LITMIR.BIZ

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side. After a while, crashing noises sounded from the nearest tree. A shadow fell outside the bivouac. One of the cats was standing there.

      Because we had camped so near to the tree for purposes of concealment, and because we had arrived in the dark the previous night, we had not dug slit trenches as usual. Our slender cover was propped up on poles in order to make it easier to enter and leave the tent. The big cat strolled in. I lay there, resting on one elbow, afraid to move. The cat came closer. It looked in at me. Only the net separated our faces. Neither of us spoke. Then it walked out the rear of the tent and was gone.

      What communication could I have had with it?

      That camp remains in memory my favourite. It was one of the few sites where there were Burmese nearby. They had not fled at our approach. They had harvested the crop on the field by whose perimeter we stayed and were busy threshing grain while we were there. We watched the operation with interest, talked to them, called to the women, and offered them cigarettes. Beyond the field of stubble was a grain field, the crop very much broken down, and beyond that lay a canal, with low-growing blossom trees on its banks and nine inches of water flowing in it. The whole neighbourhood was attractive, with small white pagodas here and there like silver pepper-pots set randomly on a lawn.

      But it was water that was the attraction. Water we had not seen for six weeks at that time. Sweat and dust alone had kept our bodies clean. It was possible to lie in the canal and be almost totally submerged in water. All the relief went for a bathe that first day. Thereafter, they considered that nine inches of water was too tame, and so I went alone, accompanied only by Sid Feather’s rhesus monkey, Minnie. Minnie ran beside me on her long lead like a dog. In the water, she would enjoy a swim and then come and perch on my shoulder to dry herself. I lay there prone, watching a busy kingfisher which fished in the water from one of the low trees. The sun burned overhead, war was miles away. I communed with nature.

      The trouble with communing with nature is that she does not commune back. One day, when returning through the flattened cereal crop from the canal, I almost stepped on a great snake, straw coloured, basking in the sun. It reared up to strike. Minnie immediately scaled the nearest tree, which happened to be me, and stood on the top of my head, screaming furiously and throwing handfuls of my hair at the snake.

      Perhaps Minnie saved the day. The snake did not strike. It suddenly made off, shaking out its long coils. I watched it thrash its way through the burnished stalks. It was six or more feet long. It made its way rapidly across the field. Shaken, I walked back to camp. Minnie remained clinging to my ears until we were in safer surroundings.

      The fear of snakes always haunted us. Army training in India taught us that the first thing we did on waking was lean out of bed and tip our boots upside down, in order to eject any nasties which might have lodged there during the night. It was a habit which took years to break, even in relatively scorpion-free England.

      Although I never became fond of the army, I found a developing passion for the natural world, that great green system which encompassed us. It could bring my heart up from my boots. Burma is a varied country, by no means all jungle as some imagine. Its variety was beautiful and the Burmese appeared to have lived in harmony with its variety, embellishing it with their pagodas, and not overwhelming it – as India was overwhelmed – with humankind. But the Burmese had by and large vanished, taking cover like rabbits under the wing of war. We entered their buildings, moodily looking for souvenirs and poking about, rifles in hand, in the manner of invading soldiery. Some of the wooden houses were enchanting. I remember one in particular, with a verandah contained behind an ornamental rail. Of the four stilts on which it stood, only three remained. Inside, all was as it had been. Although chairs remained in place, everything listed to starboard, like a sinking ship.

      In this surreal landscape, the British were surreal objects. The ethos of the Forgotten Army was to look as wild as possible. We wore trousers with puttees and boots, to keep out insects, and bush hats. Our torsoes were mahogany brown, our backsides alabaster white. It was the custom to tie bits of the coloured signal scarves dropped with our airborne rations round our hats to serve as puggarees, and to grow our hair long. ‘In the depths of the Burmese jungle lived a strange white race …’ For me, this costume remained a kind of dressing up; for the older members of the army, it had become second nature. Many of them described themselves as puggle. It was the sun, the heat, the awful food, they’d tell you.

      The maddest in ‘S’ Relief was Steve Dutt. It was rumoured that his father was a general; Steve was just a private and an orderly. A sweet-natured man, he was never heard to raise his voice in conversation. He would sit about, listening to our talk, smiling, stroking his moustache. His recreation was to drill himself as if he were a platoon. On these occasions, he put on a sergeant-major’s voice.

      ‘Steve Dutt, Steve Dutt, harten-shun. As you were. Wait for it. Steve Dutt, harten-SHUN. Saloope arms. By the right, quick – wait for the order, Dutt. Quick – MARCH. Ep, ep, ep, right, ep. Let’s see you swing that arm. Plenty of bullshit. Keep in line.

      ‘Steve Dutt, Ri-ight TURN. Chin up. Look to your front, man. Harbout TURN. Ep, ep, ep, right, ep.’

      And so on. True, we all on occasions drilled ourselves, but it was Steve Dutt who drilled himself continually, for a half-hour at a time, up and down in whatever clear ground there was. We would hear him at night, outside the bivouacs. No one thought anything of it.

      ‘By the right, number. One, two, three, four, five – six. As you were. Wake up, Dutt, you know what comes after five, don’t you? Dutt, by the right, number. One, two, three, four, five, SIX, seven, eight, nine, ten. Pick up your dressing. Squad, diss – I want to see you smartly away. Diss-MISS.’

      Then he would come in. ‘Sergeant put me through it today,’ he’d say cheerfully, lighting up a cigarette.

      A few of us in ‘S’ Relief had small lanterns. We would sit and chat in the entrance of someone’s bivvy after dark. We spoke our own lingo of English and fractured Urdu. The conversation would often turn to London. There were frequent arguments about which number bus ran through Cockfosters, or where it went after it left the High Street.

      My mates were homesick, and would talk about ‘our mum’ doing this or that, or ‘my old woman’ doing this or that, or how they went down to see the Spurs play every Saturday. Their small home worlds were continually resurrected. Homesickness was something I never felt. The present was too vivid.

      Another favourite topic was how forgotten we were in this unearthly part of the world, and how we never featured in the news. It was the rule to find nothing good about overseas. To declare that one felt passionately about Burma would have been to invite ostracism, or else the scornful, ‘Wait till you’ve got a bit of service in.’

      The man I was most fond of in ‘S’ Relief, after Bert Lyons, was Ron Grade. Ron was a slow-spoken farmer from Pinner way. One of his eyes was beyond his control and would wander about in the course of conversation. Ron was the only man with a camera; perhaps it was a sign of the interest he took in the world for which the others cared little.

      Ron never ran out of film. He seemed to photograph everything, dead Japs, distant landscapes, ‘S’ Relief in transit. It must have been his roving eye. The few snaps I have of those times come from Ron’s camera. He photographed us when at last we reached the Mu river. So delighted was ‘S’ Relief by the charm of running water that Sid Feather drove us to bathe every time we were off duty.

      Since the spirit of Romanticism is connected with ruin and destruction, the Mu site must be one of the most romantic places to choose for a swim. Two railway bridges had once crossed the river at this point, a low wooden bridge and a grander one, metal on sturdy brick piers. Both bridges had been blown up by the British in their retreat from Mandalay. Both had been blown up with engines and rolling stock on them, so that the invading Jap should have no use of them.

      The wooden bridge had disappeared – swept downstream or eaten by ants. What remained to mark the spot was a small tank engine, only half-submerged by the river in its shrunken dry season state.

      The greater bridge had left greater remains. Two stout double piers had not fallen in the doubtless hasty explosions,

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