A Short, Dark Season (extract)

This is not an uplifting read, but it is, perhaps, important in its own way, considering current scenes in Afghanistan. It comes from a novella I wrote some twenty years ago on the great refugee trek out of Burma (now Myanmar) that followed the Japanese invasion in 1941. This is fiction based on eyewitness accounts gathered by my Grandfather, Geoffrey Grindle, who escaped rather more easily than some (and did so unsure whether his wife and young daughter had made it in the Tiger Moth that had flown them out of the jungle some months earlier), and who felt so guilty that he began to correspond with other survivors. I used details from his memoirs, and the letters of two of these correspondents, Cherie Crowley (then 14), and Bill MacLachlan (then in his early twenties) with their full knowledge and blessing.

Photograph Burmese Car by GAF Grindle (C Pete Langman 2021)

A Short, Dark Season (extract)

Our final arrival in Myitkyina was in the nick of time. Gillespie was, by then, sufficiently recovered from his collapse on the Assam to attempt to walk the final twenty five miles from the river but the strain had eventually proved too much for him. He had to be hospitalised as soon as we arrived. I am sure that, had he not finally collapsed only four miles from the town, and almost within sight of it, Jeffreys and I would not have had the strength to carry him. Hannah, of course, was her usual ebullient self. After the first few days of our journey she had taken on the part of court jester, cheering us up at every available turn. I still think that she began to feel responsible for Gillespie and myself when she realised exactly how poor we were at the basics of life, like cooking. She had carried more than her fair share of luggage, all wrapped up in two pillow cases and held up on the end of the two walking sticks which we had acquired along the way.

The sight which greeted us at the hospital was quite frightening, there were hundreds of sick and wounded men lying in the hallways propped up against the walls, on trestles and stretchers and slumped on chairs; there was no hope of them actually being treated, that was for certain. I had noticed that on the Assam very few attempts had been made to minister to the wounded; one orderly wandered around injecting morphine into the patients who made the most noise, and when the morphine ran out, he used distilled water. Hannah elected to stay with Gillespie while I decided to try to locate an old friend of mine, Richard Morris, a surgical registrar who worked at the hospital. Though a civilian, I imagined he would still be here. It took me three hours. The hospital was labyrinthine, packed with tiny corridors leading onto hallways which fed into stairwells which opened out into large wards which, in their turn, fanned out into other sets of stairwells leading to hallways with tiny corridors disappearing off them in every direction. The building resembled the vascular system of the human body, the evacuated contents of which I often saw gathered in pools in corners, waiting for a cleaner who never came. It seemed that as soon as I was sent in one direction with information that Richard was stationary there, he was being sucked in the opposite direction by one of the many currents of humanity which swirled around constantly, never allowing one to stop, to settle, to rest. Rest in a hospital means only one thing.

I finally caught up with him as he apparently hid in a small closet, trying to snatch a few moment’s rest before he launched himself into the river of human suffering once more. I explained to him our situation and he suggested that I take Gillespie to the runway. He seemed to think there was little point in leaving him in the hospital. He was so tired and fraught he seemed to be on the verge of giving up all of his patients for dead. I had never seen a man changed so much, from the once jolly and avuncular doctor who made his rounds with pockets bursting with sweets and his patter bursting with little jokes, to this pale and wasted specimen I saw in front of me. He knew that if we took Gillespie to the plane someone else would be left behind, but, as he explained, someone was going to be left behind, and if he could possibly prevent that from being anyone he knew, he would. I had the feeling that he was unwilling to allow anyone who knew him witness what he plainly believed to be his final descent. He signed some papers for me and told me to present them to the Sergeant on duty on the runway, and that there was a plane due within the hour. I thanked him as best I could and made my way slowly back to where I had left Hannah and Gillespie. I had been gone for almost four hours. No-one had even looked at him. Hannah was downcast as I approached, but as I explained the chit I had, she became excited once more, and we eased Gillespie into a wheelchair that I managed to appropriate, and made for the airfield.

It took us half an hour to negotiate the checkpoints and gates, and when we finally arrived, we were greeted with a scene of absolute devastation. All one could see, in any direction, were thousands of refugees all sitting quietly and still in the blistering heat, with no water and no food, no shelter, and hundreds of stretchers and wounded men lined up along the runway’s edge. It was truly horrific. I knew immediately we had no chance of getting Gillespie on the next plane, there were simply too many people waiting. We decided to have a go anyway. Hannah’s face was not one which invited disappointment; she expected us to succeed, so I thought that maybe we would.

There was a system of perimeters in operation, whereby each of the enclosures contained men whose evacuation was deemed more imperative than the men in the previous perimeter. We had negotiated two of them, our progress hampered by our lack of suitable material for bribes, when we heard the plane approaching. As one, the entire mass of refugees and soldiers became silent, and those sitting rose to their feet, and everyone stared into the sky, searching for the saviour that they must have known would never be able to provide them succour. As it neared the field, and eventually, wheels screeching, landed, the mass seemed to walk a few steps closer like a cricketer, walking in towards the batsman as the ball is bowled. We were too far away to stand a chance of gaining passage, and I was about to turn the wheelchair around in search of a better plan, when Hannah suddenly shrieked and started to run towards the plane, which, having landed, was now being loaded and refuelled with what appeared to be almost indecent haste.

I stopped in my tracks, and then, after laying my hand on the helpless Gillespie’s shoulder, I gave chase. She squeezed past the first row of guards easily enough, with far more ease than I managed; I had to beg and plead, explain that she was my daughter, until they let me past. As we neared the aircraft, the crowd became thicker as it seemed everyone within range had decided to simply rush the plane in the vain hope that the fates would smile on them and let them climb on board. I heard gunshots. What Hannah was so excited about, I had no idea. I fought and pushed and kicked like everybody else to get close to the plane, but in my case it was to remove someone, not to gain entry.

When I had got to within fifty feet or so of the plane, I saw the doors slide shut, and the crowd pulled back momentarily as the engines started up, propellers arcing lazily in the air before the real power kicked in and they  tur turned into a spinning haze of black. The plane started to inch forward and I saw Hannah standing alone, twenty feet from the plane, shouting herself hoarse, tears streaming down her cheeks. I rushed up to grab her just as she was about to give chase, and the plane pulled away down the runway. I held her face up to mine and asked her what on earth had got into her. I was angry. She simply looked at me, dumbfounded and then quietly, almost apologetically, she said “My mother. My mother is on that plane.” I hugged her and looked up as the plane took off rather shakily and the crowd started to dissipate. I turned around and, with the distraught Hannah clasped to my chest, I walked slowly back to were I had left the hapless Gillespie. It was then we heard the noise that we all dreaded; the Japanese air force.

The plane which had just taken off, full of refugees and wounded, was attacked first, when it had barely put three hundred feet of air between itself and the ground it so desperately wanted to flee. The fighters chased and harried it like a pack of dogs after a wounded deer and, as was inevitable, it crashed, skidding back across the runway and into the fields beyond. The fighters kept on strafing it as the runway cleared of refugees, we all ran, screaming, as fast as we could away from the scene. There was no thought but away.

The fighters, however, were not content with the plane. Having become bored with their initial prey, they left it bloodied and burning as they turned their attention to the strafing of the long lines of wounded that were still laid out on the runway’s edge. It was like something out of a funfair. It was impossible to see how much more could have been done to present the Japanese with an easier target. They wheeled and fired for what seemed like hours, and Hannah and I lay in the thick shrub surrounding the runway, Hannah with her hands over her ears crying. We had left Gillespie behind. He had been on the end of one of the long lines.

It was probably the most difficult thing I have ever had to do; dragging the silent yet tearful Hannah away from the smouldering wreck of a plane which contained the remains of her mother. I, for one, was unsure that she really had been on board, as in such times of stress it is easy to see what one wants to see, even what one expects to see. After the privations she had endured since leaving Rangoon it was not surprising that she assumed the worst. I certainly hoped that it wasn’t her mother who she had seen, merely someone who looked similar, wore some clothes which she recognised, but whenever I broached the subject, I was stared down; Hannah wouldn’t say one word. It was as if we were back in Pagan, with her sitting silently in the car waiting for something to happen, except that this time the only thing she could be waiting for was death.