Prologue

1 May 1940, Rangoon

MISTER Stripes the tiger, stuffed, mounted and plunging through the club wall, mocked Grace with his eye of green glass. Overhead, a ceiling fan shuffled the heat.

‘The Japanese can’t fly. They have a defect in the tube,’ Colonel Handscombe surveyed the others around the bridge table, holding on to his secret knowledge for as long as possible, ‘of the inner ear.’

Looking away from her fan of cards out through the windows of the Pegu Club Grace glimpsed a gardener watering a green chequer-board of lawn, exquisitely cross-mown and surrounded by rose bushes, blooms, a herbaceous border. It could have been Lymington, were it not for a vulture by the cess-pit pecking out the guts of a white-bellied rat.

‘One heart.’

‘Also, they are myopic.’

‘Two hearts.’

‘And their balance is defective.’

‘Three clubs,’ said Grace, not rising to the bait.

‘So why worry about them? Eh?’

‘My dentist is Japanese,’ said Miss Furroughs, timid, pink-cheeked, a little white mouse of a rebel.

Grace felt imprisoned by the walls of the room. Outside the club was an unknown city which she ached to explore, to see and hear all she could, ponies trotting by, the Rangoon Electric Trams, wheels biting rail, monkeys yelping and honking, the whole exquisitely alien world.

Back home, the blossom would be out. It was 1 May 1940, and England was fighting for its very life. But here, in this backwater of the Empire, there was no war, only starch and protocol and sticky heat. What was so dreary to Grace was the pettiness of British life in Burma. Was it one of the Russians – Chekhov? Tolstoy? – who’d remarked ‘nothing worse than a provincial celebrity’. Whichever Ivan said that had probably met someone very much like the colonel: handsome-ish, tall, in his mid-forties, with a fine jaw, a sweep of grey hair, the pitiless grey eyes of a lounge predator and mediocre to the core. Grace had gathered he did something ‘hush-hush’ at Government House in Rangoon. Whatever it was, she found it hard to imagine a circumstance in which he could further the war effort. Yet the others appeared to think he was a catch.

More fool them.

Miss Furroughs sipped her sherry and said, ‘Three no trumps.’ Damn. That meant Colonel Handscombe would be dummy, so they’d be in for yet more monologues on the Japanese menace or eugenics or the price of fish.

‘Your dentist is almost certainly spying for Nippon,’ said the colonel. The cards fell on the table, a light patter of applause.

‘I speak as I find, Colonel,’ said Miss Furroughs.

‘You know what they’re all talking about in the bazaar now, don’t you? When the Japanese will strike.’

‘I have no idea about the military side of things, but Mr Magaguchi is a gentleman and quite the best dentist I have ever had. Nothing wrong with his balance,’ said the headmistress, relishing her rebellion.

‘The Japs can’t fly,’ repeated the colonel, his logic as circular as the sweep of the fan.

‘But they can fix teeth,’ the headmistress snapped back, so fast that Grace found herself gurgling out loud. She tried to hide her fit of giggles by faking a cough, but she somehow choked. Helpless, acrid-throated, she mouthed ‘water’. The colonel called out: ‘Boy!’

No one stirred.

‘Boy!’ Handscombe barked, louder this time.

An Indian servant, snow-white hair, his hands a-tremor, appeared bearing a mahogany tray and poured water from a cut-glass decanter into a tumbler filled almost to the rim with ice, decorated with a sprig of mint and a dwarf strawberry. Grace drank deeply, nodded her thanks, recovered her poise and only then did the servant bow and depart.

‘I rather think that gentleman hasn’t been a boy for a while,’ she said.

‘Boy,’ repeated the colonel.

Pig, thought Grace.

What about Miss Furroughs? She had trapped Grace into this dreadful game, so she was not beyond deviousness. A stern old-fashioned mouse, Grace was damn sure the way the headmistress was running the school was of no real use to the half-caste orphan girls, the human stain of Empire, who were supposed to live and flourish there. On the other hand, every now and then the eyes of the old lady would twinkle and she would say something fierce and sparky. Tiny, barely five feet, she seemed unafraid to squeak her mind. Grace sensed Miss Furroughs’ tendresse for Colonel Handscombe, yet the headmistress was more than happy to indicate when she did not agree with him, and Grace could not but admire her for that.

The colonel began to bang on about why the three big clubs in Rangoon – the Pegu, the Gymkhana and the Boat – had to ‘maintain standards’. He sluiced back his gin and Indian tonic, dug out an ebony case from his white linen jacket, offered cigarettes around, lit up a Lucky Strike and puffed out a cirrus of smoke.

‘This pressure for us to give everything on a plate to the Burmese, let alone the Indians and the Chinese, has to be resisted. We can’t wear our shoes in their pagodas. Fine. They can’t wear their native costumes in our clubs. They don’t want to come to our clubs anyway. But if they do, all we ask is for them to wear a suit and tie if they’re a chap or a proper dress if they’re a girl. What could be fairer than that, eh?’

Play dribbled on for a few more hands until Grace sensed that someone had entered the room behind her back.

‘Mrs Peckham!’ The colonel clapped his hands, a sea lion at the zoo reacting to the arrival of a bucket of fresh mackerel. Miss Furroughs’s face turned vinegar-sour. The newcomer, a brunette in her mid-thirties, significantly younger than the headmistress, was the original fourth hand for bridge. Grace shot up, offering to withdraw.

‘No, no, no, I couldn’t possibly deprive you of the pleasure, Miss–’ returned Mrs Peckham, her voice silken, eyes weighing up Grace coolly, the youngest woman in the Pegu lounge by a decade or more.

‘Collins,’ said Grace. ‘Miss Collins. But I really must give way. I have enjoyed myself enormously.’

‘You are most welcome to stay, Miss Collins,’ said Miss Furroughs. It sounded like an order.

‘Yes, do stay,’ said the fourth, whose name Grace had forgotten. She added: ‘Mrs Peckham’s husband is in the Royal Navy and he’s at sea.’

Colonel Handscombe blew his nose into his handkerchief while Mrs Peckham smiled woodenly, a medieval saint pierced by a red-hot poker.

‘I am most awfully sorry,’ said Grace, breaking the spell of unpleasantness, ‘but my father always used to say that too much pleasure is bad for the digestion. So, do take my seat Mrs Peckham, goodbye and thank you very much once again.’

Backing out of the bridge room, she nodded at Mister Stripes up on the wall, whose glass eye stared on, unperturbed. She turned and picked up speed, flew down the stairs and skipped across the lawn, out of the club and onto the street, bent-double, cackling with glee. The morning mists had gone so there was still an hour or two left to walk around before the suffocating heat of the middle of the day made any exertion horrible, and Grace set out to indulge herself in the sights, sounds and smells within Rangoon from which the walls of the club sought to protect her.

In tight white bodices and longyis, two Burmese women floated towards Grace, clouds painted on porcelain. Drifting towards the great river, she passed high walls hiding lush gardens, and was hailed by bicycle rickshaws tingling their bells. No thank you.

A rich Chinese businessman piloting a brand new Mercedes with fusspot care slowed to offer her a lift. No thank you. A Sikh taxi-driver driving an antique Ford crawled beside her, imploring her.

‘Oh, leave me alone.’ Shaking her head, Grace walked on. From their entreaties, her decision to walk in the heat of the day appeared eccentric, no, peculiar, for a European lady. She didn’t give a tuppenny damn.

A screeching cut the air. Rounding the corner came an ox-cart, the racket made by wheels spinning in wooden axles without benefit of oil, carrying a grand piano half-cloaked by a grey blanket, thick bandy mahogany legs peeping out from under the cloth. The driver, hidden by a straw hat, brushed a whip against the left-hand side of the lead ox and the cart turned down a lane towards a white-picketed house underneath a flame tree.

One hundred yards on, to the west, the stupa of the great Shwedagon temple rose up above the city, sunlight, blisteringly bright, bouncing off its golden spire, a cathedral to an alien God.

A pony, pitifully thin, plodded by, pulling a sweeper’s cart, trawling a host of flies and a great stink past branches sagging with blossom, air-bursts of jasmine and magnolia. For Grace, that moment fixed the smell of British Rangoon in her mind’s nose: perfumed blooms, stinking dung. Pye-dogs yapped at her from behind a ten-foot-high fortress made of cactus and bamboo. Startled, a little jumpy, she hurried on.

Grace heard what she thought was the sound of a ship’s engine, a mechanical rhythm, rising and falling. She saw statues of half-lion, half-men, red-eyed and gilded, tongues lolling, guarding a shrine housing a Buddha, his mouth adorned with ruby-red lipstick, spirals of incense rising in the air, the prayer wheels whizzing away. The sound Grace had supposed came from a ship’s engine was really a dozen or so of the faithful, humming a chant.

An ancient Hpoongyi – a monk, shaven-headed, clothed in saffron – leaned against a stick and bowed with ornate politeness, but a younger monk hurried by, staring at her and, as he passed, spat on the ground by her sandals. Grace was astonished and hurt.

The old monk called after the pupil in Burmese querulously and, in perfect English, said ‘Good morning, Miss.’ He bowed again: ‘I am sorry for the rudeness of my pupil. He is young and foolish.’

‘Why is he so angry with me?’ Grace said. ‘Because I am a female?’

‘No. Because you are British. They think the British are like a house-guest who has overstayed his welcome.’

‘And what do you think, sir?’ she asked.

‘That one should not be rude to a guest.’ The old monk smiled, and bowed deeply for a third time, and shuffled slowly off.

Beyond the Buddhist temple were wooden godowns, warehouses for rice, tea and rubber, a mosque for the Mussulmans, mostly from the Indian minority, a teak sawmill buzzing furiously, a Chinese temple, and shacks where you could buy a ball of rice and a cup of sweet green tea for a few annas, a fraction of the ten rupees for high tea at the Strand Hotel. A few yards back from the river’s edge lay a chaos of stalls, where hawkers sold monkeys gnawing at the bars of their cages, fishwives offered stinking cuts of river dolphin, mudfish and the huge-headed trevally. By sacks of saffron, turmeric and ironwood, traders stood chatting, smoking cheroots.

The meat ponged to high heaven, dripped blood and was covered by a fizzing blanket of flies. What kind of animal carcass, Grace wondered, had these strips of flesh come from? Snake? Monkey? Elephant?

Close to a stall noisy with squawking chickens, tethered upside down, a Burmese woman was selling a curl of amber imprisoning a tiny bee. The woman said something incomprehensible and a young Burman, passing by, stopped to translate. Earnest, fresh-faced, slight, he sported a careworn black suit in the western style, wire-frame glasses and was holding a book in his hairless right hand. His hair was slicked back and oiled. The Burman translated the amber seller’s price into beautifully enunciated but slightly old-fashioned, Victorian English. It was impossibly high – two month’s wages at the school – and Grace both wanted it very much and knew that she could not afford it.

The Burman addressed Grace solemnly: ‘She says: “My Honoured Lady, you must buy the bee. It is fifty million years old, as old and beautiful as you are young and beautiful.”’ Blushing, Grace handed over a fistful of rupees to the amber seller, knowing that she could now barely afford to eat for months. The woman fastened the bee around her neck with a leather string. School dinners, grim as they were, would ensure she would not starve.

Turning to thank her translator, she wondered whether he might be able to help her answer some of the questions that teemed in her mind. He bowed slightly as Grace reached out, accidentally touching him, stroking his face. Startled, he dropped his book. Grace, quicker than him, bent to pick it up, turned it over to examine the front cover. On it, a swastika.

‘Mein Kampf?’

‘Heil Hitler,’ he replied.

‘Are you enjoying it?’

‘Yes. It is the future of the world.’

‘Have you tried Pride and Prejudice? Same themes, but not half as tiresome. Heil bloody Hitler, indeed.’

The Burman scuttled off pretty damn fast, almost knocking over a butcher carrying a roasted pig on a long skewer. The amber seller eyed Grace coldly, as if to say: ‘Why fall out over a book?’

Alarmed that she might have stumbled on a Nazi Fifth Column, but also wary that she might be making too much of a trivial incident, Grace paid a visit to Government House, a fairy-tale castle in pink and white stone, the citadel of British rule. People called it St Pancras. An Indian servant in turban and silk cummerbund showed her to a waiting room, decorated by a pencil-thin lizard clamped to the wall above two black-and-white photographs, one of a fat Beefeater, the other of a thin king, Edward VIII, the last but one. To this corner of the Empire, news ambled on flat feet.

After an ocean of time, an extraordinarily tall Englishman entered, sporting a white shirt and knee-length white shorts, making him looking even more ridiculous than nature had intended. At the sight of the lone female, the half-baby-giraffe, half-man gulped, announced in a gravelly voice that his name was Mr Peach, and gulped again. He had a floppily cut head of very dark hair and, if you squinted in poor light, might just pass as handsome-ish. But he behaved as though she might bite him at any second, fear mixed with hopeless longing. In her driest, most matter-of-fact tone, she explained meeting the Burman in the market down by the river.

‘Mein Kampf, you say?’

‘Oh dear. Would you care for a cup of tea?’

Even as the outlying marches of the British Empire were being threatened by the Axis Powers, some things would not change.

She would rather run away, but she was damned thirsty and a tiny bit intrigued. She nodded in a bored sort of way. He rang a bell and when a servant appeared ordered tea for two and some cake, if they had any, if it would be no trouble.

‘Can you describe this chap?’ asked Mr Peach.

‘A Burmese man, around average height, wearing a black suit, very worn, and a white shirt. Glasses. Oiled hair.’ He jotted down the details in a small navy blue notebook.

‘Any distinguishing features?’

‘Oh.’ He stared at her and gulped again and then gazed out of the window.

‘I’m terribly sorry. It’s not a very good description.’

‘I didn’t catch his name.’

‘No. Your name, Miss. Your address and place of work, if any.’

While he wrote her details down, he coiled and uncoiled his fabulously long legs and she suspected that he was trying very hard not to glance at the top of her blouse, and failing. He finished writing. Another pause, painfully long. Grace was about to get up to leave when the tall man spoke.

‘He’s almost certainly a member of the Black Dragon Society. These chaps are Burmese nationalists who side with Nazi Germany and the Japs. They’re not proper Nazis. I don’t think they’d know the difference between the SS and the Boy Scouts. They just want to see the back of us. Many of them have sworn an oath: “I will free Burma heart and soul without flinching from my duty even if my bones are crushed and my skin flayed.”’

‘Fanatics?’

‘I’m afraid so. Usually the hard core dress in local costume, sarongs and the like. They smoke cheroots, not Lucky Strikes, their women are encouraged to boycott western clothes. In their hair they wear scarlet dak blossoms or stars of jasmine.’

‘That sounds beautiful.’

The tea arrived but no cake. ‘Shall I be mother? We’ll log your chap. He stands out in that he was wearing a western suit. One of them pretending to be one of us. That makes him interesting. He might pop up somewhere else.’

‘I just thought I should tell someone.’

The pencil-lizard skittered a foot or two across the wall, and then froze.

‘Mr Peach, may I ask you a question?’

‘Yes, of course.’

‘Why is there a “western dress only” rule in the clubs?’

‘Back in Queen Victoria’s day, when we conquered Burma and chased away their king, our chaps sauntered around holy temples in boots. A great insult. As time has gone on, the Burmese have insisted that if we visit their temples we must take our shoes off. Tit-for-tat, they can’t come to our temples – the clubs, the Pegu and the Gymkhana and the Boat Club – without wearing western suits and frocks. Burmese nationalists have taken to wearing their native dress as a political statement. It’s war by dressing up. Some say the rule against native dress is a not very subtle way of saying “No Burmese welcome”.’

‘What do you think, Mr Peach?’

‘Personally?’

‘It’s a not very subtle way of saying “No Burmese welcome”.’

‘May I ask another question?’

‘Can the Japanese fly?’

‘They don’t have wings.’

‘No, I mean I was told that the Japanese have a defect in their inner ear, which means they can’t fly planes.’

‘Balls. Who told you that?’

‘A gentleman in the Pegu Club.’

‘A Colonel Handscombe.’

‘Colonel Handscombe.’ He looked away, then turned his gaze back to her and said flatly: ‘He’s my boss.’

Mr Peach looked so sheepish, she couldn’t stop herself bursting out laughing.

Another long pause. ‘The Japanese can fly. They bombed Nanking, killing thousands. They’ve pretty much bombed every nationalist-held aerodrome in China.’ He paused. ‘As it happens, I’m trying to learn Japanese at the moment.’

‘To pass the time.’ A reply so transparently nonsensical that she could not help being a little intrigued.

‘No one learns Japanese to pass the time, Mr Peach.’

He said something in a soft lilt, strange tones rising and falling, and then translated:

‘One fallen flower returning to the branch?

‘A pale butterfly.’

Grace asked, ‘Poetry?’

‘They call it a haiku.’

‘That’s beautiful.’

‘Colonel Handscombe is, well, he–’

‘Is a crashing bore on the subject of the Japanese.’

‘Yes,’ Mr Peach said. ‘But a bore is not necessarily wrong.’ In his earnest deliberation on the matter, she perceived a deep sense of fair play, both exasperating and quietly admirable. She raised one eyebrow a fraction, signalling mild disagreement.

‘He – we – should be worried about the current lot in power in Tokyo. They’re pretty ghastly, frankly, and are in bed with Hitler. But the people, the culture are quite different. And the language has a rare beauty, an economy of expression. What did you make of the Pegu?’ he asked.

‘The liveliest thing in it is the tiger.’

‘The tiger’s stuffed.’

‘Yes, Mr Peach, I noticed.’

The heavy melancholy lifted, his solemn, older-than-his-years expression changed, his face breaking into a tentative grin. He made to add something, then hesitated.

‘Go on, Mr Peach.’

‘I’d rather you didn’t tell anyone this, Miss Collins, and in particular Colonel Handscombe.’

‘No, I absolutely won’t.’

‘But I rather think these Burmese chaps might have a point. Not being on the same side as the Nazis and the Japanese military, obviously, but if you’re the Burmese, you might not be very impressed with the British Empire.’

The fan wafted the cloying air this way and that. Grace waited for an explanation.

‘In 1886,’ Mr Peach said, ‘we deposed King Thibaw, forcing him into exile. They have not forgotten that they used to be the masters of their own land.’

Fishing out his notebook, he flicked through a few pages: ‘Listen to King Thibaw’s lament to his late father, King Mindon: “The golden-footed lord of the white elephant, master of a thousand gold umbrellas, owner of the Royal peacocks, lord of the sea and of the world, whose face was like the sun, always smoked the Esoof cheroot while meditating on his treatment of the bull-faced, earth-swallowing English’’.’

The notebook snapped shut.

‘The poor king was reduced to advertising cheroots. These are a proud people. The Burmese didn’t ask to be ruled by us. We invaded, deposed their king. They resent our presence here very much. But it’s worse than that. I’m sorry- I hope I am not boring you?’

‘Not at all, Mr Peach. I was driven to distraction in the Pegu Club. You are not boring me in the slightest. Do carry on.’

People, men in particular, told her that she was an excellent listener. There was something, they said, about her beauty – the freshness of it, the lack of artifice – that brought forth confidences. Or was it just that men liked staring at her and had to fill in the awkward silences somehow?

‘We say we are on a civilising mission, but there are about eight thousand Europeans in Rangoon, the lords and ladies of all Burma. With a tiny number of exceptions, the Burmese have been excluded from all our clubs, gymkhanas, social events. There is a pretence of power being handed over to the Burmese politicians, but everything that matters is still handled by the Governor, from Government House, from here. I have a friend, a professor, an Englishman, who speaks the most beautiful classical Burmese, knows more about this country than any Englishman alive, married to a Burmese lady of real charm and accomplishment, who studied at the Sorbonne. And because he is married to a Burmese who chooses to wear national dress, my professor friend and his wife are not welcome in all the grand European clubs in Rangoon. To be accepted, they have to wear our clothes in their capital. A deliberate humiliation. The point is, Miss Collins, the Burmese hate us and they want us out of their country. That’s why the chap you met was carrying Mein Kampf. To the Burmese, my enemy’s enemy is my friend.’

‘They don’t realise that my enemy’s enemy can also be my enemy.’

He gulped again, a sign that he had something more on his mind.

‘Please do carry on, Mr Peach.’

‘What I have to say is in confidence.’

‘Trust me.’

‘It does not paint our way of doing things in a good light, I’m afraid.’

‘Carry on.’

‘Very well. You’re most kind. Last year a British officer, Lieutenant Fortescue, ginned up to his eyeballs, drove from the Gymkhana Club to hurry back to his regiment. He raced through a red light, crashing into a car carrying two Burmese ladies. They went flying, rolled into a ditch and were badly hurt. The older lady, a Chinese Burman, suffered a fractured skull, her niece broke her pelvis, rupturing her bladder. The case came before a young magistrate and he applied the law, finding Fortescue guilty, jailing him. There was an almighty row. People said that British officers shouldn’t be jailed because of a silly accident, and the Burmese can’t drive anyway. The officer appealed against his sentence. Everybody and his dog turned up for the appeal. The newspapers, a whole gang of officers from this chap’s regiment, their girlfriends, their aunties. The senior appeal judge for Lower Burma took about five minutes before he freed him. I’m quoting from memory, but the appeal judge said: “I see no reason why an officer, whether he happens to be a British officer or a Burman holding the King-Emperor’s Commission, for a piece of isolated negligence, however gross, ought to be deprived of a useful career in the public service by serving a term of rigorous imprisonment’’.’

‘I see,’ said Grace.

‘Really? I fail to understand why an army officer guilty of gross criminal negligence should expect to get away with it just because he’s British.’

‘No, sorry, that’s wrong.’

‘The judge made the point that he would apply his interpretation of the law equally, whether the culprit be a British or a Burman officer.’

‘That does seem fair.’

‘There is no Burman officer in any regiment of the army.’

‘Ah. So, in reality, that’s not fair at all.’

‘No. In reality, the opposite of fair. After the appeal, Fortescue was treated like a hero and the junior magistrate was transferred out of his job and shunned. When he goes to the clubs, especially the Pegu, everyone falls silent until he leaves.’

‘I am that junior magistrate.’

‘I am very sorry to hear that, Mr Peach.’

He stared out of the window, lost in his own reflections. After a while, she stirred and he studied her again, and gulped.

‘I must be going, I’m afraid,’ said Grace.

‘Yes. Thank you very much for coming and thank you for the information.’

A Sikh guard bowed to her deeply as she left the pink and white castle and walked out on to the street. Grace wondered what kind of empire it was, if its very own guardians no longer believed in it?

The first letter inviting her to take afternoon tea with him arrived the following morning.

Stone spelt wealth in Burma, plain bricks meant some money and the poor made do with wood. The old schoolhouse at Bishop Strachan’s was brick, the rest – classrooms, offices, a three-storey dormitory for the girls and the little chapel – were made of teak on low wooden stilts, the buildings forming three sides of a square. The orphanage had been set up by a pious Victorian, a good man in a crowd of hypocrites, to give girls abandoned by their Burmese or Indian mothers and, of course, their adulterous British or American fathers, something of an education.

To Grace the school was a dead end, not remotely useful to the girls, not seriously of benefit for the war effort, badly paid – for the first time in her life money was becoming an issue because her father had lost ‘rather a lot on bonds and shares’ invested in Europe – and irrelevant for the future of these unwanted children.

After the school day was over, she set out for the headmistress’s office and tapped on her door.

‘Come! Miss Collins? What a pleasant surprise? How can I help?’

‘Miss Furroughs, I just wanted to have a word with you about…’ Grace’s courage started to sink, bow first. ‘…I just thought that… well…’

‘Go on, Miss Collins.’

‘…the syllabus, Miss Furroughs. It seems a little…’

‘…a little what?’

‘Old-fashioned. We are teaching the girls the correct way to curtsey, how to address a bishop, how to write a sonnet, how to memorise the six wives of Henry VIII: “divorced, beheaded, died…”’

‘Are you suggesting we change the curriculum, Miss Collins?’

‘Well, I thought that it might be useful to teach the girls something, perhaps, a little more modern, a little more practical, a little more about, say, Burma.’

The old woman’s face turned to flint.

‘How long have you been at Bishop Strachan’s, Miss Collins?’

‘Two months.’

‘Well, Miss Collins, I have been here two decades, since 1920, to be exact. And I would not dream of changing the syllabus. We teach the girls how to behave in polite society, as if they were in Regent Street. That is how we have struggled along in the past. And this is how we will continue in the future. Thank you, for your observations, Miss Collins, but if you forgive me I have some administrative work to attend to.’

Cast down, Grace retreated to her room, little more than a closet, housing a single bed, a chair and a side-table, a wash-basin and a long shelf, on it a few novels, a silver hairbrush and a black and white photograph of her mother in an ebony frame, a woman of rare beauty whom Grace had never known. On the side-table beside her chair was a stack of the girls’ exercise books.

Running a hand through her hair, limp in the suffocating air, she began going through their homework, here and there tut-tutting at bad spelling or ticking a sweetly-written sentence. Marking the books seemed to Grace, in the great scheme of things, pointless. By her side was a copy of the Rangoon Times. Yet more news of the Nazis rolling up the map of Europe, of ships sunk, of battles for places she’d never heard of, lost. Time oozed by, but suddenly it was pitch black outside.

Kneeling in front of her bed, she prayed for victory, for her father, for the children she was teaching – God Help Them. She switched off the light, stepped out of her clothes and, naked, clambered underneath her mosquito net into bed.

The slow wet heat of Burma lay on her, as thick and prickly as a woollen blanket. She lay sleepless, writhing this way and that, guilty that she was playing no part in the great battle being fought and lost in Europe. Grace wanted desperately to do her bit yet her absent father had managed to place her out of harm’s way in this over-baked, stinking backwater. Good people were dying and she was doing nothing of consequence to help them, to defeat the evil that was swallowing up the world.

Nearby a pye-dog yelped and, much further off, a train sloughed through the night. The slow rhythm of teaching helped soothe Grace. Geography had always been her best subject and she had a knack for making it interesting. She shunned the map of Europe, it being full of traps. But she explained, as best as she could, how the earth formed and the seas rose and fell and the ice came and went and why volcanoes boiled up and rain fell down. They listened and absorbed. In other lessons, Romeo and Juliet still had a power to move young hearts, and her classes lapped up the Tudors and Stuarts, grew fascinated by the chopping off of heads, wooed by Keats, dulled by geometry – eeyuck – laughed out loud at Voltaire, and listened, rapt, to the stories of the giants of medicine, astronomy and exploration. Occasionally – or, especially during maths - the girls tempted her off the syllabus and asked questions of affecting simplicity: what is England like? Can you eat snow? Have you met the King?

‘It rains all the time’, ‘yes’ and ‘not yet’ were by no means good enough, and she lost herself utterly, talking about the colours of an English autumn, or recounting a snowball fight in Sussex or the mild affection the British had for a King who, the complete opposite of Mr Hitler, could barely speak a sentence without the most dreadful stammer but, unlike Mr Hitler, sought to talk politely about other people. The school bell clanged, breaking her reverie. Thirty young faces, smiling to themselves. They had tricked her away from the hypotenuse and the cosine, yet again, and she burst out laughing: ‘you naughty terrors!’ It became the catchphrase they used against her, to be sung out by the girls whenever they suspected they had the edge on her, which was more often than not.

Kneeling by her bed one morning, during the daily ritual of washing herself with a jug of water, a moment of realisation – she’d fallen in love with this hopeless school teaching dead lessons to black-balled children in the back end of beyond. Teaching her forgotten orphans, abandoned and denied by their parents, was part of it, part of the war against ignorance and hate. Marking essays, ticking the correct use of the apostrophe, taking off marks for poor punctuation, was her part in the fight against the men who marched in step; semi-colons and sonnets against tanks and Stukas.

True, Grace disliked how ‘the cream’ – pretty rancid cream, in her book - of European society in Rangoon treated the children at close hand: sly looks as the school crocodile of half-castes passed by, the dearth of invitations for the children to meet with other Christian schools, how the girls from Bishop Strachan’s were placed at the back of the side aisle for services at the Anglican cathedral. But the children were a blessing, sometimes troubled but more often smart, loving and lively, and she relished the delicious irony of implanting in them everything she herself had been taught by the hand-maidens of British rule: every grace, every nuance of fine breeding, the superstructure, she had begun to suspect, of a cardboard empire.

The more Grace loved teaching, the more she had in common with Miss Furroughs, the less starchy her headmistress became towards her. The flint began to soften.

On a glorious Friday evening in 1941, after Easter but before the monsoon broke, Miss Furroughs popped her head around Grace’s door after school and invited her around to the headmistress’s study for just a small glass of sherry. They drank till two in the morning, emptying two and a half bottles, hooting with glee at the folly and foibles of British rule in Burma, of teaching, of men. From that time on, Grace woke up every morning with something she had never had before – a purpose in life – to give ‘her children’ the very best possible education they could enjoy as the world hurtled to hell in a dung-cart.

Time-tables, earthquakes, Macbeth, igneous, metamorphic and she never could remember, French irregular verbs, A Midsummer Night’s Dream, amo, amas, amat. School life treacled by.

One evening, as the grim year of 1941 was drawing to a close, Grace was taken to see The Road to Zanzibar at the New Excelsior Cinema in Rangoon by Mr Peach. Grace had no idea why she had said yes to Mr Peach’s pleading: boredom at refusing him for the thousandth time, she supposed. Or a failure to come up with ever more incredible excuses as to why she couldn’t spare the time. Bing Crosby’s tunes were catchy, Bob Hopes’s jokes – ‘I’m so nervous my bed is still shaking… It’s a snake’ – dire but somehow annoyingly cheering, Mr Peach’s palm on her bare knee soft, wet and not so terrible that she had to remove it. The moment the film was over and the credits started to roll, he grasped her hand, blustering: ‘Don’t call me Mr Peach. Herbert… Bertie…’

‘I shall do no such thing. Mr Peach, I really must be going…’

‘How about a drink? Champagne?’ And, almost without hope: ‘Cocoa?’

Blurting out some nonsense, she made her excuses to Mr Peach, the word ‘Bertie’ never crossing her lips. The aisle leading to the exit was clogged with customers, moving absurdly slowly, as if from a well-attended funeral. A champion hurdler at school, she took off, skittering over the banks of seats, astonishingly fast. He tried to make chase, but his long giraffe-like limbs got entangled in the flip-back seats, generating ribald remarks from people in the queue, and she was out of the door and into the night before he had got to Row K. Tucking herself into a cycle rickshaw, she laughed gaily at the absurdity, but also the sweetness, of a date with Mr Peach. The rickshaw raced to the school, where she knew Miss Furroughs would be bent over a Jane Austen or one of the Bronte sisters, endlessly re-reading, and draining yet another small bottle of dry sherry.

Instead, the headmistress was sitting in her armchair, staring through her fingers clumsily masking her face.

‘My God, what’s happened?’

No answer, only a muted sobbing.

‘Miss Furroughs, please tell me, what on earth has happened?’

‘Haven’t you heard?’ She stared at Grace, her eyes red-raw.

‘No. I was at the cinema. The Road to Zanzibar.’

‘The wireless… the Japanese have bombed Pearl Harbour. The BBC are reporting that the Americans and the British have no choice but to go to war against Japan. This war is spreading all over the world.’

Head bent, her delivery broken, staccato. ‘The last war, that was supposed to be the war to end all wars. That was why they all died. I had a lover, you know. I was twenty-five, not then a spinster, when I met him. He was forty, unmarried, a chaplain, Church of England. Such a good man. We met in Dorset, fossicking, at Easter in 1917. Had to return to his regiment in Flanders. On his next leave, we were planning to get married. We even booked the church. Killed at Passchendaele. He died so all this nonsense would never happen again. And now it is happening all over again. So he died for nothing.’

Without expression, she repeated her last few words.

Grace leant down to stroke her grey hair.

‘I think Mr Gandhi is right,’ said the headmistress. At the Pegu Club, over bridge, such talk was High Treason. ‘War is wrong, it’s just stupid and wrong.’

She began to sob, unbearably. To drown her crying, Grace found herself talking, opening herself up as Miss Furroughs had.

‘I never knew my mother,’ said Grace. ‘She died in childbirth. Father was – is – high-up in Whitehall, something in the Treasury. He sends cheques and short letters on my birthdays, loving me coldly, from afar. I was brought up by a succession of nannies, then placed in a small boarding school on the South Downs. I hated it. The winds swept through the dorm. Icicles in the lavatory in winter. I was achingly lonely. Shortly after the war started, Father used his clout and got me on a ship bound for Canada. I had just turned eighteen. I had never been at sea before and was as sick as a pig. I just wanted to die. The only place where I could fight the sea-sickness was out on deck but it was bitterly cold so I was wrapped up, dressed up like the Michelin Man in duffel coat and jumpers. The cold cut you to the bone but better that, than the stink of people being sick on D Deck.

‘One night, very late, I was shivering so much I was about to turn in, when, underfoot, I felt a shudder. Deep, bass notes coming up through the soles of my feet, transmitted up my legs, then my spine, drumming into my brain. I hurried inside and began climbing down to my deck but had only gone one flight when the ship’s lights flickered, on and off, then died. Blackness. It was utterly terrifying. I turned around and began to feel my way up. The ship started to list. Climbing up that stairwell must have only taken a few seconds but it felt like years. I had to put my whole weight behind opening the door and then I almost fell out on deck, the sea at a crazy angle, the whitecaps and troughs almost above me, the salt-spray whipping into my face. Star shells lit up the night, fireworks. A destroyer zig-zagging towards us, a great white surf foaming as her bow sliced through the waves.

‘Boom! Boom! Depth charges mushroomed ahead, sending great fountains of water into the air, soaking me. A klaxon hooted and a man’s voice, so calm, as if he was reading the football scores, came over the Tannoy: “All hands on deck. Abandon ship.”

‘More people were coming out on deck. An old man in pyjamas asked me, “Have you seen Mabel?” Ropes dangled down. A lifeboat swinging on davits, an Indian seaman grabbing me, pushing me into a boat which rose up then fell down with the rise and crash of the waves. At school, they had drummed into us all that stuff about the British stiff upper lip. Well, that turned out to be nonsense. The British, some at least, weren’t selfless, but selfish, disgracefully so.’

The old lady was still sobbing mechanically.

‘I had never been so cold as in that lifeboat. A lurching, freezing darkness, hour after hour of it. When the moon came out we hoped for rescue. Instead, a great explosion. A tanker, half a mile away, had been hit. Small black figures, silhouetted by orange fire, crawled over the tanker’s rails and leapt. The sea was burning. They were boiled alive. I will never forget the screams. Long after the tanker had gone, the oil on the surface continued to blaze, making night, day. From the lifeboat, we could hear a few survivors cry for help. We tried to row towards them. A big wave lifted the lifeboat and I could see them, bobbing up and down. The destroyer reappeared and surged past us, curving left, then swerving right. We shouted for them to stop. It did not slow down. It did not stop. The seaman next to me explained: “If she slows down to pick up those men from the tanker, even for ten seconds, she’ll be a sitting duck for the U-boats. So they don’t stop, ever. And everyone knows that.”

‘And then a man’s voice, as clear as a bell over the slap of the waves, “Taxi! Taxi!” For a dying man, a good joke.’

The old lady spoke for the first time in what seemed like hours: ‘Yes. That was brave of him.’

‘One felt so proud,’ said Grace. ‘By the time we managed to row to the men in the sea it was dawn. We called out: “Hello! Anyone there? Anyone alive?” No answer. The sea was covered with bodies, and not one of them was alive.’

The headmistress exhaled a long, deep sigh.

‘So, Miss Furroughs, I am very sorry for your loss. But the people who died in the boiling sea? And that chap who called out, “Taxi! Taxi!” They didn’t want this war. I fear Mr Gandhi is wrong. Putting our hands up and surrendering to Mr Hitler and now the Japanese is not the proper thing to do. I’m afraid that we’re going to have to fight, and fight like tigers.’

The only sound was the tick of the clock in the headmistress’s study. Grace ran her fingers through the old lady’s hair, mothering the woman old enough to be her mother. She hummed to herself the Bing number from The Road to Zanzibar, ‘You Lucky People, You’.

Try as she might, she could not get it out of her head.