Page 76 of The Girl from the Tea Garden (The India Tea #3)

Dimapur, a mass of grey dripping roofs, was squalid from its swollen population: injured and battle-fatigued sepoys; coolies and porters who were helping with the back-breaking building of roads; suppliers, cooks, camp followers, medics, railway workers, undertakers and refugee families.

Asking around at the army divisional hospital for Sophie Khan and the Red Cross, Adela was told she was most likely helping up at Kohima.

They performed at the hospital and nearby barracks.

At one show a group of Gurkha children crept in and giggled at the front.

Afterwards, Adela and Tommy went to chat to them.

It hadn’t occurred to Adela that the men might have their wives and families with them.

Suddenly the little dark-eyed boy she had been talking to caught sight of his mother and ran off, throwing himself at her legs and laughing.

Adela was winded by the sight of his simple adoration of his young mother.

For a moment she was paralysed by a fresh wave of grief for having given up her own son.

She had hoped that the vast distance she had put between herself and Newcastle would have helped dull the ache for her baby.

Instead the sight of the Indian children just made her long for him more keenly.

Within days they were being jostled in a truck up to Kohima Ridge among the Naga Hills.

The former village of the Naga tribe and the bungalows of the British officials had been obliterated.

It was now one large military camp, surrounded by glittering rain-filled craters, burnt-down buildings and a landscape shattered by intense bombardment.

The Toodle Pips– with Betsie drafted in to take Mavis’s place– did their first performance on an open patch of ground, their audience a straggle of tired soldiers standing around, grinning in amazement to see the women and whistling loudly through their fingers.

Over the next days they went about the camps, performing up to six times a day, their reward being the gratitude of battle-weary men, some of whom had been away from home for years.

Everything was soaked daily by the monsoon: tents and trees dripped, their costumes stank of sweat and mould, and they all turned a yellowish hue from the amount of Flit sprayed on them to keep mosquitoes at bay.

Adela took up smoking cigarettes to burn off the purple leeches that sucked at her ankles, thighs and arms.

Yet all the discomfort was forgotten when, to Adela’s joy, she encountered Sophie at a field hospital. She recognised her bob of fair hair and her trim figure in jodhpurs and uniform shirt as soon as she climbed down from the cab of a Red Cross truck.

‘Sophie!’ Adela screeched and ran at her mother’s friend. They hugged in delight.

‘Adela, my darling.’ Sophie grinned, her eyes glinting with tears. ‘I can’t believe it! You’re so grown up. Are you well? You look wonderful.’ She hugged her again.

‘I’m fine. So glad to see you. I’ve missed you and Rafi so much. And mother. You saw her recently?’

‘Yes, and she’s as amazing as ever. Running everything without a fuss. Missing you, of course.’

Adela gave a rueful smile. ‘Maybe.’

‘Not maybe. Yes!’ Sophie insisted, swinging her arm around Adela’s damp shoulders.

They hardly had time to gabble out their news before Sophie was due to make the arduous drive back to Dimapur with two wounded sappers.

‘Poor boys. Got burnt in a mess-tent accident. One will need an amputation unless we can save his arm at the main hospital. Besides, the field hospital is packing up and moving down beyond Imphal.’

‘Haven’t things stopped for the monsoon?’ Adela asked.

‘Apparently not. Looks like the orders are to push on into Burma after the Japanese, despite the monsoon.’

‘Sam Jackman’s flying planes,’ Adela blurted out. ‘And making films for the forces. Have you come across him?’

‘No,’ said Sophie with a sympathetic smile, ‘but that doesn’t mean he’s not here. There are thousands of us.’

‘Of course,’ said Adela, feeling foolish and adding hastily, ‘I saw Boz in a newsreel about Kohima. He looked very calm and in charge.’

Sophie gave a broad smile. ‘Good for Major Boz. I’m so glad to hear it. I knew his artillery company was here, but I haven’t come across him either. He could be on leave or moved further to the front.’

They kissed goodbye. ‘You’ll find me at the divisional hospital in Dimapur,’ Sophie said. ‘Please call on your way through, won’t you?’

‘Promise,’ Adela said and smiled, hating to be parted so soon after being reunited.

‘And take good care of yourself!’

Over the next few days Adela badgered for them to be sent on to Imphal. ‘From what I hear, the place is chock-a-block with front-line troops, as well as a major field hospital.’

Tommy tried but failed to get them taken by plane, but a week later, in mid-August, they took the more hazardous road route among a convoy of engineers.

After two days’ travel through shattered jungle, along roads on which sappers worked like Trojans in the incessant rain to lay tracks in the liquid mud, they reached the amphitheatre of Imphal, nestled in the hills.

That afternoon The Toodle Pips performed in a makeshift overflow ward of the field hospital for bed-bound officers, a mixture of newly arrived wounded and sick from the front.

There appeared to be more men dying from illness– dengue fever, malaria and an outbreak of typhus caused by ticks– than from battle wounds.

After they finished and were leaving, a man from a corner bed called out hoarsely, ‘Miss Robson! Brava, Adela!’

She turned in surprise. He was gaunt and sallow-faced– probably jaundiced– and his hair shorn. Something about the brown eyes was familiar.

‘You don’t remember me, do you?’ he said, attempting a smile, his eyes betraying disappointment. ‘Jimmy Maitland. Simla, ’37. I was on leave at Craig Dhu, the officers’ hostel.’

‘Jimmy!’ Adela gasped. ‘Of course I remember.’ She hid her shock at the change in him.

The young Scots artillery captain who had dated her that Simla summer had been robust and athletic, with thick dark hair and a cheeky dimpled smile.

She had corresponded with him for a few months and then lost interest. ‘How wonderful to see you. Not in here, of course, but good all the same. How are you?’

He smiled. ‘All the better for seeing you. You’re as bonny as ever– and sing just as sweetly as I remember.’

‘And you’re as charming as I remember.’ Adela grinned. ‘So you’re one of the heroes of Imphal?’

He shook his head. ‘I didn’t do anything more than the other boys.’ His expression tightened. She sensed the subject was too raw to talk about. Instead she asked him about his family. He’d been back home on leave in Scotland when the war broke out.

‘And you, Adela?’ He reached for her hand with his bony one. ‘No ring on your finger yet. Does that mean there’s still hope for a love-struck major?’

‘Major now, are you? Well, you never know.’ Adela laughed.

‘I’m sorry we lost touch,’ said Jimmy. He was too gallant to blame her for stopping writing.

‘I left Simla in ’38 and went to England,’ Adela explained. ‘I should have let you know.’

‘Not at all,’ Jimmy said. ‘I should have been more persistent.’

‘I better go now,’ she said, smiling, ‘but I’ll come back and see you.’

‘Will you?’

‘Of course.’

‘I’d like that. Just to talk to you would be a better tonic than the stuff they’re making me swallow.’

‘Jimmy.’ She squeezed his hand. ‘I promise I’ll not leave Imphal without seeing you again.’

She went quickly, before he saw the tears of pity in her eyes.

The number of shattered lives that they had seen on their tour was sometimes overwhelming.

But to suddenly come across a man that she had known before the war– had been a little in love with– and see him reduced to a husk of his former self was heart-wrenching.

Each morning before their hectic schedule of performances, Adela made the effort to go early and visit Jimmy. Most of the nurses on duty encouraged it, as it raised the morale of the whole ward when she sang them songs over breakfast.

At the end of their second week in Imphal, rumours spread of the imminent arrival of a VIP.

‘Could be Mountbatten come to dole out medals,’ Tommy speculated.

‘Oh, I hope so.’ Prue grinned. ‘He’s a real dish. Do you think we’ll get to perform for him?’

But before it could happen, Adela, Tommy, Prue and Betsie agreed to go to a casualty clearing station at Tamu sixty miles away to perform to medics and patients.

The monsoon rains had eased and the roads were drying out.

They crammed into a jeep without room for props or costumes and were driven south by a cheerful Gurkha.

The friends were nervous at going nearer to the front– Jimmy had pleaded with Adela not to go– but the joyful surprise of the hard-pressed staff at their surprise arrival was worth it.

The clearing station was a huddle of canvas buildings in a forest clearing by a river, with patients lying on stretchers that were kept off the ground by forked sticks.

The nurses had dispensed with the starched-white uniforms of hospital and were living in tents with holes in the ground for latrines and sustained by food dropped from the air.

To Adela’s amazement she came across an old school friend from Shillong, the only girl who had ever been a true friend, however briefly.

‘Flowers Dunlop! I don’t believe it!’

The young woman in slacks and shirt, and her dark hair still worn in a thick plait, gaped at her. At once they were hugging and giggling as if they were thirteen again.