A glance in a shop window brings back haunting memories of a little girl’s wartime escape form the Japanese.
A flash of colour in the window caught my eye, and I turned to stare in disbelief. Incredibly, after years of searching, there they were…and in this of all places! Half a world away – yet, in a sense, where it had all begun. And ended. Half a lifetime later – but with all that had happened, light years distant…not just 40 years on, but certainly "far and asunder".
A little thing… but to me, not just a pair of rather ordinary, though colourful, sandals. They meant far, far more. It was as if I'd found a small, inexplicable, but vital part of myself – a part which I’d thought had gone forever. These were larger, of course, with high fashion, elegant heels. The others had been a child's...but the colours were the same rainbow combination of reds, blues and golds in fine strips of leather.
My eyes stung and my mind raced back to the events that had changed my life...and the lives of millions: events that had burned themselves into my then child’s mind with the intensity and indelibility of a branding iron...to be tucked away in some dark corner of my brain and buried with my lost childhood in a dozen unmarked graves in the wild places of a distant, now alien, half-forgotten land.
I had turned seven when the breath-taking, bicycle-powered Japanese advance brought the armies of the Emperor up the Malay Peninsula into Burma and the order came to "get out".
Death and destruction were all around us, and had touched the family. During the first bombing of Rangoon on Christmas Eve, 1941 – just 17 days after Pearl Harbour - a much loved and admired grandfather had been killed, or presumed killed. His house had received a direct hit. No trace of him or his servants could be found in the pile of rubble that remained. Grandpa, a bearded old sea captain with merry ways who’d called me his "li'l ole mon", whose intense blue eyes twinkled as he sang a seemingly endless repertoire of sea shanties to his HMV gramophone which need incessant winding...
"Where's Grandpa?" brought evasive answers.
Nobody told me my Grandpa was dead.
"No trace," they said, not noticing I was in the room. I had not been able to comprehend...where had Grandpa gone?
"To sleep," they said.
We were stationed farther up country on the Shan plateau and had also been subjected to bombing. In the end we had to spend days sheltering in the nearby jungle with the guns, picnic baskets, dogs and, as always, servants in attendance. Nights we spent in the family air-raid shelter with the wireless, listening to the news from Europe to the tune of high-flying bombers and the high-pitched whine and blast of bombs, falling and exploding...wheeee...booom...whee...boom...Japanese bombs.
Day and night they blasted away into my small child's mind: the sight of cook’s body – bloody and headless – part of the head here, the other, with the hair, plastered in blood, red on a wall. Too late. Whisked away from the gory sight – the strange, peculiar smell of blood stuck fast in my nostrils.
"What happened to Cook Mummy?"..."Cook is sleeping"..."When will he wake up?"..."Not for a long time"..."But why did his head come off?"..."Stop talking and go to sleep"...a long silence..."I know, Cook is dead! That is what dead is: with your head cut off and blood and stuff all over...and Grandpa is dead because you said Grandpa had gone to sleep too and wouldn't wake up for a long time...why won't you tell me truly where they've gone. Cook and Grandpa...why?"
"If we are all God's children, and if he loves us like a father, when why did he let Cook's head be cut off and Grandpa's and Aunt Maud's and...and"..."If you don't stop talking you're going to wake everyone up and your little sister will start crying...now you don't want that do you?" No, indeed. Perish the thought.
The memory remained, hidden, in the dark recesses of my mind and returned to haunt me, standing there as I was, 40 years on, "afar and asunder" – like Cook's head from his body...Cook, who had made the most delicious brandy snaps filled with fresh cream...who had taught me to recite: "One, two, three, four, five, once I caught a fish alive" in Hindustani...
Finally, the time came to leave. In the cold morning mountain air, we were loaded, women and children, onto open army lorries...standing room only...and only as much as you could carry in a rucksack on a small back, clutching a favourite rag doll...and without Daddy, because Daddy is a "Sambo" and must stay behind to "tidy things up"...and come later with "Uncles" Sam and Jack and the dogs, and "I'm sorry but you will have to give Daddy your dolly because we can only take what we can carry"..."But I can carry my baby myself Mummy, she’s so little and not a bit heavy and I left all my other dollies and things and all"...pleading...but to no avail.
Tears.
And more tears, for miles and miles, all the way down those twisting, turning, hairpin bends – down the road to Mandalay.
Meaningless, oh so meaningless, were the cans of food on the thin little back.
(Standing here in the street now, I wondered was it really only a rag doll? It hurt so much.)
Down the road to Mandalay in the dawn, to the thunder of bombers overhead...and lorry loads of the retreating Chinese army heading strangely to my child's mind, in the opposite direction...laughing at us.
Mandalay – hot in the April sun. Heat intensified by a suffocating dust storm, the stench and force of flaming oil installations and thick black smoke along the banks of the Irrawaddy. We spent the night on the floor of the crowded "dak" bungalow.
The Irrawaddy: muddy, fast-flowing, sweeping around the Flotilla Company’s flat-bottomed tied up against the steep bank with nothing but a few flimsy planks connecting ship to shore: planks which bent and shuddered with the weight of the panic-stricken refugees crowding to get on board, pushing...shoving...in a frenzy to escape the approaching menace...whatever it was.
Separated in the crowd from my mother, I wandered lost and frightened back and forth over that frail connection, searching and calling, the muddy water a mere false step or an impatient shove away.
Another nightmare...had my mother fallen in? What would I do if she had fallen in? Or had they gone and forgotten about me?
I called and called. Was I to lose her too? Grandpa...Cook...Nanny...Dolly. Daddy and now Mother?
Until the tears took over, and I was finally found by an equally distraught but relieved mother who gave me a thorough shaking for "not keeping up".
We spent ten days and nights on the hard, open-sided, crowded deck of the boat – a journey that normally only took three. My mother’s legs hung down the gangway, black and blue from kicks by the hundreds of fierce feet hurrying to and from the latrines below in case their precious "places" on the deck were lost.
We were "blacked out" at night and tied up along the bank for fear of being seen...heat and flies by day...mosquitoes and kicks by night...the stench of inadequately washed bodies and uncleaned latrines...and always hungry, because "we must be careful with what we've got, we don’t know how long it'll be before we get to India". I heard my mother crying softly in the black night…"Please don't cry Mummy, I'll take care of you"..."Ssh, darling...try to go to sleep. We mustn't wake your little sister."
How frightened she must have been, my brave, young, little mum! For the first time in her life – alone. Alone, with two small children more familiar with their nannies than with her; without the support system of husband, friends, family and servants, many of whom were also friends and considered part of the larger family.
Brave she was indeed. In the months, then years, of hardship that followed, she cried only when she thought she wasn't seen. I know she went without food so that we could eat- the fear of being caught by the Japanese driving and hardening her normally gentle spirit with determination. But now, 40 years on, she is dead – at just over four stone, a frail, bitter old lady, wrenched from her roots; for whom life became an intolerable burden, but whose courage and determination saw us through all those years ago.
Late on one of those blackened nights on that river boat, there was a fearful commotion: a scream, high pitched, shrill, followed by a splash, men's voices shouting, a child crying, a lone, timid lantern lit.
Even the jungle suddenly came alive, twittering and shrieking alarmingly, shattering the normally eerie stillness of the night.
A woman had fallen overboard.
They found the body next day and brought it back to the boat. It had been in the water for several hours – bloated, bluish, eyes staring, a thing that had once been a beautiful young woman. "Pushed," said some. "Jumped," or "Fell," said others. Did the Japs do this too?
"What’s wrong with her Mummy?"
"She fell overboard and was drowned. Now you see why I keep telling you to stay away from the sides of the boat!" Ah yes! The swirling, muddy water assumed yet a greater malevolence.
"Is drowned, dead?"
"Yes, stop asking so many questions and come away."
Just how many kinds of "dead" were there? If dead was to have your head cut off like Cook with blood and bits all over, then what sort of "dead" was this? No blood. No bits. All together. Together, and yet so still. So still, and oh so…ugly! Was "dead" always ugly?
They hastily built a funeral pyre on the bank with wood from the store kept for refueling the steamers. The body, now neatly dressed in a fresh sari, hair done, eyes closed with coins, face painted, making it even more grotesque to me, was placed atop the pile of logs. A "sadu", holy man, stripped to the waist, his lower half draped in dazzling white, face painted, set a blazing torch to the mound.
It roared into life, and soon became an inferno at the centre of which the body, now clothed in orange flames, slowly began to rise.
A sharp, collective intake of breath from the silent, watching crowd, as the now gruesomely mobile corpse moved into what appeared to be a sitting position. Men with long poles, lathis, beat the thing down.
The sight and sound of the crackling, roaring flames and the dull "thwack, thwack" as the poles beat the body down, nostrils assailed by the acrid smell of burning flesh, were mesmeric. What sort of “dead” was this? There was no answer.
We were making for the only airfield left operational in the far north at Myitkyina. United States Air Force planes, on their return from flights into China, made refueling stops en route to their base in India, transporting refugees as they did so. The longer we took to reach the aerodrome, the greater were our chances of being caught. Air raids on the towns and villages along the river were getting ever more frequent. The need for speed became crucial.
Instead, during a particularly grueling raid on a riverside town, we tied up, and here the crew finally abandoned ship. At Katha, we were still about 150 miles from our goal. Mother, frenzied but more determined than ever, ran around making inquiries.
There was a railway. But the only train running that day was one carrying troops, mostly the wounded remnants of a badly mauled British army heading north for evacuation.
We were smuggled on board, into the dark corner of a windowless wagon that held hay, mules, and goodness only knew what else, rustling and shuffling in the darkness. We had to be “very, very quiet because we don’t want to be found out,” but each time the train stopped and it stopped with unusual frequency, the groans and cries of severely wounded drifted in. as our benefactor checked to see if we were all right, whispered words – "gangrene," "Maggots," "amputate" – were exchanged between the adults.
"What’s a gang-green, Mummy?"
"It’s something that happens to cuts when they get dirty and go back, but don’t talk – go to sleep or someone will find us and put us off the train."
Gang-green…gangareen? Did you go green all over? Why maggots? And what was “amputate”? What was it all about anyway? Why were bombs to make people dead? Why? So many questions…so few answers.
During the night I woke. The train had stopped again, and from nearby someone was screaming. What were they doing to the gang-green?
Quite suddenly the screaming stopped. The train got underway once more. Visions of green maggots danced in my head as we chugged through the night to a weirdly orchestrated medley.
As stowaways we had to be off the train before it reached the station. Next time the train stopped, we scrambled off into the darkness, crouching down beside the line as the engine chugged out. Dimly lit carriages rattled by, showing once-white bandages, dark with stains, wrapping arms, heads, legs; and we smelled once again the smell of blood and another, newer smell, hard and foul. Was that how green maggots smelled?
We spent the rest of the night sleeping on the hard ground beside the railway line.
We had nothing to eat or drink for 30 hours or more, what little remained of the contents of the knapsacks having been hastily discarded in our clandestine scramble onto the troop train. All we had now in the world were each other, the clothes in which we stood – minus my sandals which had been stolen – and a large, white damask napkin, the corners knotted around Mother’s precious family Bible and jewellery.
The loss of the sandals had not meant much on the boat where there was precious little walking around, or since boarding the train. Indeed, the sensation was new – a kind of freedom which I’d not been allowed to experience before: "People who walk around barefooted get hook-worm and they hook themselves into your insides"…ugly! Hook-worms were a highly effective device to keep shoes on feet, but it made for very sore feet when there were no shoes.
Hunger, thirst, sore feet and fear and the hard ground notwithstanding, we slept…
With the grey light of dawn we set out to walk to the airfield which, we had been told, was about four miles away. In order to reach the dirt road which ran alongside and slightly below, we had to cross the tangles of barbed wire along the railway line.
Clumsy, I tangled with the barbs and tore both my dress and a foot. As I bellowed, my one remaining dress was torn into strips to bandage my bleeding foot – "It'll be an anti-tetanus for you, my girl, as soon as we get to India" – and, to avoid further mishaps, the other foot as well. What remained of my little print dress was taken off and discarded beside the track.
With me clad only in a pair of cotton knickers, my dress in shreds around my feet, we set out along the deserted track, narrow fields covered in long grass, separating us from the jungle. My mother's determined stride saying “we will walk the whole way to India if we have to.” Many of course did.
She clutched in one hand her Bible and jewels and in the other my little sister, while I trailed along in the rear, uncomfortable with the wadded feet.
Soon a bullock-cart came by and the driver, friendly, concerned, took us aboard. We rode in style on the bamboo slats of the cart floor the last few miles to the airfield – an open area carved out of the jungle. There we were catapulted into the midst of thousands of people of every race and hue, in varying stages of panic depending on how long they had been there.
Many wounded, both British soldiers and civilians, some on stretchers, make-shift crutches, sticks – each for himself, no-one in authority. Except for the pilot of each plane after it landed standing guard in the door of his aircraft, holding the swarming crowd off with the point of his revolver.
As each plane landed, the crowd converged on it like ants around a grounded dragonfly. The lucky few who happened to be at the right spot when the door opened, or those who had been strong enough or aggressive enough to push, shove and fight their way to the fore, scrambled on board.
Somehow our little party always ended up at the very back.
More and more fights broke out as the day wore on, growing hotter, until chaos reigned with each arriving aircraft and carried over the next. Many just gave up, and either decided to stay and take their chances with the Japanese rather than risk being killed or injured by the mad crowd; others set off to walk through the valley – the Hukawng Valley – headhunting country of the Naga, to Ledo and India; the valley later to be known as "The Valley of Death" along which the known dead numbered something like 56,000.
As the day grew hotter and the temper of the crowd increased, the decision that had to be made was whether to remain in the shade of the trees at the edge of the field, to stay in the burning sun to be near the planes as they landed, to abandon all hope of flying out and start walking or, the unthinkable, to remain and be captured by the Japanese and put into a concentration camp.
They drew nearer by the hour…we remained under the trees.
There was water in the mules troughs dotted around. It was green, and while some drank out of desperation, we were not allowed, growing more hungry, thirsty and despondent as the day wore on with every departing plane.
As evening drew near and the heat marginally less, desperation gave way to hopelessness. We, nevertheless, moved out into the open and nearer a spot where planes seemed to come to their brief, almost reluctant, stop. We sat there on the hot grass, ready to leap up and make a dash for it. A young British "Tommy" joined us. Out of his rations, one lone can of milk remained. He opened it, sharing it with the three of us. We were given the lion's share.
It must have been about six o’clock in the evening when, as usual, we were at the very back of a huge crowd that had mobbed a lone aircraft. The pilot stood at the door angrily waving his pistol as human beings scratched and clawed each other to get aboard. Suddenly, and without ever being able to explain just how, the three of us were immediately in front of and just below the tall, thin American with pistol drawn. He bent down, his free hand shot out and hauled first one then the other child and our frantic mother through the door.
It was a DC3 in wartime rig…light aluminium bucket seats along each side, about 30 in all…No frills…We were among the first and got seats, as many packed into every available inch of floor space. A more motley bedraggled bunch of humanity would have been hard to find. All the panic-fed aggression had turned to relief and a terrible weariness. Spirits soared visibly when a Khaki-clad figure appeared armed with a large cane basket out of which he handed round neat cellophane packets of chicken, bread and olives. It might have been a banquet, and as long as I will live I will never forget the taste of that bread, that chicken and those olives.
What we did not know until much later was that, on touching down at the airfield to refuel, the crew had found the pumps locked. In addition, the DC3, built to carry some 30 passengers, had 60 aboard. Sixty, that is, that they had known of, for another five had been discovered in the cargo hold on landing. It was also the very last plane to leave. The Japanese bombed early next morning, putting the aerodrome out of action and inflicting heavy casualties on the refugees…mainly women and children.
Finally, we were in the air. It was a long flight, tree-hopping, lights dim and flickering on and off…the chicken and olives…Even if all we had in the world and wrapped up in our mother’s white napkin, we were together in the star-studded, black velvet sky in which we bumped and swayed.
It was late when we finally landed at Calcutta’s Dum Dum airport. The relief in the voices and on the laughing faces of the pilot and his crew were patently obvious. As we passed them on our way to waiting trucks, we heard the fuel takes had been "only just greased".
We were received at the Loreto Convent by the nuns. First, there’d been the inoculations until we'd felt like pin-cushions, then the washing, hand-out of Red Cross clothes, food and bed – heavenly mattresses on the floor!
Now I like to think that it just might have been a young Mother Theresa who had so gently tended us, dressed and presented me with, above all, the sandals.
They'vd been the most beautiful things I'vd ever seen. Just the right combination of shades – red, blue, green and gold. Afterwards I always referred to them as my "rainbow sandals". They had put me in mind of the story of the flood and of Noah's ark, and of the rainbow that God had placed in the sky as a token of His covenant with Noah and with all mankind. A sign of hope, and a promise – but a reminder too.
The clothes had meant little, even the food and bed were only temporary, passing things. The sandals somehow made up for everything; for all the lost roots and treasures of childhood in a way which my child's mind had not grasped, but the adult recognised.
The Rainbow Sandals had been the only footwear I owned for a long time afterwards. Until, often repaired, I outgrew them to such an extent that I was at last persuaded to part with them.
Parting with my beautiful sandals had been as painful an experience as giving up my rag doll or any of the other things which had marked themselves upon my mind, crammed into those few months that had so drastically and forever changed all our lives. I was finally coaxed into giving them up to the little Indian girl from one of the many mud-and-dung huts near the camp to which we’d been sent.
The child was one of many who could be seen each day rummaging through the garbage tins behind each row of barracks…scratching for a scrap of anything that resembled, or might once have resembled, food. Which might have been overlooked or, worse wasted…eating whatever they could find, and, on the many occasions when there was nothing to find, licking the empty cans and paper which had once held food.
Timid and shy at first, the child retreated in fear lest she be beaten for "stealing" from the garbage. Desire for the proffered sandals, however, at last overcame fear, and she snatched them and ran off as fast as her skinny legs could carry her, a great white-toothed grin flashing across the black face, wizened by starvation and the cares of one several times her years.
Whenever I saw the girl after that the Rainbow Sandals were tied around her neck like some garland worn in triumph, and the grin never failed to shop itself. I watched for her, to see if she would wear the sandals on her feet. She never did. Then one day the child didn’t come to do the rounds of the garbage cans. She never came again.
With the starving little Indian child the Rainbow Sandals had gone forever.
Or so I'd imagined. Not quite forever, I thought as I stood outside the shop window, for here they were again after all this time, more beautiful than ever – more elegant perhaps with their slim, high, adult heels, but nevertheless to me the same sandals.
I came specially to visit the city and its memorial now that the bitterness had been sweetened and gentled by time, love marriage, children and the serenity of life on a New Zealand farm.
As I looked at the column upon column of names, strangely I felt as I had when I stood on the "Arizona" memorial in Pearl Harbour. The tears, uncontrollably, began to pour down my cheeks.
A little white-haired lady who had just placed flowers before the memorial laid her hand on my shaking arm and said gently, in faltering English: "It’s all right…it’s all right…"
Just a little old lady, nodding and bowing in her bright Kimono…here…in Hiroshima.