Nick Drake Read Free Page B

Rudyard Kipling had written of his love of Burma in the poem ‘Mandalay’. George Orwell hated the place with a vengeance, having spent ‘five boring years’ there between 1922 and 1927, as an officer in the Imperial Police. Burma may have disgusted Eric Blair, as Orwell was then known, but it inspired some of his best writing, notably the short stories ‘A Hanging’ and ‘Shooting An Elephant’. In 1934 his first novel,
Burmese Days
, though enthusiasticabout the country and its landscape (‘It was a good life while one was young and need not think about the future or the past’), displayed real venom towards the petty snobbery and pinched racism of the expatriate British Empire-builders.
    For the British inhabitants of Burma during the 1920s and 1930s it was a good life. Servants kept the mundane at bay during the day, while the evenings were spent socializing and fulminating against progress and native independence with those of a like mind. There was a prosperity in Rangoon and other capital cities of the British Empire which kept the expats buoyant. Back at home you might have been born to trade and struggling for acceptance, but in Burma you were unquestionably part of the ruling class. It could be an idyllic and undemanding life, with no reason to change. The Empire had survived a mutiny in India in 1857 and no other nation had since had the temerity to challenge decisions made in Whitehall on its behalf.
    If you came from the top drawer, the product of a public school, the far-flung reaches of the Empire were a good place to finish your education, in the teak or rubber trade, or the Army. Clive and Livingstone, Rhodes and Wellington – these were the gods of Empire, in whose shadow you walked.
    By 1937, though, another sun rising further to the East was beginning to cast shadows. Long-time British residents in the Far East had never paid much attention to the threat of Japan, dismissing the barbarities meted out by its army to the Chinese since 1931 as like against like. The British Empire surely had no reason to fear the tiny, rather jaundiced-looking troops of the Emperor Hirohito. Here was racism they would live to regret.
    Just before eight o’clock on the morning of 7 December 1941, two years and three months after Hitler unleashed the Nazi blitzkrieg on Europe without warning or declaration of war, Japanese dive-bombers zeroed in on the American fleet at Pearl Harbor. Within half an hour over two thousand Americans lay dead or dying, and the European conflict had exploded into a global war. Just three months later the Japanese had subjugated the Far East, and the Empire of the Sun had spread its tentacles from the tip of the Soviet Union all the way to Australia, thousands of miles across the Pacific.
    Before Pearl Harbor, Burma had been seen as a safe outpost of the British Empire, the likelihood of war reaching its inhabitants remote. Even as Nazi tanks trampled across Poland, Belgium, the Netherlands and France in the spring of 1940, the residents of Rangoon wereuntroubled by the war which raged half a world away from them. Others scoffed at such lassitude, and a rhyme, popular in the officers’ messes of the Far East, ran:
    â€˜Where was I when the war was on?’
    I can hear a faint voice murmur,
    â€˜Where was I when the war was on?
    In the safest place, in Burma.’
    Within three days of Pearl Harbor, the British territories of Singapore and Hong Kong had been bombed, and Japanese troops had landed in Malaya. By 12 December the war was inching towards Burma, and Victoria Point, the Burmese town nearest to the Thai border, was evacuated. Rangoon itself was bombed during the following December, and as the Japanese swept along the Malay Peninsula, Burma’s rich rubber and teak plantations offered a succulent prospect.
    As Singapore – ‘the Gibraltar of the East’ – fell in February 1942, the full extent of Japanese barbarities