“IT WAS A GLORIOUS MORNING, ONE OF THOSE DAYS WHEN THE sun chases the shadows over the hills,” Susan would remember. At 9:30 a.m., September 9, 1932, she and Jim were married at the All Saints Church in the picturesque old market town of Evesham at the edge of the northern Cotswolds. They had waited till the very end of his leave so that their honeymoon would not rob his parents of time spent with him.
Jim had secured a shiny, powerful black AC Six sports car, with a red racing stripe and a specialized high-performance clutch. It was the beginning of what would turn out to be a lifelong lust for fast cars. The two-seater kicked up gravel as they left the church in a roar—they had no set plans as they tore vaguely toward Wales, munching fresh-picked apples from Susan’s family garden. “We purred along,” Susan remembered, “the car seemingly as happy as ourselves.” On her hand was a sapphire ring they had purchased in Ceylon.
By the middle of October, they were back in Burma, reunited with Jim’s Eastern family. Standing on the wharf when their ship docked was Aung Net, Joseph the cook, and Po Lone, a newcomer to the group who spoke English. There was a busy week in a borrowed brick company house in Rangoon—just enough time to shop for “tinned and bottled luxuries” that would be unobtainable in the outpost villages—and then it was off to headquarters in Mawlaik, on the Upper Chindwin, close to the border of Manipur. They began at the chaotic and colorful train station in Rangoon, grabbing the Mandalay mail train and riding first class in a comfortable, breezy compartment with access to the well-stocked saloon car. (In the packed third class, hundreds of Indian and Burmese passengers would be forced to stick their feet out the windows in an effort to stay cool.)
They had time to visit Mandalay, on the banks of the great Irrawaddy River, the country’s second largest city. And then they were off to Monywa to catch the company boat for a three-day river romp up the Chindwin. Headquarters in Mawlaik, the riverine station, would now belong to Williams. It was a large town and a big responsibility.
The couple arrived just before sunset, their little luxury boat emitting two shrieks from the siren as it pulled up to the jetty. On the high sandy bank Susan could see the bullock cart waiting to take their luggage, and behind it, several wooden shacks.
In their new home in Mawlaik, Susan (left) could watch Jim play polo.
“Here, besides the firms,” Susan wrote, “were stationed military police, civil police, Forest department, etc.” A little hospital, nothing more than an insubstantial bamboo hut with matting walls, was run by an Indian doctor. The rustic social club managed to include a tennis court, polo grounds, and “a hazardous nine hole golf course.” And while there were no fancy shops with English goods, there was a sizable native market selling local produce and offering spectacular orchids for a dime a dozen.
While their possessions rode in the wagon, Jim and Susan walked a mile to the house. By the time they arrived, they were covered in the fine red dust of the road. It was November, “the loveliest time of the year in Burma,” Susan wrote. “The beginning of the cold season when every day is like a perfect summer day.” Their new home, enclosed by a white picket fence and set high up on a hill with a view of the town and river below, was constructed entirely of teak, with white painted eaves. A breezy veranda, used as an open-air living room with some old cane chairs, rimmed the first story. The pretty yard was filled with brightly colored bushes and flowers—purple bougainvillea, imported yellow allamanda, and red and yellow cannas, which were visited by delicate hovering hummingbirds. Susan immediately made plans to add a vegetable garden in which she could grow chili peppers “to give a bite to Jim’s breakfast buttered eggs.”
The interior was spacious and handsome. Just inside the entrance, there was a large dining room (where the table legs were set in tin lids filled with kerosene to discourage ants) and a sitting room. An elegant, twisting teak staircase dominated the center. The furniture, chosen by the company, was solid and formal. The stuffiness could be relieved, however, by floor-to-ceiling hinged shutters, which opened the rooms to the outdoors.
The bedrooms were ample, and each contained two baths. Despite the presence of faucets, the big zinc tubs were filled not by modern plumbing but by servants hefting jugs of hot water. A glazed earthenware “Pegu jar” containing cold water was always within easy reach. The toilets were emptied by a lowly Indian worker who had his own sweeper’s staircase from which he could silently and invisibly remove what would be flushed in a modern bathroom.
As eager as Susan was to settle in, it would have to wait. There wasn’t time to unpack boxes from England, as the couple were about to embark on their first jungle tour together. This is what Jim had been dreaming of for a decade: his life among elephants shared with his true love.
He wanted Susan to have everything he did, including his clothes. He designed a feminine version of his own field wardrobe for her, starting with an Australian bush shirt, customized with four big pockets, tailored for a woman, and hemmed at knee length. Beneath this, Susan would wear fine smooth-cotton lisle stockings, woolen ankle socks, and canvas hiking boots. She loved it.
Their journey began that first cool morning just after dawn. Jim’s rank and marital status now entitled him to a large entourage. Twenty traveler elephants—tuskers unsuitable for logging work, adult females, and even a teenager—appeared from out of the ring of forest that surrounded the house. The animals were led to the rear veranda from which servants loaded them up with luggage, lightweight Burmese baskets, and gear. It was expertly organized—tents and poles on one elephant, and beds, suitcases, tables, chairs, and radio set distributed in a systematic fashion on the others. Po Sin, Joseph the cook’s kitchen elephant, carried not only all the pots and pans, but in cane plaited baskets, the live chickens and ducks who would ultimately end up in them. (Susan eventually insisted on pardoning two ducks; the two birds were carried all the way home where they lived out their natural lives as pets.) They also brought Rhoda, a little buff-colored cocker spaniel; Gipsy, a wirehaired fox terrier; and one cat, a Siamese named Tigger. When everything was in place, they set off.
After four hours of steady marching, they reached their campsite, which had been cleared by some of the logging staff. A large open dining room with woven bamboo walls and thatched roof of jungle grass had been built that very day. Most of these camp dining rooms contained a bamboo table for the radio and a tray for drinks. Wherever foresters went, little buildings were put together fresh, and rarely used for more than two days. The jungle quickly reclaimed everything before it could ever be occupied again.
Soon after, Susan heard the sound of the kalouks and looked forward to watching the elephants as they were unburdened. Within a half hour the tents were up. Installing the “wireless” set involved a lengthy process, because the battery had to be secured in a basket of hay for travel to avoid spilling the acid. Once the antenna had been fixed high in a tree, if the conditions were right in the hilly terrain, Susan could listen to the chimes of Big Ben from London over the calls of jungle birds. Though they were far from Westminster, “This made us feel nearer home,” she wrote. The connection was so deeply felt that on the occasions that “God Save The King” was played on air, both Jim and Susan would rise from their canvas camp chairs and stand at attention.
In the couple’s tent there was one large area in the center for the raised beds, theirs as well as those for the dogs. Mosquito netting was draped over all of them. There was even a bathroom inside, partitioned off by canvas and containing a tub. Discarded kerosene tins were filled with water from the nearest stream and heated over the massive campfire. Susan would enjoy a hot soak nightly before dinner. For fun, she sometimes played fortune-teller and read Jim’s future in the leaves at the bottom of his teacup. They would then go off to sleep, cocooned in wool blankets.
IN THE EVENINGS, AUNG Net set the table with linens that he kept spotless. Cocktails were poured. Joseph prepared fresh bread, pickled pork, or roast chicken. How different this was, Susan thought, from “the very austere and comfortless touring” she had done with Hopwood, where all the meals were “dry as dust.”
At sundown, the jungle came alive. Williams often kept a large reflector lamp burning all night to discourage wildlife, particularly leopards, who were known to snatch dogs right out of tents, away from sleeping owners. One of Williams’s colleagues lost a large Labrador retriever that way.
In the morning, Susan was up first because “the boys” could not enter the tent until she was dressed. During the day, while Susan oversaw domestic tasks, including pressing clothes with a heavy charcoal-heated iron, Jim caught up on paperwork and met with contractors and logging camp workers. People in the vicinity, curious to meet Jim’s new wife, would come by to pay their respects and bring offerings—“half a dozen eggs on a plate, a pineapple, bananas, sweet limes, oranges. No one ever came empty handed,” Susan wrote. She was overwhelmed by the warmth she was shown. The people embraced her, and she found their culture and customs to be reassuringly kind and family oriented. In the bigger villages, she loved the sounds of Buddhist ritual: the children chanting, the gongs summoning monks to prayer, and later, the chiming of pagoda bells in the night air.
At all of these places, Jim pulled out his big medicine kit, for he was not only an elephant doctor; he had become a bit of an MD, too. With his company-issued medicine box full of quinine for fevers, suture silk, needles, ointments, pills, and bandages, he was on call with the villagers. Life was too harsh in the forest for him to be reticent about treating the most horrifying diseases and wounds: the woodsman whose run-in with a sun bear had left his eye dangling and his scalp torn from his skull; women with breast abscesses, which were treated with maggots to clear away dead tissue; and many others suffering from malaria, dysentery, smallpox, goiters, and nutritional deficiencies such as beriberi. Williams knew he might kill a patient with his amateur doctoring, but to refuse care would be a sure death sentence. Susan watched Jim during his field clinics, and started to pitch in, eventually acting as nurse.
Soon they would pack up and be back on the trail. Jim brought Susan to the area that had been his headquarters when he started in 1920. The great joy of the reassignment in Mawlaik was that Jim was once again in Bandoola’s backyard. In just a couple of weeks, he’d be able to introduce his wife to the tusker who had saved his life.
For the Williamses this wasn’t just a jungle tour, it was a honeymoon, and they made love often. Or often enough to be noticed. Settling in to a campsite, Susan came to Jim asking him to investigate a strange odor radiating from her bed. Williams stripped it down and discovered that the leather strapping that tightened the canvas had been coated with fat from a roasted wild pig. When he confronted the servant in charge about what was going on, the man grinned and said it helped stop the creaking.
Susan took to the life with remarkable ease and eagerness, and Jim felt profoundly happy at having found someone who loved the forest as much as he did. “I had previously enjoyed my loneliness in the jungle despite all the longings for companionship which at times assailed me. I enjoyed it because it brought me private joys which I could not believe that anyone would ever share with me. The discovery that Susan could not only share my pleasures but also enlarge them was the perfection of my happiness,” he wrote. He also reveled in the fact that even though Susan had toured the forests of Burma with Hopwood, she had never really seen them, not the way she could with him. Hopwood was a hunter; he wanted to kill creatures. Now with her husband, Jim said, “she came to enjoy all the living things of the jungle: the birds, the beasts and the flowers.” It was their Eden.
“The wonderful beauty of the Burma jungle at dawn is something never to be forgotten,” Susan wrote. “The deep green faintly tinted with pink as the sun was coming up, the mists in the river beds. The spirals and faint smell of wood smoke from the newly stirred camp fire. The call of the doves or the longer cry of the Burmese imperial pigeon. A pleasant nip in the air, the occasional squeal of an elephant being harnessed. Sitting down muffled up in a warm woolly sweater and scarf, sipping one’s first cup of tea, smoking the first cigarette. The wonderful beauty and sensation of it all was only fleeting, but in those moments life was good.”
Susan and Jim hiked the forest together, sometimes ten miles at a stretch, starting on paths that were wide enough to drive bullock carts on, but then usually narrowed into tiny game trails made by wild animals. They would walk along, sharing their favorite pack food, such as slabs of plain chocolate or rye crackers, and point to signs of wildlife or jungle flowers in bloom. Jim might sit down on a boulder with her and blow on a blade of grass held between his thumbs to mimic the mating call of a barking deer. Occasionally, one of the small creatures would venture to poke a red head out of the vegetation.
They visited the logging camps, where Jim greeted the elephants like the old friends they were, and Susan could see the very best of him. The first time, Susan was sitting in camp when Williams came striding up. “Come on, Sue,” he said, “the elephants have been brought over from one of the elephant camps for me to inspect; they are being bathed just below here in a pool in the creek.” He had been an elephant man for more than a decade, but this moment still filled him with excitement.
The uzis scrubbed the elephants’ skin with a vine that lathered up like soap.
They walked down to the banks of the creek. A dozen elephants—females, tuskers, babies—splashed in the cool water. The big ones were on their sides, their uzis atop them, crouched down and scrubbing their skin with a vine that lathered up when soaked. Many of them lazily sucked water in their trunks and noisily sprayed it into their open mouths. They would do this over and over, sometimes plunking their trunks underwater and breathing out—sending a sizzle of bubbles to the surface.
As Jim and Susan continued their tour, they finally met up with the one elephant he had spoken so often about: Bandoola. Reunions with this tusker were always emotional, and though Jim never would have quite let on, Susan by now could read him. How could Jim not betray his excitement?
She felt it herself. Jim had not exaggerated—here before her was the finest tusker she had seen. No matter how long he had been separated from the elephant, Williams greeted him in the same way. He spoke to Bandoola in Burmese, rubbed his cheek, and presented a sweet hidden away for him. Susan instantly grasped Bandoola was the very embodiment of determination, an animal of the highest “courage and cleverness,” just as Jim had said. In fact, all the virtues he attributed to this elephant had reminded her of Jim himself. No man could rival Jim in her mind, but maybe an elephant could measure up.
Po Toke wanted to make a good impression, and he often liked to show off a few of Bandoola’s tricks: how he could pick up any tool asked for, tie a knot, untangle a chain, or move a boulder. Almost thinking aloud, Jim said, “He’s a wonderful animal.” Susan smiled and took his arm. “You’re quite paternal about him, aren’t you darling?”
“Am I?” Jim said. “Yes, I suppose I am.” Susan hoped she would see more of Bandoola in the months to come. Jim would make sure of it.
As they continued touring, Susan discovered the armies and air forces of biting and stinging insects. And everywhere leeches. Jim warned her that in deep jungle they came not by the hundreds, but by the thousands, and they were famous for embedding themselves in any orifice available. Susan had her fair share of them—“silently hummocking over the leaves” and attaching themselves to her skin, where they would bloat up on her blood till touched with a lighted cigarette. They, of course, made meals of the dogs, too, and the elephants even suffered the indignity of having them slither up their trunks.
It didn’t happen often as they traveled these great stretches of forest, but part of Jim’s job now was checking in on his assistants. They were all lonely young men hungry for English-speaking company. One day, they rendezvoused with a young assistant, Gerry Carol. He was like most of the others, tough and self-reliant, friendly and obliging. He was a favorite of Jim’s.
Gerry served Jim and Susan a meal with his best stores of food and liquor. And the next morning, he and Jim set about tending to the elephants. They made plans to travel together for a week. Gerry had been such a grand host, Susan was looking forward to reciprocating. But on their first night of travel, over dinner, Gerry wasn’t himself. Early in the evening he apologized, saying he thought he had caught a chill and needed to turn in. It was a red flag to Williams. He knew how precious this kind of companionship was to a lonely forest assistant, particularly one as gregarious as Gerry. If he went to bed early, something was very wrong. Sure enough, by morning Gerry was in the grip of fever. This alone was not a matter of concern, malaria being as common as a head cold for forest men. But throughout the day none of the usual remedies—including trebling the quinine—helped. By evening, his temperature had climbed to 105 degrees and Gerry was delirious. “I don’t like this, Sue,” Williams told his wife. “We must get this chap in to hospital.”
It was typhoid fever—transmitted when the feces of someone infected with it contaminates food or water—and it was outside Jim’s by-now capacious field medicine playbook.
That night there was nothing to be done but to take turns in Gerry’s tent, sitting on a cane stool, trying to make him comfortable with cold compresses and soothing words. By the light of a hurricane lamp, Susan looked into Gerry’s blue eyes, which seemed to stare without seeing. She wrote later, “an awful feeling of helplessness came over me.” In the morning the race would be on for the railway, a good thirty miles away, over “some of the most difficult hill country in Burma.” They packed as quickly as possible and carried Gerry on a makeshift stretcher—a long camp chair supported by two poles—marching for seven hours. It was torture for the stoic assistant, who even in his wakeful periods never cried.
By the time they reached a village, he was in a steady stupor. They rested him in the shade, ministering to him even with the knowledge that nothing was helping. The next day they had a stiff, jolting bullock cart at their disposal, which would transport them over a bruising twenty-three-mile leg of the journey. Williams tried to fabricate a makeshift suspension system under Gerry’s stretcher, but seeing that it did little good, Jim lay beside him as a human harness and cushion in one.
It was two grueling days and nights for the sick young forester, and a huge relief for the Williamses when they reached the railway—“We felt we had won,” Susan said. They lifted Gerry aboard. “It was pathetic to see the look of relief which crossed his face when he felt the firmness of the railway carriage seat beneath his aching body,” Susan remembered.
They traveled all day. Gerry woke just as a beautiful sunset emerged. Williams tenderly held his shoulders and eased him up to look out the window, “You must look at this, old man. It’s wonderful.” Gerry saw the warm colors shimmering across the horizon and reflected in the waters of the Irrawaddy. He managed to smile and to whisper to Williams, “Billy, you’re the best doctor a man ever had—you knew just what seeing that would do for me.”
They got to a modern hospital where Williams handed over the patient along with a meticulously kept day-to-day log of the illness. Treatment began immediately. The Williamses were assured that “enteric” was “dangerous, but not incurable.” No antibiotics were available. Within three days Gerry was dead. “I don’t think in all our married life I have ever seen Jim so deeply moved and depressed,” Susan would say later. The spell of their magical honeymoon was broken.