Forgotten Life. Brian Aldiss
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on either flank. We looked at each other and laughed. Then we lit up cigarettes.
‘Where’s that bloody plane?’ we asked.
We spent another night out in the open, on the burnt earth. Next morning, an aged Dakota with the American star on its wings landed on the black airstrip; we climbed readily enough into its hold, and soon were flying westward, over the Chin Hills towards India and a quieter life.
History is what happens to contemporary events when they have receded enough for us to draw a moral from them. What is the moral of the Burma campaign?
That change is all. Three years after the victory of the Forgotten Army, Burma was granted independence. Although the Japanese had packed their bags and left, Britain was unable to regain the confidence of the Burmese people, who had twice seen their fair country reduced to a battlefield – Burma, that most religious of countries. Nor could the brave Indian Army be relied on to hold down Burma by force. India was being returned to the Indians. That was the British will: while behind that will was American pressure; righteous to a fault about British and Dutch Far East possessions, the United States nevertheless let itself be led into another war that has been seen since to have caused more damage and destruction in Vietnam, Cambodia, and surrounding regions than even the Japanese dreamed of.
Nineteen thousand men of British and Commonwealth origin – the greatest number being Indian other ranks – died in the Irrawaddy crossings by Mandalay and Meiktila. In the earlier battle of Kohima, over two thousand men of British 2 Div, for which I was a pale-skinned reinforcement, died. All told, in Burma, there were seventy-one thousand British and Commonwealth casualties. Japanese casualties have been numbered at 185,000.
A memorial was erected to the British dead at Kohima. On the memorial is carved a free translation of a Greek epitaph, which reads:
When you go home
Tell them of us and say
For your tomorrow
We gave our today.
Sadly, it was no one’s tomorrow, despite the brave words. The British got out. The Burmese then sank under a repressive regime. Various kinds of struggle still divide it. Visitors from outside are scarcely welcome.
The bamboo grows beside the rivers where once we so bravely, so fruitlessly, drove from Milestone 81, through Kohima and Imphal, down the Tiddim Road, across Chindwin and Irrawaddy, to a ruined Mandalay. A lot of tomorrows lie buried along the route.
4
Clement sat over his brother’s old exercise book for a while, engaged in unconstructive musings. Then, sighing, he made a few phone calls. As he was setting the phone down, the intercom buzzed. It was Michelin.
‘Your supper’s all ready, Clem. And I’m just off out.’
‘Got another party?’
‘Yes, another party …’
‘Oh, well, enjoy yourself.’
He went downstairs slowly, dragging his steps so that anyone observing him might imagine there was something weighty on his mind. Downstairs, where the temperature was cooler, Sheila was in the conservatory pouring herself another glass of white wine.
‘Where’s your glass?’
‘Oh, I left it on my desk upstairs.’
‘Doesn’t matter. I’ll get another. It’s so hot, Michelin has laid a table outside by the pool for us. She’s just gone.’
‘Another party …’
‘Good drinking evening.’
She was pouring wine slowly into the glass she had taken from the cabinet, letting the neck of the bottle chink once against the rim of the glass to emphasize the benefaction of what she was doing. It seemed to him, watching her, that her strong nose was slightly less sharp this evening, as if a certain watchfulness, apparent in her manner during their time in the States, had now relaxed.
Passing him the brimming glass, she said, ‘If you go outside, I’ll bring the food. It’s all ready.’
The garden was still mainly in sunlight, slanting over the old brick walls. The little pool was in the shadow cast by the Farrers’ house next door. But it was warm there, and in the patio area Michelin had laid a pink linen cloth on their white conservatory table.
‘Did you have a dip?’ he asked, when she emerged with avocados.
‘I spent a whole hour on the phone catching up with news since we’ve been away.’ She passed on various items of gossip.
‘The film contract’s come alive again,’ she said.
‘I don’t believe it.’
They chatted about the Kerinth film contract with Obispo Artists. A letter had been awaiting her from Tarleton Broker, film agent in London for the Green Mouth novels. A deal with Obispo had been on and off for over a year; now they were involved with a director-producer called Calvin Boas Lee, whom both Sheila and Clement had met, and liked tolerably. Now the deal was alive. Tarleton had a contract ready. After they had demolished most of Michelin’s strawberry shortcake, Sheila produced Tarleton’s letter, and they read it over between them.
‘So I’ll go up to London on Thursday and work over the contract page by page with Tarleton.’
‘Looks as if you’re going to be rich and famous. Even more of both.’
She pulled a face at him. ‘Don’t say it. It frightens me. Poor me. Everyone will hate me even more.’
‘Love you even more.’
She squeezed his hand. ‘I’ll keep my head. Promise.’
‘Don’t count your chickens, love.’
‘That’s right …’
Thursday, the day that Sheila took the train up to London to see her film agent, was also the day of the week when Clement drove to Headington for his regular appointment with a fellow analyst. This analyst, a Jungian like Clement, was a Czech exile called Mrs Vikki Emerova. They had known each other for some years, and occasionally met in the Department of Psychiatry in the Warneford, or at official functions. He always addressed her as Mrs Emerova, and she him as Dr Winter.
Clement’s clinic, which these days he held only once a week, was in central Oxford. Mrs Emerova had a downstairs room in a small Edwardian house with a neglected garden off Headington High Street. Headington was full of similar houses with similar rooms, each occupied by people much like Mrs Emerova. The Emerovas of this world sat in chairs listening to the woes of people sitting opposite them. Anything could be said to them. One could talk in intimate detail about sexual perversions, or one could enter on a lengthy diversion concerning politics. One could be fearfully academic or downright coarse. The Mrs Emerovas would never flinch.
Unnatural though this arrangement might appear, many of the academics of Oxford, burdened with personal problems, made their pilgrimage weekly to the shabby rooms in the discreet houses of Headington.
In the back garden at Mrs Emerova’s were three ancient apple trees, and nothing else. The grass did not seem to grow. It was never short and never particularly long. Perhaps, Clement surmised, there were special nurseries – garden centres, they were called nowadays – in the wilds beyond Headington, in Wheatley and Holton and Horspath and Garsington which supplied special grass seed for analysts’ gardens, guaranteed to lull their clients with its monotony. His own clinic had no garden.
Once a year, in the Headington spring, the three ancient apple trees burst into blossom. Hope sprang into the breasts of the analysands. Christ may have died for them, God might have created the world for them … All was possible … But come the autumn and the fruits were as green and acid as the lives of those who looked out upon them from Mrs Vikki Emerova’s window.
‘But she had it off with him in the next room. This was in Boston. In our hotel –