Page 133 of The Girl from the Tea Garden
The next month was spent in the north of India. They toured the tribal territory of the North-West Frontier under an armed escort of Sikh soldiers in a convoy of lorries that kept breaking down. Adela and Prue wore bandanas to keep the dust off their hair, and Mavis moaned about her feet swelling in the heat.
‘Call this heat?’ Tommy derided. ‘This is a spring picnic. Wait till we get to Calcutta and Bengal– fires of hell. That’s when you’ll really start to melt.’
The days were hot in the rocky, barren hills around Peshawar, but the nights were still cool. They performed to pilots training with the Indian Air Force, to Gurkha soldiers and British conscripts. The paratroopers at one remote camp made so much noise with rude comments and ribald laughter that they could hardly hear themselves sing.
‘ENSA– Every Night Something Awful!’ one shouted out when the juggler dropped his batons for the third time.
They mocked the impressionist and booed the ukuleles. At his wits’ end, Tommy sent The Toodle Pips back on again, which received rousing cheers.
‘Think I prefer the officers’ wives knitting in the front row at Rawalpindi to this lot,’ Mavis panted, her face beetroot red and her blonde wig awry after a final encore.
They travelled on to Risalpore, where they played to RAF audiences. Then March came and they moved up into the hills around Murree. Leaving the plain, with its walled villages, temples and bullocks, they climbed steep, winding roads surrounded by thick emerald-green bushes. As they gained altitude quickly, Adela felt a jolt of familiarity. She leant out of the truck window and breathed in the sweet scent of pine and was transported back to Simla.
Arriving in the hill station of Murree, Adela was struck by how similar it was to her former home in the British-Indian capital. Wooden bungalows, hotels and shops were strung out along a ridge, which was milling with rickshaws, the road being closed to motor traffic. It too had a Cecil Hotel, with dizzying views over a sheer drop away to the distant hazy blue plain, and a bazaar spilling down the hillside that throbbed with activity and noise in the rarefied air.
The chalet where they were staying, with its flight of wooden steps up from the hotel lawn and the glimpse of Himalayan mountains beyond the fir trees, reminded Adela nostalgically of her home with Fluffy Hogg. Her eyes smarted to think of her carefree life with her kind guardian. Fluffy had kept in touch by occasional letter. From her she knew that Sundar Singh had distinguished himself in North Africa fighting the Italians and that Boz had re-joined the army and was training mortar gunners. Fatima was still at the hospital in Simla, working all hours. But there had never been any more news of Sam or where he had gone.
Adela stood on the veranda, gazing at the peaks of Kashmir, and felt anew the sharp tug of longing for Sam Jackman. She was older and wiser than the impulsive seventeen-year-old who had fallen so deeply for the handsome former steam captain that heady spring of ’38, but her feelings for him had not abated. Despite the intervening years and the separation of continents, she knew she still loved him– and now back in India, that love flared ever stronger. It had taken just the sweet smell of pines and the sight of snowy peaks to conjure up Sam’s lean smiling face and vital eyes, his deep laughter and passionate talk.
From the breast pocket of her uniform, Adela drew the photograph of her with Sam at Narkanda. It was creased and dog-eared from use, but the image of Sam still set her heart hammering.
‘Where are you, Sam?’ she whispered.
Adela vowed to herself that she would not leave India a second time without knowing what had happened to him.
‘Dancing up here is worse than the heat,’ Mavis gasped. ‘You can’t catch your breath.’
Her litany of complaints had gone on all month as they ventured to outlying camps. They travelled up hairpin bends, where the narrow road was sometimes washed away, and had to clamber out of vehicles while their drivers negotiated the ruts and avoided toppling into ravines. At other times they had to squeeze past oncoming local buses, with only inches to spare above dizzying drops. One evening, as the temperature plummeted their truck skidded and slewed towards the cliff edge. The driver ordered them all out as he fought for traction and managed to regain the bend.
‘Got nerves of steel, these Indian laddies,’ accordionist Mack said in admiration.
‘They’re hopeless mechanics,’ Mavis retorted. ‘The motor vehicles are always breaking down.’
‘Well, go by bloody mule then!’ Prue snapped. ‘There’s a war on and we’re not priority. They do their best.’
Tempers were frayed after the nonstop series of shows and the nerve-racking travel. They shared tin-roofed huts with giant red cockroaches and changed for shows all together in the same small tent, without chairs or mirrors. Monkeys invaded and ran off with costume jewellery and hats, the juggler got dysentery and the magician fell off a rickety stage and broke a leg. They had to leave him behind in a hospital in Abbottabad, to follow on when he could travel. And Mavis had a point about the thin air: singing required double breaths that left the singers feeling faint.
For Adela, all the tension and exhaustion was worth it for the moments of comradeship with the men – seeing their faces relax as they enjoyed the show and forgot about the war for a few precious moments. They danced in mess tents with the sound of jackals in the forests beyond and sat cross-legged with troops around campfires singing all the songs they could think of until they grew hoarse. The women were in high demand as penfriends for homesick conscripts, who were on the verge of being sent into action in Burma.
‘Be my girl and write to me’ was a constant refrain. Prue took on the task with enthusiasm.
‘What about Stuey?’ Mavis pointed out. ‘You’ve already got a man.’
‘Most of these boys have also got girlfriends,’ said Prue. ‘That’s not the point. They just want letters. It’s what they live for.’
Nobody would tell the entertainers what their impending orders were, but it was obvious that the fightback against the Japanese army on the fringes of India’s eastern borders had begun. The mood in the camps was jittery.
Adela and Tommy had renewed an old habit of slipping off to the cinema together whenever there was a free afternoon at their base in Murree to watch out-of-date newsreels. There was footage of General Orde Wingate and his guerrilla force, the Chindits, being airlifted into Burma, and reports of their successes, but the film was six months old. From what Adela could glean, there had been fierce fighting on the Arakan peninsula near Chittagong since December. What she wanted to know was the present situation further north, on the Assam border.
When they returned to Murree from Abbottabad, there was a letter awaiting her from her mother. Adela sat on the chalet steps and read it eagerly. Clarrie and Harry were well and managing things at Belgooree. Her mother was worried about James pushing himself to the point of exhaustion, taking on numerous civil defence duties, as well as the work of the plantations.
‘I’ve forbidden him to come to Belgooree while the present crisis is on,’ wrote Clarrie, ‘as I can manage perfectly well with Daleep and Banu’s help.’
What present crisis was she referring to, Adela worried? Was it the war in general or Assam in particular? Familiar tension curdled in her stomach.
I had a visit from Sophie last week. She has volunteered with the Red Cross as a driver and was on her way up to Dimapur. She is so plucky and brave. It doesn’t seem to bother her that she is heading into a war zone– she was as cheerful as ever. She said that Rafi fully supported what she was doing– besides, he’s away such a lot that she hardly sees him. She is very excited to think she might come across your show and see you if you are sent up to Dimapur. Selfishly, I hope you won’t go anywhere near Upper Assam. There’s never any mention in the press about the Japanese being on Indian soil, but from what James tells me, Imphal is under threat and Kohima too– do you remember playing tennis up there with your father one Christmas holiday? One of his fishing friends had a bungalow with a tennis court. How long ago that all seems now.
Adela could hear the longing in her mother’s words. It was nearly six years since her father’s death. For Adela, the pain of loss had eased to the point where she could think about him and smile rather than be choked with tears. But she sensed that, for her mother, the grief was as raw as ever.
