Return to Mandalay by Rosanna Ley Page A

That some indeed would rather be free. ‘I see.’ He nodded. But he would still meet him. There was a lot, he realised, that he would do, for a chance to spend more time with this woman.
    ‘Tell me about your work,’ she said to him.
    ‘Well …’ The teak camp had not prepared Lawrence for any such notion of Burmese freedom. Every man who worked for him seemed loyal and accepting of his place. They had to be, otherwise the logging could not run smoothly. ‘We are a team,’ he said simply. And it was tough, demanding work. ‘We have to be resilient.’ It meant living for long periods in the teak camps away from civilisation and spending a lot of time in the jungle, along with the leeches, mosquitoes and the rest. And in a heat and humidity that could sap every ounce of energy from a man. But she would know all that, he realised.
    ‘Why did you choose such a job?’ Her eyes were wide. To her, such a choice must seem very strange for an Englishman.
    ‘I often wonder.’ Especially when the rains didn’t come to take the logs off down the river, or when they lost an elephant to disease or accident. It was such bloody hard work. ‘I like to be close to the earth, to the soil, to nature,’ he told her, and perhaps this was what had first attracted him. He relished the rasping sound of the saw as the timber was felled, the creak of the complaining tree and the explosion as it fell, crushing everything in the forest within reach. He loved the sweet scent of the wood that could fill the hot, heavy air, and he had nothing but admiration for the elephant handlers who guided the great beasts, tied chains and fastened harnesses, so that the logs could be dragged to the banks of the
chaungs
, the wild and rushing mountain streams.
    ‘You have taught us how to use the power of the river,’ said Moe Mya. ‘And to harness the power of the elephants too.’ Although even as she acknowledged this, her small smile seemed to suggest that it was, after all, an insignificant thing.
    What was not insignificant, thought Lawrence, was the way that with a boom and a crash, the logs would tumble downstream. And those logs could move. They’d hurtle singly or in packs, colliding into each other and everything in their path with a reverberation that could be felt all along the river bank. Or a log could get caught in rapids or heavy debris and in the blink of an eye there’d be a massive dam of the things until the force and weight of them made the obstacle give and a tidal wave of water carrying logs like missiles would pour down the mountainside. If you got in the way, you’d be a dead man.
    ‘It’s not all hard work, though,’ he acknowledged. There were terrific cold-weather days too in Upper Burma when you could go on a jungle-shoot for fowl, geese or even bison. And there were the Forest Headquarter hill-stations like Maymyo where you could take leave to play tennis and enjoy a whisky in the club and plain home-cooked food and British camaraderie in the chummery or simply rest and recuperate before returning to camp. Even in camp, there were compensations; there were men who specialised in ferrying supplies and luxuries out there. You could more or less order anything you wanted: cigars, whisky, cans of meat or sardines. You just didn’t know when it would arrive. ‘You never know what will happen next,’ he told her. ‘That’s what’s so exciting. You’re at the mercy of the elements. And you’re living – do you see? Really living.’ It was about as far from a desk job in the UK, working in the family stock-broking firm, as you could get.
    ‘You have great passion,’ she said, ‘for your work.’
    And he supposed this was true. He’d come to Burma to escape duty and the desk and he’d discovered the world of nature, the world of wood and a landscape and people that had already crept into his heart. It was indeed a different life.
    Forestry was an old trade. Teak had been shipped from Burma to India as far