Towards dusk, the air acrid from the still burning city, Molly spotted him first. ‘An Indian soldier, Miss, on a motor-bicycle. Asking for someone in charge.’

An officer of some kind, face strikingly pale, tall, painfully slim, eyes of light green, a beaked nose. Hanging from his shoulder a leather satchel – a despatch rider? Taking Grace to one side he started to describe what he had witnessed: ‘A refined lady, middle aged, very correctly dressed, white blouse, dark skirt, short, with white hair. Miss…’

‘She’s…’ The urge to panic was animal and strong, but the quickest of glances told her that Emily and Ruby were staring at them. Grace tilted her face closer to his ear: ‘…dead. Isn’t she?’

The officer nodded. ‘I am most terribly sorry, Miss.’

‘She meant to kill herself, didn’t she?’

‘I do not know. We saw her go out onto King’s Street, just after four, in the middle of a bombing raid, when the flames were at their strongest. And then she was killed. But it was Queen Elizabeth who said: “I would not open windows into men’s souls.” We don’t know what was in her soul. I am very sorry for your trouble, Miss.’

He spoke Oxford English, exquisitely.

‘I would not open windows into men’s souls. Yes, that is right.’

The most powerful emotion for Grace was one she was ashamed to admit to anyone, and certainly not to the young Indian officer. Relief that she no longer had to beg Miss Furroughs to make decisions, relief that, with the headmistress gone, they could press on to India as fast as possible, relief that she had a better chance of saving the children on her own. Had the old lady realised that she was slowing them down, that her indecision and helplessness at the thought of leaving Burma was becoming a danger to the children? Was that why she had walked into fire?

Eyes smarting, she pushed past the officer, out of the cellar. Below stood the burnt city, mile after mile of charred black, here and there wisps of smoke rising from still smouldering fires, and she wept in shame that she had done nothing to save her friend.

The officer had come to her side.

‘I am sorry for your loss, Miss.’

‘Sir…’

‘Jemadar Ahmed Rehman, at your service.’

Grace told him her name.

‘Miss Collins–’

‘Call me Grace, please.’

‘–Miss Grace, the children cannot stay here,’ he said flatly. ‘The Japanese will be here in days.’ The Jemadar started to speak, soldier’s stuff, talking for talking’s sake, giving her time to adjust. She wiped her eyes with the edge of her sleeve and listened.

 ‘The bombers will return. Mandalay is on the Burma Road – it’s the main, no, probably the only supply route for the Allies to get arms and ammunition through to China. If the Japs cut the Burma Road, they weaken the ability of China to fight, and that will free more Japanese soldiers, so they can conquer India. They will keep on bombing Mandalay until everything is burnt. And soon, the Japanese army will come here, too. The front is one hundred miles away, but the Japanese keep on overtaking us. They did so at Moulmein, Rangoon, the oil fields at Yenangyaung. Mandalay will be next. It may take them a month or they could be here in two days. But no one is safe in Mandalay.’

‘We must go to India as quickly as possible,’ Grace said firmly. That simple statement of the obvious, without having to defer to Miss Furroughs, without qualification, without anxious introspection, carried with it its own pleasure – and instantly stirred her guilt again, that she had not stopped the old lady from walking into the flames.

‘Tomorrow, Miss Grace. There is no time to lose.’

‘Tomorrow, yes. But the route, east or west…’

‘Drive west, as far as we can. Then walk to India.’

‘East? The aerodrome at Myitkyina?’

 ‘When they get round to it, the Japanese will bomb it to smithereens.’

‘West, then. We’ll need petrol, food, water. Can you help?’

‘I shall try.’

The Jemadar vanished but, shortly after dusk, a lorry rumbled up the track that passed the rear of the Masonic temple. In the back of the lorry were crates of tinned food, boxes of biscuits and jars of jam, jerrycans of petrol for the bus and water. By the light of a kerosene lamp she spied an enormous strawberry sponge cake, resting on a crystal glass cake-stand.

‘Where did you get that?’

‘Miss, it was baked for Generalissimo Chiang Kai-shek and his wife by the best pastry chef in the whole of Burma. But it has been decided that it is to be diverted for refugee use.’

‘Did you steal it?’

‘It has been decided that it is to be diverted for refugee use.’

‘Did you steal it?’

‘You have no idea how much trouble I had to go to get it.’

She could not help herself from giggling.

‘Do you want me to take it back?’

‘No, Jemadar, I don’t. We shall have it for dessert.’

He bowed, comically low, and set out about transferring the provisions.

Unaware of the cake, the children tucked into the rations provided by the Jemadar, tins of bully beef, sardines, jam, condensed milk.

She popped outside and caught the two boys, Michael and Joseph, playing on the steps of the Masonic Hall with a revolver.

‘Bang-bang, you’re dead, Miss,’ said Michael.

‘Where in heaven’s name did you get that? Give it to me, Michael. Give it to me right now.’

‘It’s the Jem’s, Miss. He gave it to us to play with.’

‘Well he should have done no such thing and he is clearly out of his mind.’ Horrified, she confiscated the weapon and marched out to the back of the hall, where she found him taking boxes from the back of the lorry and stowing them in Hants & Dorset.

‘Does this object belong to you, Jemadar?’ She held the revolver by the bottom of the handle, with evident disgust.

‘Ah, yes, that’s mine, Miss Grace. Thank you for finding it. I knew I’d left it somewhere.’

‘Jemadar, what on earth do you think you are doing? The boys told me you gave it to them.’

‘Oh, did they?’ He replaced the revolver in his holster, bent down and shoved a wooden box full of tins of strawberry jam into the belly of Hants & Dorset.

‘Why on earth let them play with a deadly weapon?’

 Standing up, his sea-green eyes mocked her. ‘Ah, that was because they were playing with this…’

Tucked into his officer’s belt was a Masonic dagger, decorated with an arch and compass emblazoned in ivory on its onyx handle, which he pulled out and waved in the air, its blade flashing murderously in the reddening light.

‘So, Miss Grace, the same question. Why let them play with a deadly weapon?’

‘I had no idea.’

‘On a technical note, a dagger is dangerous at all times, but a revolver, when you have taken all the bullets out, is not. I gave them my revolver, minus the bullets, to distract from the loss of the knife, which I took from them. I explained they could only play with my gun for half an hour and they had to give it back to me in exactly the same condition – I stressed the word exactly – I had given it to them. Is the knife yours?’

Blushing, she shook her head. ‘Of course not. It must belong to the Freemasons. I don’t want the damned thing, you silly man.’

‘You are very kind.’ He replaced the knife in his belt and walked past to the lorry and took out a box of sardines, marked Made in Japan, in his arms. In the distance she caught sight of Emily, staring towards them. The moment Emily realised that Grace was looking at her, she turned her back and walked away.

Amongst the children, the boys’ nickname for their hero, The Jem, stuck.

‘Girls and boys,’ Grace called the attention of the whole school, ‘Miss Furroughs has gone ahead to the border to help organise things. But she has sent us this cake to send us on our way.’ Cheers and claps as the Jemadar brought in the cake.

‘You’d better take your dagger to divide up the cake.’ The Jemadar offered her the knife.

‘Once and for all, it’s not my dagger.’

‘Really?’

‘Oh, you’re impossible.’

‘Cut the cake and keep it. It might come in handy.’ The children didn’t get more than a sliver each, but it tasted like angel food. When no one was looking, Grace wiped the dagger clean on her dress, wrapped it up in a dishcloth and slipped it into her handbag.

The Jem disappeared, to return the lorry, but came back on his motorbike an hour later.

‘It has been decided that I am to be diverted for refugee use,’ he said.

‘How did you do that?’

‘Piece of cake,’ he said, and unrolled his hammock, tied it to two columns of the Masonic Hall, climbed in and feigned sleep.

They almost didn’t make it out of Mandalay.

They started off late, the children irascible and mewing about having to get up so early. Joseph wanted to play with the Jemadar’s pistol and Grace snapped at him to behave, which made him cry.

Long after dawn, with the early morning mists gone, the bus pulled up at the eastern end of the Ava Bridge. Red iron girders hurdled across a mile of the Irrawaddy, the greatest river in all Burma. A military policeman, nervous, edgy, barred their way, blowing his whistle, gesturing at the bus to turn round, yelling: ‘Go back, go back.’ The Jem ignored the policeman and gunned his BSA motor-bicycle around the road-block. More British troops, green hackles on their berets, emerged from the shade, rifles at the ready, blocking his path.  Allu pulled the bus up in front of a wooden barrier.

 The tallest of the soldiers marched swiftly up to the bus and leapt on board, angling his neck so that it didn’t bash against the roof of the bus.

‘What the bloody hell is going on? We’re blowing this bridge in three minutes and you must go back.’

 ‘Mr Peach!’

‘Oh, Miss Collins, it’s you!’

 ‘Mr Peach, you escaped Rangoon.’

‘Yes, just. It’s Lieutenant Peach, actually. Emergency commission in the field. But, but, but… you must go back. We’re going to dynamite the bridge any second.’

 ‘Mr Peach – sorry, Lieutenant Peach – we’re terribly sorry but this is our only chance.’ The children watched, fascinated, at how in the presence of Miss Collins the warrior bearing of the astonishingly tall officer began to melt.

‘If we can’t cross the river by the bridge,’ Grace continued, ‘we will have to abandon the bus and walk and that will be a disaster, especially for the young ones.’ She looked around her, and the girls shrunk, goggle eyed, helpless.

‘But I’ve got to dynamite the bridge in three minutes.’

 ‘Couldn’t you just have a word with your commanding officer. Just to let us through, and then blow the bridge? Could I speak to the commanding officer, Mr Peach?’

The gangly lieutenant shook his head. He gazed at the children – sixty-odd, nearly all girls apart from two little boys, and one of them a little backward at that. Scowling at them all, he glared at Miss Collins, said: ‘Bugger this,’ more to himself than anyone else, backed down the steps of the bus, turned to his men, and lifted up a flat palm and roared his command.

 ‘Hold! Hold the firing sequence. Hold the demolition.’

At once, cries of ‘Hold!’ echoed and re-echoed down the line of troops to the solitary Royal Engineer, poised to fire the detonators. A red flag came down and a yellow flag snapped high in the air by the command post, a second yellow some way down the bridge, a third by the engineer hovering over his fuses, a fourth three quarters towards the far bank, and finally a fifth on the far, western bank a mile away. Almost instantly a field phone jangled in the command post in the shade of a banyan tree.  Lieutenant Peach scurried to answer the call.

Silence as everyone – soldiers, orphans, Allu, Miss Collins and the Jem – strained to listen in to the lieutenant’s side of the conversation.

‘Sorry, sir, but we’ve got to hold… Yes, sir, on my authority, sir, that we hold and let them pass…  No, sir, you cannot order me to proceed. I am the senior officer here… Yes, sir, I know you are a brigadier… but with respect, sir, you are on the west bank of the river and I am the officer in charge of the east bank… I’m giving the order that we hold the demolition until these VIPs have passed. They are the daughter of an earl, yes, and the party includes relatives of the Marchioness of Dufferin and Ava.’

Ruby looked at Emily, an enormous ‘What?’ written on their faces.

‘They can speed across the bridge in ten minutes, maybe less. Yes, their vehicle will make it, sir…’

Peach turned to squint at Hants & Dorset, its ancient engine wheezing in the heat. ‘…virtually brand new… Yes, sir, the moment they’ve crossed the bridge, sir, we’ll blow it sky high. On my head be it, sir.’

He put down the field phone and walked towards the bus. ‘Go. Go now. And if that museum piece of a bus breaks down on the bridge, I will be shot. Go.’

Grace got up from her seat, hurried down the steps, lifted her hands around Lieutenant Peach’s neck, dragged his mouth down towards her height and stood on tip-toe and kissed him on the lips. Wolf-whistles from the other British soldiers as the lieutenant’s face turned salmon-pink, then post-box red. The sergeant-major, a squat barrel of a man, roared for the troops to stand to attention ‘for the VIPs’, and thirty men snapped into brigade ground salutes.

‘Good luck, Lieutenant Peach,’ said Grace and she ran back to the bus and Allu did his best to coax some life out of old Hants & Dorset. Grumbling into motion, belching smoke, it lurched off towards the bridge, with the Jem, after a crisp salute for Lieutenant Peach, following on behind. Ruby began ‘We’ll Meet Again…’ which the children took up, all the while frantically waving goodbye to the soldiers, who were sternly saluting and grinning their heads off at the same time.

Sergeant-major Eric Barr came over and stood next to the officer.

‘That old fuss-pot is going to have me shot when he sees our VIPs,’ said Lieutenant Peach.

‘Well, sir, he can fook off, sir.’

The sergeant-major was King’s Own Yorkshire Light Infantry, from Barnsley.

‘The brig won’t send ’em back over the bridge again, sir. Any road, we may be losing every bloody battle and on our way out of Burma, but we’ve got standards, sir. If we’re not going to help the likes of ’em poor bastards, sir, what are we doing here?’

‘Well put, Sergeant-major.’

Lieutenant Peach sighed as the bus rattled across the bridge. The sergeant-major coughed, officiously, as if he was about to make a formal announcement, a toast-master at a banquet.

‘Yes, Sergeant-major?’

‘Sir, when we first heard that you were going to be our new officer, sir, we all thought you were an arse, sir. We’d all heard about you jailing that officer. But we heard wrong, sir. The men would like you to know you’re not an arse, sir.’

‘Not an arse,’ said Lieutenant Peach, frowning. And then, after some thought, ‘Very good, Sergeant-major.’

The lieutenant stared after the bus clattering along the bridge’s span: ‘Let’s hope they don’t get strafed while they’re crossing the river. God speed, little bus.’

But the luck of Bishop Strachan’s held, for a time.

Hants & Dorset rumbled off the far end of the bridge, coughing and chugging past a group of staff officers, whose gallantry withered once they saw the VIPs they had gathered to salute with their own eyes. Elbows held at perfect angles hung downwards; moustaches drooped; shoulders slumped. A vein on the brigadier’s temple throbbed and he marched to the field phone, a martinet bent on revenge. ‘Get me that idiot, Lieutenant Peach. I’m going to bust him down to Private… ’ But no one stopped the bus.

Ruby turned to Emily: ‘Good morning. I’m not sure that we’ve been properly introduced. I am the grand-niece of the Marchioness of Dufferin and Ava… ’

Emily’s giggles were interrupted by a boom.

A mushroom of smoke and dust and water rose up into the air and slowly fell in on itself, revealing a tangle of metal knitting lying higgledy-piggledy in the river, and two spans of the bridge gone.

The signalman on the west bank of the Irrawaddy saluted the brigadier. ‘Sorry, sir, you wanted Lieutenant Peach?’

‘Yes, I bloody do,’ said the brigadier.

‘Phone line is dead, sir,’ said the signalman. Behind the back of the brigadier, he replaced the receiver in its cradle and permitted himself a ghost of a smile.

Ten miles, twenty, thirty, one hundred. Past Shwebo, Ye-u, Pyingaing, always to the west, past an army camp, hidden from the sky, littered with the junk of war, empty wooden crates of ammo, a fifty-five-pounder with a broken axle, brown tents thronging with British and Indian soldiers resting in the shade of a giant banyan tree. The Jem overtook, fast, on his motorbike and disappeared around a bend. He drove on a few miles and then pulled over, hiding from the sun in the cool of a fig tree. Arms resting on the handlebars, he closed his eyes and waited. The sounds of Burma – the itchy crackle of insects, the moo of an ox, a weird hiccoughing, repeated endlessly, hard to place, maybe a bird - and then an engine, growling and whining, and, in a higher register.

This singing bus, he thought, will be the death of me.

For some magical reason the engine of Hants & Dorset kept going. Every thirty miles or so, they had to top up the radiator with fresh water. At one stop, the wheels got stuck in sand, as soft and treacherous as the dunes at West Wittering, where Grace had swam when she was at school. They feared they would have to abandon her, because the bus by now had become a friend– and a female one at that– and walk. The Jem disappeared on his motor-bicycle and returned with a Honey tank on his tail. The school decamped off the bus while the tank men fixed a chain to the chassis of Hants & Dorset, Allu looking on, nervously. The tank’s tracks bit deep through the sand onto harder, packed earth beneath and soon the bus was on the road again.

Theirs was a race against the Japanese, and the monsoon. When the rains came, the dusty cart-tracks along which the bus could struggle, just, would be turned into sludge and mud, becoming impassable. But for the time being the landscape was parched, the earth bone dry, the bus stirring up a great wash of fine red dust high in the air, making it a comically easy target for Japanese fighters overhead to spot them and descend for a kill. But still, somehow, they drove on, unhurt.

At a road junction, they spotted a small fuel depot. Allu pulled up and Grace got down to beg for a few more gallons of fuel. The clerk in charge was Indian, the lord and master of a hut with palm fronds for a roof and no walls. He refused Grace’s chit for more fuel and handed it back.

‘The details are not correct, Miss. You must go back to Mandalay and get it counter-signed by the appropriate authorities.’

‘Sir, we cannot do that. They have blown up the bridge. We saw it happen with our own eyes. And Mandalay is burnt to a cinder. We cannot go back.’

‘The paperwork is not correct, Miss.’

‘For God’s sake, don’t you know there is a war on?’

‘The chit must be counter-signed by the correct authorities,’ he insisted.

She sighed deeply.

‘The paperwork is not correct, Miss.’

No response. Her shoulders heaved, tears welled up and ran down her cheeks. Out of the corner of her eye she saw Emily stare at her from her seat on the bus, her face revealing that she was, to put it mildly, unconvinced by her teacher’s performance. Likewise, the little man was not to be moved. The moment she stopped, he repeated in a voice as unfeeling as an abacus: ‘The paperwork is not correct, Miss.’

The Jem, as usual, was nowhere to be seen. He had been scouting ahead, making sure the road was clear, searching out stores, shops, anywhere still open and working where they could pick up extra food and water. The splutter of his returning motorbike lifted her. When he arrived, she whispered the problem into his ear. Smiling, he said: ‘Boorishness, too, has its geniuses,’ and went into battle.

The Jem sat down opposite the depot clerk, studied her chit, delved into his leather satchel – she’d never seen him without it, not even when asleep in his hammock - and extracted the largest rubber stamp Grace had ever seen. He brought the stamp down with a bang, counter-signed the chit with an expansive scrolling signature, turned it over and stamped it three more times and counter-signed.

A bead of sweat formed on the clerk’s upper lip.

The Jem turned the chit over again, back to the first sheet: stamp, stamp, stamp. Again, he counter-signed, then handed it over to the clerk.

The clerk said impassively: ‘Everything is now in order. You may have the fuel.’ Sitting with her face in her hands, Grace studied the Jem through her fingers. The clerk walked off to help Allu fill up the bus.

‘I swear you are a sorcerer, Jemadar.’

‘I don’t have a white rabbit, Miss Collins. At least, not yet.’

She read the chit upside down and felt a twinge of unease.

‘The name you’ve signed. That’s not Ahmed Rehman, that’s not your name.’

‘Ah, yes. “When fighting for truth and justice,” wrote Balzac, “it’s never a good idea to wear one’s best trousers”.’

 ‘Sometimes, I wonder about you.’

‘In what way?’

‘You might be a Jiff– you know, “Asia for the Asiatics” and all that.’

He frowned, momentarily.

Emboldened by his unease, she challenged him directly. ‘So, are you a Jiff, Jemadar?’

‘A Jiff, Miss Collins? Perhaps we Indians are a little smarter than that. I no longer think that the British have a God-given right to rule the lesser breeds without the law, as Mr Kipling thought. One day India will be free of the British, although I suspect we may still play cricket and drink tea and sit around and chat when there is work to be done. But are the Japanese our friends? Perhaps it is the case of better the devil you know.’

‘And do you think every Briton is a devil?’

‘Well, yes, I do rather. I know one in particular I cannot but serve, never mind what hell she may take me to.’

‘Your eyes are of the deepest green, Jem,’ she said, ‘just like the stuffed tiger in the Pegu Club. But do I trust them?’ She marched back towards the bus, holding a smile within herself.

‘Grace…’ the Jem called out, but the moment between them was lost. He gunned his motorbike and was off. Soon, all that she could make of him was an exclamation mark of dust rising in the air, one, two, miles ahead, shimmering in the heat.

The immense flatness of the Irrawaddy Plain, here and there interrupted by stubs of rock, capped by Buddhist stupas, gleaming in the harsh sun, gave way as they drove west to a more undulating landscape, and soon they were travelling through a frozen green sea of sharp ridges, high peaks and low ravines, the road circling and wheeling and doubling back on itself.

Half-dozing in the front seat immediately behind Allu, Grace opened her eyes as she sensed Hants & Dorset chugging to a halt. A white pole lay across the road, figures moving in the deep shade of a banyan tree. Three or four British soldiers brewing up, a kettle whistling. A checkpoint, of sorts. In no great hurry a corporal walked up to them, perched on the first step of the bus and took in the rows of children, many asleep, quiet.

‘Afternoon, Miss. We’re supposed to check everyone’s papers, Miss, but then we’re supposed to be doing lots of things. This lot looks pretty harmless to me. Refugees?’ She nodded. ‘Can you vouch that you’re not concealing the enemy?’

‘Yes, Corporal.’

‘Good, thought so. On your way, then.’

 ‘Who are you looking for?’ It was the very first checkpoint they had come across.

‘Deserters, suspicious people without papers, Jiffs–’ said the corporal.

‘I see. Have you seen our Jemadar? He’s on a motorbike?’

‘Nope. No one on a motorbike the whole afternoon.’

‘And the Japanese?’

‘One hundred miles away, according to our latest intelligence. That means they’re playing cards round the next bend. Good luck.’

Allu put Hants & Dorset into first gear and the ancient green bus moved out of the shade onto the road, driving on and on, its wheels still kicking up a great quantity of dust; the flow of air through the open windows providing the children with some measure of relief from the heat. They passed small knots of Indian refugees, straggling along the road, fewer in number, now, but no less exhausted.

She heard the familiar pop-pop-pop of his motorbike, overtaking the bus. The children waved, calling out: ‘Hello, Jem!’

How could that have happened? Before the checkpoint he had been miles ahead of them, and somehow he had fallen behind. The old bus must have overtaken him when she had been sleeping.

Through cathedrals of green they drove on, past rice paddies and teak forests and tidy European bungalows with white picket fences, empty, and wooden houses on stilts, thatched by sheaves of palm,  where the Burmese watched them pass by in silence, like standing stones.

The violent white of day, making black silhouettes of the shade, began to dim. To the west, a dark bottle green, the road immediately ahead a golden brown. They passed a farmer, following an ox ploughing up an old rice paddy, turned a bend and drove on and on…

As the sun died behind the hills, Hants & Dorset eased to a full stop. The children got out, stretched their legs, scrubbed their faces in a mountain stream tumbling down rocks on the far side of the road. Grace busied herself, feeding them, playing with the boys, making sure that she had a word here and there with the more anxious-looking girls.

Night fell with the suddenness of an axe. Only then did she hear his motorbike, the sound of its engine making her all but purr with pleasure, and the realisation of that both terrified and excited her, very much.

He parked the bike at the back of the bus, lit a cigarette and waited for her to join him. There was something supremely arrogant about the way he did that, she thought, and smiled to herself.

‘Tell me about that English lieutenant, the one who looks like a giraffe,’ he asked.

‘Oh, Lieutenant Peach.’ Moonshine bathed them in silvery-grey, eerie and surreal, ghouls poised to frighten a ghost train. Looking at him along her eyes, she said: ‘There is nothing to tell, Jem.’

‘My name is Ahmed.’

‘I prefer Jem. It is more proper.’

‘Proper?’

‘Proper.’

‘I think there is something between you and Lieutenant Peach, you know. You kissed him. I dared to steal a Generalissimo’s cake to impress you’ – Grace’s eyes widened – ‘but I would never have dreamt of holding up the demolition of the biggest bridge in Burma. Not with the Japanese Imperial Army a few miles off. He dared risk the whole of Upper Burma to impress you.’

‘I’m sure he didn’t.’

 ‘He loves you. If he didn’t love you, he would never have risked disobeying orders.’

‘I don’t know about that. I find Mr Peach rather plucky, sir, but my heart belongs to another.’

‘And who would that be?’ The Jem’s green eyes grew more tigerish.

‘That would be telling, Jem, that would be telling.’

‘That bee around your neck. How old is it?’

‘Fifty million years old.’

‘I would give my life to be that bee.’

She bade him goodnight, brushing against his arm, and began walking back towards the bus.

‘Stop.’

‘Jem, no… ’ The kiss was urgent and longed-for. This was no time to fall in love – but what can you do other than stop time itself?

Allu rose before sunrise, said his prayers, and sat behind the wheel. The engine wheezed into life, causing a pack of vultures to thwack the air as they wheeled off. Away from the rising sun, mile after dusty mile, through walls of morning mist still hanging in the river valleys, desperate to put as much distance between them and the invisible enemy. Twice, Allu began to nod off before she jabbed him in the back and the old driver shook his head, dabbed his eyes with water from a flask and drove on. The mist thickened, lifted, thinned and fell heavier than before, sometimes clear for half a mile, at others a thick grey treacle flowing against the windscreen. A jolt, the haze of sleep pierced by tyres squealing, Allu wrestling with the wheel, his right leg pumping the brakes, uselessly.

Brakes don’t work on thin air.

The bus lurched not forwards, but down. Through the open door at the front Grace gazed down at the rags of mist. They melted away revealing a dry river bed one hundred feet below. Molly, sitting next to her, squeezed her hand. ‘I’m scared, Miss.’ Grace wanted to say, ‘So am I, Molly,’ but instead she said: ‘I’m sure the Jemadar will sort it out.’ He was nowhere to be seen.

The bus creaked, its weight working loose a rock which fell with a clatter. The mist came back, and knowing the drop was there without being able to see it was all the more frightening.

‘Pop-pop-pop.’ The racket of the Jem’s exhaust was the most soothing sound in the entire world.

Across the chasm his face came into view. ‘Good morning, Miss Collins. Did you sleep well?’

‘Very well, Jemadar. Thank you.’

‘Have you had breakfast?’

‘Oh, for God’s sake, Jem, stop prattling on and get us out of here. Please!’

A dazzling smile. He picked up a big stone, the size of a brick, and went to the back of the bus. Warning the children not to worry, he smashed a window, removed the shards of glass with his gloved hands, and then helped the children squiggle out. As the bus emptied, the weight shifted forward and the bus tilted an inch down.  Everyone froze.

Molly started to pray, out loud. ‘Our Father, Who Art in Heaven…’

They heard the singing first, a wonderful low bass, an unreal sound from another world. Goggle-eyed, the children watched as soldiers of the King’s African Rifles rounded the bend and marched towards them. The Jem grinned. ‘You are in luck, Miss Collins. We won’t keep you hanging around for much longer.’

The African askari tied ropes to the back of the bus, holding it down, allowing the rest of the children and finally Grace to wriggle out of the rear window. It was a tight fit, no easy way of pulling off an exit that could be deemed lady-like. Her etiquette teacher had overlooked the problem of leaving a bus over-hanging an abyss by the back window while wearing a frock in front of two hundred African soldiers. She extracted herself with as much dignity as she could and treated the Jem to her grandest scowl. Bowing, he said. ‘Are you always in such a bad mood before breakfast, Miss Collins?’ 

Like a dog shaking dry its fur after a swim, she shook her head, but had to turn away from him to hide her smile.

One of the askari, Private Tomasi, coal-black, almost a boy, thin and very light, looped one end of a long rope around his shoulder and tied it off. After squeezing through the back window of the bus, he crept down the aisle to the front step, the bus tilting its nose as he went forward. He swung around above the drop, gripped the bumper, heaved himself up and rested his feet on it, his body leaning forward against the bonnet.  Another askari threw him the end of a second rope, which he caught in one hand while he held on to the bonnet with the other, and then he tied the rope end round a metal ring fixed to the chassis. A third rope was thrown and that, too, was tied to the ring at the front of the bus. That done, he swung back through the open door of the bus in one smooth arc and popped out the back, as neatly as a circus trick. The askari fixed block and tackles to an enormous, overhanging branch of a teak tree, and three dozen of them tugged on the pulleys and the tackles creaked horribly but the front of the bus was hoisted an inch in the air. Another inch, and a third, and slowly the bus came to a level and they swung it back onto the road like a toy and Emily cried out, ‘Three cheers for the King’s African Rifles, pip pip!’ and the girls hurrahed, and Allu fired up the engine and the bus spluttered back into life and everyone climbed back on and Ruby stood up in her seat and sang the first lines of sultry ‘Summertime’.

‘Ruby Goldberg, where on earth did you learn that?’ asked Grace, incredulous.

‘That would be a secret, Miss,’ said Ruby.

At high noon, as they were passing a large army camp, hundreds of soldiers milling around, tents, lorries, guns, even a few tanks, backed up underneath the trees, Hants & Dorset gave out a pathetic woof, like the last bark of an elderly dog, and stopped. Allu stood up, took a straw mat from beneath his seat, stepped out of the bus, unrolled the mat, lay down and within seconds was fast asleep.

As places to break down in Burma, in the borderland between the great river plains and the highland jungle, the army camp was perfect: food and water, and a whole squad of mechanics given an exciting new challenge: how to bring back to life a dead bus engine. Observing the soldiers pouring tea for the children or attacking the innards of the bus, boredom, Grace realised, was the great enemy of soldiers everywhere, boredom while they waited for someone in authority to order them to the front line. Or to the next camp, and more boredom. They relished any excuse to do something different, to entertain the children, to fix an ancient engine, and, of course, to chat up the schoolteacher.

But of the Jem, no sign. It was weird, Grace thought. When they were in trouble, he would appear immediately. But if something happened and he was not needed, then he disappeared.

It took the mechanics two hours of sweat and tinkering before old Hants & Dorset groaned and gibbered into life, its exhaust pipe sending up a thick black smoke cloud. The senior mechanic, a Welshman, revved the engine as he told Grace, ‘We’ve done the best we can. I’d give the old thing another ten miles and then it’s going to die forever. Where are you off to?’

‘India.’

‘Well, pray for a miracle.’

Pressing his foot down hard on the accelerator, the engine growled, frighteningly loud. At that Allu stirred from his sleep, rubbed his eyes, stood up, rolled up his mat and waited for the mechanic to get down from behind the wheel. As he did so, Grace heard the distinctive pop-pop-pop of the Jemadar’s motorbike.

He must have been waiting in the shade of some trees, a quarter of mile back, for hours. The bike neared the bus and dawdled to a stop. The children called out to him: ‘Where have you been, Jem?’ and he was about to reply when two things happened simultaneously. Allu let in the clutch and Hants & Dorset lurched forward and the mechanic started yelling at the Jemadar. The noise of the accelerating bus and the shouts of the children as they waved goodbye to their new friends was loud, but not so loud as to hide the Welshman’s fury: ‘Traitor! Traitor! I saw you in Singapore! You…’

The rest was lost. Grace twisted in her seat as the Jem accelerated past the bus, zooming through the dust, sashaying past a water buffalo standing in the middle of the road, dangerously fast.

No sign of his tell-tale two-wheel cloud of dust for the rest of the day. Shortly before dusk, Allu pulled up by the side of the road for the night and explained to Grace that the following day they should reach the Chindwin, so it made sense to try and get a good night’s rest.

Fat chance of that. Restless, she begged for the comfort of sleep, but in vain. The very dead of night, the crickets whirring and buzzing in the undergrowth, and a new sound, a motorbike being wheeled, its engine cut, towards them. Framed against a red half-moon rising, he came to a stop.

‘So. The mechanic…’ Ice in her throat. ‘He recognised you. What did you do at Singapore?’

A stillness between them; his silence, an admission of guilt.

‘Traitor? Jiff?’ The words, hissed.

‘Yes.’

Fury, sudden, irresistible, rose within her, her voice a high-pitched shriek: ‘How dare you! You’re a bloody Jiff! How could I have been so stupid! You appear from nowhere, always on your own, never with any soldiers or senior officers. You never stop at any of the army bases. You didn’t speak to any of the soldiers at the bridge.’

She slapped him hard on the face. ‘You used us.’

‘Yes, I used the children.’

‘And you used me. And what are you going to do now, Jiff? Because I swear to you that the very first British soldier I meet, I will condemn you out of hand.’

 ‘Listen to me, Grace.’

‘Why the hell should I trust a Jiff, a traitor?’

‘Because… because I cannot be a traitor,’ the Jemadar told Grace, ‘to a foreign power, to an Empire that is occupying my country, imprisoning its leaders, holding its people captive. I am no traitor.’ The passion died from his voice. ‘But, at the same time… ’

 ‘But what, traitor?’ said Grace.

‘Can I trust you?’

‘How dare you!’ Grace repeated. She made to slap him, but he gripped her wrist with bewildering force, drawing her towards him.

Near them, something crackled in the undergrowth.

 ‘What’s that?’ he whispered. Further off, an owl hooted to its mate. Under the red moon, his eyes– on fire. He talked and talked until the moon hid behind a heft of clouds. In the near-darkness, her fingers traced the length of his jaw to just below the ear, down his neck, touching his shoulder-blade, and unbuttoned his shirt. They lay down on the grass. Bending over him, she untied her hair, and it fell down on to his naked chest, making a cave of dark gold.

The listener, unseen by the two lovers, locked in silent ecstasy, moved away.

Far, far way, almost on the edge of hearing, a wild dog howled at its own echo.