December 1941, Rangoon

 

The Saturday after Pearl Harbour was the date of the annual pre-Christmas treat, part of the fixed calendar of the school year. A party of thirty girls would go to the Rangoon Zoological Gardens to admire the tigers, laugh at the monkeys, hiss at the snakes, and then have cakes or ice cream for tea. One year before, not to have taken the girls to the zoo just before Christmas would have seemed peculiar, but the mood in Rangoon was becoming uglier by the day. The evening before the trip to the zoo, Grace tried to raise her anxiety with the headmistress.

‘Miss Furroughs, I’m just wondering about the trip to the zoo. Do you think it’s a good idea to go?’

‘The girls are looking forward to it, Miss Collins.’

‘But I’m a little worried. The city has become unstable.’

‘The girls are looking forward to it, Miss Collins.’ The old lady returned to Wuthering Heights, the matter closed.

 

The daughter of a Burmese woman and an American oilman, long gone back to Texas, led the crocodile. Seventeen, but both looking and behaving older than her age and almost but not quite European in appearance, Emily was one of the stars of the school, noted for her ability to recite Miss Furroughs’ favourite poets – Keats, Wordsworth but above all Tennyson – from memory. In the old days, just six months ago, Emily’s pale cream skin would have been held to have been an advantage, but no more. If the Japanese did invade Burma, half-caste Emily was not European enough to be evacuated to India, but not Burmese enough to submerge into the local population. And that held true for all of the children at Bishop Strachan’s. Even a few yards out of the school gates, Grace noted, more and more young Burmese were staring at the party in a way no-one could consider friendly.

The walk between the school and the zoo was only a mile long, but at one point they had to pass the street market by the river, where Grace had bought her bee trapped in amber. Even in December, Rangoon was fantastically warm, around 80 degrees Fahrenheit. Whatever the time of year, Miss Furroughs was a stickler that the girls must wear their uniforms of maroon cardigans and white dresses at all times. Grace thought that rule ridiculous, and allowed the girls the option of leaving their cardigans behind. The girls had set off in high spirits and as they passed an enormous Indian policeman doing traffic duty at a crossroads, he tipped his white solar topee at them – they all knew it was for Miss Collins’ benefit – causing a wave of chatter and giggles.

Scrawled in fresh red paint on any available surface, fences, walls, anywhere, were slogans in the otherworldly wriggles of Burmese script, their meaning beyond Grace’s grasp. Soon the crocodile passed the same red paint, this time in plain English: ‘Free Burma’, ‘Strike for Your Independence’, ‘Down with the British’ and ‘Asia for the Asiatics’.

Casting her mind back to the Burman with his copy of Mein Kampf Grace shuddered at what might happen if – or was it when? – the Japanese walked through the front door of Bishop Strachan’s. They called the British rulers the ‘Heaven Born’, so high and mighty they were, so far removed from the lot of the ordinary Burmese. The Heaven Born were snobbish and cruel about mixed-race children. They did their best to ignore them. But they would not harm them. About the intentions of the Japanese towards the living consequences of British Imperial lust, she could only feel dread.

Half-way along the market, the crocodile stopped dead. Grace jogged to the front to find Emily weeping, her white dress and face spattered by gobbets of red. Grace stammered: ‘B-b-blood?’

‘Betel juice, Miss.’

‘Oh, bless.’

‘Miss, I stopped the crocodile. I don’t want the other girls to see.’

Taking out a handkerchief from her handbag, Grace dabbed Emily’s face. ‘Who did this, Emily?’

The girl motioned to a group of young Burmese men in sarongs, who were staring at them, blankly. Arching her heels, she turned towards the men: ‘Excuse me, which one of you spat at my pupil?’

The shortest of the Burmese walked up to Grace, coming within an inch or two of her face, and spat, phlegm and betel juice dripping down her left cheek, just below her eye. It was quite the most disgusting indignity Grace had ever experienced. She wiped the spit off her own face with her bare hand.

‘How dare you! How dare you spit at my pupil, who has done no harm to you?’

Three of the men stood in front of her, blocking her path. The fourth and fifth circled around her back. No figure of authority was in sight. Calves trembling, heart thumping against rib-cage, in a voice as imperious as she could muster, she said: ‘Emily, would you please run back to the police officer at the crossroads and tell him to come here immediately. Immediately, Emily, if you please.’

The girl ran off, back down the crocodile. The men shuffled closer towards Grace, encircling her.

On the far side of the street a European couple, holding hands, were walking towards a black saloon. The hard white light at noon was blinding. But she knew him from somewhere.

‘Colonel Handscombe!’

Head jerking in recognition, he ducked into the car and was behind the wheel in seconds. The woman opened the passenger door, dived in and the car was accelerating away before Grace could finish her sentence. As it passed her she saw the two of them laughing at some huge private joke, and then the saloon turned a corner, fast, and was gone. But not before she had recognised the woman. Someone had mentioned her name just the other day, saying that her husband was on the HMS Repulse, steaming for Singapore. Ah, yes, Mrs Peckham.

The Burmese grew closer. Standing at a distance behind the knot of men threatening her, but somehow part of them, was an onlooker. Threadbare western suit, smooth face, oiled hair, glasses, carrying a book in his hand. The man closest to her made a move to fetch something behind his back. Grace caught a glimpse of an ebony handle – a knife?

‘Now, look here, you chaps,’ said Grace, her voice squeaking, high-pitched, ‘you may hate the British Empire and all that. Good for you. If you think I go “Ra-ra” every time I see a British soldier you’d be wrong. But these girls and I are not the bull-faced, earth-swallowing British army, we have done nothing wrong and frankly for you to go round spitting at us half-castes disgraces Burma. Old King Thibaw would be ashamed of you. You may well be the future of Burma, the new rulers of this land.’

The market-goers had seemed indifferent to the confrontation but as Grace found her voice some began listening to the blonde Englishwoman berating the Burmese youths. Many would not have understood a word she said, but about the tone of her voice, about a lone woman taking a stand, there was something urgent and brave.

‘People may well be on your side for a time, and they will welcome anyone who can help them see the backs of the British. But if you take power by force you run the danger of staying in power by force – better men than you will ever be have fallen in that trap – and eventually, in ten, twenty, fifty years’ time the people will hate you. You may well be Lords of Burma but everyone will know what you are.’

Her right hand slowly raised, the index finger pointing at them in condemnation: ‘Nothing more than thugs and crooks who stay in power by thuggery and crookedness. If that is the future, then God save Burma. But right now every single man, woman and child in this market-place is watching you, watching what you do to us. So, how are you going to begin this “Burma for the Burmans” of yours? By spitting at half-caste orphans? By knifing their school marm? Is this the new Burma? Is this the best you can do?’

She stopped, conscious only of her fear and the hammering of her heartbeat against her ribs and the hatred in the eyes of the gang fixed on her. The market’s constant hubbub fell silent. No one moved. No one spoke. From the river beyond came the sound of a tugboat hooting. Nearby, chickens squawked and a pig snorted irritably.

From nowhere, a tiny Burmese woman – the stall-holder who had sold her the bee – appeared next to her, slipping her arm in Grace’s. She snarled something in Burmese at the gang. Grace had no idea what her friend had said, but it did not sound complimentary.

The gang melted away. Just before the reader in the threadbare suit disappeared, he studied her again, spat on the ground and treated her to a smile of royal sourness.

The Indian policeman came running, followed by Emily, but by then the men had vanished. Grace offered Emily her cardigan to wear, to cover up the red stains on her blouse. Emily put it on without saying a word, out of character for a girl with near-perfect manners.

‘Emily, I…’  Grace stumbled, her mind feeble with anxiety. ‘I’m so sorry.’ In truth she could think of no words to ease the fact that the girl had been spat at because she was a half-breed, a by-product of the British Empire. From that moment on, Grace detected an aloofness on the part of Emily that she found unsettling.

Grace’s friend who had sold her the bee had vanished before she had time to thank her properly. But Grace understood her swift disappearance was not impolite. A Burmese woman who stuck up for a European in public in these times could get into trouble.

They carried on walking in the stifling heat. A sign on the front gate of the zoo announced that because of the emergency it was closed. They returned in silence, Grace regretting that she had not persevered with her objections to this foolish trip. Her weakness with Miss Furroughs meant the girls – Emily especially – had suffered pointless humiliation.

When told about the spitting gang, Miss Furroughs dropped her head onto her chest and said nothing for a time, wringing her hands together. Sitting upright, she asked:  ‘How is Emily coping with it?’

‘Not very well, Miss Furroughs. On the walk back from the zoo, she seemed withdrawn. It was very disturbing. I cannot forget the look of the man who spat at me, as if I wasn’t human. For Emily, it must have been far worse.’

The headmistress nodded and said, ‘Poor Emily’ and repeated herself.

‘We shouldn’t have…’ but Grace left the sentence unfinished. The headmistress sat in her chair, staring ahead of her, her eyes unfocused.

Retreating to the empty staff room, Grace tuned the school wireless to pick up the BBC. Whistles, mush, then the atmospheric static gave way to ‘Lilliburllero’. The announcer, back in the studio in London, she imagined, sitting in a black dinner jacket, poised to read out the bulletin.  ‘This is the BBC News from London.’

A crackle, then the plummy voice told of the loss of the Prince of Wales and the Repulse, torpedoed by Japanese bombers off Singapore, hundreds of sailors believed to have gone down with their ships, missing, presumed dead.

Kneeling, she said a prayer for the sailors and poor, cuckolded Peckham, RN: ‘Our Father, Who art in heaven.’ As the words tumbled out, she tried not to think of those other sailors in the Atlantic, screaming as they drowned in the burning oil.

A walk in the cool of the evening brought Grace down to the river towards her favourite Buddhist pagoda, the one she had mistaken for a ship’s engine. Two saffron-clad monks hissed at her. Returning to the school by another route, she saw a line of Indian policemen armed with lathis – bamboo sticks topped and tailed with brass metal blunts – facing an angry crowd of Burmese.

Doubling back, she bumped into a living tree, which apologised profusely and started gulping.

‘Mr Peach.’

‘Sorry. Awfully sorry.’

‘I should have looked where I was going.’

‘You should be careful around here, Miss Collins. The Mussulman areas are safe. Anywhere near a minaret, within earshot of the muezzin’s call, the people will look after you. But in the Burmese Buddhist parts of town, I am afraid to say’ – he gulped again – ‘it’s not safe any more.’

His mouth opened and closed and his eyes darted around a point somewhere above Grace’s head. He wanted to say something more to her, but could he get it out by sunset?

‘Yes, Mr Peach?’ Something about him brought out a streak of cruelty in her. Did she enjoy playing with him, watching him suffer? Yes, she thought, she did.

Nothing sensible came from him, just his mouth sucking in and blowing out air.

‘Well, Mr Peach. I must be on my way.’

‘Miss Collins? Why did you run away from me?’

Ah, finally, he’d managed to get it out.

‘A joke.’

‘You don’t hate me, then?’

‘Of course not. Don’t be silly.’

‘Well, I must… I ought to let you know what’s going on. The situation here is Rangoon is not good. Our chaps have yet to hold the Japanese. We keep on falling back. Everywhere. I shouldn’t tell you this,’ he lowered his voice until it was just on the edge of hearing ‘but I’m now doing intelligence stuff. Last week the only early warning radar kit in Burma was flown back to India. The RAF is next to leave, to save the planes for the battle for India. They’re making plans to evacuate the Europeans from Lower Burma, but not to tell the “useless mouths”.’

‘What?’ gasped Grace.

‘They call them the “useless mouths”. Refugees, people who can’t fight. The Indian civilians chiefly, and the mixed races. Like the girls at your school.’

‘Mr Peach!’ She cried out his name so loudly that a British police sergeant turned his head and fixed them with a stare. Lowering her voice, she tried again: ‘You’re not for one second suggesting that the British Empire is secretly planning to abandon Burma?’

Jaw firm, mouth no longer opening and closing like a goldfish, he made no sound at all, but, almost imperceptibly, nodded his head.

The next morning, over breakfast, Grace told the headmistress about the two great battleships, now lying at the bottom of the sea.

‘Mrs Peckham’s husband?’

‘I don’t know,’ said Grace. ‘Very few survived.’

Silence between them.

‘Miss Furroughs,’ Grace continued, ‘people are talking about evacuating Rangoon. They are saying that the military situation is gloomy, that the necessity of defending Britain means that there aren’t enough soldiers and tanks and planes for the Far East. I believe that, for the safety of the children, we should consider planning to evacuate the school from Rangoon and arrange to travel to the safety of India.’

There, at last, she’d said it. The headmistress, pouring out jasmine tea, jerked the teapot spout against her cup, spilling its contents over the tablecloth. She wiped up the mess with a napkin.

‘This nonsense is just because of that silly spitting incident, isn’t it? You just can’t stand Rangoon any more. Not fashionable enough, I suppose?’

‘No, Miss Furroughs, that’s not it. I have heard certain information from someone close to the Government, that there is a plan – that the Government is planning to abandon Burma.’

‘Nonsense. Abandon Burma? Poppycock. I won’t hear a word more on this subject. Good day, Miss Collins,’ and she scurried out.

Two days before Christmas, Grace was kneeling in the school gardens, picking some fresh flowers for the dinner table, when the corner of her eye caught a sparkle far above. Thin silver arrows glinted in the late morning sun and from them tiny flashes of light began falling towards earth. The ground bounced up and smacked her hard in the face. Soil plugged her mouth and throat and nose, her eyes, burning, jammed shut. A thing scissored by close to her right ear, spinning fast, hissing.

Flowers, sunlight, normality, gone; in their place dust and snot and screams. A screech of tyres, a dull thump, a horn blaring; half-human voices, crying out, bawling, gibbering with terror.

Blinded by the dirt in her eyes, retching, clearing out the muck from her throat, Grace needed water, desperately, and began to crawl forward, her fingers prospecting the earth in front of her. Her left index finger snagged against something. Feeling its shape with her fingers, a crazily twisting curl of metal, razor sharp, an inch long, still hot to the touch, as if from an oven. With wonder, she realised that they – the airmen high above in their silver machines – had intended this, that there could be no other explanation for the riot of noise and dust and this horrible piece of ragged-edged shrapnel.

They mean to kill us.

The dust began to settle, her eyes to open, to see some fuzzy dirt-brown fog instead of a hot darkness. Coughing up snot and dirt, the back of her throat unbearably sore, Grace staggered upright and started to limp towards the school buildings. As she did so, she reflected that at least she would not have to put up with any more claptrap from Colonel Handscombe. The Japs could fly, that had been proven.

Racing to the cellar of the old school-house, she swung the door open. The space was dank, empty of life. She backed out, astonished, and over the buzzing in her ears she heard them. The sound grew, defining itself, clear and loud:

The ground juddered as a fresh stick of bombs fell, maybe two hundred yards away. Running up the steps, she found the whole school kneeling at their pews inside the wooden chapel.

‘Miss Furroughs!’ Grace screamed over the psalm. ‘Miss Furroughs, the chapel is not safe. The children must go to the cellar of the old schoolhouse. One bomb will kill us all.’

The singing faltered.

‘For Christ’s sake, Miss Furroughs, the chapel isn’t safe!’

‘Miss Collins, how dare you swear in the House of the Lord!’

‘And how dare you risk their lives? The children must go to the cellar, Miss Furroughs. Now. The chapel is made of wood. It’s not safe.’

The headmistress’s face came alive and she spoke: ‘Hurry to the cellar, children.’

Emily found Grace.

‘Miss, the two boys. I don’t know where they are.’

‘Oh, Lord.’ Two boys, little Michael, aged five, and Joseph, ten, twice Michael’s size but with half the wits, had somehow been adopted by a school for girls. They called Joseph a Mongol but she hated the word. Michael and Joseph were also half-caste orphans – no one knew who the parents were – and helpless. At five, Michael was street-smart but Joseph had the body of a ten-year-old boy and the mind of a toddler. Yet he would never do anyone any harm, ever, and he had a strange gift of sensing moods: most often happiness but also fear. When scared, he ground his teeth, the prelude to a kind of shivering fit that the girls found deeply upsetting.

And both had vanished.

‘Where did you look?’

‘Everywhere.’

‘Did you check the boys’ lavatory on the third floor?’

‘No, Miss. I’m not allowed…’ but Grace was already running out into the yard and up the flights of the dorm. She pushed open the heavy door to the boys’ lavatory. Not so far away, someone started screaming, a piercing, animal noise. She pushed open the door to one cubicle. No-one there. She pushed opened the second door, and there they were, lying on the floor, hands over their ears, Joseph grinding his teeth. Grace clapped her hands around both of them, said, ‘Come on you two, let’s pop down to the cellar,’ and the three of them pelted downstairs.

A third stick of bombs clattered down, blasting every window in the school, but by then the two boys and the teacher were safe in the cellar.

Re-emerging from the inner gloom with a lit kerosene lamp, Miss Furroughs hissed: ‘You should not have blasphemed in the chapel, Miss Collins. I fear that you are setting an entirely wrong example to the children.’

 ‘Miss Furroughs–’

‘Swearing in chapel is the very worst example to set to the students.’

‘But the chapel is not safe during an air raid. They could have all been killed.’

‘That is entirely beside the point.’

This was not just unfair, but maddening. ‘I have no wish to work at a school with dead students because of the folly of the headmistress.’

‘Then you should look for a new post somewhere else.’

 ‘Thank you very much for saving the boys, Miss,’ interrupted Emily.

‘What? Where were they?’ snapped Miss Furroughs.

‘Hiding in the boys’ lavatory on the third floor,’ Emily carried on, coolly. ‘Miss Collins found them and rescued them, Miss. While you were looking for the lamp, Miss.’

‘Did you?’ she asked Grace.

 ‘Yes, Miss Furroughs, I did.’

The headmistress shivered and turned away, her lip trembling. The faces of the children stared up at them, at a world of adults gone mad.

Four thousand people were killed in Rangoon that day but, somehow, the school and everyone in it stayed safe.

On Christmas Eve morning Grace hand-delivered her letter of resignation. Miss Furroughs opened up the envelope in her presence, read the note, and tore it up.

‘Ruby seems to be getting more obstreperous by the day. Have a word with her, Miss Collins, or I am afraid that I will set her detention.’

Grace made to speak to defend the good name of Ruby Goldberg, half-Burmese, half-Bronx grifter, but thought better of it, and closed the door behind her.

On Christmas morning, the children pounced on their presents. It seemed pitiful stuff to Grace  – cheap bangles, hand-me-down frocks, a few books for the passionate readers – but the girls were genuinely grateful. The boys got hand-carved wooden rifles. When the bombers returned, just as Christmas lunch was about to be served, they ran out into the playground and started firing their toy guns at the Japanese airmen. Grace shooed them, and everybody else, Miss Furroughs too, into the cellar.

Cold and dank, it felt like a tomb. They shuddered as a fresh stick of bombs thump-thumped down on the defenceless city. From the crack between door and cellar floor a dagger’s blade of sunlight sliced through the dark, lighting up socks and shoes fidgeting in the dark. The thump-thumps grew nearer, showering dust over the little feet. Grace found herself singing the opening line of ‘Once in David’s Royal City’ but stumbled over the words as the explosions thudded closer to home, her voice quavering, drying up.

In the prickly silence, a child started to sob.

But then came: ‘stood a lowly cattle shed…’ Ruby sang like a night-club artiste down on her luck, haunting, sexual and brimful of soul. Soon the whole school was belting out the carol, drowning out the hateful clatter of war.

When they finished, the cellar clapped and cheered and whistled, Ruby’s voice powering through a fresh and terrifyingly close bomb-burst: ‘Silent Night, Holy Night…’ Her audience gasped at the cheek of it, some laughing out loud, then the children took courage and sang their ironic taunt at the bombers above:

And still the school survived, untouched.

The Christmas Day air raid pricked the headmistress’s inertia. That night, Miss Furroughs mumbled to Grace that it might be a good idea, on mature reflection, for the school to plan to leave Rangoon and travel by ship to Calcutta for a while. But the half-caste orphans were not a high priority in the colonial scheme of things – on the contrary, the children were an awkwardness, an embarrassment, somehow never quite worthy of active consideration – and no orders were made for their embarkation. Had Miss Furroughs pressed the matter, something might have happened. But she did not. In the past, the headmistress had been quick, sometimes unpleasantly so, to express her anger or irritation at the most trivial failing of Grace or the children, let alone any shortcoming by the colonial Government, the diocesan officers or even the Lord Bishop of Burma. In her prime, Miss Furroughs had been afraid of no one and nothing. But in these days she seemed overwrought. Money might have solved the problem. Bishop Strachan’s school had precious little, and the better-heeled Anglicans were steadily disappearing by ship or plane.

New Year came and went. Day after day passed without word from the Government for the arrangement of their safe passage to India. One morning, Grace came down to breakfast to find the front page of the Rangoon Times folded on her place, proclaiming the official message, that everyone should ‘Stay put’ – keep on working and let the British soldiers do their job, stop the Japanese and all things would be well. Miss Furroughs entered and nodded at the paper.

‘Stay put?’ asked Grace, incredulous. ‘No one will fall for that.’

‘Nonsense. Colonel Handscombe told me at the Club that he is going to stay and fight, at the last ditch.’

‘Bully for the colonel. Was he on his own?’

‘What do you mean by that?’

‘Nothing, Miss Furroughs.’ Grace hadn’t told her that she’d seen the colonel and Mrs Peckham holding hands. It would not have been proper. And given that Commander Peckham of HMS Repulse had since officially been listed as missing, presumed dead, Mrs Peckham was now a widow, free to be courted by whoever she chose. That was how it was in war.

‘Whatever Colonel Handscombe does in his ditch,’ Grace continued, ‘does not mean the school should be there with him. The children are no longer safe in Rangoon.’

‘No, Miss Collins, that conflicts…’ The headmistress stopped mid-sentence, as if she doubted her own mind.

‘We must leave for India,’ countered Grace.

‘But that’s not the official advice! We shall stay until the order,’ again, Miss Furroughs halted abruptly, her pattern of speech maddening, indecisive, ‘for evacuation.’ Her voice tailed off, her last words uttered so meekly that Grace had to strain to hear them ‘But not before.’

Locking herself in her study, Mrs Furroughs read and sipped dry sherry, distracted, unsure, inert.

The news was always grim, grimmer than before. The Japanese made their way up the Malayan peninsula towards Rangoon methodically, village after village, river after river. Not just the richer Indians but the poor ones too started to leave Burma. Grace’s anxiety grew but Miss Furroughs had a way of sensing when she was about to raise the subject of the school leaving for India, or booking tickets on one of the ships, and blocking her.

Singapore fell, the Empire disgraced. In the days that followed, the part-time staff at the school - Burmese, Indian and Chinese teachers, cleaners, cooks – said their goodbyes and left, with the exception of the ancient school caretaker, Allu, a Mohammedan, originally from Bengal. One evening, before dinner, Grace had to run to the night market to buy some fresh vegetables and fruit for the children, because the last cook had gone.

While there, the electricity was cut – no one knew why – and the market was plunged into almost total darkness, people whistling and laughing nervously as they struggled to feel their way along. A feeble glow-worm of light came from the flickering candles at a small Buddhist shrine at one end of the market; here and there starlight penetrated through gaps in the canvas awnings above the stalls. When an unseen chicken squawked in its cage by Grace’s feet it sounded so freakishly loud she jumped in her skin, called out and her voice was recognised by Mary, an Anglo-Burmese nurse at the hospital and an old friend. In the murk, Mary told Grace the gossip gathered from the wounded soldiers in her ward. Her latest patients included a tiny handful of the troops who had escaped from the great defeat at Singapore by sailing to Indonesia and then being flown up to Rangoon. On the way their transport plane had been shot up by the Japanese and three of them had ended up badly burnt, with little chance of survival. Medical supplies were fast running out, and all the boys’ talk was of defeat.

‘They’re so bitter about their general, Percival – he’s the one with the awful buck teeth,’ said Mary, her face three-quarters invisible in the darkness. ‘They say he was just petrified, that, in the face of the Japanese attack, he turned to stone. They should have been digging trenches and securing supplies and fighting. Instead the officers insisted on endless roll-calls, parades up and down the streets and the troops painting the stones in the barracks white. One sergeant who came back from the front line filthy – he’d had to hide in a storm drain from Zeroes – was put on a charge for being improperly dressed.’

‘Madness,’ said Grace.

‘The morale of the British troops was rock bottom but with the Indian soldiers, it was worse, a lot of talk of how they should follow Gandhi, that the British should “Quit India”.’

Mary’s voice lowered to a whisper: ‘There’s been nothing about this on the BBC but my chaps say that after the surrender, thousands of the Indian troops went over to the Japs. The Japs have promised to free India. They call themselves the Indian National Army, the INA, but my chaps call ’em Jiffs, Japanese Indian Fighting Forces. They say there are thousands of these Jiffs.’

Grace fell silent. If the Indian troops abandoned the British it would be a catastrophe.

‘What are your plans, Grace?’

‘The whole school should go to India. We need to go now but getting it organised is difficult. And you, Mary?’

‘The day after tomorrow they’re flying out all the European nurses and the injured they’re happy to move,’ she paused delicately, but Grace caught the inflection, which implied there were other patients who weren’t going anywhere, whom they had pretty much given up on, ‘but that will leave the hospital horribly understaffed. There will be about two hundred patients and only seven nurses.’

‘What are you going to do?’

‘I’ve decided to stay on, to look after my chaps.’

‘That’s very brave of you, Mary.’

‘Don’t be silly. Anyway, must dash. Got to get back to my boys, do some bedtime reading, keep them from getting into trouble.’

Trouble? Grace had visited Mary’s burns ward: a long line of beds, crowded together, gauze bandages over blackened skin, whimpers of pain, softly muted.

‘Good luck, Mary,’ and her friend disappeared into the night. A half-caste, Mary would not have been welcome if she had turned up at the posher clubs in Rangoon. And when the Japanese arrived at the hospital, and found Mary and her boys, what then?

Still no word of when they were going to leave Rangoon. That night, after school dinner – a miserable affair of rice and beans, somehow both undercooked but yet burnt to a cinder by Grace – she was determined to raise the subject of leaving yet again. The second she opened her mouth, Miss Furroughs skittered along the school corridor and slammed the door of her study behind her.

The air raids grew more frequent. One night the untouchables who had emptied out the thunder-boxes of the British sahibs and memsahibs, the Indian money-lenders and the Chinese merchants, taking away the night soil of the town for generations, vanished. The imperial city was rotting from within.

One lunchtime in late February Grace abandoned her class and went to Government House. A manservant in a maroon sarong showed her straight past Sikh sentries, up a brick staircase, into a vast, empty hall, boasting oil paintings of past Governors on one side and a panoramic view of the city and the river curling in a great bend beyond. Clouds of black smoke were rising from the refinery.

‘Hello, darling, how the devil are you?’

To say that Mr Peach was pleased to see her was something of an understatement.

‘What about a kiss?’

Mr Peach, she realised, was drunk.

‘Mr Peach, that is no way to talk to a guest.’

‘Sorry, love, sorry. Only we’re all going to hell. Bloody army blew up a bridge on the bloody Sittang River, leaving two thirds of a bloody division on the Jap side. Indian soldiers can’t bloody swim. The British ones can swim but they’d like to have a general who knows how to fight. The one in charge has a hole in his arse, an anal fistula is how I have to explain it to Whitehall. Top secret, but he pongs, literally, so no one can go near him without throwing up. No wonder we’re losing. And leaving.’

His gulping stammer had gone.

‘Leaving?’

‘Top Secret. Sssh.’

‘What?’

‘Sssh. You are lovely, you know. Give us a kiss…’

‘Mr Peach…’

‘Here. Watch this.’ He lobbed a red billiard ball at an oil of a grand old Victorian gentleman. It gouged a hole the shape of an egg in the canvas, the frame falling to the floor with a tinkle of broken glass.

‘Know who he bloody was? Bloody Sir Augustus Rivers Thompson. Chief Commissioner or Lord High Everything Else. Can’t leave this lot for the Japanese to smash up. So let’s do it instead.’ He offered her the pink.

‘Come on, darling, you have a go…’

‘Mr Peach, I demand that you sober up. I have come on behalf of Bishop Strachan’s school. We need to know what is going on.’

Something imploring in Grace’s voice got down through the great well of alcohol to his brain– that, and some innate sense of decency.

‘I’m sorry.’ He collapsed into a leather armchair and said in a different, much quieter voice, ‘I’m sorry. The order for the final evacuation of all government staff in Rangoon was made this morning at six, effective immediately. To be promulgated tomorrow morning at six, by me. I’m the last man in. And out. Governor’s gone, Government’s gone. We’ve burnt the code books, burnt the files, bar one, opened the prisons, the leper colonies and even the bloody loony bins. Last passenger ship leaves tonight.’

Oh, no, no, no, thought Grace. She felt a sickening realisation that her very worst fears were about to come true. The school had left it far, far too late. Miss Furroughs had been so weak, so horribly indecisive. Trapped in Rangoon, the children would suffer far worse than men spitting at them.

‘Rangoon is finished,’ Mr Peach continued. ‘The Japanese may be here tomorrow. Or next week. But soon. Get out now. If you can go by sea, do it. The road is good to Mandalay, then it’s just a track, then there isn’t a road, at all. After that, it’s a bloody long walk.’

She made ready to go.

‘Before the war,’ Mr Peach interrupted himself with a long, noxious belch, ‘we didn’t build a bloody road between Burma and India lest all the bloody Indians came teeming in. So there isn’t one. Oops! We’ve spent the last hundred years fretting about the bloody Russians threatening the north-west frontier through Afghanistan into India, never thinking that the bloody Japs might walk through the north-east frontier from Burma. How unintelligent is that, eh?’

In the distance, the muffled bark of an explosion. Grace’s ears were attuned to the sound of bombs by now, but this was different, in a lower register. Artillery?

‘And do you know what is really scaring the pants off the red-hats? Sssh,’ he pressed a finger to his lips. ‘How many Indian troops were bagged at Singapore?’

‘I’m afraid…’

‘…forty thousand. And how many of our loyal Indian soldiers have become Jiffs?’

Silence.

‘Thirty thousand.’

She stared at him.

‘Three quarters. Where is the leader of the Jiffs, the so-called Indian National Army, one Subhas Chandra Bose? They call him the Netaji, that’s Hindi for Fuhrer. Where’s Hitler’s Indian, eh? We don’t bloody know. Special Branch lost him. Bloody useless.’

Eyes closed, he started to sway like a tall tree in a great storm. Grace thought he might pass out. Suddenly, his eyes opened wide.

‘Another top secret, for you. Some of the Jiffs have found out that Japs aren’t such nice chaps, after all. They ran away from the Japs, landed up here, and Colonel Handscombe had them tortured, beaten on the soles of their feet because “I’m teaching these bloody traitors a lesson they won’t forget.” I told him to stop it. He carried on. I told him I knew an American newspaper correspondent who’d print his name as a torturer unless he stopped it, and then he stopped it. So I got to talk to the chaps, sepoys - Indian soldiers – ordered to surrender at Singapore, who turned Jiff and then ran away from the Japs. Forty-four of them, so that makes me something of an expert. I’ve interviewed more ex-Jiffs than any other official in the British Empire. These chaps aren’t traitors. They want the British out of India. But with the Japs they smelt a rat.  One Jiff told me that a Jap general said to them all: “Let the Japanese be the father. Indians, Burmese and Chinese will live like a family. However, if the Indian child is thin and needs more milk, we will give him more milk.” Bugger that, thought my chap, and he was off. So I wrote a report on what the runaway Jiffs have to say.  My report says we’ve lost Burma. And if we don’t do something about the Jiffs, we’re going to lose India too, and then the Japs and Jerry will join up in Delhi and we’re all goners. The solution? Announce pretty damn quick that we will be handing India over to its people as soon as the war is over and make the point, loud and strong, that neither Hitler nor Hirohito have shown much respect for any other nation apart from their own, so if anyone thinks that the Nazis or the Japs are serious about independence,’ he hiccoughed again, ‘they’re talking out of their arse.’

He picked up a thin buff folder and waved it at her.

‘And the response from on high? Nothing. Zero, if you’ll pardon the pun.’

An enormous blast rattled the windows as a dust cloud rose a quarter of a mile away, over what used to be the army’s central barracks. They were leaving nothing behind.

‘No reply,’ continued Mr Peach. ‘Why not? Got me thinking. I’d burnt all the other bloody files. And the code books. When I’d burnt everything, well almost everything, I started on the cellar. First, the bubbly. Then the white wine. Then the red. Bit tiddley, tiddly-pom-tiddly-pom. Where was I? Ah, yes, sssh, top secret, just before I popped the Peach report on Jiffs into the boiler I thought I would have a look at it. I’m in charge, after all. And why hadn’t anyone replied to it? After all, it had called for us to quit India. That should have caused an almighty palaver, Winston screaming bloody murder, etc, etc. Instead, nothing. Why was that, eh?’

‘I have no idea,’ Grace said.

‘Colonel Handscombe decided not to send it up, that’s why. He made a note in the file that Peach’s report was “too defeatist”. And now all lines are down to the outside world. So I’ve written a report no one’s read and, in the meantime, the danger is that more and more chaps will join the Jiffs, and we’ll end up not only losing Burma and India but the whole bloody world. And is anyone listening? No. Has anyone in London got an idea of how dangerous the Jiffs are to the Allies? No. Or that they could be turned round, if we promised them independence? No. And where is Colonel Handscombe, that noble last-ditcher?’

Like a clockwork soldier, Peach rotated three hundred and sixty degrees, his eyes scanning the horizon. Of the colonel, no sign.

‘So, may I summarise? Total balls-up. Eh, gorgeous?’

A red ball took out another mutton-chopped nabob. ‘Are you sure you don’t want a go? How about High Commissioner Charles Umpherton Aitchinson? Come on, darling.’ He belched again, a revolting noise. Grace had had enough.

 ‘I love you,’ Mr Peach shouted, beseeching, swaying. ‘Do you love me?’

‘Mr Peach, you’re a damned fool.’

Grace started to back out. Hearing a crash, she turned and saw that he’d fallen plumb down and was now slumped over a leather chaise longue, dead to the world. The manservant who first had led her to Mr Peach started to walk slowly towards him.

She ran down the echoing steps of the seat of British rule in Burma, dashed past the guards and was out on the street. A white-bellied rat scuttled down the steps, passed her and the last she saw of it was its long reptilian tail vanishing into a drain. Even the rats were giving up on the British Empire.

A cycle rickshaw took her past the front of a mansion owned by a wealthy Chinese merchant, a Catholic, famous in Rangoon for his gleaming Rolls Royce. The house was being ransacked, with Burmese looters running out with upholstered chairs and mahogany side tables balanced on their heads. The front gate was open and she could see the main hallway, barren apart from a picture of the Sacred Heart. None of the looters had fancied it.

Back at the school, Grace ordered everyone to go to the dormitories and pack for India. She pounded on the door of Miss Furroughs’ study and told her about the order for evacuation. The headmistress was a picture of wretchedness, her eyes bloodshot.

‘What is it, Miss Furroughs?’

‘I went to the Club, to hear what Colonel Handscombe was planning to do. They told me that he had flown to Calcutta three days ago. Along with Mrs Peckham.’ The headmistress snuffled. ‘They are engaged to be married, and her husband not dead a month.’

Grace cut through the self-absorption of the older woman. ‘Colonel Handscombe is a pig. Good riddance to him. The school must leave Rangoon immediately. Now.’

‘Yes, Miss Collins, I am sorry. I fear I have been a complete fool.’

‘But, we are leaving–?’

Grace was interrupted by the harsh growling of an engine.

‘Yes. I’ve asked Allu–’

An antique green single-decker bus chuntered into the school yard, Allu behind the wheel, Hants & Dorset Motor Bus Company still clearly visible on its sides where it had been ineffectually over-painted. The bus had spent the prime of its life in the New Forest, running between Lymington and Southampton, before being shipped out to Burma, a gift to Anglicans in the colony from the Bishop of Winchester. The exhaust snorted a cloud of half-burnt oil and the engine uttered a metallic death rattle. His Grace, clearly, hadn’t been much of a mechanic.

Grace stepped outside. ‘Will this wreck get us to the docks, Allu?’

‘Well, Miss, it might. Three miles. But not much further.’

 Grace could have sworn she smelt alcohol – the local hooch – on Allu’s breath, but what to do about it? Nothing, for the moment. When everyone had boarded and their bags stowed, Miss Furroughs was missing. Fully engaged with removing excess baggage from the bus, Grace sent Emily, the headmistress’s favourite, who found her in the school chapel, kneeling in a pew, lost in prayer. The schoolgirl coughed, to alert the old lady to her presence.

‘Please, Miss,’ said Emily, ‘Miss Collins says the bus is ready and we must go. Please, Miss.’

Eyes closed, fingers steepled in prayer, the headmistress made no move. Emily turned and walked down the aisle, down the steps and onto the bus. ‘Please Miss Collins, Miss Furroughs won’t come. I told her the bus is ready to go, but she didn’t hear me.’

‘Damn!’ She snapped at one girl who had smuggled the school’s umbrella stand on the bus – ‘no, we’re not taking that, you clot!’ – and ran off to the chapel. Grace opened the thick wooden door, dipped her hand in the water stoop out of habit and crossed herself, quickly. Sunlight poured through the stained-glass windows, bathing the headmistress in blood and gold. As Grace walked up the aisle, the deep bass of artillery rattled the windows. That was the loudest she’d heard, ever. The war was getting closer. She knelt down, beside the headmistress, two pews down from the altar. Another series of booms from the big guns, disturbing the motes of dust spiralling in the sunlight.  Grace said a prayer for a safe journey for the children, then spoke, her voice harsh in the quiet of the chapel: ‘Miss Furroughs, we must leave. We need to secure places on the ship. It’s our last chance.’

‘Go without me.’

The young teacher shook her head. ‘I can’t do that. I can’t look after sixty children on my own. For their sake, you’ve got to come, Miss Furroughs.’

‘I’m sorry, Miss Collins, I’m so sorry,’ the headmistress wept and unsteadily rose to her feet. Grace felt an overwhelming sense of pity for the older woman. She had lived a good life, taught and educated two, three generations of children at Bishop Strachan’s, but now her entire world was collapsing. All the simple certainties of the British Empire, of everyday life in Rangoon, of everything that Bishop Strachan’s stood for were dying. Grace placed her arms around the headmistress’s shoulders and led her towards the bus.

Allu revved the engine, put it into gear, let slip the clutch and ‘Hants & Dorset’ slouched through the school gates.

As they drove towards the docks, the headmistress leaned close to Grace, gesturing at Allu. ‘You don’t think he’s one of those Jiffs, do you?’

Grace said no, she did not, and stared out of the window at a city emptying of people.