MORNING SERIAL

Boys of Gold by George Brinley Evans

THEY slung bed-rolls and the rest of their kit up onto the spare luggage rack, where their K-rations were stacked.

There was a bump as the engine was shunted and coupled up. Slowly they moved away and a warm breeze wafted in through the window.

“Char chana sahib?”

The sound of the char wallah making his way along the train had five dark green enameled mugs at the ready. Their K-rations: two packs a day for each man. Breakfast, one small round tin filled with two mouthfuls of spongy scrambled egg and bits of bacon. A bar of prunes or apricots, a bar of hard chocolate. Hard-tack biscuits, baked and re-baked to give them a shelf-life of at least sixty years, and able to shatter most sets of teeth in one bite. The dinner pack was the same except for the contents of the tin, which would be spam or spam and dried egg. The hot char was ideal for soaking the biscuits in: just dunking was futile.

Taff climbed onto the top bunk and looked out through the vents above the window.

They were going quite slow, in a curve. In the late afternoon light he could see the magnificent spire of the Shwedagon pagoda, covered in twenty-two-carat gold leaf.

Someone had said it was eighty feet higher than St Paul’s. In the clear darkblue afternoon sky, its slender curve reached up into a fine, round, golden canopy where the gentle spirit of Buddha was supposed to rest.

The train stopped at Pegu. He bought some sweet-limes, a coconut, a mango and a mug of char. They had covered about fifty miles and it was dark. Sentries were posted. Pegu was a small town, mostly shacks. The war was over, but seventy murders had been reported in the area in the last month. They took water, coal and a few passengers, then slowly clattered away to the north.

By morning they were on the wide Pegu plain with green paddy fields stretching to the horizon on either side. Farmers working in the fields lifted their heads from their work and waved, no doubt glad to see the chuffing, puffing sign of normality return.

Boys of Gold by George Brinley Evans is published by Parthian at £4.99 www.parthianbooks.com