Paul Theroux - The Great Railway Bazaar

I noticed the pad, pencilled with Burmese characters.

'Are they sending you Burmese Morse code?'

'Why not?' He explained that there were thirty-six letters in Burmese, but that occasionally they used English Morse code.

'How do you know whether they're sending Burmese or English?'

'Say you're getting Burmese. It goes on for a while. Then you get twelve dots. That means English is coming. Then you get English. Twelve more dots means they're going back into Burmese. See, there's no word for "piston-rod" and "crankshaft" in Burmese. It's interesting.'

He spoke rapidly, with nervous gestures. He was as dark as a Burmese, but had the beaky features and lined face of an Italian peasant.

'Your English is very good.'

'It's my mother tongue!' He said his name was Tony. 'Actually I'm going crazy in this joint. I'm up at Hsipaw, but I came here because the May my o chap packed it up. They didn't have a relief, so I'll be here until the nineteenth. My family's at Hsipaw, and I should have been back weeks ago – I've got six kids and they're wondering when I'm coming back. Where are you headed for?'

I told him I wanted to take the train to Gokteik, but I had heard it was forbidden.

'No problem. When do you want to go? Tomorrow? There's a train at seven. Sure, I can get you on it. I suppose you want to see the bridge – it's a nice one. Funny, not many people come up here. About a year ago there was a chap – he was English – heading for Lashio. The soldiers stopped him and put him off the train at Hsipaw. He was in a terrible shape – all disconnected. I told him not to worry. The police came and made a little trouble, but the next day I put him on the train to Lashio and when the police came at nine o'clock I said, "He's in Lashio," so there wasn't anything they could do.'

'Is it against the law to go to Gokteik?'

'Maybe yes, maybe no. No one knows – but I'll get you on the train. Don't worry.'

He walked me out to the forecourt of the station where, in the rain, on that muddy open space, there were about thirty stagecoaches – wooden carriages with faded paint and split shutters, and drivers in wide-brimmed hats and plastic capes flicking stiff whips at blinkered ponies. The ponies were stamping, and many were straining to pull loaded coaches out of the mud – they were overloaded, with boxes and trunks roped to the roof and six faces at the windows. With the steam engine shunting bogies just behind them, the sight of these gharries - and the rain and mud, and Burmese bandaged in scarves against the cold – completed the picture of a frontier town. A driver clomped towards me in mud-spattered boots (others wore rubber sandals, and some were barefoot, although all wore heavy overcoats), and Tony told him to take me to Candacraig.

The old man hoisted my bag on to the roof and covered it with a stiff piece of canvas before tying it down. I got into the wooden box and we were away, rocking; I was sitting bolt upright, peering through the rain at the broad streets of Maymyo lined with eucalyptus trees. The crooked wood and brick houses looked ancient and frail in the rain, and at a corner of the main street, before a two-storey wooden house with a covered verandah, a stagecoach was turning, the man whipping the pony as he cantered sideways in the broken road – not a car in sight – whinnying in the rain-darkened town, in the storm's dull gleam on the wet street, before the Chinese shops, shanghai pinmen and charlie restaurant. It was like a sepia photograph of the Klondike, brown and noiseless, a century old and nothing moving except the blurred black horse wheeling in the foreground.

Candacraig was above the town, on East Ridge, nearly three miles from the station. Here the houses were huge, the bricks reddened in the rain, with slate roofs and towers, the former homes of British civil servants who came to Maymyo when the capital moved there for the summer months. We passed The Pines, Ridge House, and Forest View; Candacraig was at the top of a little hill, like a mansion in Newport or Eastbourne, with porches and gables and over the door a neatly pruned trellis arch of ivy.

I paid the driver and went inside to a central hall as high as the house. The rooms were ranged along the upper sides of this hall, in a gallery broken by a lyre-shaped double staircase that rose to the gallery's walkway. Beyond a fireplace faced in teak was a bare counter, and the walls were bare, too, the floors gleaming with polish, the bannisters shining; in this large wooden hall there was no ornament. It was empty. It smelled of wax. I rapped on the counter.

A man appeared. I had expected Mr Bernard, but this was a man in thick glasses, neither Burmese nor Indian, with prominent teeth and large fretting hands. (I found out later he was Ceylonese, but had been more or less marooned in Upper Burma for thirty years.) He said Mr Bernard had told him I was coming; I was wise to come to Candacraig – the other hotels in Maymyo had no facilities.

'What sort of facilities don't they have?'

'Soap, Uncle.'

'No soap?'

'None, Uncle. And blankets, sheets, towels, food sometimes. They have nothing. A place to lie down but nothing else. Uncle,' he said to Mr Bernard, who was just entering the room, 'I am putting this gentleman in Number Ten.'

Mr Bernard brought me to the room, and then got a shovelful of hot coals and started a fire in my fireplace, talking the whole time about Candacraig. The name was Scottish, the place was really a "chummery" for unmarried officers of the Bombay-Burma Trading Company, to keep the lads out of trouble in the hot season after months in remote timber estates: here they could take cold showers and play rugby, cricket, and polo. The British Empire operated on the theory that high altitudes improved morals. Mr Bernard went on talking. The rain hit the windows and I could hear it sweeping across the roof. But the fire was burning bright, and I was in an easy chair, toasting my feet, puffing on my pipe, opening my copy of Browning.

'Would you like a hot bath?' asked the gentle Mr Bernard. 'Very well then, I will send my son up with some buckets. What time would you like dinner? Eight o'clock. Thank you. Would you like a drink? I will find some beer. You see how warm the room is? It is a big room but the fire is nice. What a pity it is so rainy and cold outside. But tomorrow you will take the train to Gokteik. We used to camp there – the Royal Artillery.

There will be nothing to eat at Gokteik, but I will make you a good breakfast, and tea will be ready when you come back. Here it is pleasant, but it is only jungle there.' That night I dined alone, by candlelight, at an enormous table. Mr Bernard had laid my place near the hearth. He stood some distance away, saying nothing, gliding over from time to time to fill my glass or bring another course. I think I am as intrepid as the next man, but I have a side – and it may be the same side that is partial to trains – that enjoys the journey only because of the agreeable delays en route, a lazy vulgar sybarite searching Asia for comfort, justifying my pleasure by the distance travelled. So I had come 25,000 miles to be here, loafing in May my o, warming my bum at the fire, losing my place in 'Bishop Blougram's Apology' each time I was waited on: the only guest in the twenty-room Burmese mansion.

In an early morning corner of Maymyo, a clearing beyond a pine grove, thirty people were standing at the fragrant teak pews of the Church of the Immaculate Conception and singing the 'Kyrie' from the Missa di Angelis. I had crept off the road and passed under the" dripping trees towards the sweet imploring chant, the Gregorian High Mass I had learned twenty years before in a summer of idleness and devotion. It was my own youthful voice I heard there, brave with unrisked innocence, aged twelve, asking mercy for some clumsy sin. Out of respect for this little boy I stayed for the Consecration, standing behind a poor Burmese supplicant kneeling on the hard tiles in his bicycle clips. When I left, the priest's quavering 'Pater Noster' drifted with me all the way to the road, where novice monks, children in yellow robes, shaved and barefoot, hurried to their monastery hugging black lacquer bowls.