Page 75 of The Girl from the Tea Garden (The India Tea #3)

Calcutta was a shock. Adela had not seen it for six years, but she was appalled at the scenes of destitution along the railway tracks.

She had heard from her mother about a terrible famine in Bengal the previous year– there had been almost no news of it back in Britain– but nothing had prepared her for the grim sights that still lingered.

Skeletal naked people with shrivelled limbs and huge staring eyes in skull-like heads lay by the rails or under bushes.

It was impossible to tell if they were men or women; they were just husks of their former selves.

Adela was nauseated. How could it possibly have got this bad?

Surely the authorities could have done something for them.

Outside the station was also crowded with the moribund. The ENSA group looked about them in disbelief. Adela saw some of them recoil as sticklike arms gestured towards them for food. Their army escort instructed them firmly not to give away their rations.

‘Sorry, but those are the rules. You’ll get used to it I’m afraid.’

Adela knew about Indian poverty and beggars who lived by alms, but this was wretchedness on a sickening scale.

She wondered what the effect must be on Indian troops to see their fellow citizens reduced to skin and bone, dying in front of their eyes.

What would Rafi think, and had he seen the effects of the famine on his travels?

For a moment she thought of Rafi’s brother Ghulam, so passionate and angry about the treatment of Indians under the British.

Adela had no idea what had become of him.

They hurried from the sound of empty tin bowls being tapped on the hard ground and the sour smell of rotting humanity, guilty at their healthy flesh and the knowledge that they would be fed that night.

Central Calcutta, around Chowringhee Street, where the city teemed with troops and airmen on R Vera Lynn had flown in for a short hectic tour of Chittagong and the Arakan.

There was talk of sending some to Imphal when it became less hazardous.

But most troupes were too large and unwieldy to travel to these forward positions on the front line.

Adela kept pressing their entertainments officer in Calcutta for a smaller group of them to go.

Finally, in July ENSA agreed to send a group up the Brahmaputra River to Assam.

By this time the monsoon had come, bringing relief from the intense heat, but also swampy pools rife with mosquitoes and roads turned to churning mud.

Insects crawled out of the walls, and Mavis’s wig was eaten by white ants.

Half the show had come down with malaria or jaundice and was being packed off to Darjeeling in the mountains to recuperate.

To Prue’s relief, Mavis, dispirited at losing her wig, went with them.

But nothing would keep Adela from volunteering for Assam.

Together with Tommy, Prue, Mack, Betsie and a couple of dancers from another troupe, they took the train out of Calcutta.

Two days later they were transferring to a boat on the swollen Brahmaputra.

She thought of Sam and his steamship and knew he would rail at the conditions on board, with workers in steerage crammed in and enduring the suffocating heat while the ENSA members and a handful of British officers enjoyed the relative comfort of crowded cabins on the prom deck.

It would have been far easier to go by aeroplane, but all available space on planes was taken up by priority troops and their supplies.

It was sweet agony to Adela to sail past Gowhatty and know how close she was to her mother and brother at Belgooree, and yet not be able to see them.

‘Write her a letter,’ said Tommy, ‘and maybe you can meet her on the way back.’

‘She’ll only worry if she knows I’m anywhere near the war front,’ Adela replied. ‘If I get the chance on the way back, I’ll surprise her.’

The views of the towns they passed were depressing: ghats and streets filthy and crowded with the poor– perhaps refugees from Burma who had struggled back to India two years previously and got no further.

Then, after days on the overcrowded boat, they transferred to a train again to get up to Dimapur.

Adela’s heart raced at the sight of emerald-green hillsides of tea bushes rippling away in to the sparkling heat.

They weren’t the Oxford’s, but it made her feel pangs of homesickness for the tea gardens she knew so well.