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while puffing coquettishly on outsize cheroots and generally presenting very good wife or (more likely) mistress material. Outside Rangoon, the flower-bedecked houses and shops … the smiling villagers trundling by on slumberous bullock carts, through a shimmering countryside dotted with Christmas treelike pagodas.
    Burma offered a more leisurely life than India. Its branch of the Indian Civil Service was less competitive, and so attracted the more easy-going sahib. In
The Ruling Caste: Imperial Lives in the Victorian Raj
, David Gilmour writes that some members of the Indian Civil Service regarded Burma as ‘a place of banishment … The climate was unhealthy and debilitating, especially in Upper Burma … and the mosquitoes were so bad in some areas that even the cattle were put under nets at night.’ A vivid, if jaundiced, account of the life is given by George Orwell in his novel of 1934,
Burmese Days
, which is based on his experiences as a police officer in Upper Burma. The central character, Flory, works in the Forestry Department. In view of what would happen to the British in Burma, it is interesting that he seems half menaced by nature, half enraptured by it. He spends the cooler months in the jungle, the rest of the time in a bungalow on the edge of an Upper Burmese town. He describes Burma as ‘mostly jungle – a green, unpleasant land’. In the garden of the town club, where the back numbers of
The Field
and the Edgar Wallace novels are mildewed by the humidity, some English flowers grow: phlox and larkspur, hollyhock and petunia. They will soon be ‘slain by the sun’. Meanwhile, they ‘rioted in vast size and richness’. There is no English lawn, ‘but instead a shrubbery of native trees and bushes … mohur trees like vast umbrellas of blood-red bloom … purple bougainvillea, scarlet hibiscus … bilious green crotons … The clash of colours hurt one’s eyes in the glare’. Vultures hover in a dazzling sky; in early morning temperatures of 110 degrees Fahrenheit, the Englishmen of the club greet each other: ‘Bloody awful morning, what?’
    The country grips him like a fever, and sometimes the effect is euphoric. When Flory meets Elizabeth Lackersteen, the love interest of the book (Flory’s native mistress, Ma Hla May, cannot be so described), they bond over flowers. ‘Those zinnias are fine aren’t they? – like painted flowers, with their wonderful dead colours. These are African marigolds. They’re coarse things, weeds almost, but you can’t help liking them … But I wish you’d come into the veranda and see the orchids.’
    Flory works some of the time ‘in the field’, but even he gets lost on a short walk through the jungle with his own spaniel bitch, Flo. The box wallahs (office workers) of the British Secretariat would tend the flowers in the gardens of their bungalows at Maymyo, the hill station to which they repaired to escape the oven that was Rangoon in summer, just as their counterparts in Calcutta went to Darjeeling. They rode horses through the margins of the jungle, but they would not penetrate deeper, to encounter, say, the giant banana plants that might for all they knew be quite literally the biggest aspidistras in the world. The evening breeze might bring the sound of a tiger’s roar intermingled with the tinkling of the temple bells, but that tiger was safely confined in the Maymyo Zoo. The British were protected from the jungle by their punka-wallahs, their chowkeydars (nightwatchmen) on the veranda, by the elevation of their houses above the malarial ground, their quinine pills and the revolver in the study drawer.
    The Governor of Burma, Sir Reginald Dorman-Smith (Harrow, Cambridge, Sandhurst), was a fitting leader for this decorous and unreal society. A very good-looking man – almost
too
good looking – with a fondness for fragrant pipe tobacco, Dorman-Smith had seen action briefly in the Great War, but his former tenure as Minister of Agriculture under