Spring 1942, Upper Burma
Through a shifting fog, myths drifted through the trees. Shapes, grey on grey, stirred, fell still, moved again. Grace’s eyes fluttered open. She saw only the bus, cocooned in the early morning mists. The rain had stopped in the night.
There was nothing else. The ghosts in the mist, gone. Closing her eyes, she ached to return to the comfort of sleep. She’d slept awkwardly, her neck cricked.
A vast grey wall, as high as a battleship, passed in front of her nose.
‘Oh my giddy Aunt.’
The biggest living creature she had seen, ever, halted close to the bus, its trunk snuffling around a clump of bamboo, two massive tusks standing out proud. A fat round eye, some kind of goo running down from it, studied Grace as, with the laziest of pulls, the trunk uprooted the bamboo and bashed it against a tree, causing lumps of mud to fall off. The bamboo was dipped in a puddle like a maiden aunt dunking a biscuit in a cup of tea. But the smell was nothing like that of a maiden aunt. The air was drenched in a rich, moist, cabbagey pong.
‘Miss! Miss! Elephants!’ shrieked Molly, her voice electric with excitement.
The mist rose, a little, for two hundred yards or so, down to the Chindwin, and Grace could see that the bus was being passed by ten, twenty, thirty elephants, each one commanded by a Burmese elephant man, sitting high up on the animals’ necks. The elephants plodded towards the great river, ears flapping, trunks and tails swishing the air, haunches swaying now this way, now that.
To Grace’s mind, the swaying motion suggested that the elephants were tipsy, enormous drunks on their way home from a fancy dress ball, a fantasy both silly and utterly delightful. A calf, tripping along in the wake of its massive mother, emerged from the swirling low mist, passed the bus and, having sniffed the presence of flowing water, could not bear to dally. Skin covered in a threadbare coat of brown-red down, trunk raised aloft as if summoning a waiter, he pounded towards the Chindwin as fast as his very little legs could carry him.
‘Look at the baby one, Miss!’ shouted Molly and the bus erupted, an explosion of joy. On his backside he slid down the muddy slope into the water, making a fat splash.
‘There’s more babies! Oh, Miss, they’re so sweet,’ cried Ruby. Seven more calves hurtled across the open space, tobogganed down the mud bank into the water and, while mothers and aunties stood guard, there began a riot of squirting and squishing and squeaky trumpeting.
‘Elfunt, elfunt,’ cried Joseph.
‘Miss!’ It was Molly, the best watch-girl in the world. ‘It’s a man, with a dog.’
Sure enough, from the green curtain of jungle emerged a man with a dog. The man wore British Army uniform, had dark hair, turning to silver, was tall, lean; the dog a cocker spaniel, chocolate-coloured, who paused to sniff the air pompously, then caught up with his master. The pair of them looked as though they could have been out for a stroll on the South Downs. Another figure emerged behind them, an old Burmese gentleman in a sarong.
Leaping out of the bus, Grace ran towards the elephant men.
Another clump-clump of big guns, the sound muffling in the hills, making it hard to judge the distance between them and the artillery. Not far enough.
‘The Japanese!’ She barked the word, bubbling with fear.
‘Good morning,’ he replied, a little warily.
‘They’re only a few miles away.’
‘Is that a bus? What’s a bus doing in my jungle?’
‘Have you got a boat?’ demanded Grace. ‘The Japanese sank the ferry. The river’s too wide. The children can’t swim it. Have you got a boat?’
He peered at the occupants of the bus. ‘Schoolchildren?’ He seemed astonished – no, worse, affronted - by the presence of the bus, the children and Grace, as if he’d caught them trespassing in ‘his’ jungle.
‘The children can’t swim this river. Have you got a boat?’
‘What?’
‘We left Rangoon six weeks ago. We…’
‘What? Why didn’t you evacuate sooner? What on earth do you think you are doing?’
Thrown, Grace turned away, hiding her face. ‘We should have left Rangoon sooner. It was a mistake.’
‘A bloody awful mistake, if I may so, and one for which your children have yet to endure the full consequences. I suppose you’re hanging around expecting a bloody taxi, eh?’
The word ‘taxi’ hit her like a punch in the solar plexus. All her restraint, all her self-control vanished. Bent double, suddenly her chest racked with great gasping sobs: ‘I begged her to leave, but she just wouldn’t. I’m so… it’s…’
The words tumbled out of her, incoherent, more than a little mad.
‘The taxi thing…something happened to me… she just wouldn’t listen… torpedoed in the Atlantic… but you must not abandon us, the children, now, we’ve come too far.’
He half-turned away from her, presenting his shoulder to her face. ‘You realise we can’t take you to India.’
‘You can’t take us?’ She was incredulous.
‘I’m afraid not.’
A cone of sunlight punched through the mist and Grace was bathed in a pool of amber translucence, an actress spot-lit at the theatre. To him, she was one of the most ridiculously beautiful women he had ever met – a tumble of blonde hair, sky-blue eyes, a body exactly engineered to male desire, all curves and angles - and without doubt the most beautiful Englishwoman on this, the eastern and very much the wrong bank of the Chindwin. No competition, really. But off her rocker. Ga-ga. A madwoman, lacking only the twigs in her hair. No idea what she was doing up here, miles north of the main refugee tracks. Nor could he make head nor tail from her babbling, bursting into tears at the mention of the word taxi. Mad as a hatter she might be, but still, here she was. And the girls in the bus, staring out of the windows. Two boys as well. Half-castes, by the look of them. Never mind that: there were far too many to look after, let alone feed.
‘If you don’t help us, the children will die.’
‘How many children, er…’
‘Miss Collins, Grace Collins. Sixty-two.’
‘Adults?’
‘Just me left.’
‘You’ve had a rough time?’
‘Our headmistress, Miss Furroughs, died in the Mandalay fire. Yesterday our bus was shot up by Zeroes. They killed our driver, Allu, and the Jemadar. I haven’t told the children, but it wasn’t an accident. He was murdered by a British sergeant, one of us.’
The man kicked a clump of mud with his boot. ‘Have you any food?’
‘Very little, I’m afraid. We’ve all but run out. A few tins of fish, some packets of biscuits, they’re on the bus. Enough for two days, perhaps three. The children each have their own water bottle, but that’s it.’
‘If we take you, it will imperil the whole operation. We need to hand you over to the appropriate authorities.’
‘What’s your name?’
‘Sorry. Sam Metcalf, formerly of the Burma Teak Corporation. Now a colonel, of sorts.’
‘Show me the appropriate authorities and we’ll happily go with them.’ She scoured the horizon. Saw jungle, elephants, orphans in a wreck of a bus. If the appropriate authorities were around, they were well hidden.
‘Hmpf.’ It was more an elephant’s snort than a word in the English language. He started to look around, searching for someone.
‘Havildar Singh? Havildar Singh! Ah, there you are. Bloody Sikhs, always hiding.’ An enormous Havildar – in rank the equivalent of a British sergeant – fierce in beard and turban, emerged from the trees, and the two men started to discuss something in Urdu. Lost in talk, they walked towards the elephants, now down by the river bank. The Sikh scowled, protesting forcibly.
Sam slapped him down, and the two men started shouting at each other, trading vicious-sounding insults. They fell so deep in argument that they did not see the smallest elephant calf get closer and closer to them. He lowered his trunk, raised it and fired, soaking Sam and Havildar Singh.
As the two men retreated from the jets of water, the children, still rooted to the bus, began to murmur. It was a sound Grace felt that she had not heard from them in a very long time: laughter.
But she could not allow herself to join in. The anxiety written on the face of the two men as they had talked down by the river terrified her. Not speaking more than a few words of Urdu, she couldn’t hope to understand the row between Sam and the Havildar, but she was certain they were talking about the children and it did not look good.
‘Well? Are you going to abandon us?’ Grace’s tone was brutal. ‘We’ll slow you down, won’t we?’ Gesturing to the Havildar, she added: ‘Is that what he said?’
Beauty she might be, thought Sam, but she had the makings of an almighty pain in the backside.
‘Do you speak Urdu, Miss Collins?’
‘No.’
‘No. And no, the Havildar did not say that. I said that, word for word. He said we’ve got no choice but to take you, at least to when we hook up with the main track of refugees. I was about to call him an old softie when we got soaked. So you owe him an apology.’
She looked directly into the Havildar’s eyes and said: ‘I apologise.’
The big Sikh nodded his head and wiped his moustache with the back of his arm. He had an air of steely gentleness about him. But – she couldn’t see clearly – there was something wrong with his hands.
‘We are very sorry to put you to any inconvenience’ said Grace, the words coming out more haughtily than she intended.
‘Look, Miss…’ Sam struggled to retain his calm.
‘But we would be grateful if you could put us in the true picture.’
‘I would be delighted to, Miss Collins.’
One of the elephants trumpeted irritably down by the river, and Grace could have sworn that Sam nodded, as if in conversation with it.
‘In plain English?’
‘In plain English.’
‘Your party is a walking disaster for us. Elephants can’t carry much more than they need to eat. A big tusker may get through six hundred pounds of green fodder, mainly elephant grass and bamboo shoots, a day. That’s the weight of three big men. The harder you march them, the more you load them, the lamer, the slower you get. And you can’t jeopardise fifty-two elephants by hanging around for the fifty-third. If we were to take you, we’d have to carry the children, more often than not. Our supplies would be split between sixty-three extra mouths. It would slow us down so that the Japanese would be on our tails in a trice. Disaster.’
Grace flinched at the word. ‘So you are going to abandon us?’
He ignored her.
‘The Japanese command the air. On the ground, they are ahead of us, to the north, and behind us, to the south. They are pressing in from the east, and their main force is probably no more than thirty miles away from us, if that. One advantage is that their grand objective is due north, Imphal, and we are slightly off at a dog-leg here. But their scouts will be very much closer and are probably watching us right now. We’ve got one hundred elephant men and forty Chin guards with us, but if the Japs find us, we will be in trouble. We will cross the river, but so can they. They can build bamboo rafts in half a day and they will come after us. Elephants in this war, well, this corner of the war anyway, are worth their weight in gold, so they are going to chase us all the way to India, if we ever get there. They will try to kill us and capture the elephants alive and get them back. They now control all the metalled roads and main tracks in this part of Burma, so the only possible escape route for us is due west, over five mountain ranges, to the safety of Assam. The mountains are six, seven thousand feet high. And that’s out of the question for elephant. On the other side of the river is country I have never been in and the best map we have is a quarter inch to the mile. Remember the Little St Bernard pass that Hannibal took the Carthaginian army through over the Alps in order to give the Romans the fright of their bloody lives? That way,’ he gestured to the west, ‘is higher. No one’s taken elephants that high, ever. We have forty-five elephants and eight calves, and now, thanks to you buggers, sixty-three extra mouths to feed, but we don’t have enough food for our elephant men now, let alone for the month that it might take all of us.’
‘So?’
‘We shoot the elephants, turn back, brandish the white flag and surrender.’
A fresh wave of mist came down from the hills, blanketing the river valley.
‘Are you going to do that?’ Grace asked.
Sam scowled fiercely. ‘Not on your nelly. We are not abandoning you and your children and we’re not surrendering, nor are we handing over my elephants to the Emperor of Japan. Not while I’m alive and kicking anyway. So we’re heading west.’
‘You’re going to do the impossible.’
‘No. All of us are going to do the impossible. It’s going to be a race between them and us, and it’s a race we are going to win.’
‘But you said it was impossible.’
‘Stop arguing.’
Eyes tight shut, she breathed out so deeply her body shuddered. ‘Thank you very much, Colonel. Thank you very much indeed.’
‘Don’t thank me too soon. We’ll get you across the river and take you along with us for a day or so, but the moment we meet up with the main party of refugees, we will be saying goodbye. You will be quite safe from the Japs then. Understood?’
‘Understood.’
‘And there’s one more bloody problem.’
‘What’s that?’
‘Ministry of Agriculture rules.’ He removed a scruffy piece of paper from his breast pocket, on which was typed the heading: Importation of livestock from the Crown Colony of Burma to India, May 1942 and one line below that: Elephant: 43. Underneath, he added in pencil: OL: 63.
‘OL: 63?’ asked Grace.
‘Other Livestock. You and the brats.’
She treated him with the ghost of a smile.
‘Once we cross the Chindwin, we’ve effectively left Burma and we’re in a kind of no-man’s land. India is somewhere over that way,’ he nodded towards the west, ‘but if I don’t keep a tally, some damn fool sitting in an office may try and refuse us entry. Still, we’ve got a river to cross. I warn you we’re all going to get splashed a bit. Elephants do love a bath.’
‘The children won’t mind, I’m sure.’
‘I need to plan the crossing, so we don’t mislay the freight.’
Grace was puzzled. ‘Freight?’
‘The bloody children. We’ll start crossing in ten minutes or so, then hike until sundown. The more miles we get between us and the Japanese, the better.’
‘Shouldn’t we cross the river immediately? With the Japanese so close?’
‘You’re on elephant time now. The elephants are not going to swim across that river until they’ve checked it out. No power on earth can change that. We’ll move in ten minutes. Or something like that. First problem is that I need to talk to your lot about elephants. I don’t want anyone squashed. Messy.’
Making light of a desperate situation was one thing, but she could not stop herself from grimacing.
Sam climbed up into the bus, his dog Winston clambering after him and trotting up to Joseph, pale and sickly. The dog treated the boy to a lick. Sam glanced at Joseph, stopped in his tracks and bent down and felt his brow.
‘Ice cold. Malaria.’
‘Havildar Singh!’ The giant Sikh clambered on to the bus, and had to crouch to make sure that his turban wasn’t knocked off by the roof.
‘Quinine for this lad. What’s his name?’
The Havildar took a knapsack from his back and delved in it, taking out a bottle of pills. To her horror, she saw that the Havildar had only a couple of fingers on one hand and only half a finger on the other. Deftly, he used his most crippled hand to flick the pill bottle into the air, catch it and unscrew it.
‘Joseph,’ said Grace. ‘He’s ten, but he looks younger because of his condition. They call him a Mongol.’
‘Hmm. I’m an elephant doctor. Don’t do people. But I know what Little Joe needs. Whack him full of quinine.’
The Havildar sat down next to Joseph and, gently, shifted him upright.
‘Miss,’ said Molly in a whisper that could have been heard back in Rangoon, ‘he’s missing lots of fingers. What happened to his fingers?’
The Havildar turned to Molly and stared at her, saying nothing. She blushed bright red and looked down.
‘Got any chocolate, Havildar?’ asked Sam. ‘These pills are so bloody bitter he’s going to vomit them back up again straightaway, unless we give him something to take away the taste.’
At the mention of the word chocolate the girls turned their heads from the elephants and watched the Havildar pluck out a bar of Cadbury’s, misshapen and squishy in the heat, from his knapsack. A gooey mess, but a luxury, for them, in Upper Burma in the spring of 1942, no words can convey. He scraped off a sludge of chocolate, pressed in a yellow pill, and said to Joseph, ‘Come on, eat,’ and popped it in his mouth. The boy munched quietly and the Havildar gave him a sip of water.
Ruby whispered to Emily: ‘I’m going to pretend I’ve got malaria, too.’
Sam addressed the bus: ‘Lucky you. You’re all going for a ride on an elephant. In fact, you are all now officially members of the Number One Elephant Company of the Royal Indian Engineers of the Fourteenth Army. That means you’re under orders, under my command. And the number one order of the Number One Elephant Company is… don’t frighten the elephants. No shouting, no running near the elephants, no going under their legs. They can kill. Any breaking of those orders and Havildar Singh will come and chop your head off.’
A mistake. Most of Sam’s audience were around twelve years old, some even younger, and they were all wide-eyed. They had noted that some of the Havildar’s fingers were missing. Fearing that they were all going to start crying, Sam gabbled quickly.
‘Actually, Havildar Singh is a bit of a lambkin. He doesn’t go round chopping people’s heads off. To be honest, he hands out chocolate. If you’re good. But do obey him and the elephant men – they’re called the oozies. Now, which one do you think is the most dangerous of all these elephants?’
Ruby’s hand shot up. ‘That big one, over there.’ She was pointing to the tusker who woke up Grace.
‘Rungdot. He’s killed two men when he was in musht, that’s on heat…oh, never mind, but as far you chaps are concerned he’s not the most dangerous elephant by a long chalk. Any other suggestions?’
Molly shouted out: ‘The little one, the one that soaked you.’
‘Exactly right. That little one there.’
‘What’s his name?’ asked Molly.
‘Well, his oozie calls him “Oomy” which means Fat One. He’s the sweetest little calf, but here’s the problem. You’re not daft enough to play around with Rungdot. But if you get in between Oomy and his mother– the name’s pretty unpronounceable but it means Jewelled One – and he gets scared, he blows his trumpet and his mum will come charging and trample you to death without turning a hair. So, children, watch it with the little ones. Don’t get between them and their mothers. Watch it with the big ones, too. Be wary of the elephants at all times.’
He studied them, hoping that some of his words were sinking in.
‘Now you’re going to ride in the baskets on top of the elephants’ backs as they swim across the river. They may squirt you with water, just as little Oomy did to me and the Havildar. They may even swim underwater for a bit. Just hold on tight and pretend you’re riding on a submarine. The wettest children on the wettest elephant will win a prize, once we get to the other side. After that, you’re going to have to walk. All day, every day, for two weeks, maybe longer. So you’re going to have to dump everything that’s silly. You must only take stuff you need and which you can carry on your back. I’m sorry about that, but that’s the way it is. We’re going to split you up into six groups of ten each – Grace can you do that presently – and you’ve got to look after each other, even the ones you don’t like. Especially the ones you don’t like. You’re going to hold on with one hand, hold hands with the next child with the other, and not let go. There are sixty-two bloody children here – and there will be sixty-two of you bloody buggers on the other side of the bank.’
Grace imagined the consternation if Miss Furroughs had been around to hear such language.
‘Any questions?’
‘Will the elephants eat us?’ asked Molly.
‘No, you’re not tasty enough. Let’s go. Last bugger across is the dirty rascal.’
The children started dumping their possessions brought with them all the way from Rangoon. Silk dresses, cheap bracelets, poetry books, Shakespeare’s plays, magazines telling the latest gossip from Hollywood, hair brushes, bangles, boxes, shoes, even a fur stole, a gift from a father, long-gone, were dumped. Grace, too, threw all her precious possessions away, apart from one change of clothes, a book of Tennyson’s poems given to her by Miss Furroughs, her copy of Moonfleet, the photograph of her mother, her bee in amber around her neck and the Masonic dagger, her one gift from the Jemadar. She crammed them all in the Jem’s satchel, next to a large buff envelope.
Stepping down from the front step of Hants & Dorset for the last time, she remembered the naked traffic policeman on the day they fled Rangoon, Miss Furroughs snarling at the fat man as he pushed in front of the children at the docks – ‘you horrible little man’ – the Jemadar stamp-stamping the chit for petrol with such intensity that the pompous clerk gave in, and Allu, desperately trying to start the engine as the Zeroes came in over the treetops. Bowing her head, she said her farewell to the bus and all who had gone before and hurried off towards the line of elephants standing parallel to the river.
In baskets shaped like coracles the elephant men stacked guns, ammunition, paraffin oil, food rations, medicine chests. The coracles were to be paddled across first by a platoon of the Chin, not by elephant power, lest one of the great beasts panic and fling the precious valuables into the river.
Grace split up the children into small groups and appointed a leader for each one. Gathering together her own charges - Joseph, Michael, Emily, Ruby and Molly – she went towards the elephant with the long unpronounceable name, who was keeping an eye on her baby, Oomy, now cropping at a knot of elephant grass underfoot with her trunk. She waved at the oozie perched on top of a flattish natural seat immediately behind the elephant’s forehead, his brown legs tucked behind the ears, and he waved back, grinning shyly, pointed to himself and said ‘Po Net’. It was clear that he didn’t speak a word of English but his gentle, amused patience meant something special to them. The goal? A great cane wicker pannier sat crossways on the elephant’s back, more than ten feet above the ground, high-backed at both ends, the shape of a monster Victorian bath-tub.
‘Looks safe enough,’ said Grace.
‘But it’s so high up, Miss,’ said Molly.
Aware that she would often have to look after the other children, Grace told them that she had to appoint a leader for this group too. Ruby was confident enough, but something made her call out another name.
‘Emily? Would you mind leading this group? That means going up top first, I’m afraid.’
Po Net motioned for Emily to step closer to the elephant’s head. The oozie pressed his right knee firmly against the back of the elephant’s right ear and the beast rotated slowly to the left. Once they were in the correct position, he cried out, ‘Hmit!’ Immediately, the elephant bowed her head and bent her knees, withers still high in the air. ‘Hmit’ was elephant-speak for ‘sit’. The basket was now at a crazy angle, front down, end up, but the nearest edge a mere six feet or so above the ground, yet still too high for Emily to step into. The elephant coiled her trunk so that the tip provided a low step, just a foot off the ground.
The girl hesitated. ‘Go on,’ said Ruby.
‘Go on, Em,’ said Molly.
‘It looks as tall as a house, Miss.’ Emily stepped up on to the trunk and slowly, a magician performing a trick, the elephant lifted her high up so that she was now within arm’s reach of Po Net. He held out his hand and she grasped it and she leapt across the gap between trunk and on to the elephant’s back and with her other hand grabbed the wicker basket which slipped half an inch towards her, then held – and she was in. Peeking from over the lip of the basket, she waved down at the rest of the girls: ‘Miss, that was amazing’ and Emily wore a smile that could have cut her face in two.
The game was on and they were all desperate to go next. The Havildar sauntered up to help and picked up Michael and almost catapulted the little boy into the basket. He landed in a heap of giggles next to Emily. The Sikh passed up Joseph’s blanket first to Po Net, then stood on tiptoe and passed the boy up to the oozie who gently took him by the armpits and placed him in the basket on the other side of Emily. She started arranging Joseph’s stuff and chatting to him, as if they were on the bus. Throughout, the elephant stood absolutely still. Grace, anxious that something could have gone wrong, studied the scene. The elephant seemed to perfectly understand their anxieties about Joseph and be as calm as possible. That required an intelligence, or an empathy, that astonished her.
Joseph peeped his head over the basket. ‘I’m on the elfunt,’ he said, matter-of-factly, as if he was on a train, and everybody laughed.
Ruby was hoisted up and then it was Molly’s turn. She stepped on the elephant’s trunk and planted a big kiss on her corrugated grey face. The elephant slowly lifted her trunk and Molly ascended to the level of the basket as if she was riding in a lift.
‘What’s her name again?’ asked Molly.
Po Net, craning his neck round at them, made sense of her question and said something Molly judged ridiculously unpronounceable.
‘What did he say her name was?’ whispered Grace.
‘Mother Engine, Miss.’
Grace pulled a face – ‘that can’t be right, Molly’ – but Mother Engine, shortened to just Mother, was the name that stuck. The teacher went up last, heart fluttering because it felt very precarious. She stowed the Jemadar’s satchel in a small wooden box, fixed to the basket. A squash, but all six of them were just getting comfortable in the basket, making cushions of their spare clothes, when a dreadful rumble came from the elephant’s nether end.
‘What’s that pong?’ asked Molly, mock-innocently.
‘I am afraid that our elephant may have broken wind,’ Grace replied and Joseph scrunched up his face in an ecstasy of disgust: ‘Mother Engine has done a poo,’ and everyone fell about.
Po Net kicked his feet into the fold of skins behind Mother’s ears and cried out: ‘Htah!’ – ‘Get up!’ – and suddenly the elephant jerked off its fore-knees and the children looked terrified as, inside the basket, they toppled forwards and tottered backwards, and then they were sitting more than twelve feet off the ground.
‘Woo,’ Joseph cried out, ‘wobbly elfunt.’
Mother began to plod towards the river, the basket yawing and lurching with every footfall.
‘Oh, my word, I’m getting seasick, Miss,’ said Emily as they rose and plunged, plunged and rose.
‘Emily, we’ve got two hundred miles to go. I’m afraid you’d better get used to it.’
Mother shuffled to a halt. Oomy, preoccupied with his breakfast, had almost been forgotten. He lifted his head, made a little toot-toot noise with his trunk, and ran towards his mother. Only when Oomy was by the heels of Mother did she turn her great head and give his back a little pat with her trunk, making him wriggle with pleasure.
Ahead, a long traffic jam of elephants, waiting patiently in line for the order to cross the river. Ruby stood up in the basket, one palm stopping one line of imaginary traffic, the other waving fantasy vehicles on – the naked traffic policeman. Grace wagged a finger at Ruby, who sat down to hoots and catcalls.
Sam, riding on the very last animal at the back of the herd, raised his hand and, at the very front, Rungdot, the biggest, oldest bull, bearing a Siamese wicker basket, loaded with chains, food and other necessities of the elephant camp, led the way down to the river. An oozie rode on his neck, but two more elephant men accompanied his every step on shore, one on either side, carrying bamboo staves, tipped with a sharp iron hook. No one was taking any chances, lest he run amok. Rungdot’s oozie dug in his heels, the two other elephant men climbed up into his basket and the great bull slid down the muddy bank, his forelegs sinking deep into the mud. He struggled, lurching unsteadily, for a second or two and then his legs found bottom and he surged forward into the stream. For the first one hundred yards or so he was tall enough to walk, breasting the current, but soon the river became deeper, the current faster, and he paddled strongly off towards the other bank, more than one thousand yards away.
For every yard the elephants crossed the river, they were pulled two downstream by the current. Their target, selected by Sam, was an eighty-foot-high tree on the far bank, bursting with orange, white and flame-red blossom, as bright as fireworks a mile or more downstream. Directly behind the old tusker came twelve cows carrying the children in their high baskets.
As Mother got out of her depth and started swimming, water lapped over their toes in the bottom of the basket, soon swilling dangerously close to their bottoms. Anxiously, Grace examined her gang – the two boys and the three girls - who beamed back at her, at the rolling mist, at the grey monster underneath their feet. They were enraptured.
Halfway across, with another five hundred yards to go, Grace was gazing at Oomy swimming his little heart out, keeping up with his mother, when a bank of mist rolled in, as thick as sea-fret, blanketing them. Sounding through the grey murk, a girl’s voice, piping loud and strong:
‘Thick jewell’d shone the saddle leather,
The helmet and the helmet-feather
Burn’d like one burning flame together,
As he rode down to Camelot.’
It was Emily, and the whole school sang out:
‘“Tirra lira” by the river
Sang Sir Lancelot.’
The otherness of war.
‘Bloody shut up! The bloody Japs might be listening,’ shouted an angry voice through the mist. That could only be Sam.
Silence, broken only by the rippling of river water and the huffing and puffing of the swimming elephants. The sun scoured a hole in the mist, which widened into a tunnel, then, as suddenly as it had come, the mist was lifting fast and both banks of the great river and the green hills rising above them were visible.
Close to the west bank, the strength of the current picked up and wavelets lapped against the baskets, soaking everyone. Oomy started to mew anxiously, but within a few seconds Rungdot hit hard ground and walked up the bank, wiggling himself dry of water.
As Mother, the last of the elephants carrying children, and Oomy struggled against the current to step on to firm ground, fireworks from where they had just come from, the eastern bank, crackled and popped. Tiny figures scurried towards the river, spurting orange flame, and behind them were ten large brown-grey shapes.
The reason the Japanese had caught up so fast? They, too, had found that the fastest way of travelling across a land without roads is on the back of an elephant.