Land of the Living

by Georgina Harding

  He saw a woman pick up the white silk of a parachute. At points in the siege supplies had been dropped by parachute. There were clusters of them on the ground here and there, like mushrooms where they had landed and dirtied now to the colour of mushrooms. This woman bent and pulled at the silk, and a light breeze got beneath and made it billow as she pulled it in towards herself. She was small and determined, a matronly little woman in a dark sarong. She wants it for herself, he thought, she will make of it a tent or a dress – or a shroud, a shroud for all of them – as she went on pulling the silk out of the mud, bundling it against her chest. But once she had it all in her arms she let the bundle drop. He had not noticed that the remnants of a hut lay beneath.

  It was beginning to rain harder now. They got to the car just in time. It was too soon to go back to the house so they sat in the car for a while watching the rain fall, Jess thrashing about as Claire reached awkwardly behind and rubbed her coat dry with the blanket they kept on the back seat.

  Darling, you’ve never told me so much before.

  No, I haven’t, have I?

  He had told her this but he could not begin to convey to her the whole. Number and extent. The smell of it, the maggots, the flies, the rats, the vultures and the crows. The unimaginable panorama, all this going on and on, turning through 360 degrees. The rain, the cloud, the endless ranges of hills that they knew were there even when they could not see them.

  He slammed his hand flat to the steering wheel so that the horn sounded out across the beach.

  Why there, why were we all there? Of all the places in the world. We’d come all that way to this remotest of places to kill one another, across half the world, we and the Japs – no, not just we and the Japs, but Welshmen, Indians, Gurkhas, Africans with insignia of crossed assegais on their shoulders, each of us distinguishable only by these details once we lay in the mud, and all the same to them. (Sikhs with turbans, the image recurring and recurring, but that he could not say.) How strange it must have been to them that it was their land to which these strangers had come to die, where hardly any strangers had ever come before. It didn’t strike home till then. Till then the only Nagas we’d seen were the porters. That was different. They were working for us. They were part of the war.

  Thank goodness she didn’t speak, because nothing she could have said would have helped. She would know, as he knew, that it wasn’t like him to speak like this, not Charlie.She was just looking out now, watching the rain on the glass. He thought of those crazy grinning men, running up for the next load, one after another, as if war was a lark. Who maybe even won them the battle, carrying supplies over the mountain through the siege, along jungle trails and up impossible slopes. Bent backs, wiry legs. Little and cheery and hard and wiry like Tommy Prosser, who had been a stable lad at Newmarket and used to ride the horses out, who might have been a jockey by now if it hadn’t been for the war. Racing off as if from the starter’s gun. Wonder how they’d run on the flat, Tommy said. Shouldn’t think they’ve seen a piece of flat ground in their lives.

  Rain streaked down the windscreen and the windows. Inside, the glass steamed up, with the condensation of their breath and that of the panting dog, and the wet on the dog’s hair and on their clothes. The sea began to disappear, and the beach, grey and beige horizontal smears dissolving. She turned to look at him and saw that his eyes were closed. His hands still gripped the wheel. She wanted to touch his face that was still as rock, reach soft fingers to his cheek, to make him open his eyes and turn towards her. She lifted up a hand but his stillness deterred her and she let it drop.

  From their post in the Naga Village they had looked steeply down onto a road. That was where they had been stationed when they came to the battle. Sometime early on, perhaps the day they had got there, a Jap had been killed by a sniper on the road. He was still there days later, flat in the mud, flattened deeper into the mud as the battle moved on and the tanks and the vehicles passed along the road. In time he became only the flattened outline of himself, until one morning he wasn’t there any more, his disappearance completed with a slow mechanical logic.

  Thank God for that, Walter had said. Poor bastard’s gone at last.

  The jungle seemed a purity when they first volunteered for the patrol. A chance to step away in an instant from the men and the machines and the murder. To disappear beyond the green wall from which that boy had come. To enter into his world which was a world of mist and of filtered green light, to know the depths and varieties and intensities of greenness fed by the rain, to listen to the sound of rain on leaves, on one layer of leaves beneath another, hard leaf to frond to fern, this dripping of moisture the life-flow of the forest, the mist rolling through like its breath. It was as if they had entered a place still evolving, the water still to drain away to make of it an Eden, but the water had not drained yet, it was not ready for their presence, not ready for them, they with their boots and guns an oddity, an intrusion of the future. The things that belonged were the leeches and other creatures of the wet, and eerie birds that they did not see but only heard calling. It was not until later that he would discover what kind of Adam it was who might live there, how such a man moved and spoke and found his way, and found what wild fruits he might eat and an orchid to put behind his ear.

  How odd it was, that they should have been left in such a place, they too left to melt into the soil, Englishmen where they did not and would never belong.

  Charlie darling, It’s half past twelve. I should think she’ll be back by now.

  He reached into his pocket for the key, put it into the ignition and for a moment held it there. He started the car and then, with the engine running, wiped irritably at the inside of the windscreen with his hand so that he could see, as if he had only just noticed the misting, wiping clear just a patch of windscreen in which to see as he turned the car, back and away from the beach.

  What would you like me to do, darling? Should I stay in the car?

  He turned the car roughly, running onto the verge. She was right. She didn’t need to be there. It wasn’t her concern.

  No, please come, he said. It’ll be easier if you’re there.

  A pine tabletop scrubbed almost white. Tea put out with busy hands: biscuits overlapping on a rosy-patterned plate, milk jug, sugar bowl, saucers, cups, then the teapot and a knitted cosy over it.

  Hazel, her name was in the letter, Hazel Clarke. She was short, a little plump, fresh-faced, with brown hair and eyes like the boy they had met at the door, sure in her movements and her speech. She seemed more sure than Claire had expected her to be, a woman who seemed well capable of bringing up three boys on her own. Signs of them were tidied into corners of the kitchen, a jam jar crammed with crayons and some schoolbooks on a shelf, shirts folded by the ironing board, muddied boots on the mat by the door. The room had some deep familiarity to it that she envied. She had not expected to envy this woman anything. (Or perhaps she was not so sure, after all, she would think with hindsight, perhaps she was not really seeing her; she was an outsider here, looking from the outside and with the gulf of class between them, deceived by the plainness of the woman’s manner and the homeliness of her surroundings.) She made some compliment, that she hoped came across right and did not sound condescending, what a welcoming house it was to come to when it was raining so hard outside, though in fact the rooms in the cottage were cramped and dim, only the daylight in them and so little of that this particular morning.

  It’s what keepers’ cottages are meant for, isn’t it, Hazel Clarke said. For men to come into out of the rain.

  Of course, she said. Of course that was so.

  It was clear Mrs Clarke had been looking out for them, since she had come to the door as soon as the car drove up. There wouldn’t be many cars that stopped before this isolated row of cottages.

  You want to be bringing the dog in?

  No, no, she’s very wet, she’ll be fine in the car.

  We can have her in, put her in the scullery.
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br />   No, really, she’s fine. We can’t stay long.

  She’ll dry off better indoors.

  Oh you’re very kind.

  She had taken their coats. Shaken the wet from them, hung them in the passage.

  You’d think the weather could’ve held off for the morning at least, if you’ve come all this way.

  Then she made the tea and they drank the tea, and Claire asked about the boys, their names and ages and schooling, and for a time the two women filled the dim minutes with chat without meaning, as the man was silent, while the rain began to clear outside and sunlight at last to break through, spilling in through the little window and brightening the objects on the table. It seemed as if they might have gone on with their small talk until the visit was over yet the thing that had brought them might not have been mentioned at all.

  We looked in the atlas, Hazel Clarke said all of a sudden, turning to Charlie. In that moment she sat very still, and her stillness was heavy in the room. The shaft of light striped the table before her. Me and the boys. Took us a while to find the place.

  Yes, he said. It was like the ends of the earth.

  That’s how Walter put it, in a letter he wrote us. He said he’d come all that way and there were armies from everywhere, but what they’d come to was the ends of the earth.

  So you got his letters, I’m glad you got his letters.

  He wrote after the battle. He said it was a terrible battle.

  It was, but we were all right, Charlie said. The worst was over before we got there. We were just mopping up.

  How awkward he looked, Claire thought, as he said that. His hand seemed too big for the fragile cup that he held, though it was empty and he might have put it down.

  Perhaps you can show me where you were. Then I can show the boys.

  She took a big black atlas down off the shelf where the schoolbooks were, and brought it to the table, clearing a space before him, pushing aside the teapot and the jug and the dish that she had put out such a brief time before, saying how she was glad of the light as it would be the easier to read. The book fell open where it must have been opened many times: India, the British Possessions all pink.

  He placed the cup on the saucer, delicately as if the china might shatter.

  See, here, he said, up in the north-east, here’s Assam. It was a long journey there, Walter must have written to you about that. We disembarked at Bombay, and then we had to go right across the country, all the way up here, to this railway station, up here in the Brahmaputra Valley, and the place was pretty much nothing but a railway station, the name told you that, Manipur Junction, that was all that mattered about it, that it was on the railway, and there we set off for the hills. Kohima’s marked. You found Kohima?

  So many names, but he didn’t know the use of them; just a list of places passed through, where they’d not stopped and nothing had occurred. Why did he see the need to tell her all of these names?

  And then, she wanted to know. She said the words plainly but he saw how her hands were clenched into fists on the table by the book’s edge. And then, after that, where did they go after that? This was what she had wanted to know, not any of the rest. The rest she could have worked out for herself.

  After that, we followed the Japanese retreat. Most of the force went south, this way, along the road towards Imphal, and then east towards the Chindwin, and detachments spread out into the mountains.

  She looked where his finger pointed as if there was something actually to be seen in the smooth and empty pink.

  Here, they’re marked up here, the Naga Hills. They run on to the south, but the map doesn’t show you that. The map has it all one colour. It doesn’t show you how mountainous it is there, this whole area a chaotic tract of mountains running on from India into Burma. We were here, somewhere along the red line that shows the border. Even here it’s printed in parts as a dotted line. Parts of it haven’t even been charted.

  He had no more names to tell her because there weren’t any to be told.

  You mean no one had been there before?

  Oh, there are people there, just not Europeans.

  But he had told her nothing, only geography. He knew that he must say something more. Why make the visit, if he had nothing to tell her?

  All the chaps looked up to him, he said. To Walter, I mean.

  Then, He was such a good and steady man. You knew that the moment you met him.

  Again, he began. In the battle there was one young soldier got windy. Walter took him in hand. Stay with me, he told him. Go where I go. The soldier followed him after that like a dog.

  That’d be like Walter.

  Yes.

  And what happened to the lad?

  That was Luke. He was on the patrol with us.

  Explanation enough.

  And the other one?

  His name was Tommy. Tommy Prosser.

  Of course she must know that already, but he had nothing to say about Tommy. So often he had tried to put the thought of Tommy away, as if there had been three of them, not four, as if things could have been different if it had been only the three.

  He was a stable lad, from Newmarket, I think. But then she might well know that too.

  Not local then. No particular reason for him to join the Norfolks, then.

  No, not so far as I knew.

  He had said how it had happened, in the letter that he wrote. He had said how they had been ambushed in a clearing, and that it had been very quick – one always said that it was quick, whether or not one knew that it was so. No need to repeat any of that now. Better to say what Walter had said about the orchids.

  That touched her. He saw that. She busied herself again to cover the emotion, lifted the pot to pour more tea but the tea was stewed now.

  I’ll make a fresh pot then, she said.

  No, don’t worry.

  Claire was saying, Really, you’re too kind, and besides, we must be getting along.

  It was so good of you to come. Stay a little longer, if you can, and the boys’ll be back for their dinner.

  But we’re in your way, Mrs Clarke, Claire was saying.

  So they stayed, as they felt obliged to, and drank too much tea.

  When the three boys came in they stared at him though they must have been taught not to stare. There was the one who had answered the door to them, who had a cold and had been lying on his bed upstairs, an eight-year-old with a runny nose. He was the middle one. The oldest had a look of Walter, fair and lanky. The youngest was a sturdy little boy with that five-year-old’s confidence in being only himself. He would scarcely have known his father.

  He stood up when the boys came in and didn’t sit again. The tall chair at the table’s end should have been Walter’s. He kept standing behind it. He said hello to each of them, and they watched wide-eyed. He saw how he mattered to them and felt the weight of it as if he was famous, this famous man who had fought alongside their father.

  The atlas was still there on the table. They pulled their chairs close and sat down, and he stood behind them and traced out the journey all over again, for them this time, everywhere their father had been; and still there were names where they weren’t needed and no names where they were – and that blank space, of which he could say nothing.

  Was it very hot in the jungle, sir?

  No, not hot like you’d think.

  Somebody must have read them some Kipling. Their jungle was green and hot out of Kipling, with lurking tigers and snakes looped from branches.

  Some of the jungle is hot, he said. It was very hot where our army went later, in Burma, but where we were was really quite cold and rainy. It was in the mountains, you see, very high, and there it can be cold, even though it’s India. And rainy.

  Oh, they said, but he could see that the oldest one – Edward, if he had their names right and this one was Edward – did not quite believe him, so fixed was the place in his imagination. He left it at that. Let them see it as they liked. They did not need to know
how dank it was, how clammy in the mist, how the moment you stood still the leeches could swarm at your feet. How they never even came close to a tiger.

  When they were finally leaving she said, You must have had a rotten time of it, yourself, in the jungle. I hear you were lost a long time. I’m so glad you made it out.

  The house was cold. They lit the fire straight away, took their tea into the sitting room as the fire began to burn. Spent a quiet domestic evening. Supper in the kitchen, back to the sitting room, warm now, listening to the wireless, reading the paper, putting down the paper and watching the fire, and at last, moving to go to bed.

  It was good to do that today. Wasn’t it, darling?

  Yes. He crouched before the fire to damp it down.

  She’s a nice woman. And they were such nice boys.

  She thought how she might one day have boys like that. They would fill the quiet house with noise. They would have big hands and play cricket and grow to tower over her.

  I wish I could have done more, he said.

  But you did well. You said all she wanted. The boys thought you were a hero.

  I’m not.

  Not what?

  Not a hero.

  Will you be seeing the other families? Claire had asked.

  No, he had said. No, I don’t think so.

  So little she knew. So little any of these women knew.

  He looked into the fire, crouching, holding the iron poker.

  He jabbed at the last log that was burning, turning the log over, bright gobbets falling from it, small yellow flames flaring up, fluid, spilling along its length. He thrust at the log again and saw it break, and there was more fire. He felt the heat of the fire on his face. He could crouch like that for a while, the poker in his hand, seeming ready to spring but holding still. He would stay until the last of it burned away.