I am noted for. People are still continually pulling my leg about it.’

  At the end of the war U Ba Thein had visited England to enable him to study the British prison system on the spot. He had been impressed by the kindness he had received, the kippers and the watercress of course, and by the favouritism of people behind the bars of public-houses, who had produced cigarettes for him from under the counter. No one had ever guessed that he was Burmese. It was at a time when all Far-Easterners were Japanese, although nobody had apparently bothered to enquire what a Japanese was doing in England at such a time. When, on one occasion, he addressed some Borstal boys, he invited questions at the conclusion of his remarks. He had mentioned Buddhism, and one of the boys asked if it was true that Buddhists could have more than one wife. ‘I informed them that that was so,’ U Ba Thein said, ‘and I must say they all seemed to regard it as an excellent thing.’

  As we paced solemnly down the passages, the prisoners stood to attention by their folded bedding. ‘Look at those fellows,’ U Ba Thein said. ‘They are a product of the times. There is no inherent criminality in those faces.’

  It was perfectly true. The convicts looked no more vicious than the young fellows to be seen in the streets outside. They were in for robbery, crimes of violence, murder. Fortunately, sexual crimes were very rare. There was no sexual repression in Burma, the Director General said, owing to the freedom practised between the sexes from the age of puberty. Bigamy was not an offence, and charges of rape were rarely brought because the offender in such cases was considered automatically to have married the girl.

  In Burma, U Ba Thein said, robbery and violence had always been the problem. He was inclined to trace some of it back to the deliberate policy of the Burmese kings, who encouraged delinquency in a certain restricted area in Upper Burma in order to provide themselves with a reserve of suitable recruits for their armies. The old Burmese kings were, above all, well intentioned. They had none of the cynical disregard for human rights displayed by recent European aggressors. All men were brothers and equally entitled to the salvation which the Burmese kings – who had seen the light – knew that only they could bring. They wanted nothing better than to extend their enlightened benevolence to all humanity; to govern according to the five fundamental precepts, and the four kingly laws, which ordained that the king should content himself with the tithe, that he should pay his servants regularly, lend money without interest to the necessitous, and use courteous and fitting language according to the age and the degree of the person addressed.

  It was unfortunate that only by totally non-Buddhistic measures could those nations which continued in ignorance of the Law be gathered into the fold of Buddhist felicity, so that the kingdom of Heaven on Earth might become a reality. But since all the king’s subjects had received a monastic training in the course of which it had been emphasised that of the five precepts, the most important was to take no life at all, how could they be persuaded – even in pursuit of a sanctified end – to enslave, to ravish and to slaughter all those who persisted in their error. The solution was the delimitation of the area within which, for the kingdom of heaven’s sake, the five precepts were ignored. From this the king’s janissaries were obtained, and from this still come a disproportionate number of the students at this strange public school of Rangoon.

  * * *

  It was reasonable to expect, I thought, that the Director General would have organised this visit with a little window-dressing in mind. We passed, for instance, a block of solitary confinement cells, which, although ‘the inheritance of inhumanity was rapidly being wiped out’, were obviously still in use. There were three or four prisoners there who couldn’t be put with the rest, but no offer was made to show me them. However, when, with a wave of dismissal, U Ba Thein indicated the women’s block, saying that he didn’t suppose I wanted to see it, I made it clear, as tactfully as I could, that I did. This seemed a good opportunity to visit a part of the prison where probably no preparations had been made. Before going any further we had to await the escort of the head wardress. This lady, a most chic custodian, arrived swinging her symbolical bunch of keys, her face larded with cosmetic. Bracing myself for a vision of screaming harridan
s in the manner of the women’s prison at Naples, I was surprised to find an atmosphere of gentle domesticity.

  With a trace of embarrassment, U Ba Thein excused the presence of the women’s babies which, he said, while not in keeping with European practice, they tolerated here for the babies’ sake. There were toys that had been made in the prison workshop strewn about the floor: wooden horses, lobsters, elephants. Each mother had a prison pushcart. This building was built of airfield metal landing-strip, and the kittens, which the children had been allowed to keep, wandered in and out of the perforations. The women were spruce in their ordinary clothes. They were importunate, too, and ignoring the wardress, came up to U Ba Thein to ask favours. Most of them were serving sentences for carrying firearms, and one, a delicate, almost ethereal creature, with the face of an Eastern madonna, had organised a huge diamond swindle.

  There was one other class of prisoner. We came on a rather tall man, with an unusually gentle expression. He seemed more reflective and less animated than the average Burman, and although some difficulty is found at first in telling the Mongolian peoples apart, I at least realised that the man was not Burmese. He turned out to be a Japanese kampé, one of a number who were serving ten-year sentences for war crimes. U Ba Thein said he had no idea what this one had done, but he had heard that some of them were sentenced for burying prisoners alive. A few words had been exchanged in English. Was he short of anything? The Japanese nodded down at his ragged trousers and the Director General said that he would see to it that he got another pair. We turned away. ‘Patience,’ said U Ba Thein, in parting salutation, and the Japanese smiled with gentle resignation. ‘There but for the Grace of God …’ said U Ba Thein again as we moved on.

  CHAPTER 8

  To Mandalay

  IN THE LATE AFTERNOON, and several hours behind schedule because of the heat-haze, the plane bumped down on Mandalay airfield. The moment the plane door opened I knew that this was a different heat from the Rangoon kind. The horizon was ringed by scorched hills that wavered slightly as you moved your head, as if seen through bad, uneven window glass. The passengers clambered down and took refuge under the wings; sheltering as though from torrential rain. Waves of scorching air rippled from the plane’s metal surfaces. Working very slowly, the airport staff dragged out the baggage.

  Mr Tok Galé, representative in Mandalay of the British Information Service, was to have met me. The problem of lodgings was supposed to be particularly bad, and it was hoped that this gentleman, who had been warned by telegram from Rangoon, might have been able to find me a room. Outside the airport huts one or two decayed taxis waited for passengers. These soon filled up and went lurching and bobbing away. The various officials prepared to close down for the day. Mr Tok Galé had evidently given up hope of the plane’s arrival.

  Another half an hour passed and an outlandish vehicle came rumbling up out of the dust. It was, as I soon discovered, a typical Mandalay gharry. This once modish conveyance had a galvanised iron body, decorated with the British Royal Standard, and much fancy scrollwork in brass. Huge glass rubies were dotted about the coachwork, and there were several diamond-shaped insets of coloured glass. Enormous lamps were supported on fancy brackets, and the wheels turned unevenly under high, polished, metal mudguards. This piece of fantasy, which had clearly been created and maintained with tender pride of ownership, had something ghostly about it. It was like one of those fragile, immensely aged ladies who, clad in the height of Edwardian fashion, still haunt remote London squares. Nothing could have better typified Mandalay.

  Seeing that he had a fare the ancient driver climbed down from his seat. He was gripping a bag, and his horse was allowed to mumble a few mouthfuls of the dried herbs it contained, to give it strength for the new journey. The piece of cord which did service as a handbrake was then untied from the wheel and we set off towards the thorny hedges, the stagnant pools, the ruined palaces of Mandalay.

  Mandalay. In the name there was a euphony which beckoned to the imagination, yet this was the bitter, withered reality. Through the suburbs mile followed mile of miserable shacks; a squalid gypsy encampment, coated with a bone-white dust which floated everywhere, like a noxious condensation of the heat-haze itself. Pigmy pagodas sprouted like pustules. Hideous dogs snarled and scuffled in the streets, which were still rutted and broken from the pounding of wartime traffic.

  Mr Tok Galé, whom I found in his office, was a small, quiet-voiced Burman in well-pressed European clothes. He was just about to make another trip out to the airport, which temporarily could not be reached on the telephone. With relentless efficiency, Tok Galé had already worked out the details of a comprehensive sightseeing programme to fill in my stay in Mandalay, which was to begin, it seemed, the moment I arrived. A jeep had been hired, and awaited us with the driver standing respectfully bareheaded in the terrific sunshine. While Tok Galé stood by I washed off a layer of dust. Within five minutes I was sitting in the jeep, lulled by the balm of my guide’s gently imparted information, jerked into wakefulness as we crashed through pot-holes.

  The most important of Tok Galé’s many kindly services consisted of finding a room for me. The circuit-house, he said, was out of the question. It was a mile or two from the town’s centre, well inside the dacoit zone. The room was owned by a Chinese merchant. It had been divided by partitions, and he and several tenants slept in beds that had been distributed as evenly as possible about the available space. It was reached by an outside staircase, at the top of which was a platform with a small table, an ancient, filthy but still beautiful pitcher, full of water, and an aluminium washbasin. Here, at night, a lonely but brilliantly neon-illuminated figure, I performed my toilet, watched incuriously by the Burmese seated at the tables of the tea-shops below. It seemed that Mandalay was without drains. When I asked my Chinese host what was to be done with the waste water, he pointed to the palm-thatched roof of the house below. When I had finally brought myself to accept his implied suggestion there was a sharp exclamation from within, as if the inmates had never been able entirely to accustom themselves to the procedure.

  * * *

  Night in Mandalay called for special qualities of endurance. As the evening wore on, both heat and noise increased. The large, modernistic windows with their westerly exposure had been a suntrap since the early afternoon, and by the evening the heat was seeping through the walls themselves. At about six-thirty the sun went down redly in a glittering haze of dust particles. Immediately the lights of Mandalay came on. A fluorescent tube had been installed for decorative purposes across the façade of our building, providing a pale glare until the early morning hours. The cinema across the road was outlined with flickering fires of neon. Probably as an anti-dacoit measure, because it was left on all night, a large, naked electric bulb was suspended outside my window. This supplied, when other sources failed, a continuous, death-cell illumination.

  At all times a cheerful hum of café gossip ascended to my window, mingled with the exuberant blowing of motor-horns. In the evening, the cinema came to life, advertising itself with trailer-music broadcast from powerful loudspeakers, and by the pertinacious note of an electrically struck gong, attached to the wall nearby. Above this background of confused noise several pagodas sometimes asserted themselves, signalling their religious offices by harmonious and long-echoing sounds struck from the huge triangles of brass suspended in their courtyards.

  The windows were open wide in the hope of catching a current of air, and sparrows flew in, and in their fluttering set in brief motion an otherwise static frieze of lizards.

  * * *

  I took my meals at a Chinese restaurant across the way, called the Excelsior. Whenever I went in the proprietor would come out of the kitchen and guide me firmly into the polite solitude of a private room. A moment or two later I would hear a preliminary scratching and the gramophone would begin to play ‘Kathleen Mavourneen’, followed by ‘The Harp that Once …’ The sides of the record were always played in this order. Alway
s the proprietor asked with a hopeful uplift in his voice, ‘Eggs and chips?’ And always I shook my head, pointing without understanding to some Burmese or Chinese speciality on the wall menu. This was never available, and the dish finally served was fried soft noodles with mincemeat, although it was always given a fresh name. This was sometimes followed by a turnip-tasting fruit, called in Burmese, ‘Ice from Russia’. Mandalay Pale Ale could be had here at the source for three rupees, or four and sixpence. You could also buy Fire-Tank Brand Mandalay Whisky at seven rupees a bottle, which was reasonable compared to genuine imported Scotch at the black-market figure of eighty.

  Every night I sat in this sallow cubicle, trying to put off the time when I should have to face the oven of my room. Across the road a rank of small covered-wagons, decorated with brass cupids, would be drawn up. These had brought peasants to market and now their owners were sitting in teashops, gambling away the proceeds of their sales. Once a woman sat on the pavement outside, giving her baby alternate sucks of a nipple and a fat cheroot, and once while I sat there a silent, thickly-bearded Indian came in and handed me a slip of paper on which was printed, ‘a conjurer will make your party a success’. On another occasion there was a Chinese private party in a booth opposite and, as the door was slightly ajar, I caught a glimpse of one of the ladies sitting on her escort’s lap, washing his face after the meal.

  * * *

  There was no important reason for Mandalay’s existence. It never possessed strategic or commercial importance, and the whole district had had a detestable climate since, centuries before, pious kings had cut down all the trees to be used as fuel in brick-making for pagodas. At some time in the remote past astrologers had declared the area to be astrally favoured, so Ava and Amarapura had been built. These had finally been deserted, as Burmese towns were, when it was decided that the efficacy of the human sacrifices made at the foundation was exhausted. And then, in Victorian times, the pious King Mindon had been tempted to try his luck again. On the advice of the Brahmin astrologers an exemplary mass-sacrifice was arranged, including that of a pregnant woman. According to the old Mongolian belief the spirits of mother and child would unite in death to form a composite demon of exceptional malignancy. This would be animated by an implacable desire for revenge, directed – with seemingly defective logic – against the king’s enemies. As a Buddhist scholar of renown and the leading authority of his times on Pali texts, Mindon probably disapproved of this stone-age practice. If he permitted the woman to be buried alive, he did so in the same spirit as a socialist cabinet minister might dress for dinner – not because he agreed with the principle, but because these things were expected of him; and, after all, there was nothing to be lost one way or another.